The Search for Intelligent Life on Planet Earth
News stories from the Cincinnati Zoo describe the little boy who fell into the silverback gorilla enclosure as a "fall." Down there for ten minutes with the gorilla, in shallow water, the boy became the focus of the animal's protective instinct as people cried out and shouted above. The boy, one of several children looked after by his mother, had told her he wanted to go down there. While distracted by her other children, the boy squeezed through a barrier, making his way into a danger zone where he then fell into the water, the gorilla taking a quick interest. Here was something for the gorilla to do--a tiny primate suddenly in his containment zone.
The 400 pound gorilla moved the kid around, dragged him through the water into a corner, got the boy behind him. Zoo officials debated on what to do. A tranquilizer dart would work, but the knockout effect might take up to fifteen minutes, creating the probability of a pissed off gorilla also acting as a defender of a small person put mysteriously into his care. The officials decided to kill the gorilla.
Afterwards, the seventeen year old gorilla, having been "put down" for behaving like himself, was regarded as a helpless victim stuck in a situation he didn't choose, but reacted to normally. The little boy's safety and survival (with a visit to the hospital resulting in a diagnosis of "he's going to be fine") simultaneously became the main concern, because human life is always seen as more important than animal life. I don't suggest that it's too bad the gorilla wasn't tranked. I understand the on the spot lethal motive of the zoo officials. What bothers me, apart from the worst part of the story--the gorilla's ruination--is how the boy's stupid, albeit toddler, behavior, has been mischaracterized.
A reporter at a press conference asked the zoo director if the boy's mother will be charged with negligence. The director said he doesn't like to assign blame. "Let politicians get into the blame game."
Yes, the no blame society in which George W. Bush isn't the one responsible for invading Iraq under false pretenses, and even if he is, why "litigate the past"? "What's done, is done," says Lady Macbeth, justifying the assassination of King Duncan. Later, while sleepwalking, she says, "What's done cannot be undone."
That sleepwalking mindset, the voice scratching the backs of our brains while the sunny fronts of ourselves claim always that everything is fine, and "Let it go," is conscience, but also the part of us that sees more clearly the nature of things, even when they're gilded with lies.
The boy who "fell" into the gorilla enclosure didn't deserve to be terrified or hurt. He made a young child's mistake. His distracted mother didn't do enough to prevent from happening his choice of entering a dangerous place. Her mistake. These two mistakes combined got a gorilla killed. If the truth of the event comes to, "The boy fell, the gorilla had to be put down," newsmen and -women, and those not thinking clearly about this, will have ignored the role of free will. It's common these days to assume that things "just happen." No one is to blame, the zoo director said. The barrier keeping small children and others from entering a gorilla enclosure is, as he claimed in the press conference, "adequate," even though he has a dead 400 pound animal and a hospitalized boy proving that it isn't.
Imagine being that gorilla, minding your own business, and then someone deemed more important than you invades your space. You don't know what's going on, but the shouts from above are loud and urgent, fear is in the air; the little thing that plopped into your pool needs protection. You die, believing you were doing the right thing.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Sunday, May 29, 2016
If the Roman Empire Had an Air Force
President Obama's Asia trip provided him with the opportunity to express his commitment to something he calls "peace." To illuminate this idea, imagine a father who keeps order in his household by giving regular beatings to his children, and keeping his wife cowed through the ever ready threat of violence. Thus, for the father, does peace come about. He reads the newspaper, drinks his coffee far enough away from the sounds of his children weeping to easily ignore, and quickly forget about, the violence that makes life in his house smooth, for himself only.
My heavy-handed allegory touches on American dealings with two countries, Vietnam and Japan, both visited in recent days by Obama. While the president announced that the Peace Corps will be going to Vietnam for the first time, he also has opened that country to arms deals. Surveillance aircraft and drones, made by Boeing and Northrup Grumman respectively, would assist the Vietnamese military in keeping an eye on the waters in their sphere of interest--binoculars trained, so to speak, on the Chinese.
A few days ago, while watching cable news, I saw on the news scroll at the TV screen's bottom, a sentence on Obama's announcement about the Peace Corps and Vietnam, and right after that a sentence on upcoming U.S. arms deals with Vietnam. Does my TV suffer from cognitive dissonance? Or does President Obama?
In Japan, Obama visited Hiroshima--"the first U.S. president to visit that city..."
He hugged survivors of the atomic bombing, gave a speech characterized by the idea that we must seek a world "free of nuclear weapons." There's an idea, prevalent among those in political and military circles who don't like to talk about the lethal alternatives to nuclear weapons, that nukes are absolutely the worst kind of weapon. In destructive terms, they are. Used in massed multiple explosions worldwide during the type of exchange envisioned during the Cold War, nukes could bring about "nuclear winter," turning Earth itself into a temporarily (but long enough to wipe us all out) uninhabitable place. During Ronald Reagan's time in the highest office, this fate seemed likely at times. He believed in the Day of Judgment and in the Apocalypse as described in the Bible's cryptic last book.
As Obama said, "a world free of nuclear weapons," I thought, "You're not saying, 'a world free of cluster bombs.'"
We know, too, that Obama loves the effectiveness of Hellfire missiles. He killed the Taliban's leader a short while back using a Hellfire. The nice thing about those weapons is that they fulfill the adage, "Shoot first, ask questions later," except here it's "Shoot first, don't ask or answer questions."
Obama's been criticized by high-ranking spooks, like former CIA Director James Woolsey, for killing too many terror suspects. We need, Woolsey says, more of them alive and captured so they can be interrogated. Since the U.S. record on capturing and interrogating "enemy combatants" is so egregiously bad during this century, Woolsey's longing for a different tactic coming from Obama only tells me that the former CIA director's good intentions sound like a different way of practicing ineffective and dehumanizing policies. Still, he has a point. George W. Bush sought to conquer; Barack Obama assassinates. He uses machines and, occasionally, Special Forces teams. What has this power done to his psyche?
In 2012 it was revealed in the news that Obama had a "kill list." Unlike those who just fantasize about having such power, the president really does have the capability of looking at his list, choosing a name, and giving an order, crossing off the name when he gets the word, delivered no doubt in a stern neutral voice by some male underling, that the "target" has been eliminated. Collateral damage? Possibly, sir, we're looking into it.
At one point, someone in the Obama administration figured out (I'm not making this up), that if a "target" could be eliminated but was in a civilian area, upwards of twenty-nine innocent civilians could die before the hit would be cancelled as "too risky." Thus, twenty-nine innocent lives equal one untried, alleged terrorist. When carried out by machines, this kind of killing is very easy to do. It's like pressing buttons on a microwave oven, but recall the scene in Syriana when Matt Damon's character is in a car among a long line of vehicles that has a "high value target." The drone flies overhead. A control room in America has people waiting for the go-ahead. The drone pilot works the thing; it looks like he's playing a video game. The kill order comes from the master assassin, the control room is tense and then the explosion blooms on their screen. In another hemisphere, people and vehicles are blasted to smithereens. Violence for the sake of peace.
Syriana came out in 2005 during Bush's time, but the drone strike scene is one of Hollywood's most chilling depictions of the War on Terror. The sky is clean, the ground is a horror. I mistrust anyone, Obama or his successors, who can kill and maim with such passionless dedication.
Orwell had it right: peace means war.
Vic Neptune
President Obama's Asia trip provided him with the opportunity to express his commitment to something he calls "peace." To illuminate this idea, imagine a father who keeps order in his household by giving regular beatings to his children, and keeping his wife cowed through the ever ready threat of violence. Thus, for the father, does peace come about. He reads the newspaper, drinks his coffee far enough away from the sounds of his children weeping to easily ignore, and quickly forget about, the violence that makes life in his house smooth, for himself only.
My heavy-handed allegory touches on American dealings with two countries, Vietnam and Japan, both visited in recent days by Obama. While the president announced that the Peace Corps will be going to Vietnam for the first time, he also has opened that country to arms deals. Surveillance aircraft and drones, made by Boeing and Northrup Grumman respectively, would assist the Vietnamese military in keeping an eye on the waters in their sphere of interest--binoculars trained, so to speak, on the Chinese.
A few days ago, while watching cable news, I saw on the news scroll at the TV screen's bottom, a sentence on Obama's announcement about the Peace Corps and Vietnam, and right after that a sentence on upcoming U.S. arms deals with Vietnam. Does my TV suffer from cognitive dissonance? Or does President Obama?
In Japan, Obama visited Hiroshima--"the first U.S. president to visit that city..."
He hugged survivors of the atomic bombing, gave a speech characterized by the idea that we must seek a world "free of nuclear weapons." There's an idea, prevalent among those in political and military circles who don't like to talk about the lethal alternatives to nuclear weapons, that nukes are absolutely the worst kind of weapon. In destructive terms, they are. Used in massed multiple explosions worldwide during the type of exchange envisioned during the Cold War, nukes could bring about "nuclear winter," turning Earth itself into a temporarily (but long enough to wipe us all out) uninhabitable place. During Ronald Reagan's time in the highest office, this fate seemed likely at times. He believed in the Day of Judgment and in the Apocalypse as described in the Bible's cryptic last book.
As Obama said, "a world free of nuclear weapons," I thought, "You're not saying, 'a world free of cluster bombs.'"
We know, too, that Obama loves the effectiveness of Hellfire missiles. He killed the Taliban's leader a short while back using a Hellfire. The nice thing about those weapons is that they fulfill the adage, "Shoot first, ask questions later," except here it's "Shoot first, don't ask or answer questions."
Obama's been criticized by high-ranking spooks, like former CIA Director James Woolsey, for killing too many terror suspects. We need, Woolsey says, more of them alive and captured so they can be interrogated. Since the U.S. record on capturing and interrogating "enemy combatants" is so egregiously bad during this century, Woolsey's longing for a different tactic coming from Obama only tells me that the former CIA director's good intentions sound like a different way of practicing ineffective and dehumanizing policies. Still, he has a point. George W. Bush sought to conquer; Barack Obama assassinates. He uses machines and, occasionally, Special Forces teams. What has this power done to his psyche?
In 2012 it was revealed in the news that Obama had a "kill list." Unlike those who just fantasize about having such power, the president really does have the capability of looking at his list, choosing a name, and giving an order, crossing off the name when he gets the word, delivered no doubt in a stern neutral voice by some male underling, that the "target" has been eliminated. Collateral damage? Possibly, sir, we're looking into it.
At one point, someone in the Obama administration figured out (I'm not making this up), that if a "target" could be eliminated but was in a civilian area, upwards of twenty-nine innocent civilians could die before the hit would be cancelled as "too risky." Thus, twenty-nine innocent lives equal one untried, alleged terrorist. When carried out by machines, this kind of killing is very easy to do. It's like pressing buttons on a microwave oven, but recall the scene in Syriana when Matt Damon's character is in a car among a long line of vehicles that has a "high value target." The drone flies overhead. A control room in America has people waiting for the go-ahead. The drone pilot works the thing; it looks like he's playing a video game. The kill order comes from the master assassin, the control room is tense and then the explosion blooms on their screen. In another hemisphere, people and vehicles are blasted to smithereens. Violence for the sake of peace.
Syriana came out in 2005 during Bush's time, but the drone strike scene is one of Hollywood's most chilling depictions of the War on Terror. The sky is clean, the ground is a horror. I mistrust anyone, Obama or his successors, who can kill and maim with such passionless dedication.
Orwell had it right: peace means war.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Playground
I've considered various theories accounting for the success of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. Mine overlap with many I've heard mentioned by pundits and comedians, including a frequently cited one: Trump is really a Democrat--he entered the Republican presidential candidates field in order to undermine the Republican Party, like a sapper during a siege, digging under a tower to make it fall.
He's certainly put the Party in turmoil as its members either resisted him or watched his antics and heard his outrages without meaningful comment. Trump's vanquishing of the Republicans' "favorite son" establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, not only exposed the latter as a lightweight campaigner with an out of touch support structure, but also as a grown man subject to paralysis of the personality when faced with a dynamic, albeit odious, opponent.
Trump's easy successes against a series of Republican challengers came mostly from his extensive use of insults. "Little Marco," "Low Energy" Jeb Bush, and now he's saying "Crazy Bernie" and "Crooked Hillary." This method of degradation, practiced extensively by children in school when I, and Trump, grew up, still apparently works on grown men. Bush has not and most likely will not endorse Trump, but for the most part, Trump's former enemies "rally around the presumptive nominee," who, just this morning, reached the necessary delegate count: 1,237.
If Trump really is a Democrat seeking to get Clinton elected by disrupting the Republican Party from within, he is now, without ambiguity, set firmly in the role of their standard bearer. He's considered liberal by "true" Republican conservatives. Trump's positions on any given subject jump around according to the meanderings of his mind. He's a talker. He makes pronouncements on everything he mentions without ever offering evidence. His certainty several days ago that the Egyptair airliner disaster over the Mediterranean was the result of terrorism was stated with absolute conviction, based on no evidence other than "gut instinct," the kind of non-intellectual stance preferred by people like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly. The Egyptair tragedy may have been the result of a terror plot, but for one of the two presidential possibilities of 2016 to insist, without any evidence to offer other than his own feeling (which we know by now has a hair trigger), puts him in the same league as drunks talking politics in bars at one in the morning.
His dumb-American-guy "He talks like us" appeal does suggest what he really is: a lout with a lot of money. His personality, having grown from that of a more thoughtful and softer-speaking real estate celebrity in the 1980s, has been transformed through reality television into a persona that began to get particularly political in 2011, the year before the Obama-Romney competition, when Trump became the premier Birther, advocating the idea (which has no basis in fact), that Obama is not an American citizen. He worked that idea well into 2012, but now doesn't "want to talk about it." The illogical notion served its purpose a few years ago, got Trump firmly into the racist hearts of the so-called "Silent Majority," a mass of white Americans, middle and working class, feeling their imagined rule of this country slipping in favor of darker-skinned people. Hence, Trump started his campaign last June by attacking Mexican "criminals and rapists" coming across the border, a sure way to stimulate the hatred that largely fuels his reprehensible campaign.
The overwhelming truth of Trump's rise to power in politics is not a matter of a wily secret Democrat trying to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Trump himself is the secret ingredient. His desire to magnify his sense of greatness dominates everything he does and says. He's a blowhard that can't be convinced to leave the soiree. Some find him entertaining, but that's a dubious recommendation for someone trying to be president.
Trump is now his party's nominee. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is nearly as unpopular nationwide as he is. The election, in spite of Trump's alienation of women, Latinos, and African-Americans, could go either way. Americans voted for Richard Nixon twice. Americans voted for George W. Bush twice. Americans, some of them, believed Sarah Palin could be a serious vice president, and could take over as president if elderly John McCain were to die in office. Millions of Americans believed in the possibility of and accepted the reality of, without thinking it absurd, the words President Palin. The same Sarah Palin who now supports Donald Trump, just as Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and a majority of the Republican Party do.
The rush that Trump must get from all the support, seeing how he's won over Republican skeptics, is some of the fuel that flies his missile, and now donors prepare to give money to his campaign to defeat Clinton.
Giving money to help a billionaire, unless one is in a position in society to seek real control, is a very stupid thing to do, but I suspect that poor and working class "Silent Majority" victims of Trump's propaganda will make their small contributions, thinking they're doing their part to make American great again, when really all they're doing is help grow a ball of phlegm the nation would be wise to expectorate.
Vic Neptune
I've considered various theories accounting for the success of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. Mine overlap with many I've heard mentioned by pundits and comedians, including a frequently cited one: Trump is really a Democrat--he entered the Republican presidential candidates field in order to undermine the Republican Party, like a sapper during a siege, digging under a tower to make it fall.
He's certainly put the Party in turmoil as its members either resisted him or watched his antics and heard his outrages without meaningful comment. Trump's vanquishing of the Republicans' "favorite son" establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, not only exposed the latter as a lightweight campaigner with an out of touch support structure, but also as a grown man subject to paralysis of the personality when faced with a dynamic, albeit odious, opponent.
Trump's easy successes against a series of Republican challengers came mostly from his extensive use of insults. "Little Marco," "Low Energy" Jeb Bush, and now he's saying "Crazy Bernie" and "Crooked Hillary." This method of degradation, practiced extensively by children in school when I, and Trump, grew up, still apparently works on grown men. Bush has not and most likely will not endorse Trump, but for the most part, Trump's former enemies "rally around the presumptive nominee," who, just this morning, reached the necessary delegate count: 1,237.
If Trump really is a Democrat seeking to get Clinton elected by disrupting the Republican Party from within, he is now, without ambiguity, set firmly in the role of their standard bearer. He's considered liberal by "true" Republican conservatives. Trump's positions on any given subject jump around according to the meanderings of his mind. He's a talker. He makes pronouncements on everything he mentions without ever offering evidence. His certainty several days ago that the Egyptair airliner disaster over the Mediterranean was the result of terrorism was stated with absolute conviction, based on no evidence other than "gut instinct," the kind of non-intellectual stance preferred by people like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly. The Egyptair tragedy may have been the result of a terror plot, but for one of the two presidential possibilities of 2016 to insist, without any evidence to offer other than his own feeling (which we know by now has a hair trigger), puts him in the same league as drunks talking politics in bars at one in the morning.
His dumb-American-guy "He talks like us" appeal does suggest what he really is: a lout with a lot of money. His personality, having grown from that of a more thoughtful and softer-speaking real estate celebrity in the 1980s, has been transformed through reality television into a persona that began to get particularly political in 2011, the year before the Obama-Romney competition, when Trump became the premier Birther, advocating the idea (which has no basis in fact), that Obama is not an American citizen. He worked that idea well into 2012, but now doesn't "want to talk about it." The illogical notion served its purpose a few years ago, got Trump firmly into the racist hearts of the so-called "Silent Majority," a mass of white Americans, middle and working class, feeling their imagined rule of this country slipping in favor of darker-skinned people. Hence, Trump started his campaign last June by attacking Mexican "criminals and rapists" coming across the border, a sure way to stimulate the hatred that largely fuels his reprehensible campaign.
The overwhelming truth of Trump's rise to power in politics is not a matter of a wily secret Democrat trying to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Trump himself is the secret ingredient. His desire to magnify his sense of greatness dominates everything he does and says. He's a blowhard that can't be convinced to leave the soiree. Some find him entertaining, but that's a dubious recommendation for someone trying to be president.
Trump is now his party's nominee. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is nearly as unpopular nationwide as he is. The election, in spite of Trump's alienation of women, Latinos, and African-Americans, could go either way. Americans voted for Richard Nixon twice. Americans voted for George W. Bush twice. Americans, some of them, believed Sarah Palin could be a serious vice president, and could take over as president if elderly John McCain were to die in office. Millions of Americans believed in the possibility of and accepted the reality of, without thinking it absurd, the words President Palin. The same Sarah Palin who now supports Donald Trump, just as Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and a majority of the Republican Party do.
The rush that Trump must get from all the support, seeing how he's won over Republican skeptics, is some of the fuel that flies his missile, and now donors prepare to give money to his campaign to defeat Clinton.
Giving money to help a billionaire, unless one is in a position in society to seek real control, is a very stupid thing to do, but I suspect that poor and working class "Silent Majority" victims of Trump's propaganda will make their small contributions, thinking they're doing their part to make American great again, when really all they're doing is help grow a ball of phlegm the nation would be wise to expectorate.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Joan Baez, an Actual Patriot
In December 1972, Joan Baez, American singer, went to Hanoi, North Vietnam, then at war with the United States. She happened to visit while the city and other North Vietnamese locations were heavily bombed by B-52s in Operation Linebacker II, an effort by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to persuade their longtime enemy to accept U.S. and South Vietnamese conditions at the Paris peace talks dedicated to ending the Vietnam War.
Linebacker II was thus a "big stick," in the Teddy Roosevelt sense, but the voice "speaking softly" in this case, Kissinger's, had a German accent. There were eleven days of bombings, thousands of casualties, and a woman heard wailing in Vietnamese on Baez's tape recorder, "Where are you, my son?"
Joan Baez, being a guest at a good Hanoi hotel with a solid air raid shelter, got safety during her visit as the so-called "Christmas Bombings" thundered, their sounds also picked up on her tape recorder. She came back to the United States and recorded an album, Where Are You Now, My Son?, released in March 1973. There are songs on the B side, but the A side consists of a twenty minute experimental audio track. Spoken word pieces and a song or two blended in, along with raw sounds of bombing, air raid shelter conversations, the snoring of one of the people in the shelter, and outdoor noises of a large city undergoing trauma from above.
In American football, a linebacker (these days there are four, backing a front line of three pass rushers) is positioned at the middle of the defensive formation in order to stop the running back or pass receiver carrying the ball from getting too far out from the line of scrimmage. Names of military operations often make no sense. These days they tend to have tough-sounding and ridiculous names like Noble Eagle, or Power Geyser. Linebacker II was the sequel to Linebacker, the name suggesting, if it meant anything, containment of the wishes of the North Vietnamese government (the running back carrying the ball, so to speak). Vietnamese on the ground in Hanoi and other locations in December 1972, so close to the war's ending, knew nothing of the arcane name printed on Pentagon documents "justifying" their injuries and deaths.
Once the United States removed its personnel, finally, from Vietnam in 1975 (Operation Frequent Wind), the general idea in the States was, "No more Vietnams." Don't get involved in the affairs of other countries, stirring up trouble, changing regimes. U.S. journalists and some government personnel, including politicians, began examining controversial actions of the CIA, including its "Phoenix" program, an organized torture/murder operation in Vietnam seeking to root out the enemy. The JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations were probed in the late 1970s, the Congressional Committee concluding that JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy, meaning the U.S. government has two differing official versions of that event.
Introspection among power brokers after Vietnam means the same may someday occur after the War on Terror grinds along for another few more years. Trump, whose personality rules out introspection, can't be expected, if elected president, to do anything sane or humane when it comes to America's responsibility to help end the war. Hillary Clinton, too, won't do anything to stop the war, but will probably escalate it. She has a heart of stone, and can't relate, like so many politicians and, frankly, citizens of this country since 9/11, to the basic needs of children, women, elderly people and world citizens in general, to not be bombed and used in lofty power games.
Joan Baez's Where Are You Now, My Son? is worth listening to as a curious experiment in sound design, but also as a poetic statement of support for those threatened by uncaring decision-makers.
Barack Obama, visiting Vietnam on his Asia trip (a journey having more to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership than anything else), will not acknowledge to the Vietnamese that he, like Richard Nixon, kills innocent people. He also hasn't sent Henry Kissinger in a shipping crate to Vietnam for judgment and sentencing.
Joan Baez, like Jane Fonda--although to a far lesser extent than Fonda--may be regarded by some "patriots" as just some peacenik making trouble for her own country by visiting enemy territory and seeking to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of America's generosity. That Baez was bombed by Nixon and Kissinger puts her into a unique category of American musicians. That she returned to the United States soon after her ordeal and recorded an album about the experience suggests the true greatness of America, its freedom of speech and exchange of ideas quashing small-minded power-obsessed freaks and their works, which, like the American nation-building projects in Vietnam and Iraq, have toppled.
Vic Neptune
Linebacker II was thus a "big stick," in the Teddy Roosevelt sense, but the voice "speaking softly" in this case, Kissinger's, had a German accent. There were eleven days of bombings, thousands of casualties, and a woman heard wailing in Vietnamese on Baez's tape recorder, "Where are you, my son?"
Joan Baez, being a guest at a good Hanoi hotel with a solid air raid shelter, got safety during her visit as the so-called "Christmas Bombings" thundered, their sounds also picked up on her tape recorder. She came back to the United States and recorded an album, Where Are You Now, My Son?, released in March 1973. There are songs on the B side, but the A side consists of a twenty minute experimental audio track. Spoken word pieces and a song or two blended in, along with raw sounds of bombing, air raid shelter conversations, the snoring of one of the people in the shelter, and outdoor noises of a large city undergoing trauma from above.
In American football, a linebacker (these days there are four, backing a front line of three pass rushers) is positioned at the middle of the defensive formation in order to stop the running back or pass receiver carrying the ball from getting too far out from the line of scrimmage. Names of military operations often make no sense. These days they tend to have tough-sounding and ridiculous names like Noble Eagle, or Power Geyser. Linebacker II was the sequel to Linebacker, the name suggesting, if it meant anything, containment of the wishes of the North Vietnamese government (the running back carrying the ball, so to speak). Vietnamese on the ground in Hanoi and other locations in December 1972, so close to the war's ending, knew nothing of the arcane name printed on Pentagon documents "justifying" their injuries and deaths.
Once the United States removed its personnel, finally, from Vietnam in 1975 (Operation Frequent Wind), the general idea in the States was, "No more Vietnams." Don't get involved in the affairs of other countries, stirring up trouble, changing regimes. U.S. journalists and some government personnel, including politicians, began examining controversial actions of the CIA, including its "Phoenix" program, an organized torture/murder operation in Vietnam seeking to root out the enemy. The JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations were probed in the late 1970s, the Congressional Committee concluding that JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy, meaning the U.S. government has two differing official versions of that event.
Introspection among power brokers after Vietnam means the same may someday occur after the War on Terror grinds along for another few more years. Trump, whose personality rules out introspection, can't be expected, if elected president, to do anything sane or humane when it comes to America's responsibility to help end the war. Hillary Clinton, too, won't do anything to stop the war, but will probably escalate it. She has a heart of stone, and can't relate, like so many politicians and, frankly, citizens of this country since 9/11, to the basic needs of children, women, elderly people and world citizens in general, to not be bombed and used in lofty power games.
Joan Baez's Where Are You Now, My Son? is worth listening to as a curious experiment in sound design, but also as a poetic statement of support for those threatened by uncaring decision-makers.
Barack Obama, visiting Vietnam on his Asia trip (a journey having more to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership than anything else), will not acknowledge to the Vietnamese that he, like Richard Nixon, kills innocent people. He also hasn't sent Henry Kissinger in a shipping crate to Vietnam for judgment and sentencing.
Joan Baez, like Jane Fonda--although to a far lesser extent than Fonda--may be regarded by some "patriots" as just some peacenik making trouble for her own country by visiting enemy territory and seeking to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of America's generosity. That Baez was bombed by Nixon and Kissinger puts her into a unique category of American musicians. That she returned to the United States soon after her ordeal and recorded an album about the experience suggests the true greatness of America, its freedom of speech and exchange of ideas quashing small-minded power-obsessed freaks and their works, which, like the American nation-building projects in Vietnam and Iraq, have toppled.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, May 19, 2016
How Mass Murderers Win
A brief mention on the NBC News website by Katy Tur and Ali Vitali deals with Donald Trump's meeting, requested by the billionaire, with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The little story makes no mention of Kissinger's past, which includes fomenting mass murder in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Chile, Argentina. In this kind of politically motivated activity, he is not unlike many presidents, prime ministers, and dictators of numerous countries worldwide present and past. One thing that makes Kissinger stand out, however, is his glorification in the U.S. press and political circles, especially among those elites close to or part of the high end power structures running (badly and for themselves) the world.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast with a sickeningly laudatory Hillary Clinton, has said he, unlike Trump, will not, so to speak, kiss the master's ring by meeting with Kissinger, as Sarah Palin did in 2008. Given that Kissinger once dated blonde bombshell B movie actress Mamie Van Doren, I suspect that the only thing impressing him about Palin was her beautiful hair and looks that would be more beautiful for me if I didn't know anything about the contents of her scrambled mind.
"Power is an aphrodisiac," Kissinger said famously; a line accounting, perhaps, for Mamie Van Doren's attraction to him, but also Hillary Clinton's, and Donald Trump's. Here's a man who served in public office, advising Nixon and Ford, overseeing destruction on an epic scale in Southeast Asia, a man who encouraged Pinochet's coup in Chile, the Generals in Argentina, the Angolan civil war. He's responsible for more deaths than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney combined. And, in America, he's a well-respected man. His protege, L. Paul Bremer, was made virtual viceroy of Iraq in 2003 and 2004, leading that country to deepening civil strife as the consequences of his catastrophically foolish decisions generated chaos felt there to this day, with resultant phenomena like the rise of ISIS not making very many Americans wonder about the shitty behavior of their leaders.
American troops are in Iraq. They're called "advisors." They have weapons, uniforms, one of them, a Navy SEAL, was killed recently fighting ISIS forces. This Bush-Cheney war has metamorphosed into a multivalent mess, with on the side chaos in Syria. There is no reason to believe it won't continue to metamorphose into other, yet unforeseen wars.
Hillary Clinton wrote a positive review of Kissinger's 2014 book, World Order.
"His analysis," she wrote, "despite some differences over specific policies, largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration's effort over the past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century."
Kissinger's vision, which includes the practice of mass murder, "largely fits" with Obama's "broad strategy," according to the woman who has a good chance of defeating the human shit stain, Donald Trump. Our choices as Americans in choosing the next president are, to use an understatement, inadequate, if we want this country to not be a callous leader in the strategy of dominance and submission. Why has Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (an honor he shares with Henry Kissinger), bombed and destabilized Yemen, leaving it prey to the depredations visited upon it by Saudi Arabia and its allies as they make war on Houthi rebels, but also succeed mightily in devastating and decimating Yemeni citizens, creating an environment as bad, but more underreported about, than Syria? Is Obama's Yemen policy, a subject that never comes up when he's interviewed or when he gives a press conference, part of what Clinton calls the "broad strategy" so in line with Kissinger's ideas about establishing "world order"?
Allowing certain countries, like Saudi Arabia, to fight unruly elements in their vicinity, giving them weapons to do their killing, reminds me of the Cold War-era proxy wars of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Kissinger's brain was formed in the heavily anti-Communist atmosphere of the Cold War. He's ninety-two years old. It's unthinkable that he's changed, just as a sixty-nine year old tycoon who's never done any real work will never change, a process, in any case, that's harder and harder to do as one ages.
Kissinger has expressed support for Hillary Clinton's candidacy. The next time you see her face or hear her voice, tell yourself, "A German mass murderer wants her to be president. Why?"
Vic Neptune
Monday, May 16, 2016
Hello Portugal
I went to see Captain America: Civil War. I found it to be plodding until the second half. Even so, there's an interesting theme reflecting the time we live in. Zeitgeist, meaning "spirit of the times," is a German word I like a lot. I apply it to culture's fabrications (movies, books, paintings, philosophies, religious trends) and often find correspondences between a place/time and the qualities revealed in culture's prodigious output. Humans are and have been making creative products since before time being recorded. It's necessary for creative people to express themselves in the various mediums available, and new media come about over time. The first time I heard of Rap, or heard it performed, was in the Blondie song, "Rapture." Deborah Harry didn't come up with Rap, but a blonde white woman singing a song featuring Rap penetrated the general culture at a time when no small city white boy like me had ever heard such a thing.
The new Captain America movie is typically action-oriented, but there's also pondering on collateral damage and its consequences. The villain has lost his family in a heavily destructive attack occurring in his country. The Avengers, including Captain America, fight this alien menace in the second Avengers film. The villain concocts a plan leading to the pitting of the Avengers against each other, hence the Civil War of the title. It's not a brilliant rendering of the idea, but it's interesting that this expression of what happens when innocents are killed in "good causes" is the underlying philosophical theme of a movie with the word America in the title.
The gray area of the film's theme picks up on aspects of the Zeitgeist of this second decade of the twenty-first century. Fourteen years since 9/11, and I look at an America brutalized and brutalizing. The callousness of so many of my fellow ordinary citizens towards those involved overseas in war, diaspora, famine, disease, and persecution, has gone past the point of sickening me. I noticed during the Bush administration that the general American moral tone, post-9/11 and directly 9/11-related, was that of anger, desire for vengeance, a willingness to believe deceitful leaders, and an uncaring attitude towards civil rights, especially those of Arab-Americans and Arabs abroad. Sending soldiers and marines into Afghanistan and Iraq looked like a sensible and just solution to a great majority of Americans. That these actions, ordered by Bush and supported by Congress and the American people generally, have been utter failures and have resulted in the mass killings and displacements of millions of people has very little effect, to this day, on the minds of American citizens, even though a majority now believe the Iraq War was a "mistake."
From the standpoint of arms dealers, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were and are not mistakes.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump (or "John Miller"), reacted to the new Mayor of London when the latter said Trump's ideas about Muslims are "stupid." Tweeting, Trump suggested they both take I.Q. tests. Had the Mayor suggested Trump has a two and a half inch penis when fully erect, would Trump have dropped his pants and sent the Mayor a dick pic?
I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon's galloping set of problems that led to his resignation in 1974. Mostly, I remember my father cursing every time he saw Nixon's face on the TV screen. My father died of metastasized esophageal cancer in November 2004, shortly after Bush and Cheney were reelected by millions of people who believed those two were actually good for the world. Like Nixon, Bush was reelected, an almost incredible thought. People thought that vacuous, arrogant ball sack of a human being was the man for the job, as millions now believe Trump isn't the choice of irrational white people wanting to make America great again, as in the good old days when brown and black people had less rights. My father, on finding out about Bush's win in 2004, cried. He knew he was about to die; he knew his country was continuing along a very dangerous road, guided by a total fucking tool incapable of understanding the needs of the country. Had he lived to the present, my father would not be a Trump supporter. As I now do, he would curse at the television set every time the orange-skinned presumptive Republican nominee appears.
As an American, I'm proud of certain aspects of my country--its plurality, its Constitution, its culture (even the tawdry aspects of it), but I'm ashamed of the extremely low quality of politicians we have, and 2016 is the worst year, since I started voting in 1982, for presidential candidates. I know, rest of the world, that I'm not responsible for Trump, but I'm sorry. Still, he's part of the Zeitgeist, isn't he? Authoritarian-minded shits are making noises in Europe, too. Racism, religious hatred, are on the rise, and this century is looking like it might top the twentieth as the most violent ever--until the twenty-second century.
It would be hard to live with all this demoralizing knowledge if I didn't enjoy, as I did today, the sight of a pretty girl walking her dog along Main Street. Blonde hair in a ponytail, straight posture, twenty-three or so, looking straight ahead, not talking on an iPhone or texting. An image so simple, and it's life; fortunately, also part of the Zeitgeist.
Vic Neptune
I went to see Captain America: Civil War. I found it to be plodding until the second half. Even so, there's an interesting theme reflecting the time we live in. Zeitgeist, meaning "spirit of the times," is a German word I like a lot. I apply it to culture's fabrications (movies, books, paintings, philosophies, religious trends) and often find correspondences between a place/time and the qualities revealed in culture's prodigious output. Humans are and have been making creative products since before time being recorded. It's necessary for creative people to express themselves in the various mediums available, and new media come about over time. The first time I heard of Rap, or heard it performed, was in the Blondie song, "Rapture." Deborah Harry didn't come up with Rap, but a blonde white woman singing a song featuring Rap penetrated the general culture at a time when no small city white boy like me had ever heard such a thing.
The new Captain America movie is typically action-oriented, but there's also pondering on collateral damage and its consequences. The villain has lost his family in a heavily destructive attack occurring in his country. The Avengers, including Captain America, fight this alien menace in the second Avengers film. The villain concocts a plan leading to the pitting of the Avengers against each other, hence the Civil War of the title. It's not a brilliant rendering of the idea, but it's interesting that this expression of what happens when innocents are killed in "good causes" is the underlying philosophical theme of a movie with the word America in the title.
The gray area of the film's theme picks up on aspects of the Zeitgeist of this second decade of the twenty-first century. Fourteen years since 9/11, and I look at an America brutalized and brutalizing. The callousness of so many of my fellow ordinary citizens towards those involved overseas in war, diaspora, famine, disease, and persecution, has gone past the point of sickening me. I noticed during the Bush administration that the general American moral tone, post-9/11 and directly 9/11-related, was that of anger, desire for vengeance, a willingness to believe deceitful leaders, and an uncaring attitude towards civil rights, especially those of Arab-Americans and Arabs abroad. Sending soldiers and marines into Afghanistan and Iraq looked like a sensible and just solution to a great majority of Americans. That these actions, ordered by Bush and supported by Congress and the American people generally, have been utter failures and have resulted in the mass killings and displacements of millions of people has very little effect, to this day, on the minds of American citizens, even though a majority now believe the Iraq War was a "mistake."
From the standpoint of arms dealers, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were and are not mistakes.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump (or "John Miller"), reacted to the new Mayor of London when the latter said Trump's ideas about Muslims are "stupid." Tweeting, Trump suggested they both take I.Q. tests. Had the Mayor suggested Trump has a two and a half inch penis when fully erect, would Trump have dropped his pants and sent the Mayor a dick pic?
I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon's galloping set of problems that led to his resignation in 1974. Mostly, I remember my father cursing every time he saw Nixon's face on the TV screen. My father died of metastasized esophageal cancer in November 2004, shortly after Bush and Cheney were reelected by millions of people who believed those two were actually good for the world. Like Nixon, Bush was reelected, an almost incredible thought. People thought that vacuous, arrogant ball sack of a human being was the man for the job, as millions now believe Trump isn't the choice of irrational white people wanting to make America great again, as in the good old days when brown and black people had less rights. My father, on finding out about Bush's win in 2004, cried. He knew he was about to die; he knew his country was continuing along a very dangerous road, guided by a total fucking tool incapable of understanding the needs of the country. Had he lived to the present, my father would not be a Trump supporter. As I now do, he would curse at the television set every time the orange-skinned presumptive Republican nominee appears.
As an American, I'm proud of certain aspects of my country--its plurality, its Constitution, its culture (even the tawdry aspects of it), but I'm ashamed of the extremely low quality of politicians we have, and 2016 is the worst year, since I started voting in 1982, for presidential candidates. I know, rest of the world, that I'm not responsible for Trump, but I'm sorry. Still, he's part of the Zeitgeist, isn't he? Authoritarian-minded shits are making noises in Europe, too. Racism, religious hatred, are on the rise, and this century is looking like it might top the twentieth as the most violent ever--until the twenty-second century.
It would be hard to live with all this demoralizing knowledge if I didn't enjoy, as I did today, the sight of a pretty girl walking her dog along Main Street. Blonde hair in a ponytail, straight posture, twenty-three or so, looking straight ahead, not talking on an iPhone or texting. An image so simple, and it's life; fortunately, also part of the Zeitgeist.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Coups d'etat
After visiting Havana, watching a baseball game with Raul Castro, Barack Obama was flown to Buenos Aires where he met with Argentine President Macri. Together, they marked the fortieth anniversary of the military coup that put a set of loathsome generals in charge of Argentina until 1983. Obama's visit was protested vociferously. In spite of the president's usual use of the word "transparency," many in Argentina, especially those mothers and grandmothers of disappeared people from 1976-1983, don't think much will come of Obama's pledge to release more U.S. documents pertaining to the superpower's relations with the odious junta, a mirror in some ways to neighboring Chile, itself a nation screwed with by the United States in 1973, resulting in decades of dictatorship and disappearances.
Argentine citizens gave Obama the finger as his motorcade drove by. I came across this information by reading the Guardian website, not from watching American news. Obama sitting next to Raul Castro and watching a baseball game while ISIS bombers caused mayhem in Brussels made Fox News broadcasters sneer. Obama getting the collective finger in Buenos Aires didn't make anyone on cable news wonder about what that means.
As with Obama's decision to not apologize for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (cf. my May 11, 2016 post), he also didn't apologize for U.S. support for the March 24, 1976 coup in Argentina. Later that year, President Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (one of the great on the loose mass murderers of all time), advised Argentine Foreign Secretary Cesar Guzzetti, "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly," adding, "We want you to succeed."
"Succeed" means repress left wing dissent, kidnap and kill, the usual.
Resentment felt for the United States in Latin America stems in part from the superpower's actions. Depredations suffered by Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Argentinians, Colombians, Panamanians, have been caused in part by U.S. foreign policies carried out to exert control over a "sphere" of intersecting political and business interests. In a way, the traditional system of overlords and peons still operates. Latin America serves the U.S. Encouragement of right wing political movements and persons has acted, especially during the Cold War, as a shield against the more people-oriented left. U.S. intelligence helped many Nazis escape Europe (and justice), putting them in South America as vigorous foes of Communism. This is what Kissinger calls realpolitik: politics based on practicality rather than morality. If a right wing bastard can get the job done, support the right wing bastard. From America's standpoint (I speak only of the Machiavellian political class seeking these solutions, not the American people generally), the goal is control; maintenance of power over people, what Kurt Vonnegut writes as, "The power that leads to money and the money that leads to power."
Some of the people abducted and killed by the U.S.-supported Argentine government from 1976-1983 were flown in helicopters over the Rio de la Plata or over the ocean and shoved to their deaths. Obama didn't do anything to make such atrocities happen, but the government he heads did. True transparency would involve an apology, and a determination to never engage in such activities again. It would also mean the arrest of Henry Kissinger, and his trial for egregious human rights abuses on three continents. Instead, even to this day, Kissinger gets interviewed by fawning journalists as some great statesman. His advanced age ensures that he's probably got only a few years left, maybe more, but when he dies, the U.S. news and political communities will overlook everything that would, in a just universe, send his soul screaming all the way to Hell.
Vic Neptune
After visiting Havana, watching a baseball game with Raul Castro, Barack Obama was flown to Buenos Aires where he met with Argentine President Macri. Together, they marked the fortieth anniversary of the military coup that put a set of loathsome generals in charge of Argentina until 1983. Obama's visit was protested vociferously. In spite of the president's usual use of the word "transparency," many in Argentina, especially those mothers and grandmothers of disappeared people from 1976-1983, don't think much will come of Obama's pledge to release more U.S. documents pertaining to the superpower's relations with the odious junta, a mirror in some ways to neighboring Chile, itself a nation screwed with by the United States in 1973, resulting in decades of dictatorship and disappearances.
Argentine citizens gave Obama the finger as his motorcade drove by. I came across this information by reading the Guardian website, not from watching American news. Obama sitting next to Raul Castro and watching a baseball game while ISIS bombers caused mayhem in Brussels made Fox News broadcasters sneer. Obama getting the collective finger in Buenos Aires didn't make anyone on cable news wonder about what that means.
As with Obama's decision to not apologize for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (cf. my May 11, 2016 post), he also didn't apologize for U.S. support for the March 24, 1976 coup in Argentina. Later that year, President Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (one of the great on the loose mass murderers of all time), advised Argentine Foreign Secretary Cesar Guzzetti, "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly," adding, "We want you to succeed."
"Succeed" means repress left wing dissent, kidnap and kill, the usual.
Resentment felt for the United States in Latin America stems in part from the superpower's actions. Depredations suffered by Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Argentinians, Colombians, Panamanians, have been caused in part by U.S. foreign policies carried out to exert control over a "sphere" of intersecting political and business interests. In a way, the traditional system of overlords and peons still operates. Latin America serves the U.S. Encouragement of right wing political movements and persons has acted, especially during the Cold War, as a shield against the more people-oriented left. U.S. intelligence helped many Nazis escape Europe (and justice), putting them in South America as vigorous foes of Communism. This is what Kissinger calls realpolitik: politics based on practicality rather than morality. If a right wing bastard can get the job done, support the right wing bastard. From America's standpoint (I speak only of the Machiavellian political class seeking these solutions, not the American people generally), the goal is control; maintenance of power over people, what Kurt Vonnegut writes as, "The power that leads to money and the money that leads to power."
Some of the people abducted and killed by the U.S.-supported Argentine government from 1976-1983 were flown in helicopters over the Rio de la Plata or over the ocean and shoved to their deaths. Obama didn't do anything to make such atrocities happen, but the government he heads did. True transparency would involve an apology, and a determination to never engage in such activities again. It would also mean the arrest of Henry Kissinger, and his trial for egregious human rights abuses on three continents. Instead, even to this day, Kissinger gets interviewed by fawning journalists as some great statesman. His advanced age ensures that he's probably got only a few years left, maybe more, but when he dies, the U.S. news and political communities will overlook everything that would, in a just universe, send his soul screaming all the way to Hell.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, May 14, 2016
What Are Your Feet Doing?
I watched a black ant walking across the floor last night. He seemed out of place, searching for food in the wrong location. He must've entered the house on a foraging trip and gotten distracted inside, wandering around, seeking sustenance for the good of his community--some nearby underground city run by a female leader. I didn't kill the ant. I put a postcard I found at hand by the ant and coaxed him onto it. I carried the card to the front door, turning it this way and that to keep him on board, opened the door and blew him away into the night. I marvel at the lightness of an animal that can fall the human equivalent of many hundreds of feet to a hard surface and resume walking as if nothing happened.
These beings needn't deal with gravity as we must. "Watch your step," we hear throughout our lives. Walking down stairs can sometimes turn suddenly into a fast tumble, with pain. Bewilderment too, as one tries to understand how it happened.
In February 2015, Madonna, while performing, fell offstage. Three months later, The Edge, the taciturn-looking guitar-playing fellow in U2, fell offstage. It's bad enough to fall in private, but to do it in front of thousands of people turns the failure of balance into an EVENT. News organizations show video of the incident, people who weren't there make comments. Questions like, "Is Madonna getting too old to perform live?" get asked by pricks who have no musical talent themselves. Quips are made: "The Edge got too close to the edge." It's like a newsman saying, "Obama bombed yet another country, and meanwhile, pack animals in Pakistan are still used as transporters of significant amounts of arms to the Taliban, which is still banned by the government in Kabul, and that's no bull."
Tonight I find myself coming down from a light drunk, feeling somewhat at loose ends, and silly, even slightly brain dead. I'm listening to something put together by someone for YouTube, "Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi: Shoegazing 1985 - 2007" It consists of so-called shoegaze songs. The term derives, apparently, from how 1980s and early 1990s bands like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Ride, Pale Saints, and many others, would use lots of pedal effects on their guitars, thus keeping their eyes on their feet while they played. It's a generalized term, but it sounds all right as a piece of English: Shoe gazing, gaze at your shoes, which recalls the famous William S. Burroughs anecdote about how he once stared at his foot, with his shoe on, all day during his heroin-using days. As he put it, looking at the foot with the shoe on was much more interesting than it would've been had it been his naked foot. Why this might be is a matter of conjecture, but I take his word for it.
The death of Prince, like the death of David Bowie last January, reminds me that so many great musical people are dying off, while some have been lost for a long time. I was shocked when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin's drummer, died. He was thirty-two. I was about sixteen at the time, Led Zeppelin was my favorite band then. The thought of it made me feel a kind of non-physical illness, a drifting inside as if the line to a vital anchor had broken. Other musical deaths that bothered me were those of John Lennon, Freddy Mercury, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, and Lush's Chris Acland.
One death persistently haunting me is that of Jim Morrison on July 3, 1971, in Paris. I know he was in a bathtub; in cooling water, no doubt. There's an ancient Roman quality to his death. He didn't commit suicide, but a typical Roman way of suicide for the privileged classes was to slit one's forearms open and bleed out in a hot bath, the water's warmth helping to ease the suicide into the line waiting to board Charon's boat.
Our minds hold thoughts like movie images recalled and repeated; Vader, for instance, confronting Luke Skywalker with the truth of his origin after slicing off Luke's hand in The Empire Strikes Back; Ingrid Bergman's mouth, her wet eyes at the end of Casablanca as she's told by Bogart to leave town, there's no future for them, only the past. I could've mentioned far lesser known films, but used two images lots of people know. Still, I'll write about an image coming to mind from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. It's a shot that means very little in the overall scheme of the movie, but it's haunting: hundreds of birds flying over the two Berlins (pre-wall coming down), moving in unison, as starlings do. They resemble a thumbprint at one point, nature's identity pressed on the sky, which, in spite of its opaque colors, is always a way to the infinity of space.
The ant found the chemical ways back to his city, exchanged information using his antennae with others too busy to have missed him. No starlight or illumination of any kind in the tunnels, not needed or thought about. Images recalled and repeated. Wind in the grass, sunshine through tree branches making light flashes in the ant's path. No need to know what the light is. It's just there, like a thought while someone sits in a tub.
Vic Neptune
I watched a black ant walking across the floor last night. He seemed out of place, searching for food in the wrong location. He must've entered the house on a foraging trip and gotten distracted inside, wandering around, seeking sustenance for the good of his community--some nearby underground city run by a female leader. I didn't kill the ant. I put a postcard I found at hand by the ant and coaxed him onto it. I carried the card to the front door, turning it this way and that to keep him on board, opened the door and blew him away into the night. I marvel at the lightness of an animal that can fall the human equivalent of many hundreds of feet to a hard surface and resume walking as if nothing happened.
These beings needn't deal with gravity as we must. "Watch your step," we hear throughout our lives. Walking down stairs can sometimes turn suddenly into a fast tumble, with pain. Bewilderment too, as one tries to understand how it happened.
In February 2015, Madonna, while performing, fell offstage. Three months later, The Edge, the taciturn-looking guitar-playing fellow in U2, fell offstage. It's bad enough to fall in private, but to do it in front of thousands of people turns the failure of balance into an EVENT. News organizations show video of the incident, people who weren't there make comments. Questions like, "Is Madonna getting too old to perform live?" get asked by pricks who have no musical talent themselves. Quips are made: "The Edge got too close to the edge." It's like a newsman saying, "Obama bombed yet another country, and meanwhile, pack animals in Pakistan are still used as transporters of significant amounts of arms to the Taliban, which is still banned by the government in Kabul, and that's no bull."
Tonight I find myself coming down from a light drunk, feeling somewhat at loose ends, and silly, even slightly brain dead. I'm listening to something put together by someone for YouTube, "Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi: Shoegazing 1985 - 2007" It consists of so-called shoegaze songs. The term derives, apparently, from how 1980s and early 1990s bands like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Ride, Pale Saints, and many others, would use lots of pedal effects on their guitars, thus keeping their eyes on their feet while they played. It's a generalized term, but it sounds all right as a piece of English: Shoe gazing, gaze at your shoes, which recalls the famous William S. Burroughs anecdote about how he once stared at his foot, with his shoe on, all day during his heroin-using days. As he put it, looking at the foot with the shoe on was much more interesting than it would've been had it been his naked foot. Why this might be is a matter of conjecture, but I take his word for it.
The death of Prince, like the death of David Bowie last January, reminds me that so many great musical people are dying off, while some have been lost for a long time. I was shocked when John Bonham, Led Zeppelin's drummer, died. He was thirty-two. I was about sixteen at the time, Led Zeppelin was my favorite band then. The thought of it made me feel a kind of non-physical illness, a drifting inside as if the line to a vital anchor had broken. Other musical deaths that bothered me were those of John Lennon, Freddy Mercury, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, and Lush's Chris Acland.
One death persistently haunting me is that of Jim Morrison on July 3, 1971, in Paris. I know he was in a bathtub; in cooling water, no doubt. There's an ancient Roman quality to his death. He didn't commit suicide, but a typical Roman way of suicide for the privileged classes was to slit one's forearms open and bleed out in a hot bath, the water's warmth helping to ease the suicide into the line waiting to board Charon's boat.
Our minds hold thoughts like movie images recalled and repeated; Vader, for instance, confronting Luke Skywalker with the truth of his origin after slicing off Luke's hand in The Empire Strikes Back; Ingrid Bergman's mouth, her wet eyes at the end of Casablanca as she's told by Bogart to leave town, there's no future for them, only the past. I could've mentioned far lesser known films, but used two images lots of people know. Still, I'll write about an image coming to mind from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. It's a shot that means very little in the overall scheme of the movie, but it's haunting: hundreds of birds flying over the two Berlins (pre-wall coming down), moving in unison, as starlings do. They resemble a thumbprint at one point, nature's identity pressed on the sky, which, in spite of its opaque colors, is always a way to the infinity of space.
The ant found the chemical ways back to his city, exchanged information using his antennae with others too busy to have missed him. No starlight or illumination of any kind in the tunnels, not needed or thought about. Images recalled and repeated. Wind in the grass, sunshine through tree branches making light flashes in the ant's path. No need to know what the light is. It's just there, like a thought while someone sits in a tub.
Vic Neptune
Friday, May 13, 2016
Why I Never Became a Journalist
Today while driving I saw an SUV with three bumper stickers on the back. One of them warned about the dangers of texting while driving. I suspect the driver is a parent who cares about the safety of teenagers and young adults, those who tend to text while driving. The other two stickers boosted Donald Trump. The SUV driver supports one good cause while also supporting a bad cause. Duality in human nature is an old idea; Sigmund Freud certainly studied and wrote about it. Freud found meaning in the interior mind shiftings of dreams and in the ways our bodies and words can betray true feelings, as in the Freudian slip. My brother once said, deliberately, "Freudian slit," causing much laughter in this author.
The Trump bumper stickers, or automotive ass tattoos, hit my eyes forcefully because I hadn't yet seen any pertaining to the Republican presumptive nominee. I've seen some for Bernie Sanders. I don't recall any just yet for Clinton. I still see stickers for Obama-Biden, '08 and '12, as well as the occasional Romney-Ryan. A few days ago I even spotted a Kerry-Edwards from 2004. Putting bumper stickers on my car is something I will never do. Why do I want to advertise my political hopes to other drivers and pedestrians? Why put a stubborn glue on my car's bumper that might prove difficult to completely remove?
I've reached a point in this election cycle where I can honestly say I'd rather vote for glue than for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Watching cable news (which I do more for the good-looking women who anchor and report it than the meager amount of high quality journalism) shows me a body of professional journalists, pundits, and "experts" who sustain enthusiasm for bullshit, sleaze, and images meant to seize attention. My need to hear a Hillary Clinton speech is akin to my need to research the life of Jennifer Lopez, or visit every Walmart in America. I'll actually listen to and watch Trump speak for several minutes. I'll comment out loud, and pointlessly, about his declarations, most of which are false. I'll ask questions that pop into my mind, questions I would like to ask him if I were conducting the interview. It frustrates my sense of reason that journalists don't follow through with their questions. They let Trump off lightly. Politicians give hedging answers that squirt around the questions, but reporters and anchors rarely push those fuckers to answer.
I'm tired of myself caring about this shit.
Still, along comes Trump with a new story, one from an old time, all the way back to the early 1990s. A recording of someone calling himself "John Miller" has surfaced, as reported in the Washington Post. "Miller," or let's just call him "John," since that rhymes with a pertinent name, called a reporter from People magazine, saying he represented Donald Trump. "John" told her things about Trump's relationship with his mistress, Marla Maples, the second woman to sell her soul to the bastard. He revealed, among other things, that the diamond ring he gave Maples wasn't an engagement ring. Maples, when some of this information came out in the early 1990s, wasn't pleased to hear this. Trump, I mean "John," also talked about a relationship he had with Carla Bruni as well as an alleged connection with Madonna. He said Trump had three girlfriends in addition to Maples. Trump now denies having made the bizarre phone call, even though numerous people who heard the recording in 1991 said it was him, and indeed, "John" sounds a lot like Donald Trump, Queens, New York, accent included. Another telling aspect is that "John" referred frequently and glowingly to his boss's remarkable qualities.
The call ended as he was starting to tell the reporter about something he supposedly had going with Kim Basinger. Why not throw in Bridget Fonda, too, "John"? Heather Locklear and Farrah Fawcett also probably sucked your boss's cock, right?
I don't dispute that women sometimes go for rich, repulsive men. Donald Trump has been in the limelight, where business and entertainment intersect, for a long time. He's thrust his penis into lots of beautiful women. Fine. He's also, as we see now, acted as his own publicist, "John Miller."
In acting as his publicist, inventing an identity to do so, he's shown himself to be a metafictional Trump; a self-promoter working a con whereby he glorifies himself using the identity of a fictional PR man. He now claims this "John Miller," who is Trump himself, is "a scammer."
Trump, while denying this morning on a TV program he's "Miller," stopped himself in the middle of his blather to ask, "What was this, twenty-five years ago?" Does it matter when it happened? By trying to pin down the exact date, was he seeking to distinguish the Miller deception from others he's perpetrated, including his claim to be qualified to become president?
Trump, a man obsessed with illusions about himself, created a fake identity, maybe one of many, and spoke at length in a phone call he initiated in 1991 about his alleged glorious existence. I write "alleged" because Trump is not great, amazing, or tremendous. He isn't even a good businessman. He does not tell the truth. He will not "fix" America, except in the sense of the phrase, "We're in a fix." He's just an ugly deranged creep with billions of dollars who knows how to get attention in a society of mirrors and facades.
I propose that he put the name Miller on his 757 limousine in the sky. I propose that he fly away, up and up and up, surrounded by imaginary girlfriends, glaring at Obama's birth certificate, and hearing an endless recording of his own voice, telling lies.
Vic Neptune
Today while driving I saw an SUV with three bumper stickers on the back. One of them warned about the dangers of texting while driving. I suspect the driver is a parent who cares about the safety of teenagers and young adults, those who tend to text while driving. The other two stickers boosted Donald Trump. The SUV driver supports one good cause while also supporting a bad cause. Duality in human nature is an old idea; Sigmund Freud certainly studied and wrote about it. Freud found meaning in the interior mind shiftings of dreams and in the ways our bodies and words can betray true feelings, as in the Freudian slip. My brother once said, deliberately, "Freudian slit," causing much laughter in this author.
The Trump bumper stickers, or automotive ass tattoos, hit my eyes forcefully because I hadn't yet seen any pertaining to the Republican presumptive nominee. I've seen some for Bernie Sanders. I don't recall any just yet for Clinton. I still see stickers for Obama-Biden, '08 and '12, as well as the occasional Romney-Ryan. A few days ago I even spotted a Kerry-Edwards from 2004. Putting bumper stickers on my car is something I will never do. Why do I want to advertise my political hopes to other drivers and pedestrians? Why put a stubborn glue on my car's bumper that might prove difficult to completely remove?
I've reached a point in this election cycle where I can honestly say I'd rather vote for glue than for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Watching cable news (which I do more for the good-looking women who anchor and report it than the meager amount of high quality journalism) shows me a body of professional journalists, pundits, and "experts" who sustain enthusiasm for bullshit, sleaze, and images meant to seize attention. My need to hear a Hillary Clinton speech is akin to my need to research the life of Jennifer Lopez, or visit every Walmart in America. I'll actually listen to and watch Trump speak for several minutes. I'll comment out loud, and pointlessly, about his declarations, most of which are false. I'll ask questions that pop into my mind, questions I would like to ask him if I were conducting the interview. It frustrates my sense of reason that journalists don't follow through with their questions. They let Trump off lightly. Politicians give hedging answers that squirt around the questions, but reporters and anchors rarely push those fuckers to answer.
I'm tired of myself caring about this shit.
Still, along comes Trump with a new story, one from an old time, all the way back to the early 1990s. A recording of someone calling himself "John Miller" has surfaced, as reported in the Washington Post. "Miller," or let's just call him "John," since that rhymes with a pertinent name, called a reporter from People magazine, saying he represented Donald Trump. "John" told her things about Trump's relationship with his mistress, Marla Maples, the second woman to sell her soul to the bastard. He revealed, among other things, that the diamond ring he gave Maples wasn't an engagement ring. Maples, when some of this information came out in the early 1990s, wasn't pleased to hear this. Trump, I mean "John," also talked about a relationship he had with Carla Bruni as well as an alleged connection with Madonna. He said Trump had three girlfriends in addition to Maples. Trump now denies having made the bizarre phone call, even though numerous people who heard the recording in 1991 said it was him, and indeed, "John" sounds a lot like Donald Trump, Queens, New York, accent included. Another telling aspect is that "John" referred frequently and glowingly to his boss's remarkable qualities.
The call ended as he was starting to tell the reporter about something he supposedly had going with Kim Basinger. Why not throw in Bridget Fonda, too, "John"? Heather Locklear and Farrah Fawcett also probably sucked your boss's cock, right?
I don't dispute that women sometimes go for rich, repulsive men. Donald Trump has been in the limelight, where business and entertainment intersect, for a long time. He's thrust his penis into lots of beautiful women. Fine. He's also, as we see now, acted as his own publicist, "John Miller."
In acting as his publicist, inventing an identity to do so, he's shown himself to be a metafictional Trump; a self-promoter working a con whereby he glorifies himself using the identity of a fictional PR man. He now claims this "John Miller," who is Trump himself, is "a scammer."
Trump, while denying this morning on a TV program he's "Miller," stopped himself in the middle of his blather to ask, "What was this, twenty-five years ago?" Does it matter when it happened? By trying to pin down the exact date, was he seeking to distinguish the Miller deception from others he's perpetrated, including his claim to be qualified to become president?
Trump, a man obsessed with illusions about himself, created a fake identity, maybe one of many, and spoke at length in a phone call he initiated in 1991 about his alleged glorious existence. I write "alleged" because Trump is not great, amazing, or tremendous. He isn't even a good businessman. He does not tell the truth. He will not "fix" America, except in the sense of the phrase, "We're in a fix." He's just an ugly deranged creep with billions of dollars who knows how to get attention in a society of mirrors and facades.
I propose that he put the name Miller on his 757 limousine in the sky. I propose that he fly away, up and up and up, surrounded by imaginary girlfriends, glaring at Obama's birth certificate, and hearing an endless recording of his own voice, telling lies.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
We Who Have Vaporized Others
Seventy years is less than the lifespan of an average American adult (seventy-eight years). Seventy years, half of 140, goes back to 1945-1946, when World War Two ended, but before the Cold War. No one who lived 140 years ago, 1875-1876, is alive. Crazy Horse, Custer, Sitting Bull, Ulysses Grant, are dead, the wars they fought in overgrown with grass, monuments, and foliage. Seventy years, though, isn't enough time, yet, to wear down into the ground all World War Two survivors, much less the philosophies, attitudes, lessons learned, of that war from the victors' perspective.
Children of World War Two participants now run the world. One of them, President Obama, will travel to Asia from May 21 to May 28. On May 27, he'll be the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, a Japanese city that received exactly one bomb from U.S. forces on August 6, 1945, three days before Nagasaki received its bomb.
The United States invented and put into practice nuclear warfare. More people died from radiation effects during the months following the bombings than in the explosions, which were nonetheless devastating. It's a generally accepted idea in U.S. political thought that the A-bombs were necessary to end the war. A massive invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, was planned for late 1945, involving a sweep of the islands and extraordinary intensities of killing (the kind of thing some want done to ISIS). The assumption that the Japanese, military personnel and civilians, would've fought to the death by that point in the war, when most cities on the home islands were
pulverized and burned out courtesy of the mind of Curtis Le May, is arguable, but don't try to argue it with members of the Greatest Generation. Whatever the case, talking about possible outcomes of events that didn't happen remains speculation.
General Le May's bombing strategies were like the calculations of a mathematician playing a game, but lacking empathy for civilians. Japanese civilians were to him like pieces of dry wood. Fire bombing, or incineration, was widely practiced by low-flying B-29 bombers on Japanese cities. This annihilation through burning of cities and flesh, added up in casualties and property destruction, overwhelms the atomic devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nature, though, of those cities' fall sets them apart, not just in that war, but in history. They are templates for anyone evil and rash enough to make a third city go away, with radioactive pollution following and drifting with weather patterns.
According to Reuters, Josh Earnest, Obama's press secretary, stated the official U.S. position on nuclear weapons: "'[the United States] bears a special responsibility" as the only country to use nuclear weapons in wartime, the president will emphasize [in Japan during his trip] Washington's responsibility "to lead the world in an effort to eliminate them.'"
What is the nature of this "special responsibility"? I suspect it has to do with making sure no other country practices such a killing method. This, on the one hand, is a goal worth pursuing. We've all been lucky no nuclear weapon has gone off in a populated area since Nagasaki (ignoring Pacific island atolls, like Bikini, where the inhabitants were bought off and relocated so the U.S. government could blow the shit out of their homeland). On the other hand, Earnest seems to be saying that, righteous killers that we are, no one should ever presume to acquire nukes without our say so, much less use them. The final hope, that Washington has a responsibility "to lead the world in an effort to eliminate them," is as impractical an idea as it would've have been to convince the makers of the first flint knives to cease production on a weapon proven to work. If something works, it's reproduced, it's used. Nuclear weapons, ironically, have proven to be most effective as defensive options. Saddam Hussein's lack of nuclear weapons contributed to Iraq being attacked by the U.S. in two wars.
According to Reuters, a heated debate went on in the White House about whether or not Obama should visit Hiroshima. Would this be regarded by his critics as "an apology"? It took a Pope, John Paul II, about 900 years to apologize for the Christian Crusader massacre of the population of Jerusalem in 1099. I don't expect Obama or any other president to apologize for horrors visited on others. They operate in a political realm having nothing to do with real, human feelings. It makes me wonder, though, what the harm would be if he apologized to victims of atomic warfare. He'd be attacked in the press and in Washington by the same kinds of America First odious sacks of shit who always find compassion towards America's victims offensive. No apologies for the Contra War. No apologies for enslaving human beings and shipping them like sardines across the Atlantic Ocean to make them into the foundation of an agricultural industry so important to the people running it they went to war with the rest of the country. No apologies for the thousands of lies, concealments, the Orwellian activities of the NSA, no apologies for relentlessly giving us political candidates who suck.
Survivors of the A-bomb explosions want the president to seek a world without nuclear weapons, rather than an apology. No doubt, Obama will make one of his typical "soaring" speeches, one on ridding the world of nukes, but I judge this "no nukes" world will more likely happen than the United States ever apologizing to those victimized by its policies.
Obama plans also to visit Vietnam, another country he won't, on behalf of the United States, apologize to. Part of the stance of cruelty--a necessity in maintaining power--is never saying you're wrong.
Vic Neptune
Seventy years is less than the lifespan of an average American adult (seventy-eight years). Seventy years, half of 140, goes back to 1945-1946, when World War Two ended, but before the Cold War. No one who lived 140 years ago, 1875-1876, is alive. Crazy Horse, Custer, Sitting Bull, Ulysses Grant, are dead, the wars they fought in overgrown with grass, monuments, and foliage. Seventy years, though, isn't enough time, yet, to wear down into the ground all World War Two survivors, much less the philosophies, attitudes, lessons learned, of that war from the victors' perspective.
Children of World War Two participants now run the world. One of them, President Obama, will travel to Asia from May 21 to May 28. On May 27, he'll be the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, a Japanese city that received exactly one bomb from U.S. forces on August 6, 1945, three days before Nagasaki received its bomb.
The United States invented and put into practice nuclear warfare. More people died from radiation effects during the months following the bombings than in the explosions, which were nonetheless devastating. It's a generally accepted idea in U.S. political thought that the A-bombs were necessary to end the war. A massive invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, was planned for late 1945, involving a sweep of the islands and extraordinary intensities of killing (the kind of thing some want done to ISIS). The assumption that the Japanese, military personnel and civilians, would've fought to the death by that point in the war, when most cities on the home islands were
pulverized and burned out courtesy of the mind of Curtis Le May, is arguable, but don't try to argue it with members of the Greatest Generation. Whatever the case, talking about possible outcomes of events that didn't happen remains speculation.
General Le May's bombing strategies were like the calculations of a mathematician playing a game, but lacking empathy for civilians. Japanese civilians were to him like pieces of dry wood. Fire bombing, or incineration, was widely practiced by low-flying B-29 bombers on Japanese cities. This annihilation through burning of cities and flesh, added up in casualties and property destruction, overwhelms the atomic devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nature, though, of those cities' fall sets them apart, not just in that war, but in history. They are templates for anyone evil and rash enough to make a third city go away, with radioactive pollution following and drifting with weather patterns.
According to Reuters, Josh Earnest, Obama's press secretary, stated the official U.S. position on nuclear weapons: "'[the United States] bears a special responsibility" as the only country to use nuclear weapons in wartime, the president will emphasize [in Japan during his trip] Washington's responsibility "to lead the world in an effort to eliminate them.'"
What is the nature of this "special responsibility"? I suspect it has to do with making sure no other country practices such a killing method. This, on the one hand, is a goal worth pursuing. We've all been lucky no nuclear weapon has gone off in a populated area since Nagasaki (ignoring Pacific island atolls, like Bikini, where the inhabitants were bought off and relocated so the U.S. government could blow the shit out of their homeland). On the other hand, Earnest seems to be saying that, righteous killers that we are, no one should ever presume to acquire nukes without our say so, much less use them. The final hope, that Washington has a responsibility "to lead the world in an effort to eliminate them," is as impractical an idea as it would've have been to convince the makers of the first flint knives to cease production on a weapon proven to work. If something works, it's reproduced, it's used. Nuclear weapons, ironically, have proven to be most effective as defensive options. Saddam Hussein's lack of nuclear weapons contributed to Iraq being attacked by the U.S. in two wars.
According to Reuters, a heated debate went on in the White House about whether or not Obama should visit Hiroshima. Would this be regarded by his critics as "an apology"? It took a Pope, John Paul II, about 900 years to apologize for the Christian Crusader massacre of the population of Jerusalem in 1099. I don't expect Obama or any other president to apologize for horrors visited on others. They operate in a political realm having nothing to do with real, human feelings. It makes me wonder, though, what the harm would be if he apologized to victims of atomic warfare. He'd be attacked in the press and in Washington by the same kinds of America First odious sacks of shit who always find compassion towards America's victims offensive. No apologies for the Contra War. No apologies for enslaving human beings and shipping them like sardines across the Atlantic Ocean to make them into the foundation of an agricultural industry so important to the people running it they went to war with the rest of the country. No apologies for the thousands of lies, concealments, the Orwellian activities of the NSA, no apologies for relentlessly giving us political candidates who suck.
Survivors of the A-bomb explosions want the president to seek a world without nuclear weapons, rather than an apology. No doubt, Obama will make one of his typical "soaring" speeches, one on ridding the world of nukes, but I judge this "no nukes" world will more likely happen than the United States ever apologizing to those victimized by its policies.
Obama plans also to visit Vietnam, another country he won't, on behalf of the United States, apologize to. Part of the stance of cruelty--a necessity in maintaining power--is never saying you're wrong.
Vic Neptune
Monday, May 9, 2016
Indigestion
At some point around ten to fifteen years ago I began to get heartburn. Heartburn, inaccurate since it uses the word heart, an organ not involved in the malady, nevertheless possesses a poetic sound. A burning heart, like a melting heart, seizes one's attention from within.
The latest term for heartburn, GERD, refers to gastroesophageal reflux disease. In other words, a condition in which stomach acid and/or content flows back into the esophagus, or food pipe--not an implement for smoking food as one would tobacco.
The lack of communicability associated with inelegant words like GERD was experienced by me when my nurse practitioner, who's also my primary care provider (PCP, which doesn't mean angel dust in this context) diagnosed that condition in 2014. Due to the health insurance situation in America for most of my life, I didn't have health insurance until that year, so the GERD went unremarked upon by medical professionals.
She said "GERD" to me as if I knew what she meant.
"Are you speaking Klingon?" I asked. She's the kind of person I can easily joke around with.
She explained the term, and I said, "Oh, heartburn."
Acid reflux is another currently popular term, but there are two others I like, because they're out of date. There's an interesting feature in Google called Google Books Ngram Viewer. There are graphs for thousands of words showing instances of their use in written (published) form. Thus, pyrosis, an outdated term for heartburn/GERD, peaked in 1879. By 1931, hardly anyone was using it.
Pyrosis derives from Greek, puroun, meaning "set on fire." Does that describe a bad case of heartburn? I'd say so.
From a steady rise in written use in 1965, heartburn peaked in 2004. Acid reflux doesn't appear in the Ngram Viewer, indicating it's too recent a term for evaluation. GERD, same thing, but the word dyspepsia, from the Greek, duspepsia, meaning "difficult to digest," peaked in 1886, dropped to a modern low in 1985, but has risen a bit in use since then.
Of course, these instances reflect what people write, not what they say. "GERD" is often used in conversation these days. When I've mentioned my condition, I inevitably hear, "GERD?"
My case is a combination, I think, of ingrained eating habits, nervous tension, and generalized anxiety. I had a dream in the dawn time this morning that seemed like something programmed by a news organization. I was in a classroom, all of us adults. I had books and a notebook, a pen. There was a teacher, and about ten tables at which three or four students could sit. I don't know what the class's subject was (call it Physics for Dummies), but even before the teacher could start, word spread through the room lightning fast that a "sniper" was on the premises, and we should get under the tables. Inside my dream reality, the fear of being shot, and especially of hearing people, women particularly, scream in terror and pain, was a real, felt experience lasting what seemed a few minutes.
An "all clear" sounded. We got out from underneath the tables and I assume class started, although I was then absent, having woken up in the gray light of my bedroom, birds singing, traffic starting.
I'm reading Georges Bataille's book, Le Coupable (Guilty). I almost bought a copy of this strange journal-like philosophical work in the 1990s, buying his book Erotism instead. He wrote Guilty during World War Two. In France, he observed the war firsthand, along with the German occupation, but his attitude was that of a non-combatant. He embraced the experience of difficulty. My comprehension of his ideas is limited at this point. I now read the book and find it hard to get it to line up in ways I can understand, but I keep reading it. Like my father said about the historical writings of the Roman, Tacitus, "You have to plow through a lot to get to the good moments, but the good moments are in there."
Bataille writes, "Great and terrible events are difficult to deal with. But it's also true I wouldn't have wanted to live without them, even if what they brought me minute by minute was worse."
Embodying oneself in the real, which includes war, disease, hatred, interpersonal messes, the inevitability of gravity, time, and circumstances, pulling us to the horizontal position that means death, the pain of love and loss, the way gain turns into nothingness, the roar of disasters and the unheard deaths of caterpillars, means accepting the deal of being born. Of getting older, a condition relying on time's passing. During those flowing years, more and more terrors, difficulties, irritants, pile up, making two conditions, fate and character, get closer until they meet.
Set on fire, pyrosis, a burning heart. Guilty of living.
Vic Neptune
At some point around ten to fifteen years ago I began to get heartburn. Heartburn, inaccurate since it uses the word heart, an organ not involved in the malady, nevertheless possesses a poetic sound. A burning heart, like a melting heart, seizes one's attention from within.
The latest term for heartburn, GERD, refers to gastroesophageal reflux disease. In other words, a condition in which stomach acid and/or content flows back into the esophagus, or food pipe--not an implement for smoking food as one would tobacco.
The lack of communicability associated with inelegant words like GERD was experienced by me when my nurse practitioner, who's also my primary care provider (PCP, which doesn't mean angel dust in this context) diagnosed that condition in 2014. Due to the health insurance situation in America for most of my life, I didn't have health insurance until that year, so the GERD went unremarked upon by medical professionals.
She said "GERD" to me as if I knew what she meant.
"Are you speaking Klingon?" I asked. She's the kind of person I can easily joke around with.
She explained the term, and I said, "Oh, heartburn."
Acid reflux is another currently popular term, but there are two others I like, because they're out of date. There's an interesting feature in Google called Google Books Ngram Viewer. There are graphs for thousands of words showing instances of their use in written (published) form. Thus, pyrosis, an outdated term for heartburn/GERD, peaked in 1879. By 1931, hardly anyone was using it.
Pyrosis derives from Greek, puroun, meaning "set on fire." Does that describe a bad case of heartburn? I'd say so.
From a steady rise in written use in 1965, heartburn peaked in 2004. Acid reflux doesn't appear in the Ngram Viewer, indicating it's too recent a term for evaluation. GERD, same thing, but the word dyspepsia, from the Greek, duspepsia, meaning "difficult to digest," peaked in 1886, dropped to a modern low in 1985, but has risen a bit in use since then.
Of course, these instances reflect what people write, not what they say. "GERD" is often used in conversation these days. When I've mentioned my condition, I inevitably hear, "GERD?"
My case is a combination, I think, of ingrained eating habits, nervous tension, and generalized anxiety. I had a dream in the dawn time this morning that seemed like something programmed by a news organization. I was in a classroom, all of us adults. I had books and a notebook, a pen. There was a teacher, and about ten tables at which three or four students could sit. I don't know what the class's subject was (call it Physics for Dummies), but even before the teacher could start, word spread through the room lightning fast that a "sniper" was on the premises, and we should get under the tables. Inside my dream reality, the fear of being shot, and especially of hearing people, women particularly, scream in terror and pain, was a real, felt experience lasting what seemed a few minutes.
An "all clear" sounded. We got out from underneath the tables and I assume class started, although I was then absent, having woken up in the gray light of my bedroom, birds singing, traffic starting.
I'm reading Georges Bataille's book, Le Coupable (Guilty). I almost bought a copy of this strange journal-like philosophical work in the 1990s, buying his book Erotism instead. He wrote Guilty during World War Two. In France, he observed the war firsthand, along with the German occupation, but his attitude was that of a non-combatant. He embraced the experience of difficulty. My comprehension of his ideas is limited at this point. I now read the book and find it hard to get it to line up in ways I can understand, but I keep reading it. Like my father said about the historical writings of the Roman, Tacitus, "You have to plow through a lot to get to the good moments, but the good moments are in there."
Bataille writes, "Great and terrible events are difficult to deal with. But it's also true I wouldn't have wanted to live without them, even if what they brought me minute by minute was worse."
Embodying oneself in the real, which includes war, disease, hatred, interpersonal messes, the inevitability of gravity, time, and circumstances, pulling us to the horizontal position that means death, the pain of love and loss, the way gain turns into nothingness, the roar of disasters and the unheard deaths of caterpillars, means accepting the deal of being born. Of getting older, a condition relying on time's passing. During those flowing years, more and more terrors, difficulties, irritants, pile up, making two conditions, fate and character, get closer until they meet.
Set on fire, pyrosis, a burning heart. Guilty of living.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, May 8, 2016
I read somewhere that May 8 is Elena Fossi's birthday. If you don't know that name, you're unaware of one of the great singers of modern times. Italian, she's the vocalist/frontwoman of the band Kirlian Camera, and has also sung in Stalingrad, Siderartica, and Spectra Paris. I came across Kirlian Camera on YouTube one night in 2008 or 2009. I was looking for clips from Michelangelo Antonioni's great film, L'Eclisse (The Eclipse). I enjoy looking at pieces of movies, sometimes. To watch several fragments of various films in one sitting is like reading an essay: a group of ideas put together into a bundle to contemplate, making connections from various viewpoints and visions.
That night I watched a scene from L'Eclisse. In the recommended column for that particular selection was a thumbnail showing a tall woman singing a song, "Eclipse," for a band called Kirlian Camera. I clicked on the thumbnail, a simple act starting the process that eventually made Elena Alice Fossi my favorite singer.
It isn't simply the fact that she's beautiful (she is), or that her stage presence is magnetic. Fossi's voice, its expansive range and tonal expressiveness, does something to my emotions as I listen. When I hear Doris Day sing a ballad, I cry. When I hear Elena Fossi sing "In the Endless Rain," "Dead Zone in the Sky," "Falsos Sueños," "Ascension," I also cry, but with an added sense of having encountered something holy, like an unexpected encounter with a spiritual thought coming to quick light in my brain. I'm not a religious person, but I am sometimes deeply affected by encounters with particularly effective artists, such as Fossi and Kirlian Camera's founder, Angelo Bergamini, whose work with keyboards rivets my attention, the blending of non-vocal sounds never failing to bring new worlds to my ears.
The artistic combination of these two, Bergamini and Fossi, is one of the great things to happen to music in the last two decades. If you haven't heard Kirlian Camera, nor seen them performing in YouTube clips, and you're of a mind to open up to something truly fascinating and powerful, this band, with its remarkable singer, is well worth experiencing.
Vic Neptune
That night I watched a scene from L'Eclisse. In the recommended column for that particular selection was a thumbnail showing a tall woman singing a song, "Eclipse," for a band called Kirlian Camera. I clicked on the thumbnail, a simple act starting the process that eventually made Elena Alice Fossi my favorite singer.
It isn't simply the fact that she's beautiful (she is), or that her stage presence is magnetic. Fossi's voice, its expansive range and tonal expressiveness, does something to my emotions as I listen. When I hear Doris Day sing a ballad, I cry. When I hear Elena Fossi sing "In the Endless Rain," "Dead Zone in the Sky," "Falsos Sueños," "Ascension," I also cry, but with an added sense of having encountered something holy, like an unexpected encounter with a spiritual thought coming to quick light in my brain. I'm not a religious person, but I am sometimes deeply affected by encounters with particularly effective artists, such as Fossi and Kirlian Camera's founder, Angelo Bergamini, whose work with keyboards rivets my attention, the blending of non-vocal sounds never failing to bring new worlds to my ears.
The artistic combination of these two, Bergamini and Fossi, is one of the great things to happen to music in the last two decades. If you haven't heard Kirlian Camera, nor seen them performing in YouTube clips, and you're of a mind to open up to something truly fascinating and powerful, this band, with its remarkable singer, is well worth experiencing.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, May 7, 2016
Toothpick Stuck in the Wrong Hole
Rick Perry, former Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate for the 2012 and 2016 election cycles, endorsed Donald Trump, adding that he "won't say no" if the presumptive GOP nominee asks him to be his running mate. Given that Trump won't ask him this, it's a pathetic bit of self-flattery. Perry, early in the race, condemned Trump's anti-Mexican proposals. Perry used to govern a state with America's longest border with Mexico. Texas, as of 2011, had an Hispanic population of thirty-eight percent. Perry may be dumb enough to try to sidle up next to Donald Trump, but when he ran against the racist billionaire, he knew it would be political suicide to alienate nearly four out of ten people in his home state.
Interestingly, he and Jeb Bush, another former governor of a state (Florida) with a large (twenty-three percent) Hispanic population, were unable to prevail against a thin-skinned loudmouth who decided from the first day of his campaign on a strategy that includes vitriolic racism against Hispanics, who comprised in 2012 approximately seventeen percent of overall U.S. population.
Imagine what may have gone on in that orange-skinned motherfucker's mind: "I will shit on seventeen percent of the population of America for the sake of gaining millions of votes from blue collar whites who always look down, class-wise, at what they believe to be the source of their economic problems, when they should be looking up."
Perry, like many Republican politicians these days, has licked the Trump ass crack. "Little Marco" Rubio supports Trump now, making him truly a little man.
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, has said he can't support Trump "at this time." He hopes to do so in future. I suppose he believes Trump's personality might improve, from boor to gentleman. Don't expect it, though. When Trump, speaking at a rally, mentioned Perry's endorsement, he gave a hot-cold reaction, unable to restrain himself from talking about Perry's past criticisms. There was a brief time last year when Perry was the only GOP candidate speaking out against Trump, who hasn't forgotten. Trump is vindictive; everyone should understand this by now.
Jeb Bush, like his father and brother, has not endorsed Trump, who, in my view, used his exploitation of the illegal immigration issue, to some small degree, to cut at Jeb Bush's wife, who's from Mexico. Rick Perry's wife is from Texas. She's the daughter of a family physician who was awarded the Bronze Star in World War Two. I mention this little detail to show that people, even politicians' wives, can have admirable ancestry. Trump's method of ripping up opponents, like continually calling Jeb Bush "low energy," hits with shrapnel-like imprecision. I don't know Jeb Bush's wife, but I'm willing to accept the idea that she isn't a disgusting, cretinous piece of shit like Donald Trump, who, just in the last day or so, mentioned his long-defeated adversary Jeb Bush, adding, "I'm not going to say he's low energy. No, I'm not going to say that."
I'm not going to say, Mr. Trump, that your chances of winning the presidency are slim due to your odious statements about women, Latinos, Muslims, and African-Americans, nor will I say that you don't just deserve to lose the election, but should be the first human being to be exiled from Earth itself. I'm not going to say you're likely to become, if elected, the most hated man on Earth. I won't say you're face looks like a Francis Bacon painting of a rotting cheese.
I will say you're not fortunate to have the backing of dozens of Republican fools who were too cowardly to stop you last year. Their submission now is as disgusting to me as your unchecked rise to power, utilizing fear, racism, misogyny, and mankind's worst self-defeating tendencies.
Vic Neptune
Rick Perry, former Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate for the 2012 and 2016 election cycles, endorsed Donald Trump, adding that he "won't say no" if the presumptive GOP nominee asks him to be his running mate. Given that Trump won't ask him this, it's a pathetic bit of self-flattery. Perry, early in the race, condemned Trump's anti-Mexican proposals. Perry used to govern a state with America's longest border with Mexico. Texas, as of 2011, had an Hispanic population of thirty-eight percent. Perry may be dumb enough to try to sidle up next to Donald Trump, but when he ran against the racist billionaire, he knew it would be political suicide to alienate nearly four out of ten people in his home state.
Interestingly, he and Jeb Bush, another former governor of a state (Florida) with a large (twenty-three percent) Hispanic population, were unable to prevail against a thin-skinned loudmouth who decided from the first day of his campaign on a strategy that includes vitriolic racism against Hispanics, who comprised in 2012 approximately seventeen percent of overall U.S. population.
Imagine what may have gone on in that orange-skinned motherfucker's mind: "I will shit on seventeen percent of the population of America for the sake of gaining millions of votes from blue collar whites who always look down, class-wise, at what they believe to be the source of their economic problems, when they should be looking up."
Perry, like many Republican politicians these days, has licked the Trump ass crack. "Little Marco" Rubio supports Trump now, making him truly a little man.
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, has said he can't support Trump "at this time." He hopes to do so in future. I suppose he believes Trump's personality might improve, from boor to gentleman. Don't expect it, though. When Trump, speaking at a rally, mentioned Perry's endorsement, he gave a hot-cold reaction, unable to restrain himself from talking about Perry's past criticisms. There was a brief time last year when Perry was the only GOP candidate speaking out against Trump, who hasn't forgotten. Trump is vindictive; everyone should understand this by now.
Jeb Bush, like his father and brother, has not endorsed Trump, who, in my view, used his exploitation of the illegal immigration issue, to some small degree, to cut at Jeb Bush's wife, who's from Mexico. Rick Perry's wife is from Texas. She's the daughter of a family physician who was awarded the Bronze Star in World War Two. I mention this little detail to show that people, even politicians' wives, can have admirable ancestry. Trump's method of ripping up opponents, like continually calling Jeb Bush "low energy," hits with shrapnel-like imprecision. I don't know Jeb Bush's wife, but I'm willing to accept the idea that she isn't a disgusting, cretinous piece of shit like Donald Trump, who, just in the last day or so, mentioned his long-defeated adversary Jeb Bush, adding, "I'm not going to say he's low energy. No, I'm not going to say that."
I'm not going to say, Mr. Trump, that your chances of winning the presidency are slim due to your odious statements about women, Latinos, Muslims, and African-Americans, nor will I say that you don't just deserve to lose the election, but should be the first human being to be exiled from Earth itself. I'm not going to say you're likely to become, if elected, the most hated man on Earth. I won't say you're face looks like a Francis Bacon painting of a rotting cheese.
I will say you're not fortunate to have the backing of dozens of Republican fools who were too cowardly to stop you last year. Their submission now is as disgusting to me as your unchecked rise to power, utilizing fear, racism, misogyny, and mankind's worst self-defeating tendencies.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, May 5, 2016
"Go Trump!" Say His Enemies of the Day Before
In correcting a spelling mistake in a previous post, I accidentally moved that post to the fore, ahead of the post freshly written on May 4, 2016. While a minor blunder, I feel obligated to clarify the reason why a post obviously written last March sits now on May 4. Details matter to me. They don't to Donald Trump.
Lester Holt of NBC News interviewed Trump in the latter's office during the last two days. It's easy to identify it as Trump's office. Like a megalomaniacal toddler seeing a mirror for the first time, Trump's office walls are covered with framed portraits of himself--magazine covers mostly. From the available camera angles, I couldn't see two of the walls, but I extrapolate they are similarly overdecorated. On the desk is a model of Trump's 757 airliner. He would, if he could, have a mini-model of himself enjoying the interior luxury of the tiny airplane, hosting tiny journalists and a somewhat more than tiny version of Chris Christie.
The little airplane's nose points upward, like an erect cock.
Lester Holt didn't ask this, but I would like to know if Trump walks around his office sometimes, masturbating to himself. Did the first Republican president, Lincoln, do the same?
Trump, asked by Holt about his Birther ideas (the unsupported theory that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, believed in by millions of illogical Americans stoked in their idiocy by people like Trump) said he didn't want to talk about it anymore, because if he does, it just "becomes a story."
When did Donald Trump ever walk away from a story about himself? He spent four years questioning (without evidence) Obama's American citizenship, gaining followers thereby, preparatory, it now appears obvious, to building a support system of racist morons we've seen shouting slogans at his rallies. His views on Obama's citizenship, whatever they really are, earned him the idiot vote. Now, faced with a black journalist (Holt), Trump has said he's not interested in talking about the most significant lie of his political career. Instead, he shifted blame to Hillary Clinton, claiming she "started it [the Birther Movement]."
In the same interview, Trump said he hasn't yet started "going after Hillary..." Another lie--his offenses against her have already begun. He's accusing Clinton of being a Birther (which she isn't and never has been). Trump, apparently, referred to a tactic of the Clinton Campaign considered by some of her people in 2008, when she ran a difficult contest against Obama for the nomination. They wanted to emphasize Obama's growing up in places like Hawaii and Indonesia (true), which supposedly sets him apart from the lives of ordinary Americans. The tactic (probably because it's idiotic) didn't get used, and in any case, Hillary Clinton never had anything to do with the spreading of Birther ideas, which Trump did excessively in 2011 and 2012. He appeared on TV news so many times then, talking about the kinds of crackpot ideas heard in the 1980s on The Morton Downey, Jr. Show. I recall an episode of that program which featured a young man who claimed he was convinced that Ronald Reagan was Satan. For evidence, he offered the fact that each of the president's three names, Ronald Wilson Reagan, has six letters; thus, 666.
Like with Birtherism, there is no evidence that Reagan was Satan, but a weirdo could get on Downey's show and make that claim. Trump, three decades later, though he didn't originate Birtherism, as he claims Hillary Clinton did, may as well have claimed Obama is Satan. The Reagan-obsessed crackpot on Downey's show, and our orange-faced crackpot and newly minted Republican likely nominee are mainly different in that the former is obscure, while the latter is famous and rich.
Holt, unfortunately, didn't say, "Give me your evidence, actual evidence, that Hillary Clinton originated Birtherism." Trump wouldn't be able to produce it, he'd sidestep and shift topics, but he knows he can't produce such evidence because it doesn't exist. He also knows he can lie and he won't be challenged seriously. Truth, real facts, are no longer valued in the political game. Neither is integrity.
The Republican Party, Trump as their Prom Queen ascending the steps to be crowned, doesn't know what to do with itself. Some Republicans are considering supporting Hillary Clinton. In the 1980s there was a bizarre hybrid called Reagan Democrats, or, as I referred to them, Republicans. Now, will there be Hillary Republicans? If so, I will call them Democrats. What they really are, though, is a group of people who couldn't take a stand against an evil man corrupting their already corrupt party.
Last year, I did not hear Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell, high-ranking Republicans, speak out against Trump's horrible statements about Latinos, women, Muslims, innocent wives and children of terrorists ("They're not so innocent, believe me," Trump once said, defending his desire to commit war crimes). I did not hear Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who ran against Trump for the nomination but dropped out early, speak out against the billionaire. Now, McConnell and Walker both endorse Trump. Will Ted Cruz do the same? I'd be surprised if he didn't. Trump, in the Holt interview, said he "and Ted" got along well in the past, and maybe Cruz would come around: this, a day after Trump accused Ted Cruz's father of being in league with Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy! The exclamation point is there because it wasn't on Trump's face.
"I accuse your father of doing something horrible. I base my accusation on a fuzzy photograph reproduced in a newspaper no intelligent person takes seriously, and, Ted, can I expect your support?"
This, along with Holt reminding Trump of his positions on Muslims (not letting them into the country), on Latinos (mass deportation and the building of the wall which Mexico will pay for with money made from unicorn bones), on women (the demeaning statement, "playing the woman card") and other disgusting statements burped out of his ugly mouth, should show any keen observer of the human face, that Donald Trump is a psychopath.
There were no human reactions to Holt's statements as the journalist read off the partial list of inhumane utterances by the most exposed presidential candidate in American history. He gives the same reaction to the idea of building the wall (a fantasy) that he gives to the notion of he and Ted Cruz being friends again. Whether Cruz debases himself in this way or not (I predict that he will), Trump will move forward in the utter certainty of the rightness of his actions and words, a creature chained to his ego, committed above all to its glorification, acquiring things and stamping his name upon them, inside an echo chamber that is himself, as he tries now to make that self America, which will never be great again if he succeeds.
Vic Neptune
In correcting a spelling mistake in a previous post, I accidentally moved that post to the fore, ahead of the post freshly written on May 4, 2016. While a minor blunder, I feel obligated to clarify the reason why a post obviously written last March sits now on May 4. Details matter to me. They don't to Donald Trump.
Lester Holt of NBC News interviewed Trump in the latter's office during the last two days. It's easy to identify it as Trump's office. Like a megalomaniacal toddler seeing a mirror for the first time, Trump's office walls are covered with framed portraits of himself--magazine covers mostly. From the available camera angles, I couldn't see two of the walls, but I extrapolate they are similarly overdecorated. On the desk is a model of Trump's 757 airliner. He would, if he could, have a mini-model of himself enjoying the interior luxury of the tiny airplane, hosting tiny journalists and a somewhat more than tiny version of Chris Christie.
The little airplane's nose points upward, like an erect cock.
Lester Holt didn't ask this, but I would like to know if Trump walks around his office sometimes, masturbating to himself. Did the first Republican president, Lincoln, do the same?
Trump, asked by Holt about his Birther ideas (the unsupported theory that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, believed in by millions of illogical Americans stoked in their idiocy by people like Trump) said he didn't want to talk about it anymore, because if he does, it just "becomes a story."
When did Donald Trump ever walk away from a story about himself? He spent four years questioning (without evidence) Obama's American citizenship, gaining followers thereby, preparatory, it now appears obvious, to building a support system of racist morons we've seen shouting slogans at his rallies. His views on Obama's citizenship, whatever they really are, earned him the idiot vote. Now, faced with a black journalist (Holt), Trump has said he's not interested in talking about the most significant lie of his political career. Instead, he shifted blame to Hillary Clinton, claiming she "started it [the Birther Movement]."
In the same interview, Trump said he hasn't yet started "going after Hillary..." Another lie--his offenses against her have already begun. He's accusing Clinton of being a Birther (which she isn't and never has been). Trump, apparently, referred to a tactic of the Clinton Campaign considered by some of her people in 2008, when she ran a difficult contest against Obama for the nomination. They wanted to emphasize Obama's growing up in places like Hawaii and Indonesia (true), which supposedly sets him apart from the lives of ordinary Americans. The tactic (probably because it's idiotic) didn't get used, and in any case, Hillary Clinton never had anything to do with the spreading of Birther ideas, which Trump did excessively in 2011 and 2012. He appeared on TV news so many times then, talking about the kinds of crackpot ideas heard in the 1980s on The Morton Downey, Jr. Show. I recall an episode of that program which featured a young man who claimed he was convinced that Ronald Reagan was Satan. For evidence, he offered the fact that each of the president's three names, Ronald Wilson Reagan, has six letters; thus, 666.
Like with Birtherism, there is no evidence that Reagan was Satan, but a weirdo could get on Downey's show and make that claim. Trump, three decades later, though he didn't originate Birtherism, as he claims Hillary Clinton did, may as well have claimed Obama is Satan. The Reagan-obsessed crackpot on Downey's show, and our orange-faced crackpot and newly minted Republican likely nominee are mainly different in that the former is obscure, while the latter is famous and rich.
Holt, unfortunately, didn't say, "Give me your evidence, actual evidence, that Hillary Clinton originated Birtherism." Trump wouldn't be able to produce it, he'd sidestep and shift topics, but he knows he can't produce such evidence because it doesn't exist. He also knows he can lie and he won't be challenged seriously. Truth, real facts, are no longer valued in the political game. Neither is integrity.
The Republican Party, Trump as their Prom Queen ascending the steps to be crowned, doesn't know what to do with itself. Some Republicans are considering supporting Hillary Clinton. In the 1980s there was a bizarre hybrid called Reagan Democrats, or, as I referred to them, Republicans. Now, will there be Hillary Republicans? If so, I will call them Democrats. What they really are, though, is a group of people who couldn't take a stand against an evil man corrupting their already corrupt party.
Last year, I did not hear Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell, high-ranking Republicans, speak out against Trump's horrible statements about Latinos, women, Muslims, innocent wives and children of terrorists ("They're not so innocent, believe me," Trump once said, defending his desire to commit war crimes). I did not hear Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who ran against Trump for the nomination but dropped out early, speak out against the billionaire. Now, McConnell and Walker both endorse Trump. Will Ted Cruz do the same? I'd be surprised if he didn't. Trump, in the Holt interview, said he "and Ted" got along well in the past, and maybe Cruz would come around: this, a day after Trump accused Ted Cruz's father of being in league with Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of John F. Kennedy! The exclamation point is there because it wasn't on Trump's face.
"I accuse your father of doing something horrible. I base my accusation on a fuzzy photograph reproduced in a newspaper no intelligent person takes seriously, and, Ted, can I expect your support?"
This, along with Holt reminding Trump of his positions on Muslims (not letting them into the country), on Latinos (mass deportation and the building of the wall which Mexico will pay for with money made from unicorn bones), on women (the demeaning statement, "playing the woman card") and other disgusting statements burped out of his ugly mouth, should show any keen observer of the human face, that Donald Trump is a psychopath.
There were no human reactions to Holt's statements as the journalist read off the partial list of inhumane utterances by the most exposed presidential candidate in American history. He gives the same reaction to the idea of building the wall (a fantasy) that he gives to the notion of he and Ted Cruz being friends again. Whether Cruz debases himself in this way or not (I predict that he will), Trump will move forward in the utter certainty of the rightness of his actions and words, a creature chained to his ego, committed above all to its glorification, acquiring things and stamping his name upon them, inside an echo chamber that is himself, as he tries now to make that self America, which will never be great again if he succeeds.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
I recall an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer takes karate lessons. We assume through most of the episode that his classmates are physically more or less equal, until Elaine visits and sees that Kramer is the one adult in a class of young children, all of them getting slammed to the mat by an overgrown doofus.
I was reminded of this episode when I read online an article in The Charlotte Observer from March 7, 2016. North Carolina will hold its Republican primary on March 15; the vacuuming of delegates mainly by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz will, by then, have assumed even more importance on the GOP side. In NASCAR country, Trump gained the support of Brian France, NASCAR chairman, and of racing champion Mark Martin, who said, proving he may be a programmed automaton, "Let's bring those greatly needed jobs back to America, and build that wall. And make America great again."
The question, Who cares what Mark Martin thinks? comes to mind, but the snaring of celebrities by potential tyrants smells of future embarrassments for those who once believed in the rightness of dead causes that burned out not before destroying many good people. If North Korea ever makes all out war on, say, South Korea--thus, the United States--will Dennis Rodman, who bonded with Kim Jong-Un over basketball and failed to see his new buddy's policies of ruination toward the citizens of his own country, ever repent, or will that embarrassment go underground, along with the former flamboyant star, who, when he emerges again, will have amnesia about anyone named Kim?
The post-shame world we now live in guarantees a lack of remorse by those saying egregious remarks and insults, caught on camera, through microphones, shared in social media, broadcast on news programs. We've all become performers. Selfies, reality TV, political spectacle, tweets, all realizing the sentence, "Pop will eat itself."
Trump has assumed the role of contemporary icon, a man fitted for this time and place. He acquires whatever is projected onto him. Intelligent people think he's a charlatan, a boastful clownish nothing, an asshole. Those who seek an infusion of the leadership principle, its bad qualities, regard Trump as a magnificent and brilliant problem-solver, a triumphant businessman "who gets things done." His plain-spokenness stimulates inner and outer bigotry and racism, helping people let themselves go, no longer needing to keep their ignorance hidden. He's made it okay in public gatherings to say words like pussy, shit, and ass.
Some might argue, defending this, that "he talks like regular people talk," which is true, but he doesn't talk like a president. The popular term is, "he has no filter," but I think that Trump is calculated in his attacks and use of language. He berated Peter Alexander of NBC News for asking a question about the effect his raw language might have on children attending his rallies. He taunted Alexander, referencing political correctness as the new shibboleth of the Age of Trump--in fact, just a way Trump avoids scrutiny of his own inhumane beliefs in the practice of torture, the manipulation of racist views in Americans too dumb to realize they're being conned by a power-mad illusion salesman, and his appalling disregard for the dignity of Muslims and Latinos.
Those who laugh along with Trump's vicious tactics are the same kinds of idiots who were all dead in Germany by the summer of 1945.
At his rally in Concord, North Carolina, on March 7, the usual protests occurred, accompanied by the candidate yelling at his security apes to "get em outta here!"
"As Bo Carlson, a Myers Park High School student, was escorted out, Trump said, 'Looks like a nice little guy.'"
"'Go home to Mommy,' he added. 'Tell her to tuck you in bed.'"
Think about this carefully. The leading GOP contender for president easily made fun of a teenaged boy who demonstrated the courage, non-existent in the heart of Donald Trump, to shout his sincere displeasure with the man at the podium, who has at his disposal thousands of screaming and fanatical morons, as well as private guards and Secret Servicemen, one of whom recently assaulted a journalist at a Trump rally. Trump is, and should be, scared of protestors like Bo Carlson and others, for they are the first among many who are willing to put their bodies on the line to fight a rising malicious trend in America: the boot pressing down on the neck philosophy so familiar in the twentieth century, coming alive again in the twenty-first for the supposed sake of the usual reasons, freedom and security.
Kramer, of course, can defeat as many kids as he wants to face. The key to Trump's defeat and humiliation is obvious. He's actually, inside his soul-crippled persona, the weakest piece of shit running for president. A strong person doesn't belittle children; a truism so apparent that I'm amazed Trump's opponents haven't yet focused campaign-killing energies on this most vulnerable of his many weak points.
Vic Neptune
I was reminded of this episode when I read online an article in The Charlotte Observer from March 7, 2016. North Carolina will hold its Republican primary on March 15; the vacuuming of delegates mainly by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz will, by then, have assumed even more importance on the GOP side. In NASCAR country, Trump gained the support of Brian France, NASCAR chairman, and of racing champion Mark Martin, who said, proving he may be a programmed automaton, "Let's bring those greatly needed jobs back to America, and build that wall. And make America great again."
The question, Who cares what Mark Martin thinks? comes to mind, but the snaring of celebrities by potential tyrants smells of future embarrassments for those who once believed in the rightness of dead causes that burned out not before destroying many good people. If North Korea ever makes all out war on, say, South Korea--thus, the United States--will Dennis Rodman, who bonded with Kim Jong-Un over basketball and failed to see his new buddy's policies of ruination toward the citizens of his own country, ever repent, or will that embarrassment go underground, along with the former flamboyant star, who, when he emerges again, will have amnesia about anyone named Kim?
The post-shame world we now live in guarantees a lack of remorse by those saying egregious remarks and insults, caught on camera, through microphones, shared in social media, broadcast on news programs. We've all become performers. Selfies, reality TV, political spectacle, tweets, all realizing the sentence, "Pop will eat itself."
Trump has assumed the role of contemporary icon, a man fitted for this time and place. He acquires whatever is projected onto him. Intelligent people think he's a charlatan, a boastful clownish nothing, an asshole. Those who seek an infusion of the leadership principle, its bad qualities, regard Trump as a magnificent and brilliant problem-solver, a triumphant businessman "who gets things done." His plain-spokenness stimulates inner and outer bigotry and racism, helping people let themselves go, no longer needing to keep their ignorance hidden. He's made it okay in public gatherings to say words like pussy, shit, and ass.
Some might argue, defending this, that "he talks like regular people talk," which is true, but he doesn't talk like a president. The popular term is, "he has no filter," but I think that Trump is calculated in his attacks and use of language. He berated Peter Alexander of NBC News for asking a question about the effect his raw language might have on children attending his rallies. He taunted Alexander, referencing political correctness as the new shibboleth of the Age of Trump--in fact, just a way Trump avoids scrutiny of his own inhumane beliefs in the practice of torture, the manipulation of racist views in Americans too dumb to realize they're being conned by a power-mad illusion salesman, and his appalling disregard for the dignity of Muslims and Latinos.
Those who laugh along with Trump's vicious tactics are the same kinds of idiots who were all dead in Germany by the summer of 1945.
At his rally in Concord, North Carolina, on March 7, the usual protests occurred, accompanied by the candidate yelling at his security apes to "get em outta here!"
"As Bo Carlson, a Myers Park High School student, was escorted out, Trump said, 'Looks like a nice little guy.'"
"'Go home to Mommy,' he added. 'Tell her to tuck you in bed.'"
Think about this carefully. The leading GOP contender for president easily made fun of a teenaged boy who demonstrated the courage, non-existent in the heart of Donald Trump, to shout his sincere displeasure with the man at the podium, who has at his disposal thousands of screaming and fanatical morons, as well as private guards and Secret Servicemen, one of whom recently assaulted a journalist at a Trump rally. Trump is, and should be, scared of protestors like Bo Carlson and others, for they are the first among many who are willing to put their bodies on the line to fight a rising malicious trend in America: the boot pressing down on the neck philosophy so familiar in the twentieth century, coming alive again in the twenty-first for the supposed sake of the usual reasons, freedom and security.
Kramer, of course, can defeat as many kids as he wants to face. The key to Trump's defeat and humiliation is obvious. He's actually, inside his soul-crippled persona, the weakest piece of shit running for president. A strong person doesn't belittle children; a truism so apparent that I'm amazed Trump's opponents haven't yet focused campaign-killing energies on this most vulnerable of his many weak points.
Vic Neptune
John Kasich backed out of the presidential race, as did Ted Cruz, leaving an open lane for the man now called by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, "the presumptive Republican nominee," Donald John Trump, real estate tycoon, reality show veteran, and talking asshole.
Since Bernie Sanders' chances of gaining the Democratic nomination are so negligible, we're dealing with a contest between two very unappealing candidates, both of whom have favorability ratings below fifty percent. When more than half of the populace hates your guts and also the guts of your opponent, what does that say about the current level of relations between the two major American political parties and the people they're supposed to represent? What does it say, but "Fuck you, America. Take these two pieces of shit and choose. You don't deserve palatable and decent human beings running your country."
I've known for months that this would happen--Clinton versus Trump, New York versus New York, wealthy versus wealthy, celebrity versus celebrity. Bernie Sanders' populist message, incorporated somewhat by Clinton for political reasons, has been successfully squashed by the Democratic establishment, even though Sanders won Indiana yesterday. Sanders' appeal to youthful Americans, in sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton's lack of appeal to same, means very little to the craggy old bastards of the Democratic old guard. Middle-aged and elderly Americans vote, while young people tend not to. Democratic (and Republican) strategy aims at older citizens, while youth tends to be ignored. Along came a white-haired progressive politician from Vermont, second least populated state, who showed that youth can get enthusiastic about politics. Energy levels, since they were youthful, at Sanders rallies, tended to look far more enervating to the spirit than what was on display at Clinton rallies. What we now have is an election looming in the fall with two participants nobody in their right minds would want as president.
Bernie Sanders made young potential voters care about the political process. If he has to back Clinton (to help send Trump back into the abyss from which he oozed), how many Bernie supporters will turn their enthusiasm to Hillary Clinton, who seems like some rich and emotionally frosty great aunt?
I saw a short biographical piece on Clinton's personal aide, Huma Abedin, who's worked for Mrs. Clinton for twenty years, about half of the younger woman's life. There was a telling shot of the two of them on the campaign trail, in some fast food place. The image was taken by someone behind the counter, showing Clinton and Abedin looking up at the menu board in the kind of eating place the candidate and former First Lady is not used to patronizing.
Clinton pointed up at something and said to Abedin, her words not heard, but her lips easily readable: "Now what is that?"
Was she pointing at the word CHEESEBURGER? Or MILK SHAKES? I exaggerate, but this brief video clip revealed to me a rich, privileged woman, poised to become president, confused by words on a wall-spanning plastic fast food menu. This is someone who doesn't understand the basics of fast food. It could be she was pointing at something named strangely, but it doesn't take many exposures to fast food menus to get the idea of what's available. Without audible words, and just a little part of a larger story about Huma Abedin, this clip reminded me of the elder George Bush's amazement at the existence of electronic price scanners in a store's checkout aisle.
Donald Trump managed to show what he'll continue to be like as the weeks and months pass to November. He saw the cover of the National Enquirer, a sensationalistic news rag (for those readers in other countries who may not know of it) and noticed a front page photo from 1963 showing Lee Harvey Oswald handing out Fair Play For Cuba Committee leaflets, a likely act showing Oswald to be an agent provocateur participating in an effort to discredit a pro-Castro organization of that time. Nearby is another man that the Enquirer claims is Ted Cruz's father, Rafael. Whoever he is, he also appears to be handing out the Fair Play leaflets. Trump called in this "revelation" to Fox and Friends. Steve Doocy, one of the hosts, had a smirk on his face while Trump went on about this, and co-host Brian Kilmeade's eyes shifted a few times. These idiots have to listen to this godawful scoundrel on a regular basis, sit there while he says utterly insane things, and pretend like they're participating in a normal activity.
I don't know about Rafael Cruz's past, I haven't researched his background. Trump's grabbing on to this likely dubious report, though, shows how willing he is to attack the sacred cow of the official version of the JFK assassination. Chris Matthews on MSNBC expressed his feeling of offense and how Trump has finally gone over the line. The JFK assassination in official circles on news media and in politics is a simple matter of one killer, one dead victim, and collateral damage in the body of John Connally who sat in front of Kennedy. For Trump to suggest that Rafael Cruz was in league with Oswald in killing JFK is the kind of slander that Trump himself would never tolerate without threatening a lawsuit.
If Trump's suggestion that the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy is somehow "over the line," he will be in agreement with the majority of Americans on the matter of that event not being a case of just a single criminal (Oswald), but of being a more complicated thing, i.e. a conspiracy. I don't regard Trump as a legitimate JFK assassination scholar. I doubt that he's read as many books about it as I have. He is, like an insect, a living entity that reacts to stimuli without necessarily delving deeply into the meaning of things, scholar-wise. That Trump attacked John McCain, a former POW, for "getting captured," is a far worse breaking of boundaries than his suggestion that Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy (if he did kill Kennedy). When Trump made that egregious remark against McCain, he attacked all POWs, past, present, and future. It should've been enough, in this "troops"-supporting country, to get him scorned from the presidential race. A man who avoided Vietnam service, attended a teenage military academy, and now thinks he has military smarts, taking the loathsome tack of putting down a man who spent years in a North Vietnamese prison, should not be taken seriously as a Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military. Still, Trump survived that disgusting remark, and many more. He said that Ted Cruz's father (a still living person) had something to do with the JFK assassination, but so what? He's Trump. He can say anything in a media landscape where words mean nothing.
Notice that Cruz and Kasich, both of whom, like them or not, relied on the meanings of words (twisted or otherwise) to get their messages across, but had to finally recede away from the victor, who pounded them and his previous adversaries into irrelevance with blunt, forceful, meaningless statements. To fight this devil, Hillary Clinton must engage, to some degree, with Trump's manner of achieving victory in 2016 America. In other words: be the worst shit you can be.
Vic Neptune
Since Bernie Sanders' chances of gaining the Democratic nomination are so negligible, we're dealing with a contest between two very unappealing candidates, both of whom have favorability ratings below fifty percent. When more than half of the populace hates your guts and also the guts of your opponent, what does that say about the current level of relations between the two major American political parties and the people they're supposed to represent? What does it say, but "Fuck you, America. Take these two pieces of shit and choose. You don't deserve palatable and decent human beings running your country."
I've known for months that this would happen--Clinton versus Trump, New York versus New York, wealthy versus wealthy, celebrity versus celebrity. Bernie Sanders' populist message, incorporated somewhat by Clinton for political reasons, has been successfully squashed by the Democratic establishment, even though Sanders won Indiana yesterday. Sanders' appeal to youthful Americans, in sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton's lack of appeal to same, means very little to the craggy old bastards of the Democratic old guard. Middle-aged and elderly Americans vote, while young people tend not to. Democratic (and Republican) strategy aims at older citizens, while youth tends to be ignored. Along came a white-haired progressive politician from Vermont, second least populated state, who showed that youth can get enthusiastic about politics. Energy levels, since they were youthful, at Sanders rallies, tended to look far more enervating to the spirit than what was on display at Clinton rallies. What we now have is an election looming in the fall with two participants nobody in their right minds would want as president.
Bernie Sanders made young potential voters care about the political process. If he has to back Clinton (to help send Trump back into the abyss from which he oozed), how many Bernie supporters will turn their enthusiasm to Hillary Clinton, who seems like some rich and emotionally frosty great aunt?
I saw a short biographical piece on Clinton's personal aide, Huma Abedin, who's worked for Mrs. Clinton for twenty years, about half of the younger woman's life. There was a telling shot of the two of them on the campaign trail, in some fast food place. The image was taken by someone behind the counter, showing Clinton and Abedin looking up at the menu board in the kind of eating place the candidate and former First Lady is not used to patronizing.
Clinton pointed up at something and said to Abedin, her words not heard, but her lips easily readable: "Now what is that?"
Was she pointing at the word CHEESEBURGER? Or MILK SHAKES? I exaggerate, but this brief video clip revealed to me a rich, privileged woman, poised to become president, confused by words on a wall-spanning plastic fast food menu. This is someone who doesn't understand the basics of fast food. It could be she was pointing at something named strangely, but it doesn't take many exposures to fast food menus to get the idea of what's available. Without audible words, and just a little part of a larger story about Huma Abedin, this clip reminded me of the elder George Bush's amazement at the existence of electronic price scanners in a store's checkout aisle.
Donald Trump managed to show what he'll continue to be like as the weeks and months pass to November. He saw the cover of the National Enquirer, a sensationalistic news rag (for those readers in other countries who may not know of it) and noticed a front page photo from 1963 showing Lee Harvey Oswald handing out Fair Play For Cuba Committee leaflets, a likely act showing Oswald to be an agent provocateur participating in an effort to discredit a pro-Castro organization of that time. Nearby is another man that the Enquirer claims is Ted Cruz's father, Rafael. Whoever he is, he also appears to be handing out the Fair Play leaflets. Trump called in this "revelation" to Fox and Friends. Steve Doocy, one of the hosts, had a smirk on his face while Trump went on about this, and co-host Brian Kilmeade's eyes shifted a few times. These idiots have to listen to this godawful scoundrel on a regular basis, sit there while he says utterly insane things, and pretend like they're participating in a normal activity.
I don't know about Rafael Cruz's past, I haven't researched his background. Trump's grabbing on to this likely dubious report, though, shows how willing he is to attack the sacred cow of the official version of the JFK assassination. Chris Matthews on MSNBC expressed his feeling of offense and how Trump has finally gone over the line. The JFK assassination in official circles on news media and in politics is a simple matter of one killer, one dead victim, and collateral damage in the body of John Connally who sat in front of Kennedy. For Trump to suggest that Rafael Cruz was in league with Oswald in killing JFK is the kind of slander that Trump himself would never tolerate without threatening a lawsuit.
If Trump's suggestion that the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy is somehow "over the line," he will be in agreement with the majority of Americans on the matter of that event not being a case of just a single criminal (Oswald), but of being a more complicated thing, i.e. a conspiracy. I don't regard Trump as a legitimate JFK assassination scholar. I doubt that he's read as many books about it as I have. He is, like an insect, a living entity that reacts to stimuli without necessarily delving deeply into the meaning of things, scholar-wise. That Trump attacked John McCain, a former POW, for "getting captured," is a far worse breaking of boundaries than his suggestion that Oswald did not act alone in killing Kennedy (if he did kill Kennedy). When Trump made that egregious remark against McCain, he attacked all POWs, past, present, and future. It should've been enough, in this "troops"-supporting country, to get him scorned from the presidential race. A man who avoided Vietnam service, attended a teenage military academy, and now thinks he has military smarts, taking the loathsome tack of putting down a man who spent years in a North Vietnamese prison, should not be taken seriously as a Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military. Still, Trump survived that disgusting remark, and many more. He said that Ted Cruz's father (a still living person) had something to do with the JFK assassination, but so what? He's Trump. He can say anything in a media landscape where words mean nothing.
Notice that Cruz and Kasich, both of whom, like them or not, relied on the meanings of words (twisted or otherwise) to get their messages across, but had to finally recede away from the victor, who pounded them and his previous adversaries into irrelevance with blunt, forceful, meaningless statements. To fight this devil, Hillary Clinton must engage, to some degree, with Trump's manner of achieving victory in 2016 America. In other words: be the worst shit you can be.
Vic Neptune
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