This is about as far away from the topics of literature and photography as possible; but it was inspired by a recent astute email from a CCLaP reader, which is why I wanted to share it...

This week I had a reader accuse me of using the terms "neocon" and "Republican" and "conservative" just a bit too interchangeably here at the site recently, especially when writing my smartass little comments for the interesting news headlines I've come across each day. She reminded me that the "neoconservative movement" is in actuality a small sub-wing of the overall Republican Party, which of course doesn't even represent all political conservatives to begin with, and has its roots in actually a very different place than Bible-thumping, wrestling-obsessed southern Christian Evangelical redneck goons; but she actually put it in her original letter much better than I can, which is why I'm just going to quote some of it....

"The term doesn't apply to conservatives as a whole, but rather to a very small, highly intellectual coterie of hawks within the Republican party. Far from being evangelical, the majority of true neocons are atheists or Jewish, and, indeed, early efforts to discredit the neocon rush to war in Iraq were derided as antisemitic. The term 'neocon' means not a new strain of conservativism, as you seem to imply, but rather indicates that its adherents (or at least its early adherents) were new to conservatism; in fact early neocons such as Kristol, Podhoretz, et al. began as Trotskyites or at least followers of Strauss. Neocons in the Bush administration are not typical wingnuts like Karl Rove, but rather the shadowy architects of the Iraq war such as Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith. Rove and his ilk would more accurately be called paleoconservatives (I haven't read this wiki article, but it probably explains the difference). Neocons' focus is on US policy abroad; they don't focus on such current conservative obsessions as bogus 'voter fraud,' e.g., and they have no interest in pretending to be interested in Joe the Plumber: neocons are hardcore elites and proud of it.

"You could search for the term 'neocon' at any website that uses such words with any degree of care....Here's a recent nytimes article that addresses the term a bit. George Packer gives a great little history of neocons in his indispensable Assassin's Gate (a truly great account of the run-up to and early years of the Iraq war)."

And this reader is right, of course; that in my personal anger over recent events in the McCain/Palin campaign, I have deliberately used these terms interchangeably, something I shouldn't do as a lover of intelligence and a stickler for facts, and for that I apologize. And furthermore, I've studied the beginnings of neoconservatism myself, so can confirm that everything this reader says here is true: In fact, I think that's one of the most fascinating things about the neocons of all, the thing that so many people don't realize, is that it actually intellectually started with a group of Kissinger-like European Jews and atheists, who were forced to flee to the US during World War Two because of the Nazis. It was this experience that made them so militantly anti-fascist; and it was because of that that they were so violently anti-Communist during the '50s, '60s and '70s, as they gained power in the US and became the political advisors and cabinet members of various Republican administrations; and it was that message that Reagan sold to the southern Christian Evangelicals in the '80s, so to shore up the poor rural voting base when first running for President (which let's not forget, before Reagan had voted mostly Democratic); and that's why we collectively now have the false impression that neoconservatism was actually started by the clinic-bombing Rapture-embracing 'paleocons' themselves.

Also, this reader brings up something else important to remember: that no matter what the label or name, this strain of hateful, racist conservative represents just a small minority of actual Americans -- only 25 percent of them or so, according to the most recent Bush approval ratings, or in other words only half the people in this country who consider themselves politically conservative in one form or another. And indeed, anyone who's ever studied the Nazi era of German history can tell you that it was almost the exact same situation then too -- that even at their political height, only 25 percent of the German population were actual card-carrying members of the Nazi Party, with the other 75 percent merely tolerating their activities and attitudes. As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the biggest problems we face as a country right now -- that for the last eight years, we 75-percent have been letting this ignorant, backwards, hateful 25 percent do whatever they want, get away with whatever they want. As we've all seen, this 25 percent have in the last couple of weeks gotten a lot more flamboyant and obvious in their racism and hatred and backwards nature; I'm hoping that will wake up a large amount of the other 75 percent to exactly what this group believes in at their core, and will hopefully make us all collectively not accept their behavior anymore. Which is why I sometimes get a little...um, overzealous in my smartass comments here regarding recent news headlines, a situation I promise will finally end once this election is over, and will go back to being mostly a list of goofy nerdy things like it was before.

This election seems to have turned every American into a political pundit, no matter what their blog is supposed to be about; this is my self-indulgent moment for doing so, I suppose, two weeks before the actual election day, and for that I apologize as well. But as this CCLaP reader reminds us, like all other aspects of life, it's best to be as informed and intelligent about these subjects as you can possibly be; the more you are, the less you're able to be manipulated by the very people you're supposed to be wary of. That's another big part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the American educational system is simply in a shambles, and that the majority of Americans simply aren't getting the kind of education that lets them be informed, intelligent citizens to begin with. We'd have a lot better decisions being made in this country, and a lot better politicians at the helm, if we simply started by revamping our public educational system into a thoroughly modern one, instead of having it still based on the Industrial-Age factory-worker paradigm of the 150-year-old Victorian Era. (My God, we still let every American child off school the entire summer so they can go work on their family farm. Don't you think it's time to start revamping a system that still does things like that?) It's something I would love to see be a priority during an Obama administration.