"AMERICAN THEOCRACY” BY KEVIN PHILLIPS At last, a well-done book preparation-level parsing the
three prime problems pestering the people of our native land these days.
I place it in a prepositional category because I had to deal with a technical aspect which I am sure is puzzling other readers.
I like what Phillips has written – a good preparational avenue for those who wish to seriously study the problems, but he has a fixation; an unavoidable framework by which he says: “This plus This equals This.”
Had he said it once - as his opinion, I could accept and will respect. When he sums up each of the three major problems, tracing each from its beginnings, he finds all three have the same cause. The cause is the same for all that is wrong: “Bush, Chaney and the G.O.P.” There is a ninety-seven page bibliography and index appended to the book making some comparison possible.
The better side:
Most of the facts presented are public information readily available, but Kevin Phillips brings them before us in a way which shows how each of them may endanger our American way of living.
His grasp of world history is competent and he does a skillful job of showing how the leading nations of the world centered on
energy sources: wood, whale oil, water, wind, coal, oil, the atom – each in its own time and particular manner of use. The chapters dealing with oil are of particular interest right now with war in progress and pending over oil-reserves in the area.
The author brings together a vast amount of material concerning
the radical nature of religion in the United States denominations have been shrinking for decades. There are now more Muslims in the United States than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. I find it difficult to to believe that George W. Bush has been the cause of all such changes.
The third evil showing the demise of our nation it that concerning with borrowed money at all levels. We, as a nation, are spending more than our potential income might be and our nation has become a “sharecropper society”. He sees China as the world's leading power and as early as 2030 . Phillips looks back on three of his thirteen books staring with “The Emerging Republican Majority” (1966) and, rather aptly, calls them “ a trilogy of indictments.” He writes with evangelistic fervor, fueled by envy, distrust and every assurance of infallibility as a re-born prophet who, because of the nearness of our national end, writes, always, on borrowed time.
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 8-28-06 [c438wds]
