From The Washington Post:
The Pearl Changed The Culture of the Game
By Mike Wise

Saturday, December 1, 2007

In his autobiography "Giant Steps," Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recounted the day an all-star team from Philadelphia came to claim the Rucker League crown. He spoke of a player who had moves the gangly teen never had seen, vividly describing the two busloads of worshipers who came to see him play.

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Harlem, circa 1966, and the only sound was a "continuous wail that seemed to be coming from everywhere.

"Where's Jesus? Black Jesus!"

Earl Monroe parted the crowd to get to the court. They kept chanting, in a whisper now:

"Black Jesus, Black Jesus, Black Jesus."

"Mount Morris Park, that's where it was played," Monroe said yesterday. "What a place. . . . What a time."

Yesterday afternoon, it was all about back in the day. Same goes for tonight at Verizon Center, where a franchise's past and future will be seamlessly fused together in a long overdue ceremony.

Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, who played for the Baltimore Bullets from 1967 to 1971, will have his number raised to the rafters of the building alongside Wes Unseld's No. 41, Elvin Hayes's No. 11 and Gus Johnson's No. 25 this evening, 36 years after the smoothest, sweetest player of his generation left town, taking his soulful brilliance with him to Madison Square Garden.

For once, Gilbert Arenas will share the arena with another player who has taken more thrill-seeking, wild shots than himself. But his ego is okay with that.

"Come on, that's Earl Monroe," Arenas said yesterday. "I had an Earl number 10 Black Jesus shirt made just for Saturday. You got to see it."

That's the thing about the Pearl: From a teenage Lew Alcindor to a current NBA all-star, even the game's stars always have been in awe of Monroe.

He played here only four seasons, "but Baltimore and Washington is where I became the player everyone remembered," Monroe said. His titles and celebrity status were acquired in New York, but he entered the Hall of Fame in 1990 with a Bullets jersey. "Where I really got my start."

The adolescent reading this who believes improvisation and creativity started with Michael and now resides on an AND1 bus needs to check himself before he wrecks himself. Monroe spun his body 360 degrees in midair before Jordan or LeBron James's mother were born. So unpredictable, so original, Monroe painted more than he played, and the court was his canvas. He once was asked to describe his stutter-stepping, stop-and-pop game. The Pearl settled on this:

"The thing is, I don't know what I'm going to do with the ball, and if I don't know, I'm quite sure the guy guarding me doesn't know either."

Monroe was less a symbol of basketball's evolution than society's. He was not a free-flowing player as much as an ideal -- a pirouetting vision of black empowerment, who married sport and pop culture long before Jordan. Something about his loping gait, his easygoing, "don't-worry-I-got-this-game" smile -- Monroe and teammate Walt Frazier's style and panache flat-out reflected the zeitgeist of 1970s New York.

Clyde and the Pearl in fur on Friday night -- that was how to live.

The Black Jesus tale isn't even my favorite Monroe story. No, you have to bring in Miles Davis for that one. The man who gave us "Birth of the Cool" often would telephone the embodiment of cool courtside.

"He talked with such a raspy voice, I couldn't understand him," Monroe said. "He kept saying, 'Ded, ded,' and I would keep saying, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' like I knew what he was talking about. It wasn't until I read Miles's autobiography that I realized he was trying to give me the name of his orthopedic surgeon."

Monroe needed bone spurs removed and Miles thought he could help. "Wish I could've understood him," he said.

"He was Miles," Monroe said, and he wasn't the only '70s icon to deal with adversity. The Pearl carried an awful secret to the stage the night he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame 17 years ago. Monroe was severely in debt and had no health insurance. His joints and cartilage throbbed from all the midair improvisation during his youth. Double hip-replacement surgery would have to wait.

Three years ago, he admitted to me that he owed the IRS $5.5 million, money the IRS said had been hidden in tax shelters by his accountant in the 1970s. "I looked at 'em and said, 'I didn't make this much; how did I owe this much?' " he said then.

Too prideful to ask friends for help, it took him most of the 1990s pay off the debt. "I went underground. The last thing I would do is ask somebody to help me," he said. At the time, he relied on a $5,000 donation from former NBA player Dave Bing, one of the NBA Retired Players Association's founders, to steady his life again.

This is the part of Monroe's story edited from the highlight package.

The Pearl, penniless. Crazy, right? That's what Monroe thought. So he took it upon himself to devote his efforts to bettering life for players who didn't benefit from the stratospheric salaries of today; the average salary when he and Frazier played in 1974 was $30,000. Monroe never made more than $200,000 per season.

Recent changes in the pension plan have helped the retired players a bit, but Monroe presses on. "For the most part in my era, guys already took their pensions," he said. "We need programs for hospitalization when guys need it. I mean, the new deal is all well and good, but we still have guys that have are hurting out there. If we don't do it, who's going to?"

Certainly not this generation of fans. Marita Green, Monroe's wife, told me a disturbing story about the 2004 All-Star Game in Los Angeles. The woman distributing credentials to the Magic Johnson tribute had never heard of Earl Monroe. When he finally convinced her of his worthiness to wear an NBA lanyard, he and Marita strolled down the red carpet and heard loud applause.

"I thought, 'Finally, Earl gets his due around here,' " she said. "Then I turned around. They were cheering for Dennis Rodman."

And yet Monroe makes it clear: He's not an old head about to go off on an "in-my-day" rant. He knows he had it good.

He's now a big fan of LeBron and Dwyane Wade, whose subtle flair he admits reminds of himself. And he loves Arenas, who last season erupted for 60 points one night and broke Monroe's single-game franchise scoring record against the same Lakers that Monroe once dropped 56 points on; it only took someone 38 years to eclipse his mark.

Asked if Arenas takes as many ill-advised shots as himself, he added, "Hey, if they go in, it's all good."

Monroe discovered he had an enlarged prostate nine years ago and now speaks to men about urinary care on behalf of a drug company. He still is recovering from hip-replacement surgery in July. A setback while walking in the sand in Puerto Rico this past summer left him feeling "a little gimpy" for his big night.

It's wild to think the Pearl is 63 now. He and Marita moved from New Jersey back to Harlem several years ago.

They live a 10-minute subway ride from where he and Clyde ruled Manhattan, where a flamboyant guard became something more than a basketball player. Much more.

"My first years in Baltimore, that was a great place and time. But once you leave that, you can't recapture it," he said.

As his No. 10 Baltimore Bullets jersey ascends to the roof of the arena tonight, Earl Monroe can't blame us for trying.

From FOXSports.com:
Taylor's death a grim reminder for us all
By Jason Whitlock

There's a reason I call them the Black KKK. The pain, the fear and the destruction are all the same.

Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now. The life they knew has been destroyed, an 18-month-old baby lost her father, and, if you're a black man living in America, you've been reminded once again that your life is in constant jeopardy of violent death.

The Black KKK claimed another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a checkered past this time.

No, we don't know for certain the circumstances surrounding Taylor's death. I could very well be proven wrong for engaging in this sort of aggressive speculation. But it's no different than if you saw a fat man fall to the ground clutching his chest. You'd assume a heart attack, and you'd know, no matter the cause, the man needed to lose weight.

Well, when shots are fired and a black man hits the pavement, there's every statistical reason to believe another black man pulled the trigger. That's not some negative, unfair stereotype. It's a reality we've been living with, tolerating and rationalizing for far too long.

When the traditional, white KKK lynched, terrorized and intimidated black folks at a slower rate than its modern-day dark-skinned replacement, at least we had the good sense to be outraged and in no mood to contemplate rationalizations or be fooled by distractions.

Our new millennium strategy is to pray the Black KKK goes away or ignores us. How's that working?

About as well as the attempt to shift attention away from this uniquely African-American crisis by focusing on an "injustice" the white media allegedly perpetrated against Sean Taylor.

Within hours of his death, there was a story circulating that members of the black press were complaining that news outlets were disrespecting Taylor's victimhood by reporting on his troubled past

No disrespect to Taylor, but he controlled the way he would be remembered by the way he lived. His immature, undisciplined behavior with his employer, his run-ins with law enforcement, which included allegedly threatening a man with a loaded gun, and the fact a vehicle he owned was once sprayed with bullets are all pertinent details when you've been murdered.

Marcellus Wiley, a former NFL player, made the radio circuit Wednesday, singing the tune that athletes are targets. That was his explanation for the murders of Taylor and Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams and the armed robberies of NBA players Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry.

Really?

Let's cut through the bull(manure) and deal with reality. Black men are targets of black men. Period. Go check the coroner's office and talk with a police detective. These bullets aren't checking W-2s.

Rather than whine about white folks' insensitivity or reserve a special place of sorrow for rich athletes, we'd be better served mustering the kind of outrage and courage it took in the 1950s and 1960s to stop the white KKK from hanging black men from trees.

But we don't want to deal with ourselves. We take great joy in prescribing medicine to cure the hate in other people's hearts. Meanwhile, our self-hatred, on full display for the world to see, remains untreated, undiagnosed and unrepentant.

Our self-hatred has been set to music and reinforced by a pervasive culture that promotes a crab-in-barrel mentality.

You're damn straight I blame hip hop for playing a role in the genocide of American black men. When your leading causes of death and dysfunction are murder, ignorance and incarceration, there's no reason to give a free pass to a culture that celebrates murder, ignorance and incarceration.

Of course there are other catalysts, but until we recapture the minds of black youth, convince them that it's not OK to "super man dat ho" and end any and every dispute by "cocking on your bitch," nothing will change.

Does a Soulja Boy want an education?

HBO did a fascinating documentary on Little Rock Central High School, the Arkansas school that required the National Guard so that nine black kids could attend in the 1950s. Fifty years later, the school is one of the nation's best in terms of funding and educational opportunities. It's 60 percent black and located in a poor black community.

Watch the documentary and ask yourself why nine poor kids in the '50s risked their lives to get a good education and a thousand poor black kids today ignore the opportunity that is served to them on a platter.

Blame drugs, blame Ronald Reagan, blame George Bush, blame it on the rain or whatever. There's only one group of people who can change the rotten, anti-education, pro-violence culture our kids have adopted. We have to do it.

According to reports, Sean Taylor had difficulty breaking free from the unsavory characters he associated with during his youth.

The "keepin' it real" mantra of hip hop is in direct defiance to evolution. There's always someone ready to tell you you're selling out if you move away from the immature and dangerous activities you used to do, you're selling out if you speak proper English, embrace education, dress like a grown man, do anything mainstream.

The Black KKK is enforcing the same crippling standards as its parent organization. It wants to keep black men in their place — uneducated, outside the mainstream and six feet deep.

In all likelihood, the Black Klan and its mentality buried Sean Taylor, and any black man or boy reading this could be next.

From The New Yorker:
Tangled Up
"I'm Not There"
By Anthony Lane

The new Todd Haynes film, “I’m Not There,” is not a documentary about Bob Dylan. His name is in the opening credits of the movie (“inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan”), and his face looms in closeup at the end, cheeks sucking and swelling to the rhythm of a harmonica, but those are his only appearances. Nor is the film a straightforward dramatization of his existence, or even a slice of it; anyone expecting a Dylanite echo of “Backbeat,” which retold the story of the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, may have reason to be aggrieved. Ian Hart played John Lennon in that film, with recognizable punch and wit, but nobody here plays the actual Dylan. Instead, six actors take six different roles and run with them, each role being a loopy, meandering riff on the sort of life that Dylan has had, or could have had, or conjured in his songs. It makes “Yellow Submarine” look like a miracle of sober narrative.

Take the first example. A young, guitar-toting black kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) hops a freight train, finds a pair of hoboes, and declares that his name is Woody Guthrie. The time is the late nineteen-fifties. The kid shows up throughout the film, and we have the pleasure of seeing him perform—an eager, unfeigned pleasure, because Franklin can really sing, and he gets the chance for a brisk trio on a front porch, with none other than Richie Havens plucking away beside him. The question is: What is the kid doing in a film about Dylan? Well, you could view him as an oblique comment on Dylan’s own reverence for Guthrie (as evidenced by “Song to Woody,” on his début album), and on the debt that he owed to a particular strain of black music, but that’s the problem: this “Woody Guthrie” is a comment, not a character. We are kept so busy trying to weigh the burden of cultural meaning that the poor kid has to carry that we never find time to grant him, as a person, anything but the most fleeting of existences. Like the other pseudo-Dylans who populate the story, he is there for a purpose, and behind the gleam of the film—Haynes has an exacting eye for décor, and the rural American past is drenched in sap greens and warm tobacco browns—there is no mistaking a hard, Brechtian sense of dramatis personae being used like tools.

Nonetheless, Marcus Carl Franklin, operating on sheer brio, makes more of an impact than most of his fellow-performers. Four of the other Dylan figures, all played by capable actors, are left stranded in the luscious mire of Haynes’s fantasies. Ben Whishaw, who starred in the malodorous “Perfume,” is interviewed as though under arrest, and gives his name as “Arthur Rimbaud.” (To help us connect the dots, a version of Rimbaud’s most famous phrase, “I is someone else,” is uttered later by another character. Those in the know will feel smug; everyone else will be baffled.) Christian Bale, as authentically gaunt as the folk-era Dylan, plays Jack Rollins, who shows up in New York and transfixes the musical scene; toward the end, he emerges as a born-again Christian pastor in California—a deliberate overstretch by Haynes, since Dylan, though he turned to God in the late seventies, was never a minister. Then, there is Heath Ledger, who plays an actor named Robbie, who himself plays the fractionally Dylan-like hero in “Grain of Sand,” a nonexistent Hollywood film, and whose wooing of a French painter (Charlotte Gainsbourg) takes up an unlikely slice of the action. Got that? Just as you’re wondering how much farther from the art of Bob Dylan this movie is prepared to stray, up pops Richard Gere.

This, I fear, is where my patience snapped, and I doubt whether that of Dylan fans will prove any more elastic. Gere plays Billy—a nod to Billy the Kid, and thus to the music that Dylan contributed to Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973), in which he also acted. But the Gere rendition is little more than a lazy gloss on the legend of the vanishing West; as a rule, any film that offers cameos to circus performers and random zoo animals has reached the point at which invention becomes desperation. The problem for “I’m Not There” is not one of credibility (after all, these tales are meant to be tall) but of what authority a movie retains when its component parts fly off in different directions. Dylan, to judge by the ardor of his admirers, is indeed inexhaustible, in his gifts as in his changes of tack, and one quite understands why Haynes—who co-wrote the film with Oren Moverman—should have scorned a plain bio-pic. To come at a stubborn subject from multiple angles was a smart move, but Haynes is so enthralled by the stylistic opportunities that his plan affords, as he was in the fifties-hued “Far from Heaven,” that he ends up more interested in the angles than in anything else, leaving the elusive Dylan, once again, to slip away.

If the new film does cohere, for a while, that is thanks to Cate Blanchett, who, armed with curly wig and shades, delivers Jude Quinn, the most gripping of the Dylans on display. She looks like Elizabeth I after a long night out with Walter Raleigh and his packet of virgin smokes. We see Jude in London in the mid-sixties, hazy with drugs, larking with the Beatles (in a breakneck homage to “A Hard Day’s Night”), and generally treading the ground that was covered by D. A. Pennebaker in “Don’t Look Back” (1967), his concert-tour documentary. The best thing in the film is the probing of Jude’s past and conscience by a British journalist (Bruce Greenwood), whose questions about the responsibility that the artist—any artist, from Dylan on down—bears to the wider world are left blowing in the wind.

Blanchett seems to yield herself to the project with more gusto and curiosity than the others, as if there were truths about Dylan that need to be unearthed, not merely toyed with, and she is unafraid to remind us of what a pain the man could be, especially when stoned, but even she has to wrestle with the camp knowingness of the script (“I’m the only one with any balls”) and, more alarming, with the flimsiness of the context. “Live your own time, child. Sing about your own time,” the young black Dylan is told, and the instruction could stand as the motto of the movie; so why palm off on us a few stock-footage shots of Martin Luther King, Jr., mass riots, and Nixon’s declaring an end to the war in Vietnam? How can we judge Dylan’s place in history, when the history feels paper thin? “I’m Not There” is bravely conceived, but some of the reconstructions of the folk movement could have come straight out of “A Mighty Wind,” and what exactly Haynes adds to “Don’t Look Back,” or to Martin Scorsese’s majestic “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” released two years ago, only Dylanologists can tell. The rest of us, far from seeing the light, may even be led to ask, heretically, what all the fuss was about. So who is this movie for?

From The Providence News Journal:
A break with the Boss
Newark woman spends unique day filming Springsteen music video
By BETSY PRICE, The News Journal

Brigitte Hancharick, 20, of Newark, who has cerebral palsy,
works with the film crew on the boardwalk at Orange Beach, N.J.,
while her mother, Terry, looks on.
Courtesy of Karen Eller

The smile never left Brigitte Hancharick's face
during filming for Bruce Springsteen's next music video,
according to her mother, Terry.

A camera-loving Newark woman with cerebral palsy recently spent a day filming at Orange Beach, N.J., for Bruce Springsteen's next music video.

Brigitte Hancharick was picked for the gig -- the video for Springsteen's song, "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" -- after her mother, Terry, heard a Heery Casting radio ad looking for area women from 15 to 80, with diversity.

"When they said 'diversity,' I wasn't sure they meant disabilities, but that was the first thing I thought, that it would be great for Brigitte," Terry said.

She wrote Heery and told them all about her daughter and her daughter's love of the camera. She even got her daughter-in-law, Karen Eller, to send some photos of Brigitte.

Almost immediately, she got a call back from the casting company, saying they were sending Brigitte's pictures to the director. Then the casting company called and said the director wanted to use Brigitte in the shoot.

The family was thrilled for Brigitte, 20. Her cerebral palsy is severe enough that she is nonverbal and visually impaired. She can't walk, but can stand with a lot of support.

"But she loves the camera," Terry said. "She's always loved having her picture taken."

Terry says she wrote the casting company because of a technique she's employed ever since attending a University of Delaware Center for Disabilities seminar a couple of years ago.

"It was on one-person-centered planning," she explained. "From that I learned every day to ask two questions, and they are, 'What's important to Brigitte?' and 'What's important for Brigitte?' "

What's important for Brigitte is easy, Terry said. She has health care and daily care issues that have to be dealt with.

"But what's important to Brigitte is a little more difficult," Terry said. "After 21 years, I know how to read if she's happy and enjoys things, so I follow her lead on what she wants to do in life. For someone who is nonverbal, it's a little more difficult, but she's happy doing this kind of thing."

The family met the shooting crew the Sunday before Thanksgiving in Orange Beach, N.J., where they met with the assistant director and wardrobe director. The wardrobe director asked Brigitte to change into a blue shirt.

Out on the boardwalk, the crew blew some smoke behind her, and they played the "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" for Brigitte as they filmed.

"The smile never left her face," Terry said. "It was very cold on the boardwalk, and they had her in short sleeves. It didn't matter at all. She was happy."

The director then took the camera and sat close to Brigitte to do a lot of close-ups of her.

Brigitte was paid $150 for her afternoon's filming.

The video is due out in December, Terry said. The director promised to send her a copy of the video and of pictures taken during the filming.

Terry hopes to build her daughter a portfolio that she can use to get more work.

Finding things for people with severe disabilities that they really

like to do and that's available to them is difficult, especially as they get older," she says.

"Brigitte couldn't even do a typical job," Terry said. "But I think she could do modeling. I think she could do acting. They couldn't be verbal parts, but to have her out on TV and out in the public would be wonderful."

The daughter of Terry and Joe Hancharick, Brigitte is the only girl in the family of six children, who range in age from 6 to 31. They are Kevin and Adam Eller, and Joey, Ryan and Christian Hancharick.

Children with disabilities as severe as Brigitte's frequently didn't live into their 20s. Now more do, because of better medical care and better schools, Terry said.

But that can create problems, too.

Brigitte turns 21 in May. She'll lose her medical care at A.I. duPont Hospital for Children, where she's been a patient her whole life, and will have to travel to visit doctors in Philadelphia because of her complex orthopedic problems, her mother said. She also must leave John G. Leach School, which she's attended for 17 years, and most likely move on to the Adult Action Center in Newark, a new day program that's "person-centered," her mother said.

"As parents, we now just want to experience the joy in life that other young people experience as they go out into the world," Terry said.

"This video shoot has made us a little more hopeful that the world will be accepting and allow her to experience the joy of living a full life."

From The New York Post:
NO LASTING PEACE
By RALPH PETERS

November 27, 2007 -- SHORT of intolerable carnage, there's no durable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. None. The best all parties can hope for is an occasional time-out.

A respite between rounds isn't worthless, of course - lives are saved, Israel's economy improves and the Arabs get one more chance to get their act together. But we're forever disappointed because we're convinced there's a good, permanent solution, if only we can figure it out.

That's the American way: a can-do spirit, the conviction that no problem's too tough for us. But, in the real world (and in the bizarre fantasyland of Arab culture), some foreign problems can't be resolved equitably. They can only smolder on, occasionally erupting in flames.

In the Middle East, you can't buy peace. You can only buy time. If we want to help at all, the fundamental requirement is to have realistic expectations.

At present, the situation is aggravated by the Bush administration's desperate quest for a headline-worthy foreign-policy success - mirroring the Clinton administration in its closing years. But desperation's a poor basis for dealing with a geopolitical problem of near-infinite complexity, with ill will on every side except our own.

What happens in the course of Middle East "peace" talks under such circumstances? Whether the American administration is Republican or Democrat, it pressures Israel for concessions - since the Arabs won't make any. Prisoner releases precede each summit; territorial handovers come under discussion.

For their parts, Arab leaders and their representatives assume we're sufficiently honored if they just show up. We hear no end of nonsense about the great political risks they're taking, etc. We're suckers for any fat guy in a white robe with an oil can.

Today's session in Annapolis may or may not result in a we-the-undersigned statement or a few unenforceable commitments. And yes, there's merit just in bringing folks together and keeping them talking. But the baseline difficulty is that we want to solve problems for people who don't really want those problems solved.

Mahmoud Ab- bas and his Fatah Party, for example, couldn't accept a genuine peace tomorrow morning - even though Hamas' coup in Gaza has put them up against the wall. Their problem? The most successful jobs program in the Arab world has been Palestinian "resistance" to Israel.

Consider what peace with Israel - real peace - would mean in the West Bank and Gaza, in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley: Tens of thousands of gunmen (and terrorists) out of work, with no marketable skills - and radicalized by decades of fanatic rhetoric.

Think a punk who's grown accustomed to swaggering around town in a face mask with a Kalashnikov is going to scrub squat toilets for a living?

Generations have grown addicted to the struggle - and its perks. It's the only bearable justification for their individual and collective failures in life. Real peace with Israel would probably spark a convulsion throughout the Arab world - as tens of millions realized that their sacrifices were a travesty that merely empowered thieves.

Another reason Arab states won't make peace: Most of their leaders have only survived in power because they have Israel to blame for every disappointment their people face. Israel has become the great excuse for every self-wrought failure in the Middle East - and that excuse is more valuable to Arab rulers than peace could ever be.

Were peace ever to arrive, Arabs might begin to demand good government. And the corruption that has thrived during decades of crisis could come into question. Worst of all, Arabs might have to accept responsibility for the catastrophic condition of their own societies.

In the end, the problem's difficulty can be put in New York City terms: A shiftless, violent family that turned an apartment into a slum was evicted. The new tenants cleaned up the place and made the apartment a showcase. Now the former tenants hate them for it - and want the apartment back.

But the apartment can only accommodate one family.

If you want a sober perspective on the Annapolis dog-and-pony show, just ask yourself this: Who will leave disappointed, if nothing much results?

The Arabs won't care. They came because we got on our knees and begged.

The Israelis will just be relieved that their latest trip to the geostrategic dentist is over.

Any Russians soiling the furniture at the Naval Academy will be delighted if another American effort flops.

And the Europeans just popped in to check the "we care" box.

The only unhappy campers will be us. We set ourselves up. Again.

Oh, and even if there's some sort of agreement, only the Israelis will honor it. Grudgingly.

We're dealing with people who are fighting for their lives and homes. Our team's fighting for poll numbers. Now that's asymmetrical warfare.

By electing ourselves as the Middle East's indispensable problem-solvers, we've just put ourselves on the blame line for other people's problems. Without solving any of them.

Santa won't show up at Annapolis. If he did, the best gift he could bring the Bush administration and its Democratic rivals would be a sense of reality: It's a lot easier to believe in Santa than in Arabs accepting a just peace with Israel.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Wars of Blood and Faith."

Ideology Was Bush’s Undoing
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Over lunch, a liberal friend expressed puzzlement. Citing the title of Tom Oliphant’s new book about the Bush administration, “Utter Incompetents,” he wondered aloud.

Like him or not, he said, Bush is not an unintelligent man, and he is a principled and energetic executive. As for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the others, almost all had long resumes of accomplishment in politics, government and business. Why, then, do they seem to have failed so dismally?

In my new book, Day of Reckoning, published this week, I offer an answer. If there is a one root cause to the Bush failures, it has been his fatal embrace of ideology.

Ideology is substitute religion, a belief system based on ideas that are often contradicted by history and common sense. Yet men will adhere to ideologies with a zealotry that borders on fanaticism.

Marxism, fascism and socialism were are ideologies, gods that failed. So, too, is democratism, the Gospel of George W. Bush.

Democratism is a belief that all men are equally endowed with a desire for freedom and an aptitude for democracy. All can be uplifted, and all brought to see that democracy is the one true path to peace in our world. In democracy lies our salvation.

This conviction lay behind the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s crusade to democratize the Middle East and his “global democratic revolution” to “end tyranny in our world.” And, as Woodrow Wilson’s crusade “to make the world safe for democracy” gave us Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, Bush’s crusade for democracy is leaving us with ashes in our mouths.

Yet, Wilson’s heart was pure, and he ever exhibited the serenity of the True Believer, the unmistakable mark of the ideologue. One imagines Bush will be preaching the dogma of free trade long after the last U.S. factory has closed and the dollar has reached parity with the Mexican peso.

Bush’s “compassionate conservative” appears grounded in the ideological conviction that all children are endowed with the capacity to learn through the high school level. No Child Left Behind was going to raise the test scores of all our children above the national average, as in Lake Wobegon.

Why was it fated to fail? Because reality is otherwise. All children are not equal in their innate ability to learn English or math, as they are not equal in their ability to play sports, music or chess. A second-grader knows that, but our elites reject it as bigotry and blasphemy against the egalitarian dogmas that define who they are.

So we invest trillions, empower bureaucrats and enrich the education industry, demanding it produce what it has shown for 40 years it cannot produce. Today’s SAT scores are far below where they were in 1964. Like socialists striving to make their system work in Cuba, China and Russia, we have been banging our heads against a brick wall of human nature.

Consider Katrina. Bush was indeed disengaged. But Katrina was a failure of government, not of Bush. The city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana and FEMA all failed at the simple rescue of 30,000 people stranded by a few feet of stagnant water, while TV anchors boated back and forth bellowing for government to come save them.

Where were the men of New Orleans?

Why did the men of New Orleans, after getting their families out, not come back in boats to rescue the black women and children? Why did so many cops defect and start looting? And why did the National Guard and 82nd Airborne succeed and end the hysteria in hours?

In New Orleans, society collapsed because its basic building block, the family, has collapsed, for all the reasons we know too well.

Yet while civil government is failing, institutions like the 82nd, Microsoft and the New England Patriots succeed—because they operate on other than ideological principles.

You don’t vote for the head of Microsoft or choose the coach of the Patriots or commanding officer of the 82nd by elections.

These institutions reject egalitarianism. They put excellence before equality. They do not believe in a “level playing field” for opponents, but, with Vince Lombardi, that “winning isn’t everything, winning is the only thing.” They demand our best. You fall short, you are gone. They are intolerant of excuses and self-pity.

All who labor there know if they do not perform, the penalties are real: loss of jobs, income, prestige. In the 82nd, incompetence can mean dead comrades or your own death. They are one-for-all and all-for-one people. They are exclusive, not inclusive. They reject racial, ethnic and gender quotas and affirmative action. To the 82nd and the Patriots, there are places women simply do not belong.

Thomas Jefferson believed that in a republic a “natural aristocracy” of virtue and talent should rule. Those who run these institutions believe the same. That is why they succeed, and why government, when we ceased to be a republic and degenerated into an egalitarian democracy, so often fails.