Songs of the Doomed or The Enemy At Home

Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream

Author: Hunter S Thompson

First published in 1990, Songs of the Doomed is back in print -- by popular demand! In this third and most extraordinary volume of the Gonzo Papers, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson recalls high and hideous moments in his thirty years in the Passing Lane -- and no one is safe from his hilarious, remarkably astute social commentary.

With Thompson's trademark insight and passion about the state of American politics and culture, Songs of the Doomed charts the long, strange trip from Kennedy to Quayle in Thompson's freewheeling, inimitable style. Spanning four decades -- 1950 to 1990 -- Thompson is at the top of his form while fleeing New York for Puerto Rico, riding with the Hell's Angels, investigating Las Vegas sleaze, grappling with the "Dukakis problem," and finally, detailing his infamous lifestyle bust, trial documents, and Fourth Amendment battle with the Law. These tales -- often sleazy, brutal, and crude -- are only the tip of what Jack Nicholson called "the most baffling human iceberg of our time."

Songs of the Doomed is vintage Thompson -- a brilliant, brazen, bawdy compilation of the greatest sound bites of Gonzo journalism from the past thirty years.

Publishers Weekly

This third installment of the Gonzo Papers is a chronologically arranged selection of stories, letters, journals and reporting, allowing readers to see how Thompson's brand of "new journalism'' has evolved over the years.

Interesting book: Naked Conversations or Real World Adobe Photoshop CS3

The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11

Author: Dinesh DSouza

From THE ENEMY AT HOME:

“In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11. … In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world. The Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks were the product of this visceral rage—some of it based on legitimate concerns, some of it based on wrongful prejudice, but all of it fueled and encouraged by the cultural left. Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.

“I realize that this is a strong charge, one that no one has made before. But it is a neglected aspect of the 9/11 debate, and it is critical to understanding the current controversy over the ‘war against terrorism.’ … I intend to show that the left has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to numerous attacks such as 9/11. If I am right, then no war against terrorism can be effectively fought using the left-wing premises that are now accepted doctrine among mainstream liberals and Democrats.”

Whenever Muslims charge that the war on terror is really a war against Islam, Americans hasten to assure them they are wrong.  Yet as Dinesh D’Souza argues in this powerful and timely polemic, there really is a war against Islam.  Only this war is not being waged by Christianconservatives bent on a moral crusade to impose democracy abroad but by the American cultural left, which for years has been vigorously exporting its domestic war against religion and traditional morality to the rest of the world.

D’Souza contends that the cultural left is responsible for 9/11 in two ways: by fostering a decadent and depraved American culture that angers and repulses other societies—especially traditional and religious ones— and by promoting, at home and abroad, an anti-American attitude that blames America for all the problems of the world. 

Islamic anti-Americanism is not merely a reaction to U.S. foreign policy but is also rooted in a revulsion against what Muslims perceive to be the atheism and moral depravity of American popular culture.  Muslims and other traditional people around the world allege that secular American values are being imposed on their societies and that these values undermine religious belief, weaken the traditional family, and corrupt the innocence of children. But it is not “America” that is doing this to them, it is the American cultural left. What traditional societies consider repulsive and immoral, the cultural left considers progressive and liberating.

Taking issue with those on the right who speak of a “clash of civilizations,” D’Souza argues that the war on terror is really a war for the hearts and minds of traditional Muslims—and traditional peoples everywhere.  The only way to win the struggle with radical Islam is to convince traditional Muslims that America is on their side.

We are accustomed to thinking of the war on terror and the culture war as two distinct and separate struggles. D’Souza shows that they are really one and the same.  Conservatives must recognize that the left is now allied with the Islamic radicals in a combined effort to defeat Bush’s war on terror. A whole new strategy is therefore needed to fight both wars.   “In order to defeat the Islamic radicals abroad,” D’Souza writes, “we must defeat the enemy at home.”

Publishers Weekly

Conservative pundit D'Souza (Illiberal Education) roots the blame for the 9/11 attacks in the left wing's "aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family" in this mostly lucid but unconvincing argument. Pointing to Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears and Noam Chomsky, he decries those who have teamed up with Hollywood and the U.N. to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture-epitomized by Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives-on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al- Qaeda in its effort to defeat Bush's war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home, he asserts. But D'Souza's claim that Islamic extremists are inflamed solely by America's music videos and feminists-not its U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or American support for Muslim dictators-is too single-minded. For example, he paints Abu Ghraib poster-girl Lynndie England as the personification of liberal sexual depravity, without acknowledging that the U.S. Army sent her to Iraq, not the left. Charging that liberals aid terrorists while sympathizing with the terrorists' culturally conservative worldview, D'Souza's critique of American cultural excess trips over its own inconsistencies. (Jan. 16) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Why do Muslim countries and indeed other traditional societies hate the West? They're put off by the permissive views espoused by liberals, argues the author of Illiberal Education. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

"In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home."Wasn't it Jerry Falwell who proclaimed that the gays and lefties were responsible for the terrorist events of 9/11, God having vented righteous wrath against the decadent? Rightist ideologue-for-hire D'Souza (Letters to a Young Conservative, 2002, etc.), a denizen of the ivory-tower Hoover Institution, picks up where Falwell left off, and though he takes pains to distance himself from the Falwellian message, as did so many other Republicans in public, he unswervingly voices the master's themes. The "cultural left" is responsible for fostering decadence-after all, doesn't it protect pornography under the disguise of free speech and get all worked up about naked abuses of imperial power? Decadent liberal culture "angers and repulses traditional societies" such as might be found in Saudi Arabia and Dallas. By questioning the Bush administration, which has America's best interests at heart, the lefties are egging on bin Laden and company, which amounts to treason. D'Souza helpfully provides an enemies list, numbering such figures as Nancy Pelosi and Bill Moyers and of course Michael Moore, who are of course more dangerous than anything al-Qaeda might field. But to get to that list, the careful reader will have waded through a curious defense of Wahhabism (it's just Islamic conservatism), witnessed D'Souza's brave scolding of the Bush administration (it's bad to try to democratize the Middle East, since the unwashed might well vote for Osama and Saddam), seen that Planned Parenthood is the source of much evil in the modern world inasmuch as it scorns "efforts to teach sexual modesty and 'abstinence' to youngpeople" and understood that the Islamists are just upset by America's "missionary paganism" as part of the liberals' plot to undermine God. "We know who the domestic insurgents are," D'Souza warns, trying to sound ominous, "and we know who is sheltering and supporting them." Yes, indeed. Hillary, meet Hussein, whose collective fault it all is. As for the rest of the liberals, well, chadors and hellfire await. Ridiculous red-baiting, intellectually on the Coulter-not the Buckley-plane.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     1
Illusions on the Right: What Conservatives "Know" About 9/11, and Why It's Wrong     29
Reluctant Warriors: 9/11 and the Liberal Paradox     47
America Through Muslim Eyes: Why Foreign Policy Is Not the Main Problem     68
"The Head of the Snake": The Islamic Critique of Western Moral Depravity     96
Innocence Lost: Liberalism and the Corruption of Popular Culture     119
A World Without Patriarchy: Divorce, Homosexuality, and Other Liberal Family Values     147
A Secular Crusade: Yes, There Is a War Against Islam     174
Emboldening the Enemy: How Liberal Foreign Policy Produced American Vulnerability     204
The War Against the War: Decoding bin Laden's Message to America     227
The Left's Hidden Agenda: Unmasking the Liberal-Islamic Alliance     254
Battle Plan for the Right: How to Defeat the Enemy at Home and Abroad     274
Afterword: The Enemy at Home and Its Critics     293
Notes     317
Index     347