INTRODUCING COACH AMERICA

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a cooperative adventure, a conversation about America, where it is and where it is heading.
I am a historian, ethnographer and Life Coach by training, not a strategist, economist or political scientist. But politics, economics, and national strategy will figure prominently in these pages. In an earlier part of my life I spent several years with the Philadelphia Police Department as a patrol officer. Based on that work I published a study of patrol work, City Police, which James Q. Wilson described as a "landmark study". The years I spent on the streets of Philadelphia with the good, the ordinary and the very, very bad changed my life and my views of academic study. I learned first of all that there is very little that is true or worthwhile reading in newspapers. And it has only gotten much worse in the intervening thirty years. I also learned that most of what passes for intellectual study of our political and social life in universities is political propaganda and special pleading which is best read for its intellectual content and then ignored, if you really want to know what is going on.
Following on my study of police, I wanted to study the illegal drug trades. I knew some people from college who had become successful "farmers" in Colombia. Several conversations and discussions convinced me that an effort to duplicate City Police with City Dealer would have resulted in martyrdom. Instead, I went to work as a liquor salesman for the mob in New York. For the next dozen years I studied a variety of rackets all of which touched on political and regulatory corruption. And much worse. I have little doubt that there are few in Congress who could not be successfully prosecuted and sentenced to jail. They should be and they will not be. Too bad.
What then is to be done? Well, for starters you need an open mind, a willingness to listen and share, and the courage to express a point of view. This is politics, this is life, it is not science. And science by the way is a rigorous process which is constantly amending error by the discovery of new, verifiable evidence. All truth is not relative, but a good deal of what is really true, like gravity for instance, is constantly being refined, redefined, restated. And there is nothing in politics that even begins to approach gravity, except death and taxes of course.
I am neither a Republican or a Democrat although as a child of Jewish refugees from Hitler, I grew up with the New Deal. In the 8th grade I had Stevenson trouncing Eisenhower, was distraught when he lost. I am now a great admirer of Ike and wish he was President in place of everyone who has been in the office since 1960.
I am profoundly unhappy with both political parties. I believe we need a new Federalist party that will restore some balance to our political system. We are the victims of our own success and triumphs. The United States is a martial country. It was born out of world war -- The Seven Years War -- between European powers slobbering over declining Spain's wealth and treasure, and Revolution. Its leaders were all men versed in the arts of war and its spoils. They were realists but they were also men who prized liberty. This is important to remember since most of them, indeed all of them, profited from slavery or lived entirely off the profits that the slave economy produced. Thomas Jefferson could have earned a living as a lawyer; he chose to be a gentleman with 400 slaves. They recognized it for the evil it is and worked to end it in a way that did not penalize them. Well, they failed and managed to create the conditions that destroyed the Anglo-Saxon Republic they made. Hundreds of thousands of young men never had the chance to create families and descendants. From my point of view this is good because without their deaths and the upheavals the Civil War spawned, the United States would not have become a country that offered shelter to millions fleeing oppression and even death, as in the case of my family.
There is a view that argues America was born at Valley Forge. The U.S. Army is said to be the first institution that embodied the national sentiment. This sentiment was only gradually extended to other parts of our society. There were many people in America indifferent to the burning of the White House by the British in the War of 1812. But the federal army was always small, small enough to be no threat to any of the States. When war appeared on the horizon, the States supplied levies to the federal authority. At the end of each war, there was demobilization. The real power of America was its Navy, permanent, completely Federal. The U.S. fought in 1812, 1847, 1861, 1898, 1917 and 1942. At the end of each of these wars the nation demobilized. In 1865 we had an army that could have conquered Canada, Mexico and beyond; instead we demobilized. In 1946 President Truman began the process of demobilization which was interrupted by a decision to oppose Soviet expansion into Greece and beyond. The reality is the existence of nuclear weapons changed the nature of warfare forever and the growth of airpower changed forever our separation from overseas threats. Even if we had continued to demobilize, Executive Authority would have continued to grow. The vast military forces we sustained however, dramatically increased Executive authority and diluted Congressional power. This is all well known. As is the rise of Judicial power to offset the weakening of Congress. Whatever the Judiciary has contributed, we remain a country whose political institutions do not work particularly well.
Executive Authority is vast, Congressional review and vigilance is weak and undirected. The States have little independent authority and the courts have taken from them a good deal of what was left to them after the innovative years of the New Deal. We have been transformed from a Republic into a Democracy with few institutions that really function to check the vast Executive authority. Electioneering is now permanent and increasingly suspect. The country is filled with rotten boros. We can debate which is worse -- St. Louis, Detroit, Florida -- but there is the widespread sense something really stinks. Election corruption is inherent in the system and has always been present, but today it threatens to compromise the system itself. This is a grave danger. I fail to understand why we do not use the paper ballot. It is the only truly safe and totally controllable system.
There are many places where this discussion could begin. I have opened with a brief personal review of our institutions. I have emphasized national security instead of tax and tariff policies because we are enmeshed in a war that has caused deep dissent and revealed a remarkable lack of candor and preparation by our government. I still have no idea what is our policy in Iraq and have no idea why we are in Afghanistan other than to find and kill Osama bin Laden for murdering 3,000 Americans on a sunny morning in September in New York City and who would have murdered 300,000 or 3,000,000 if he could have. And after eight years we are still failing. That is a good reason to be really upset. We have vast military power and no national consensus on what it is for. This is unacceptable.
I am going to write a second post in a few days discussing my views of what are the elements of a national security policy and what is required to create one. We need one desperately. I will tell you one element now: Abolish the Pentagon and give the building to the Smithsonian. Abolish the CIA, turn its research over to the Library of Congress and create an entirely new instititution modeled on the OSS devoted to developing human intelligence in the Islamic and Chinese spheres.