He would have been hard-pressed to outshine Bruce Springsteen. I first bought this LP in 1978, as a 16 year-old, on the strength of having loved "Born To Run." The mood shift is clear from the opening track, perhaps my favorite rock 'n' roll song: "Badlands." Coming out when it did - 1978 - with factories closing all around my native Detroit, malaise gripping the country, hostages taken in Iran the next year, et cetera, this work combined songs mixing equal measures of hope and despair.
As another reviewer noted, this was also the first rock 'n' roll album I heard dealing with adult themes - from the fantastical workd of the Magic Rat, et al, on "Born To Run" to flesh-and-blood Joes and Janes trying to keep hope alive, this was a new experience, and a necessary one, as oldies about going to the Hop do not speak to the realities of adult life.
More than any other LP, this one deals with how the artist relates to his father. Count the number of serious songs dealing with father-child relationships in contemporary music - they are rare. "Adam Raised A Cain" and "Factory" are clearly attempts to come to terms with his father - like many men of his generation, a soul whose life revolved around supporting a family by doing brutal, drudge work, with nothing to hope for except making it in one piece to the next day ("Through the mansions of fear/Through the mansions of pain/Watch my Daddy walk through them factory gates in the rain"). The former also reveals that something in catechism must've stuck, because the track is bathed in Christian imagery - in some places more subtly than in others ("...You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past").
After not hearing any of the songs in 20 years (and Springsteen is rarely on the radio - then usually "Born In The USA" or "Born To Run"), I bought "Darkness" on cassette to have something to keep me awake while driving my 'big, old Buick'- and the raw emotional power of every song, sung as though he meant every word, autobiographically perhaps, struck me again, just as it had in 1978. After 25 years, in a post-9/11 world, with factories closing all around my native Detroit (and elsewhere), perhaps that's more than just a coincidence.
I'll second the reviewer who said that if he had to own one rock 'n' roll CD, that it would be "Darkness."
-Lloyd A. Conway
P.S. After 25 years, I still believe in the Promised Land

The nautre of organizational behavior (really individual behavior within the constraints imposed by organizational culture) is to seek incrementalist changes at the margins. Rarely do the well-entrenched want to leave those trenches to risk what they have in the fluidity of the uncretain. This is natural, since safety is something innately sought by most organisms most of the time. Short-term safety can be a good predictor of impending decline and death, as the old adage says: "Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give 40 Years of Success."
The authors propose that aiming for incremental, marginalist change is a "stall," a way of refusing to face or accept the need for real change. (Sometimes, the need for change can be misread or mismeasured, with New Coke being an example they give.) The authors offer a number of vingettes designed to illustrate "stallbuster" tactics that will impel the desired-for change. These vingettes are bite-sized case studies of how real-world organizations approached (or failed to approach) problems, and the results of their actions. These are compared, in terms of implicit values, with the formal values each company had adopted. The actioning of these values provides insight into where disconnects between policy and performance occur, with McDonalds' response to the infamous hot-coffee lawsuit and Odwalla's in dealing with food-poisoning problems being one example. Each company's colture at least partly pre-determines the range of responses that their leaders can imagine, with a corresponding range of predictable results.
In the tradition of Dr. Kurt Lewin ("Field Theory in the Social Sciences") the authors propose that breaking through stall-tactics requires more than a circumstantial, piecemeal approach: unfreezing organizational behavior ("stallbusters") and shifting focus to enable lock-in (for however short- or long-term fluid circumstances dictate)of more adaptive actions. This is a key to breaking out of the prepare-to-win-the-last war mentality, as well as the incrementalist mindset that curses mature firms in the cash-cow stage of growth, before radical change to survive drastic environmental shifts carries a Phyrric price for survival.
Measurement is an area of continuing focus: What we measure becomes how we measure success. Rejecting or supplanting traditional measurement concepts may be necessary so as to allow truly pertinent data to be collected. (One anecdote deals with a company priding itself on a 1% error rate for each process - without anyone recognizing that errors are cumulative, resulting in 80% of its' customers experiencing some form of product failure.) Time is one of the things that Mitchell, Coles and Metz believe has to be measured - especially in the more-nebulous disciplines, like financial analysis, where productivity has been more difficult to quantify. If outputs are hard to measure, them time spent on various tasks can show how much of a workday was productive, even if unquantifiable.
This work is not a by-the-numbers, how-to workbook with checklists. It should not be read that way. It is rather more Aesop-like, in that it uses stories to illuminate a few key points, which are them discussed in terms of broader application. Read as intended, this book can help to exercise the imagination of leaders who want to leave corporate Darwinism behind for radical mutation in a world loosed from its' fixed reference points by technological breakthroughs, geopolitical flux, demographic shifts, and culture-shock: In other words, the search for a 2,000 percent solution.
-Lloyd A. Conway

Fritz Leiber's "Lankhmar" stories tell of a fail-safe system available to the citizens of Lankmar in case they were in grave danger of defeat: They could summon the Gods of Lankhmar, who would lay waste their enemies - and them, too. (Naturally, one does not summon them too often.)
Many leaders, thinking like managers, wait until drastic action is mandatory to save their organization - risking possible destruction in the process. Mitchell and Coles outline a series of steps, somewhat reminicent of Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich" system, for recognizing danger (read: opportunity), planning for riding the crest of said opportunity, and for overcoming the organizational inertia that most large systems possess to make it happen.
Part of the change process is accepting risk: The "Gods of Lankhmar Effect" might do to describe the process they envision, as the change device carries the potential to expose the organization to collateral damage, or "creative destruction," as Shumpeter termed it. Knowledge of the risks involved contributes to the "stalls" many cohorts will use to block change. Much of the book is devoted to strategizing ways to overcome the more common ones.
Some of the stalls ("But that's not the way I thought it would be!") remind one of the reactions of individuals to personal loss - the grieving process is often described as a five-step one, including denial as an early reaction. Facing change of major magnitude, when the action called on for survival and the chance to prosper, may involve the preceived loss of what one holds dear. Like Themistocles, the innovative leader may have to sell his people on letting the Persians burn Athens, by offering a compelling vision of the marbled splendor awaiting the victors, as opposed to hoping that a conventional response to overwhelming force will somehow do the trick - magical thinking, if you will.
Tactics described by the authors start out with measurement concepts - an essential part of a rational decision-making process. Collecting relevant data, and knowing what that is, constitutes the first line of defense in directing organizational change. After all, what good is a thermometer when what is needed is a Geiger counter?
The essential quality of the book is this: Accept the need for overcoming a majority in your organization who will not see or accept change, and who may not accept the best alternative for meeting it, along with the consequent resourcing demands. Be prepared to identify and ally with those who come to share your vision. Anticipate dealing with stalling tactics, or be just another Cassandra - right on your predictions, but ignored by those you warn.
-Lloyd A. Conway

The whirlwind of creative destruction is harnessed to the concept of continuous revolution in this handbook of how to think strategically in an arena that is both instantaneous and worldwide.
Looking to business models instead of technology as the key strategic advantage for the near future, Mitchell and Coles distilled a decade-long research project, involving interviews and with CEOs of consistently successful companies that had ridden the crest of uncertainty by reinventing how they operated, in creating this book. What they found is that, of those businesses they selected to study, the ones who maintained their edge had changed their business model, many more than once. While their research begins in 1989, some of the companies in question had pioneered the concept, decades earlier. (Nucor Steel had been, "The Nuclear Corporation of America," a conglomerate making, among other things, radiac meters, before F. Kenneth Iverson reformulated their business model to that of a high-tech minimill.)
The emphasis on strategy, in seeing new opportunities in seemingly random or unconnected events, and the decidedly long view of history implicit in the underlying philosophy is what recommends the work above all else. (The authors also clearly have a broad background in classical economics, and quoteAdam Smith, Alfred Marshall and others to illustrate key points.) Much of the strategic planning/scenerio building advice reminds this writer of concepts that he first ecountered in military life, and the anology of busines to war is not a new one. (Think of Sun Tzu, lately a business guru, after millenia as a fount of military doctrine.)
Like generals preparing to fight the last war, many business leaders stick with a winning formula even as it reaches the point of diminishing returns, and as unacknowledged competitors become mortal dangers to their security. One example used by the authors is of Red Hat Linux, which depends at least partially on product innovations offered by the open-source community. While Microsoft may be market-dominant and debt-free, their business model, which, the authors note, defeated Netscape in the browser wars by offering Internet Explorer as a no-cost, bundled product with Windows, it may not be able to keep them as cost leader in the operating system market against competition relying on what Eric Raymond described as the gift culture of the open-source community ("The Cathedral and the Bazaar"). Whether Microsoft will (assuming that Red Had and company succeed in making Linux a critical threat to Windows) abandon what has been enormously successful for them (their business model) for the untried is the choice faced by everyone on top when challenged by asymmetric competition. The failure to see, plan for, and meet such challenges is more often the fate of yesterday's leaders than is the successful business model innovation that Mitchell and Coles describe. (See also, "The Innovator's Dilemma" for case studies of this problem.)
Involving as many minds as possible in worst-case-scenerio planning is another bit of wisdom, validated by the testimony of CEOs whom the authors found to be constantly ahead of the competition. This leveraging of existing resources (they're already on the payroll, if they are employees) is a low- to no-cost way to offset competitor advantages in fixed capital resources that the reader may not be able to match.
While the book is generally shorn of technical minutia, making for quick readability, the discussion on pricing strategies is fairly detailed, and provides insight into how to use pricing to test business model concepts before fully committing to them. As with the other chapters, the section on pricing is well-illustrated with case studies in what worked - and what did not.
The book is well worth an evening's read, especially before events make agonizing reappraisals of how one operates a necessity.
-Lloyd A. Conway

Jenkins' book projects a variant of the "population explosion" argument with a positive twist: Christians are the population that is exploding, all over the Third World. As the nominal Christians of the West and Russia fail to have enough live births to maintain, yet alone increase present population levels, the poor of the Earth are finding the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and they take to it, Jenkins argues, because their lives - with hard labor, hunger, poverty, and death as much a reality under opressive regeimes - is much like the New Testament world of the early Church.
And what kind of Church will it be? Jenkins thinks that your run of the mill, secularized, Christmas-and-Easter churchgoing Episcopalean or cafeteria Catholic will be shocked to find their coreligionists, even within their denominations, believing in and practicing a kind of primative, liturgical, Catholicism-(pre-Vatican II)cum-pentecostalism. This is the world that Spengeler foresaw: he called the first, Catholic millenium of Church history the Age of Peter; the Reformation to his time the Age of Paul; the next millenium, the Age of John, of ecstatic, primitive, mystic faith, a resurgence of Eastern, "Magian" civilization following the Suicide of the West (as he titled his book).
Conflict with Islam may bring on a "clash of civilizations," as Huntington and others have predicted, but the protagonist will be Southern Christendom, coalescing around the twin heartlands of Africa and Latin America, and not the West, as has been imagined. This makes intuitive sense, because be they saints, martyrs or suicide bombers, some will dare to die for their faith, but who will die for consumerism, secularism, or the morgasbord of causes that drive what passes for intellectual and cultural thought in our society? Even the Communists (really the greatest of heretics, according to Igor Scharevich) had a transending vision that could motivate a Felix Derzinsky to choose death in its' support.
Where the book loses me is in the optimistic population projections, carried out, it would seem, on some kind of least-squares baseline, with steady rates of growth to the mid-century. As Buchannan did ("Death of the West"), Jenkins assumes that the present trend is the future trend. At some point, diminishing returns will kick in, if for no other reason that because, to name an example, Yemen is short of water today: to become the 10th most populous nation on Earth by 2050, with over 90 million souls, they will need water, which they do not have and are unlikely to find. AIDS, famine, and war will further erode the projected out-year gains, as will continuing migration to the west, for as long as that lasts. War, in the age of WMD, is another limiting factor. Not that I do not wish for Jenkins' prediction to come true: I would rather share the planet with fellow Christians of any race that with the alternative.
A final word: It is heartening to se the Churches of the East get their due. Ethiopia, predicted to be a leading Christian nation of the next half-century, has been Christian officially since 341, 10 generations before Clovis. With the late Halie Selessie claiming descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and their continuous Christan tradition dating back to the fourth century, they, not France, have the best claim to being called "the Eldest Daughter of the Church"(along with Armenia, Christian since ca. 304).
A Christmas bit of good news, well worth the read, and a more positive vision of the future than Rapsail's "Camp of the Saints" or Buchannan give us.
-Lloyd A. Conway

Eric Raymond is the Margaret Mead of the Open Source movement. His analysis of the gift culture as a model for explaining why hackers write software without recieving direct financial compensation is original, and as far as I know, unique. The economic implications are vast: if programmers write programs as a hobby, and do not stand in need of income for doing so (assume that they have day jobs), with rewards being in the form of status and reputation, then why buy the equivalent of what they're giving away?
Linux is the focus of this branch of the hacker-programming movement, which can also be seen at work in Apache and Java. The nature of the movement - everyone agreeing to play by Open Source rules, a leader (Linus Torvalds) who sets goals but does not exert formal authority, and a market (the Bazaar) where knowledge is dispersed throughout, reminds one of the Austrian Economists, who believed that a system operating as a spontaneous order would show greater productivity than a command economy, because of the exponentially greater amount of brain power in use. Raymond makes much the same point, when he argues that, "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow."
For Microsoft, this is a deadly threat. Proprietary software and operating systems are expensive, to develop and to buy. If Open Source products are seen as being of like kind and quality, them software becomes a commodity, and branded, proprietary products, and the businesses that sell them, are facing inevitible decline in their core market.
If Raymond's thesis is correct (I believe, as a layman, that it is), then by 2010, Windows may have gone the way of the British Empire - living in memore (digital or otherwise) only.
-LLoyd A. Conway

Those were the words that Dorothy used to describe Oz after waking up in the bosom of her family. The same intense feeling came over me while reading this book, a task that spanned several years, as I often put it aside for other things, always returning, drawn by the power of the author's prose in opening his world to us. The realness of Solzhenitsyn's worlds makes him perhaps the most accessible Russian novelist. As he described the village where Kostoglotov, the protagonist, lived, or in recounting how Ruasov, the villian/fellow victim ruined lives while justifying his actions, a vivid portrait fills the reader's imagination.
The human struggle to find hope and beauty in the most tragic of settings is what this novel evokes so well. Soviet medicine, cancer, a Zek fresh from the Gulag, and in a twilight turned dawn, Solzhenitsyn finds for his semi-autobiographical protagonist happiness, not only in winning victories against a malignant tumor, but in thoughts of perhaps one more summer to live, with nights sleeping under the stars, of three beech trees that stand like ancient guardians of an otherwise empty steppe horizon, a dog that shared his life there, and of a young nurse and spinster doctor, both of whom he hoped at times to love.
The picture one often got (accurately) of the Soviet Union was of greyness, gloom, uniform drabnes, and of a totalitarian police state. This book serves to remind the reader that, despite such circumstances, even desparately sick human being might still seek, and find, happiness in his own, private world. Along with that, Solzhenitsyn never lets us forget the utter corruption of the Soviet state, often in the person of Ruasov, an ailing bureaucrat who has managed to turn personnel management into an exquisite art form, as an instrument of psychological torture, slowly administered.
Of all Solzehenitsyn's works, this is my favorite. The people one encounters are vividly real, and the ending isn't what one would think (or hope), but is fitting, nonetheless.
-Lloyd A. Conway

Christensen is a Karl Marx of change: "Innovators of the world, unite!" could easily be the subtitle of a very readable book.
The thesis is that change comes as a surprise to those who have enjoyed success. The old business saying, "whom the gods would destroy, they first give 40 years of success," applies here. High profits, and entrenched customer and supplier communities can thwart change, until it is too late.
Using the disk drive industry as his first case study (because, he writes, like fruit flies, the average company life cycle is so short), Christensen examines how, when a new technology came along, the company housing the innovators failed to capitalize, with only the rarest exceptions. The paradigm discovered by Christensen is that of the value network. Companies have scarce resources for which there are alternate uses: Common sense dictates that they be directed to satisfying the demands of current, paying customers, and not be diverted to risky projects for markets that either do not yet exist, or which are low-profit. Research and development continue in their established courses and product cycles, and at some point, the product may have excess value - performance than the average user needs, but for which they must pay, if they but the product.
The result of this eminently rational decision-making process is that when a new product establishes itself, it is usually the work of a start-up company, which has little to lose and is willing to accept lower profits than mainline companies will, or can. (Cost structure in bigger firms may make low-end products unprofitable.) At some point, the rising product becomes good enough to substitute for the established one. At this point, crisis looms. The expertise, experience, and momentum are with the upstarts. The replacement process is likened to a tornado, wherein only a few use the new product at first, but as its' capabilities cross the threshold of minimum utility for the mass market, a sudden whirlwind of change happens, and seemingly overnight, the mainlines have lost control of the market. The mainline companies may choose to cede the bottom end of the market to their rivals, and focus on the upscale, highly profitable segments. This Christensen relates in telling of the rise of Nucor Steel and other minimills as challengers to US Steel and other giants of industry.
The Nucors started out only working the bottom of the steel market: "Rebar" steel, low-tech and low-profit. As they advanced on the learning curve, they moved upmarket, into Big Sttel's remaining baliwicks. At each juncture, better business models and lower cost structure allowed innovative technology to help the upstarts capture market share. At each stage, Big Steel retreated, and by concentrating on only the highest-end, lucrative parts of the market, and masked their decline (even to themselves)with record profits. Only when the minimills came knocking on the door for their last market did they wake up and start playing serious catch-up.
The lesson in all of this, retold in a page-turner style suitable for light summer reading, is that radical change is seldom accomplished by those on top - it comes from the outside. Vested interests, within and without the organization, will fight for their budgets, their turf, and for their status. Only top management buy-in, the continual dedication of resources, and, optimally, setting up a seperate entity to innovate the radical (as opposed to incremental) change process holds real hope for success. (GM setting up Saturn as a wholly-owned but otherwise independent company is an example.)
One of the interesting points that the author makes is how, at some point, products may become commodities, and brand names lose influence, relative to price, in driving sales. Looking ahead, if this process begins to happen, one can expect that substitution with cheaper alternatives is not far away. (Linux' rise vis a vis Windows may be the beginning of this process in the PC Operating System market.)
This model has application far outside the business world. One can think of many examples, such as generals preparing to fight the last war, while innovators, like Erwin Rommel or Billy Mitchell, develop the weapons and tactics that will win the next one. One can see it in politics, where major parties have ignored culture and immigration as issues, only to find Pat Buchannan, the late Pim Fortuyn, and others making it their signature issues. If Christensen's model applies, them the rise to power of third parties will follow, unless established ones move quickly to co-opt their issues, at the risk of offending their current constituencies. Gary North (linkable through lwerockwell.com) wrote a column that described the rise of Methodism and Baptist churches in early America. His explanation parallels what Christensen wrote regarding the disk drive, excavator, and steel industries: lower fixed costs (lay preachers vs. seminiary-trained ministers), an unexploited market (frontier settlements vs. back East), and a product that could be substituted for its extablished competitor (mainline churches), led to sudden growth and market capture. Other examples will occur to the reader, which is part of the electricity of this book - it stimulates the mind to apply its' teachings elsewhere. "The Innovator's Dilemma" is well worth your time.<
-Lloyd A. Conway

The reperations debate has been around since the 1960s (as some other reviews neglect to mention). Horowitz has a rather bombastic style, but that is reflective of his personality (as it is of mine, so I sympathize). Do not let that distract from the fact that he hits a key point here - that free speech is a non-starter on the campus, and in our life in gereral, when the issue is one that the Far Left has chosen to monopolize. Those who dare to challenge the assumptions of the Leftists are subject to bombardment with Marxist-inspired personal attacks, which are designed to marginilize ("he's a kook"), demonize ("He's a Nazi, racist, homophobe,"etc.) and neutralize ("Don't buy the book")the mesenger. As those of us from the Old School know, the first one to start calling names has lost the debate. (By this, I do not mean "Left" or "Right," but the use of personal epithets such as, "racist.") Horowitz makes points that are not new, as in the monopolization of the traditional megaphones of society (academia, the press, etc.), which Buchannan, for example, describes in his, "The Death of the West."
The value of this work lies in the author's exploration of the reperations debate, and how it is limited by the forced acceptance of certain underlying assumptions, such as white guilt for slavery and discrimination, the uniquily racist nature of society, and the slave-labor basis of our present prosperity. While not every reperations supporter uses all three, and some other arugments may be given, the above are descriptive of the basis for the claim that monies are owed to the decendants of American slaves.
In response, it can be countered that slavery was universal, worldwide, and endemic from the dawn of history, that it existed here before the existence of the US Government, and that the US Government eventually ended it, in the persons of white, male, Christians with guns, known as the US Army, who faced shot and shell to end it.
It also bears noting that the slaves were enslaved by their fellow Africans, or by Arab slave traders, who also did a land-office business in whites. ("Slave" comes from "Slav," and uncounted numbers of them were Janizaries, eunuchs, etc., in the Ottoman Empire.) To use a notable example, Cinque, of "Amistad" fame, became a slave trader after he was freed.
To make the above arguments exposes the maker to intemperate verbal assault (as it has this writer). There seems to be an underlying theme, which Horowitz took up in "Hating Whitey" before continuing it here, that while people are, quoting Susan Sontag, "a cancer on the human race." Thus, whites bear blood guilt for the sins of all involved in slavery, which must be viewed as a white-on-black conspiracy, unique in history. No expurgation of this guilt attended on US victory in the Civil War, regardless of the blood shed in battle.
Economically, the reperations crowd argues that slave labor built this country, in spite of the fact that most of America was free soil, that slaves did a minority of the work in slave states (as most farmers were freeholders), and that Sherman and Co. destroyed most of the wealth of the South, America's least-prosperous section.
Having considered their arguments, it is easy to refute them. Horowitz concentrates on their motivations, and writes as an insider, having been a leader of the Left in his youth. This book is good reading for those who wish to devote more honest effort to understanding the issue than is needed to peruse the back cover while loitering in a bookstore.
-Lloyd A. Conway

Pat Buchannan read "Camp of the Saints" and mentions it in this book. That explains the eerie resemblence between that astringent work of fiction and Buchannan's thesis: The West is under attack, from without by immigration, and from within by its' own elites.
The birthrate numbers that Buchannan uses are unnerving, and are well-documented, and in line with other works ("Grey Dawn") that examine population trends. Western (including Russian and Japanese) women are not having enough babies to maintain population levels. The result; Florida is the model of the society of the future. For Italy, it is the present. Geriatric societies are not working or fighting societies, and the day will come when unassimilated immigrant workers will tire of caring for and supporting with their taxes old white people. If not, the grandchildren of the Boomer generation will foot a tremendous bill for their care. "Pay As You Go" Social Security financing virtually guarantees intergenerational conflict, a subject Mr. Buchannan mentions only in passing. Prophetically, he notes that illegal aliens in the US roughly equal in number the Americans aborted since Roe V. Wade. As we choose voluntary extinction, others will take our place at the table.
That said, I have to question the longer-term population projections given. They are of the nature of, "if present trends continue for 50 or 100 years..." One thing that we can be sure of is that present trends will not continue. If they did, Islam, in retreat abroad and attacked by secular modernists like Attaturk within, would still be on the defensive, for example. Thus, straight-line popluation projections detract from the argument; to imaging Iran or Egypt with nearly 100 million people assumes that water, warfare, and germs do not limit the population explosion, and that prosperity, if it comes, will not lower birthrates there as it does here.
The second front chronicled by Mr. Buchannan is the internal assault upon the foundations of Western culture. It is not capitalism that is their primary target, but Christianity, and the culture begotten of it over two millenia that the leftists have steadily undermined. The consequence of this, he argues, is that the vital energy of our peoples are sapped, and they lose the will to live, including the desire to reproduce, since the meaning of life escapes them. As the Christian Culture of Life withers, it is supplanted by the Culture of Death, manifesting itself in casual sex, abortion, euthenasia, and a general disrespect for the sanctity of life. (Human life, that is. Snail darters are still sacred.)
Much of the book is a litany of current events recalled to support the author's position. They are so fresh that the book could have scarcly been finished before Thanksgiving. September 11th is here, and an analysis of the anti-Western response. So is the Bush Administration's confirmation battle over John Ashcroft, the NAACP's infamous James Byrd ads, the Boy Scout controversy, et cterea. The book is a little long on examples to support the main argument, which is quite simple: a movement, not a conspiracy per se, has been systematically working to take over the megaphones of Western, especially American, society: TV, movies, radio, newspapers, schools, pulpits, colleges, government. Having gained control of what Richard Weaver called "The Great Stereopticon" ("Ideas Have Consequences"), they have relentlessly told us that the US is wholly evil, racist, genocidal, and that we bear the burden of that guilt. This low-grade brain-washing has succeeded, as most good ad campaigns do, in convincing our children that they should hate the country that we grew up loving, and that it isn't worth fighting for. Thus, as the forces of the '60s advance, Christians and their allies are under siege in the "Camp of the Saints," as each redout falls to a fresh onslaught.
Mr. Buchannan closes with some suggestions for combatting the spread of the new religion, but they do not amount to the galvanizing call to action that I hoped for. Perhaps the pessemism that prevades the book reflects his own doubt as to a successful outcome. If Hillaire Belloc is right, then the struggle for revolutionising society takes about three generations to decide, as yesterday's counterculture becomes today's cutting edge, tommorrow's current wisdom, and what it replaces becomes, in turn, the counterculture. As there are no lost causes, so there are no won causes, and Mr. Buchannan's book, which is conciously Catholic, lacks, in the end, the assurance that God will win in the end, with or without the West.
-Lloyd A. Conway