Six Years Inside a Trashy Thriller

Thursday, October 11th marks the sixth anniversary of the weekly noontime peace vigil, started by local Quakers, in front of San Francisco's Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. October 2001 was when we officially started murdering people in Afghanistan and they in turn started murdering our soldiers. (Click here for an awful reminder of how close to home this can hit.)



Many of Robert Ludlum's trashy thrillers have as a basic plot the notion that the Nazis hadn't really been defeated in World War II. The Evil Ones had instead regrouped and in fiendish international plots were planning to conquer the world by creating havoc (a la 9/11) and then taking over the fascist, institutional reins of all the important governments in the world.



In Ludlum's books, either a Hitchcock-style innocent hero wanders into the evil shenanigans and manages to put a stop to the worst of the dastardly deeds (his 60's and 70's novels) or a highly trained espionage professional does the same thing (the 80's and 90's novels, including the Bourne series).



At times over the last six years, it feels like we've been in the middle of an improbable, trashy Robert Ludlum novel except the hero never showed up, and we're left with a Hitler Youth Pope, a tied-to-the-Nazis family (the Bushes) running the United States, and the most racist and reactionary strains in Judaism running the global Jewish community. "Homeland" is a direct translation from "Heimat, a specifically German concept to which people are bound by their birth, their childhood, their language and their earliest experiences."



Meanwhile, the nominal opposition to The Evil Ones are people like California Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose husband Richard Blum is an Iraq War profiteer. Instead of DiFi actually trying to stop any of Bush's worst appointments and policies, she spent this weekend grooving out on the Blue Angels air show. (Click here for Jan Adams' take on Feinstein's quote in Susan Sward's article from the San Francisco Chronicle.)