The end -- or is it? Investors trying to reopen independent bookstore (Kepler's Bookstore)

....Now there's a chance that Kepler's, and "keppling," may return to Menlo Park, thanks to fans of the store -- including a fired-up group of potential investors and a lone ranger who launched an online life raft -- who have mobilized to try to reopen its doors.

Because of their efforts, Clark Kepler -- who took the reins from his now-deceased father, Roy, the peace activist who founded the store in 1955 -- has postponed filing for bankruptcy.

A conscientious objector during World War II, Roy Kepler created a haven of progressive thought long before the free-speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s. The store was a magnet for artists, musicians, scientists and anyone hungry for good books and camaraderie. Kepler had active co-revolutionaries in friends Fred and Pat Cody of Cody's Books in Berkeley and Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books in San Francisco -- all of them committed to free speech, community, great literature and quality paperbacks. (All three stores were early champions of affordable "pocket books," considering them democratic innovations.)

"Kepler's has always been more than just a store," said state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, a customer since the 1960s. "It has been a venue for the free expression of ideas in an engaged community. That's no small thing."

In honor of the store's 50th anniversary this year, a Palo Alto Online article -- called "How Kepler's Changed the World" -- put it this way: "Jerry Garcia needed musical compatriots. Joan Baez needed a mentor, peace activists needed teachers and right-wingers needed an enemy. One way or another, they all found what they were looking for at Kepler's."

***.........If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem. ................***

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