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PointsThe Dallas Morning News PSunday, March 30, 2008Think sharp.

“It is not the duty of government to bailout and reward those who actirresponsibly, whether they are bigbanks or small borrowers.” — JohnMcCain, presumptive GOP presidentialnominee, on the government’s responseto the credit crisis (Los Angeles Times,Wednesday)

“So I made a mistake. That happens. Itproves I’m human, which you know, forsome people, is a revelation.” — HillaryRodham Clinton, apologizing for havinggrossly exaggerated the danger to her ona 1996 visit to a military airbase in Bosnia(Associated Press, Wednesday)

“I do not think that’s any of yourbusiness.” — Chelsea Clinton, to aquestioner at a campaign stop, whoquestioned her about her father’sdalliance with Monica Lewinsky (CNN,Thursday)

“Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!” —Anonymous weeping Buddhist monk,embarrassing Chinese officials leading ahighly scripted tour of Tibet for Westernjournalists (The Associated Press,Thursday)

“People need to think not just aboutweight, but where they carrytheir weight. They need toknow if they’re applesor pears.” — RachelWitmer, researchscientist and leadauthor of a studyindicating that“apples” — peoplewith pot bellies —are more likely tosuffer dementia asthey age (San FranciscoChronicle, Thursday)

“I don’t want the behavior. Little girlsare walking around dressing likehoochies, cursing and swearing andshowing disrespect toward their elders.In Islam, we believe in respect anddignity and honor.” — Aya Ismael, aCalifornia Muslim mother, on why shehomeschools her four children (The NewYork Times, Wednesday)

TALKING POINTS

_ . . . . . . . .

Our Q&A withJanis Burklund,director of theDallas FilmCommission

Why has Dallas long been in the shadowof Austin as a film town?

Dallas has long been an incrediblystrong, sizable film town and one of thetop markets in the film and videoproduction industry. Dallas is the largestproduction center in the state of Texas,and the film market is pretty diverse.And, of course, the AFI DallasInternational Film Festival puts a globalfilm spotlight on Dallas and brings thefilmmakers here to … get exposure tothe film community of the new Dallas.They have an outdated perception ofthis city from that TV show, which keepshanging on.

The Texas Film Commission recentlyreleased a report that shows to datethat Dallas leads the state in qualifyingfilm incentive applicants with a total of47 out of 84 projects — the closestbeing Austin, with 21 total projects.

But people still think Austin is the Texasfilm capital.

Part of it is a perception issue, notunlike what’s described in the book TheTipping Point. If you say something istrue long enough, and the right peopleare saying it, it starts to be believed.Austin has had a couple of big featurefilms, and they’ve got [Robert]Rodriguez and [Richard] Linklater livingthere. So you’ve got these big directorsliving there and saying, “This is a coolplace; it’s the Texas film capital” — that’swhat I mean by the tipping point.

What’s the specific economic impact offilm and television production in theDallas area?

The Film Commission is currentlyundergoing a third-party economicimpact study to understand how largeand significant the Dallas film industryis. However, we do know that the filmand television industry is a significanteconomic driver for Dallas. Film andtelevision projects that apply for stateincentives must spend at least $1 millionin Texas, shoot 80 percent of the projectwithin state borders and hire at least 70percent of actors, crew and extras inTexas. For commercials, infomercials,music videos and video games, theminimum spend is $100,000. So youcan see how making these projects inDallas and the state provides moneyinto our economic system.

POINT OF CONTACT

The News’ Rod Dreher blames the economic downturn onAmericans’ lack of self-discipline. Charles Duhigg analyzesthe risk of a full-blown depression. 4P

RECESSION FEARS

Tough times ahead

This approach has beenwidely condemned as flawed —even simple — and ultimatelydangerous. That many of thosewho are fighting against Americashare similarly strident viewsabout good and evil has donenothing to quell the criticism.

But in the longing for a morenuanced view of the world — anappeal to see the grayness ofthings — Mr. Bush’s critics fail toacknowledge that some ofhistory’s biggest figures sawthings in terms just as stark.

Chief among them is WinstonChurchill, the endlesslyfascinating prime minister ofGreat Britain whose great flaws

and astounding foresight — notto mention mesmerizing oratory— helped steer his nation backfrom the brink of destructionduring World War II.

Throughout the 1930s, manyof Britain’s leading figures hadexplained away the risingmilitarism in Germany as anatural, if regrettable, outcome ofthe Treaty of Versailles. Churchillhimself called Hitler “this

TROY OXFORD/Staff illustration

Stark realityIs Bush channeling Churchill bysaying some enemies are simplyevil? asks Michael Lindenberger

F ew criticisms of President Bush have found a widerchorus of acceptance than the notion that hiscampaign against al-Qaeda has been marred by a

world view of good versus evil, us versus them. Mr. Bushhas referred to Islamic terrorists as “evil doers,” to thenations of Iraq, Syria and Iran as the “axis of evil” and, onthe eve of the Iraq war, told the world “you are either withus or against us in the fight against terror.”

“You ask what is our

policy. I will say, it is to

wage war with all our

might, with all the

strength that God can

give us, to wage war

against a monstrous

tyranny, never

surpassed in the dark,

lamentable catalogue

of human crime. You

ask what is our aim? I

can answer in one

word: Victory. Victory

at all costs. Victory in

spite of all terror.

Victory however long

and hard the road may

be. For without

victory there is no

survival.”

Winston Churchill in his firstspeech as Prime Minister, 1940

“If we were not fighting

and destroying this

enemy in Iraq, they

would not be idle. They

would be plotting and

killing Americans

across the world and

within our own

borders. By fighting

these terrorists in Iraq,

Americans in uniform

are defeating a direct

threat to the American

people. … We will never

back down. We will

never give in. And we

will never accept

anything less than

complete victory.”

George Bush in his “Strategy forVictory” speech, October 2005

READ MORE about WilliamManchester’s seminalbiography on Churchill. 5P

See LINDENBERGER Page 5P

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The Dallas Morning News dallasnews.com _ Sunday, March 30, 2008 5P

Points

monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.”But historical understanding did not prevent

Churchill from laying the blame for the Nazithreat squarely on the shoulders of Hitler and theNazis themselves.

His was a style as blunt, and astake-no-prisoners, as any pronouncement madeby Mr. Bush in the days following Sept. 11, 2001.

Twenty-five years ago, American writerWilliam Manchester captured the richcomplexity of Churchill’s life and language in abrilliant biography, The Last Lion. Re-reading itnow helps make clear how Churchill’sManichaean world view helped shape thespeeches that steeled his people to win a warmany of them initially thought was hopeless.

T he idea of “us versus them” has beenaround far longer than Mr. Bush orChurchill — maybe as long as war itself.

The dehumanization of the enemy — the easyrecourse to stereotype, as in “the bloody Huns” ofWorld War I, the “gooks” of Vietnam — has beenstandard fare for war propagandists since ancienttimes.

And when it comes to wartime leadership,few presidents, prime ministers or princes havefailed to cast their opponents in the role ofvillain.

“There can never be friendship,” Churchillsaid in 1938, “between the British democracy andthe Nazi power, that power which spurnsChristian ethics, which cheers its onward courseby a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spiritof aggression and conquest, which derivesstrength and perverted pleasure frompersecution, and uses, as we have seen, withpitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.”

There have been exceptions, and perhaps thegreatest of these is Abraham Lincoln. Ratherthan demonize the South when he delivered hissecond inaugural address in 1865, Lincoln sawthe Civil War as God’s bitter punishment on thewhole nation for its original sin of slavery.

On March 4, 1865, Lincoln told Americansthat the killing would end only when the countryhad paid the full price for its sin.

“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray —this mighty scourge of war may speedily passaway,” he said. “Yet, if God wills that it continueuntil all the wealth piled by the bondman’s 250years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and untilevery drop of blood drawn with the lash shall bepaid by another drawn with the sword, as wassaid 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘Thejudgments of the Lord are true and righteous.’ ”

If such end-times eloquence has any rival in

the pantheon of world leaders, it is probably thelanguage of Churchill, born just nine years afterLincoln’s speech and subsequent assassination.

Despite their shared genius for words, the twomen were as different as a boy born in the cold ofthe Kentucky frontier and a grandson of Englishdukes born in the full tide of British imperialismcould be.

Lincoln dressed simply and was ever ill at easein a crowd. Churchill wore specially tailored silkunderwear, was helped into his clothes by a valet,and traveled with enough matching luggage toequip an army.

Whereas Lincoln looked to God’s judgment onslavery as explanation for his country’s war,Churchill’s eyes were fixed squarely on mankind.

As the nations of Europe fell one after anotherto Germany in the quickening years of World WarII, Churchill looked for the cause of the misery inthe hearts of the men who had started the war.

For him, the evil emanated from the forcesgathered across the English Channel. “TheGermans,” he said, “are always either at yourthroat or at your feet.”

The fault, as Churchill saw it, came directlyfrom “that man,” as he called Hitler. He despisedthe Nazi leader in a way reminiscent of thepersonal enmity Mr. Bush shared with SaddamHussein.

Churchill’s contemporaries, writes Mr.Manchester, believed Hitler and Nazism itself tobe “products of complex social and historicalforces.”

By contrast, Churchill was a “passionateManichaean who saw the world as a medievalstruggle to the death between the powers of goodand the powers of evil, who held that individualswere responsible for their acts and that theGerman dictator was therefore wicked.”

Upon taking office as prime minister,Churchill pledged to fight on until the last Britishsoldier lay bleeding on the shores. He told hisdaughter-in-law that when the Germans came,she should grab a kitchen knife and take one withher.

In a kind of fatalism that Lincoln would haveappreciated, Churchill would say that same year,the year of the disaster-cum-miracle at Dunkirk,was as good a year to die as to live.

But Churchill, like Mr. Bush more than 60years later, believed absolutely that his cause wasjust and his enemy’s evil.

He believed in “the supremacy of his race andhis national destiny.”

W ith the Iraq war past its fifth year, andMr. Bush’s time in office coming to aclose, it’s as good a time as any to look

again at the spectacularly lived years, and specialgenius, of Winston Churchill.

His story has been told over and over, but it’s

probably never been told so engagingly as whenMr. Manchester published his master biographyin 1983.

Aptly titled The Last Lion, Mr. Manchester’smasterpiece put Churchill in his context — a taskthat takes more than 1,500 pages before the firstshots of World War II are ever fired.

The work is dazzling. Churchill leaps off thepage as almost a legendary figure, so full of lifeand flaws that it reads like Greek mythology. Mr.Manchester’s portrait is of a towering egoist, aman whose idea of a successful dinner was acrowd of guests alive with conversation, albeitwith him doing all the talking.

Churchill was responsible for so much in the40 years of public life before he was primeminister that it can overwhelm a reader.

He fought in the last cavalry charge of theBritish Empire; served in India, where heeducated himself by reading a library’s worth ofgreat works; was captured during the Boer War(and made a spectacular escape through 300miles of enemy territory); and was the father ofthe tank and of the British air force.

He commanded a battalion in the trenches inWorld War I — with brandy and a porter alwaysnearby, or course — and as home secretaryestablished the Irish Free State.

A natural born conservative who switchedparties, and then switched back again, hechampioned government health insurance for 30million Britons more than 80 years ago,shortened work hours for shop clerks, and raisedpensions for the poor.

Churchill was a painter and an amateur stone

mason — but most of all, he was a writer. Alwaysspending more than he could afford, and with billcollectors dogging him well into old age, all his lifeChurchill put food on his table by the words heput down on paper as an author, biographer andforeign correspondent.

Above everything else, Churchill lived as if lifewas an epic tale, with himself always cast as thestar.

His all-or-nothing extremism has been hailedas not only right for his times, but as the verykernel of his now nearly universally regardedgenius.

N early 40 years after Churchill’s death, Mr.Bush finds himself leading a war againstan enemy thought to be no less a threat to

the way of life of his country.He, like Churchill, has adopted a

black-and-white vision of the struggle thatsustains him in his resolve to keep fighting.

If the president’s rhetoric seems lesswell-grounded than the do-or-die phrases ofChurchill, perhaps the fault lies less in his dualisticworld view than in the nature of his foes.

Mr. Bush has said the war on terror is agenerational struggle against a shadowynetwork of evil. But long after Saddam Husseinwent to the gallows, the fight continues, withno clear idea of when it can end.

In this way, Mr. Bush is at a disadvantagewhen compared with Churchill and Lincoln,whose enemies were neither shadowy norephemeral.

For Lincoln, the fault for the war lay inourselves and in the willingness of the South, ashe said, “to make war rather than let the nationsurvive.” By beating the Southern armies,occupying their cities, and freeing their slaves,the war could be won.

For Churchill, the enemy was personal: Hisname was Hitler, and it was his millions-strongarmy posed across the Channel that needed tobe beaten before, as he famously said, the lastlamp of Western civilization was extinguished.

Though Mr. Bush’s rhetoric at times hasbeen Churchillian in tone, and in approach, theeffect has been less so. Perhaps what is missingis the call for sacrifice Lincoln and Churchillmade.

Whatever the case, we cannot easily dismissMr. Bush’s insistence that some enemies areevil enough to be called so. Churchill — as is soaptly portrayed in Mr. Manchester’s tour deforce — stands in the way.

Michael A. Lindenberger is aDallas Morning News staffwriter. His e-mail address ismlindenberger@dallasnews.com.

LindenbergerContinued from Page 1P

An unclosed chapterWe know that Winston Churchill’s story ended

in his death in 1965, a century after John WilkesBooth ended Abraham Lincoln’s life.

But William Manchester’s story about Churchillnever has come to a close.

Twenty-five years ago, the Americanbiographer published the first volume of hisbiography, The Last Lion; the second followed fiveyears later, in 1988.

Mr. Manchester died in 2004, with themountain of notes and pages on his desk thatwould have made the long-awaited third volumeof The Last Lion, to be called Defender of theRealm.

News reports since say that a new author willfinish the work and that the set will eventually becomplete.

But the author’s task is a thankless one. Mr.Manchester, whose contribution was to render aChurchill fully alive to his own toweringcontradictions, may be only slightly less difficultto top than Churchill himself.

Michael A. Lindenberger

A ccording to The New York Times, moreand more young adults, tired of justreading about organic food and

sustainable farming, are heading out to the landto make a go of it themselves. Unlike the babyboomer back-to-the-land-ers, today’sfresh-faced farmer wannabes actually have adecent shot at making a living, thanks tocultural and economic changes that havecreated a market for locally grown producefrom small farms.

We say: Come on in; the farming’s fine. We left our jobs as engineers and went into

business together, establishing a RockwallCounty farm that grows flowers, herbs andproduce for the Dallas-area market. We find thework to be both extremely hard andfantastically rewarding.

We started out primarily as specialtycut-flower growers with a small percentage oftotal planting space in vegetable and herbcrops. But due to the overwhelming demand forlocal, fresh, healthy food, we have done acomplete turnaround. Even now, we have a longway to go to meet demand. We have neveradvertised. Other than a few newspaper storiesand mentions in regional magazine articles, ourcustomer base has grown strictly on word ofmouth.

Point is: There is a fast-growing demand forthe kind of agriculture we practice.

Although we both love working the land, wehave also grown into healthy-food advocatessince we started farming primarily food crops.The state of our industrialized food system isalarming. The fast-food industry has

significantly changed not only our culture butalso how we as a nation treat the environmentand the creatures we get our food from — andnot for the better.

Consumers are getting wise to this andchanging the way they shop for food. Yet even ifyou buy non-processed conventional andorganic foods in grocery stores, you may notrealize that most of it travels an average of1,500 miles before it gets to the shelf. Thatrepresents a tremendous amount of wastedenergy and results in a food product that isneither as healthy nor as nutritious as what wecan pick from the ground and feed tosomebody within hours of harvest.

While we each made a great living in ourprevious high-tech jobs, we paid a high price in

terms of stress and health. After sitting behinda computer for years, taking home good moneyand yet not knowing what real good we weredoing in the world, farming has given us exactlythe opposite experience.

It is hard to describe to somebody thesatisfaction in knowing you are feeding peoplehealthy food. While we may not be making thesame money as we did in our previous lives,farming has proven to be far more rewarding injust about every other way.

The fellow farmers and food producerswe’ve met are some of the kindest, mostwell-adjusted people we’ve ever known. Andour customers’ dedication continues to amazeus.

We feel that organic farming is a viable

option for young people. Aside from the unmetconsumer demand, the price of conventional(and non-local organic) food will keep risingwith energy costs. Besides, we are fastbecoming a country that cannot feed itself.

We tell people interested in farming to gofor it, even if they start on a very small scale andeven if it is only part-time. The best way to startout is to find a farmer willing to mentor, whichis easier to do in areas where there are stillmany active farmers. We’ve volunteered at localfarms to learn from other farmers’ experience.

Look for land to lease or rent. Land pricesnear urban areas are usually too high to make itfeasible to purchase for farming. On the otherhand, being close to an urban area means morecustomers and potentially better prices. Andthe farther the food has to be trucked tomarket, the more it hurts the bottom line.Some folks solve this problem withunconventional ideas, such as using vacant citylots or renting backyard spaces. It’s a complexchallenge, and meeting it requires trade-offs.

There will be times when crops are lost toinsects or weather hazards. If you arediversified in your planting plan, with multiplecrops planted at multiple times per year, yourrisk is less than the farmer who plantshundreds of acres of the same crop.

It’s not an exact science, which was a bigdifference for us compared to what we wereused to in engineering. But the sametroubleshooting skills we honed in our previousjobs benefit us in farming. In fact, the work ismuch more challenging mentally because thereare so many more aspects to it than in mostconventional jobs.

Truly, there’s never a dull moment forfarmers. But if you are up for the challenges —the weather, the bugs, the long hours and more— it’s an amazingly rich way to live.

Laurie Bostic and Kim Martin own andoperate Barking Cat Farm(www.barkingcatfarm.com) in Heath. Theire-mail address is info@barkingcatfarm.com.

We left it all to be farmersGetting back to theland has changed ourlives, say LaurieBostic and KimMartin

How do they do it?The primary method of retail sales at Barking Cat Farm in Rockwall

County is via the CSA model. CSA — community-supported agriculture — is a system in which

subscribers pay upfront for the growing season. Each week everybodygets a box with the same contents, representing a sampling of whatevercrops are coming in at the time. The farm has a Food CSA, a Flower CSAand an Egg CSA. When the owners opened CSAs to subscribers, theyfilled immediately, and they now have waiting lists for each.

Any food or flower crops that don’t go into the CSA boxes are sold offthe truck each week.