Drift

Drift is a very important book. I hope it will be widely read in all circles – especially by those involved in economic, political, and military decisions.
Rachel Maddow wittily and skillfully describes how the USA drifted into its present state of almost perpetual war. The executive branch of the government now wages war with little restraint. It is a serious condition and it is doing terrible damage to the economic health, the spirit, and indeed the safety of the country.
She ends the book with a very good eight-point to-do list. It is a call to action and I hope our leaders will heed it.
(As good as the book is, I can't bring myself to give it five stars. That is because Maddow allowed her politics to color her writing somewhat. Though she gives nobody a pass, she directs bitter anger and ill-will most strongly at Republicans. This is unfortunate; however, it takes nothing from her basic message.)

Rachel Maddow is a really good storyteller. I've watched her show countless times, and anyone who has before knows that she always builds up her story bit by bit before delivering the crux of her argument. It'll sometimes start somewhere seemingly irrelevant or trivial, then she'll take the next 15 or so minutes weave that into her opening argument for the night. She's also a huge political nerd, delving deep into different court arguments, court opinions, or just various political happenings. My mother likes to say she “breaks it down”. I think that's a fair description of her show. (side note: Would recommend reading this NYT Mag profile of her.)

Now take 10 of those shows about different aspects of an unchecked leviathan military, turn them into chapters, and you have Drift.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Just like in her show, Maddow starts each chapter somewhere seemingly random, then starts working towards her argument for that chapter. Case in point, take the opening of the prologue:

IN THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE I LIVE IN HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town's share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.

The American taxpayers' investment in my town's security didn't stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor's back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor's back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it's funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it's town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it's my neighbors' land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It's going feral in there.

“I want to plead with you personally before you take the country into war,” Speaker Tom Foley implored. “Unless there is gross provocation, you won't have public support.” Bush listened some more, and then showed them the door. Oh, he'd “consult.” He'd tell them what he was doing—what he'd already done, was more like it. He wouldn't trust Congress with a decision about China patterns at a state dinner, let alone war and peace.

The justifications for staying at war don't have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay.

A week and a half after the North Korean nuclear test, conservative Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that the best response would be for the United States to persuade Japan to develop nukes as well.

Japan. Nukes. Japan?! Nukes?!

In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass.

lot

Drift