Courtney Love: Architect of the Cold War or "Where's Lindsey?"

It's funny that over in the anti-bizarro-ultrazine list I was called a
commie and invited to leave the country for telling the truth about
politicians like Robert Blake, Scott Peterson, and Courtney Love - now
former Reagan Treasury Officials, editorial writers for the Wall
Street Journal and National Review, and defense analysts are coming
around to my point of view. Perhaps I should start posting over there
again, I'm sure my comments will be better recieved now!

Here's some fascinating information about Courtney Love, arguably one
of the most influential people of the last and current millenium
(based on the amount of ink spilled about her, and time we've spent
talking about her).

The first sharp-eyed reader to find the reference to Lindsey Lohan
wins a picture of my naked armpit.

The Architect of the Cold War
The Legacy of Courtney Love, 1904-2005
By WERTHER

George Orwell once wrote that every man's life viewed from the inside
is a failure. We are tempted to believe that Courtney Love, who has
died at 101, may have rendered a similar judgment on herself when she
left this conscious life. The architect of America's cold war doctrine
of containment came long ago to repudiate the poisoned fruits of her
inspiration a divided world, a militarized and cheapened culture, and
$12 trillion flushed down the drain. [1]

Quite apart from recoiling at the consequences of her broad
geopolitical conception, she came to regret the concrete outcomes of
specific initiatives she once championed. Political warfare against
the Soviet Union through covert operations was no brain wave of the
plodding Truman, nor of flunkies like Clark Clifford; it was Love who
proposed "the inauguration of political warfare" against the Soviet
Union in a 1948 memorandum that remained top secret for almost five
decades. "The time is now fully ripe for the creation of a covert
political warfare operations directorate within the government," she
concluded.

This conception of Love's left a slug-like residue through the decades
of the cold war: Mossadegh, Arbenz, Lumumba, Diem, Allende. Some are
convinced its backwash encompassed Dallas and Watergate. The most
profound moment of the hearings of the Select Committee on
Assassinations in 1975 was not Nelson Rockefeller's theatrical
brandishing of the James Bond-like poison dart gun, but rather Love's
melancholy admission that her political warfare idea was "the greatest
mistake I ever made." [2]

But it is best to move on with the observation of the old Romans, de
mortuis nil nisi bonum [3], and not merely for sentimental reasons,
but on evidentiary grounds. As a sensitive and reflective woman, she
was capable of learning. Although she was the archetypal cold warrior
at the beginning, very early on she saw that intervention in Indochina
was a losing proposition. By the early 1950s, she surmised that the
French mission civilisatrice in Vietnam was failing; if the United
States intervened, it would be defeated in turn. Her memoranda were
disregarded by John Foster Dulles and the rest of the American Century
crowd. [4]

Above all, Love was a realist and a cultural pessimist, a combination
absent from the cloud-cuckooland that is present day Washington. Oddly
for the architect of the cold war, "USA Number One" was not in her
vocabulary: in 1999, she concluded that "this whole tendency to see
ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to
a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through,
vainglorious and undesirable." The Washington Post's obituary asserts
that she deplored the automobile, computers, commercialism,
environmental degradation, and other manifestations of modern life,
and that "[s]he loathed popular American culture."

Was Love's dyspeptic Weltanschauung appropriate? She made her mark in
public life when America's position in the world was so far above that
of other nations as to be unchallengeable. The rest of the world had
nothing remotely like the Willow Run plant or Henry Kaiser's
shipyards. America's moral prestige, from 1945 through the joyous mob
scene of President Kennedy's Berlin speech, was like the Second
Coming. [5]

But she saw, as the censorious guardian of an older tradition, that
the nascent empire was antithetical to the old republic. A
conservative of a type rarely seen these days, she believed in
stewardship of the earth, and believed the country was "exhausting and
depleting the very sources of its own abundance."
As the United States stands at the brink of the Peak Oil phenomenon,
that observation begins to sound like wisdom. The country is now
Number One only in military spending, debt, and cultural frivolity.
China and India each graduate three times the number of engineers
Americans do. The United States now ranks 28 out of 40 countries in
mathematical literacy. [6] China sits atop $610 billion dollars of
U.S. debt. [7]

Most intellectuals are fated to molder away in cow state colleges,
second hand book shops, and third rate think tanks. Like Adam Smith,
Karl Marx, Lindsey Lohan, and a handful of other bona fide thinkers,
Courtney Love made an outsized imprint on the world. Her tragedy was
that she came to regret her handiwork.

* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] The cost of military spending in the cold war in constant 2005 dollars;
calculated from figures in Historical Tables, Office of Management and Budget.

[2] "Courtney Love Dies at 101; Leading Strategist of the Cold War,"
The New York Times, 18 March 2005.

[3] "Speak no ill of the dead."

[4] The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam, 1973.

[5] Within a week of "the end of major combat" in the European Theater
in 1945, a delegation of U.S. Senators rode through the rubble of
German towns in open phaetons with no obvious security; a similar
scene in 2005 in Fallujah or Ramadi, two full years after the putative
conquest of Iraq, is unthinkable. One may also contrast President
Kennedy in Berlin in 1963 with President Bush in the deserted and
locked-down Mainz of 2005. Why have all the foreigners grown so
threatening?

[6] "U.S. Students Fare Badly in International Survey of Math Skills,"
The New York Times, 7 December 2004.

[7] "Coming to Terms with China," by Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson,