Donald Trump Cares
The words moving left across the bottom of the TV screen on cable news channels are sometimes more interesting than the audiovisuals above. In their spare descriptions of events they can evoke wonder, often making me think the really important story is contained in the moving words, not in the stuff dominating the screen.
This afternoon, on MSNBC, these words flowed: "Donald Trump travels to Scotland to open new golf course."
Turnberry. Trump, against the wishes and needs of residents, has developed this place in southwest Scotland into the United Kingdom's freshest location for the typical rich man's practice of hitting small white balls on a fantasy landscape. Give me a politician who isn't a golfer or a lawyer, and I just might vote for him, but such a person is rare.
Trump, amid "campaign woes" caused entirely by his own vocal cords, has jumped the pond, not to work the malfunctioning levers of his campaign machine, but to promote a business interest costing him millions. It begs the question: if or when he's president, will he carry on with business ventures during his administration? Will he promote policies that profit his own business concerns? Would it surprise anyone that such a craven lout will probably engage in such corruption if given the chance to hold the highest office?
What do Trump supporters think of their candidate going to Scotland? I haven't heard anything on the subject, but as always I can only wonder why anyone capable of rational thought (let's assume there are a few Trump supporters who are thus capable) would find attractive the idea of their candidate, who bellows simple-minded pro-America slogans at every rally, evidently more concerned about a golf course in a foreign country than working to secure the support of Republican VIPs and delegates going into the Cleveland convention, where he'll likely need help from the Party's traditional workings and methods so common to political machines.
For Trump, though, golf courses are easier to deal with than politics. To American voters, he can tout the course as a "big success," while those in the United Kingdom continue to find him loathsome. A petition to prevent Trump from entering the United Kingdom achieved 586, 935 signatures from British citizens. I've never heard of such a thing before the Internet era: techno-identified mass disgust for a human being coming from citizens of a foreign nation, expressing their desire to never allow a certain person to taint their land with his presence.
586, 935 Brits think Donald Trump is on a par with banned imported food carrying some disease-causing parasite.
Even Prime Minister David Cameron doesn't like him. Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric rubbed Cameron the wrong way. Still, Trump has claimed that Cameron invited him to 10 Downing Street, except Cameron said he really didn't.
Is Trump capable of telling the truth? I think he is, and when he tells the truth it's sometimes unsettling, as when he said he wants to practice torture, or his suggestion that suspected terrorists' families be killed. He's also said that if he weren't her father, he'd want to date his daughter, Ivanka. Is that a lie? That he wants to fuck his daughter? No, I don't think so.
Many Trump supporters I've heard on television say they like him because he speaks his mind, "he's honest." Speaking one's mind is not necessarily a virtue by itself. Listen to any interview with Charles Manson and you'll probably realize he also speaks his mind. I speak my mind, too. When I write this blog, my words comprise a model of what I think. I have no political agenda; I'm not on any one politician's side. I point things out, comment, examine, give insight as it comes to me. Unlike Trump (and Manson), I'm not self-interested in manipulating people into believing that which may harm them and others.
Even an agnostic like me recognizes the truth of Matthew 7: "...by their fruits you will know them." In other words, what do people do?
I know of a presidential candidate who, instead of tending to his troubled campaign, flew to Scotland to give his blessing to his new golf course, an artificial landscape nobody in that country wanted, just as hundreds of thousands of them don't want the soles of the candidate's shoes to touch their homeland. He's deaf to the hatred directed at him--if anyone doesn't like him there's something wrong with them. Trump's grandiose self-esteem must conceal a hollow space where insecurity's smoldering fears drive him to be "great," partly by saying words like "great," "tremendous," and "amazing," whenever he describes anything he's connected to. I've never once heard him say the word, "compassion," and I admit, I have none for him.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Flight From Damnation
In Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, Robert Ryan plays a bitter policeman so fed up with the human race he routinely beats suspects, his humanity leaking through as disappointment in the criminal wretches he goes after, asking, in effect, "Why do you have to be such scum?"
He pursues a suspect into the mountains, has an encounter with a blind woman who lives alone in a cabin surrounded by snowfields. The film becomes a sort of fairy tale, wherein the woman, played by Ida Lupino, restores Ryan's humanity as he comes to care for her. The blind cures the blinded heart. I thought it was corny when I saw it many years ago, the film's romantic second half too stark a shift from the noir opening scenes; some of the finest and most hardboiled in the genre. That such a brutal story, made in 1951, the heyday of film noir, should turn into a love story set in the mountains struck me as odd. I've seen the film just the one time, but now, for a reason I don't know and also don't question, it comes to my mind.
The hard grayness of the streets of a large city; cops, hoods, brutality, handcuffs, guns, fast-moving black police cars, sirens, jail cells, early 1950s McCarthy era fog over men's minds, inert compassion. Later, whiteness, cold landscapes, clear skies, someone who can't see amid all the bright light. Did Nicholas Ray want his viewers to think about, to feel the city's darkness giving way to the cold pure air of the mountainous world above? Why are mountains seen as sanctuary?
Ida Lupino, in 1941, played a woman helping Humphrey Bogart's career criminal character in High Sierra. In that film, the same movement from city to mountains occurs. Getting unfindable in wilderness is Bogart's reason for going up, just as the man pursued by Ryan does the same. If it's Hollywood, there must be a woman as motivator, so Ida Lupino serves the role of concerned distressed lady in both films.
In the 1940s and 1950s the filmed image of plainclothes cops show us overcoats and guns, no Miranda warnings spoken, beatings of suspects acceptable. Real cops of today have military haircuts, couldn't blend with a normal crowd if they tried. Their postures, clipped speech, bearing, suspicious natures, betray them. In uniform, their equipment looks like some busy video gamer's idea of what to send into a battle zone. They carry mild chemical weapons, guns, zip ties, electricity weapons, clubs, and communications that link them to national databases. More and more carry cameras aimed from their chests. The American cop today looks and sounds like a machine.
I've seen bumper stickers on cop cars that read, "Know Us Before You Need Us." The idea seems to be about citizens accessing web information published by the police department, letting the populace know what they do, particularly and generally. Imagine, in 1951's spirit of police stories as shown in On Dangerous Ground, a police department launching a citizens outreach program like what actually now exists in my city. What do we, the police of 1951, do? We rough people up; our jail conditions are horrible; we arrest the wrong man six out of ten times; we'll run over a small boy retrieving a ball for the sake of catching a suspect speeding away; one of our detectives has a collection of teeth he's knocked out during interrogations.
In their case, I guess, the slogan would read, "Know Us Before You Want Us."
Still, that's Hollywood's vision from several decades ago. Even so, police brutality, as shown so vividly in Ray's On Dangerous Ground--I still remember, with unsettling awe, Robert Ryan, at six-four, looming over the suspect he's beating senseless in the film's first part--has continued to exist in real life, in real cities, in decades other than the fifties.
Police corruption, racism, mistreatment of suspects, mishandling of evidence, all upset the mythical notion that these public servants always serve the public. Investigations of police departments in Ferguson, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, have abraded the upper dermis of a few places prominently featured in the news media in recent years. Doing a nationwide corruption probe of police departments would yield everything the human condition has to offer, bad and good.
Maybe that's what Nicholas Ray was getting at when he brought salvation, in the form of the blind woman, into his film. Only someone who can't see the moral stain covering Robert Ryan's cynical cop character is able to approach him and jolt his heart, without the use of a Taser.
Vic Neptune
In Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, Robert Ryan plays a bitter policeman so fed up with the human race he routinely beats suspects, his humanity leaking through as disappointment in the criminal wretches he goes after, asking, in effect, "Why do you have to be such scum?"
He pursues a suspect into the mountains, has an encounter with a blind woman who lives alone in a cabin surrounded by snowfields. The film becomes a sort of fairy tale, wherein the woman, played by Ida Lupino, restores Ryan's humanity as he comes to care for her. The blind cures the blinded heart. I thought it was corny when I saw it many years ago, the film's romantic second half too stark a shift from the noir opening scenes; some of the finest and most hardboiled in the genre. That such a brutal story, made in 1951, the heyday of film noir, should turn into a love story set in the mountains struck me as odd. I've seen the film just the one time, but now, for a reason I don't know and also don't question, it comes to my mind.
The hard grayness of the streets of a large city; cops, hoods, brutality, handcuffs, guns, fast-moving black police cars, sirens, jail cells, early 1950s McCarthy era fog over men's minds, inert compassion. Later, whiteness, cold landscapes, clear skies, someone who can't see amid all the bright light. Did Nicholas Ray want his viewers to think about, to feel the city's darkness giving way to the cold pure air of the mountainous world above? Why are mountains seen as sanctuary?
Ida Lupino, in 1941, played a woman helping Humphrey Bogart's career criminal character in High Sierra. In that film, the same movement from city to mountains occurs. Getting unfindable in wilderness is Bogart's reason for going up, just as the man pursued by Ryan does the same. If it's Hollywood, there must be a woman as motivator, so Ida Lupino serves the role of concerned distressed lady in both films.
In the 1940s and 1950s the filmed image of plainclothes cops show us overcoats and guns, no Miranda warnings spoken, beatings of suspects acceptable. Real cops of today have military haircuts, couldn't blend with a normal crowd if they tried. Their postures, clipped speech, bearing, suspicious natures, betray them. In uniform, their equipment looks like some busy video gamer's idea of what to send into a battle zone. They carry mild chemical weapons, guns, zip ties, electricity weapons, clubs, and communications that link them to national databases. More and more carry cameras aimed from their chests. The American cop today looks and sounds like a machine.
I've seen bumper stickers on cop cars that read, "Know Us Before You Need Us." The idea seems to be about citizens accessing web information published by the police department, letting the populace know what they do, particularly and generally. Imagine, in 1951's spirit of police stories as shown in On Dangerous Ground, a police department launching a citizens outreach program like what actually now exists in my city. What do we, the police of 1951, do? We rough people up; our jail conditions are horrible; we arrest the wrong man six out of ten times; we'll run over a small boy retrieving a ball for the sake of catching a suspect speeding away; one of our detectives has a collection of teeth he's knocked out during interrogations.
In their case, I guess, the slogan would read, "Know Us Before You Want Us."
Still, that's Hollywood's vision from several decades ago. Even so, police brutality, as shown so vividly in Ray's On Dangerous Ground--I still remember, with unsettling awe, Robert Ryan, at six-four, looming over the suspect he's beating senseless in the film's first part--has continued to exist in real life, in real cities, in decades other than the fifties.
Police corruption, racism, mistreatment of suspects, mishandling of evidence, all upset the mythical notion that these public servants always serve the public. Investigations of police departments in Ferguson, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, have abraded the upper dermis of a few places prominently featured in the news media in recent years. Doing a nationwide corruption probe of police departments would yield everything the human condition has to offer, bad and good.
Maybe that's what Nicholas Ray was getting at when he brought salvation, in the form of the blind woman, into his film. Only someone who can't see the moral stain covering Robert Ryan's cynical cop character is able to approach him and jolt his heart, without the use of a Taser.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Ginger Spice in a Private Detective's Eyes
After many years of not reading his work, I'm reading a William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, from 2003. I have little to write about it now, since I'm only on page 37, a prime number; thus, part of a pattern continuing with 41.
Gibson maintains on page 22 that "Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition...a gift and a trap."
In the preceding paragraph, he writes, "Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films that you've been assembling, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure."
This fresh eyes perspective seeks to override pattern recognition, that tendency of the mind to seize perceived phenomena and form individual units of image, thought, feeling, into structures with multivalent connectivity. That's Vic Neptune's definition of pattern recognition, not Gibson's, but I assume the famous author would at least argue with me about my way of putting it. Gibson's mind works as a sharply focused details-describing poet. Surfaces figure prominently in his novels. He bothers to describe the belt a minor character wears, mentioning the manufacturer by name. Such hyper-attention fits with the novel's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter," someone who predicts marketing trends. Curiously, from the standpoint of Gibson's own work, the name Cayce (she's a woman in her thirties whose name is pronounced "Case") features in his celebrated first novel, Neuromancer, in which the young male protagonist, Case, is a cyberspace hacker.
Gibson said in an interview that the detective novels and stories of Raymond Chandler influenced his own attention to detail, noting how Chandler's detective character Philip Marlowe sees everything when he walks into a room. This characteristic is common to private detectives, cops, and film directors, as well as some writers.
This noticing of things infuses Cayce in Pattern Recognition. Since I'm stuck with this characteristic myself, I can attest that it is, indeed, "a gift and a trap." I'm exceptionally adept at finding lost objects. My driving ability is above average because I pay attention to driving itself and the environment I drive through--I don't talk on the phone or text while driving.
I'm prone to obsessive-compulsive thoughts, too. Last night, for instance, my mind wouldn't settle, darting about like a gnat. The yield of such mental exertion amounts to the intellectual production of a gnat trying to figure out the nature of twilight. Fortunately, I don't always experience this useless cerebral maundering. However, the mechanism by which these rambles draw their power is the same brain operation linked to pattern recognition.
The Nike symbol on a pair of shoes, like the twin sky-linking columns of the former World Trade Center, are part of patterns Western Civilization's peoples and those of other lands buying (and making) casual footwear are deeply familiar with, the Towers and their fall connected to worldwide strife still affecting everyone, fourteen years along history's thread to now--a bulked up string of patterns comprising war, capitalism, trade, and energy strategies.
When Donald Trump bellows about "radical Islamic terrorism," this verbal pattern is immediately recognized by his followers, all of whom have a visceral reaction derived from what happened on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda, the group perpetrating the 9/11 attacks, though largely scattered and killed, has inspired other, more vicious groups, like ISIS. Pattern recognition doesn't just operate at the level of buying coffee at Starbuck's; it also functions where fear and irrationality is stirred up, sometimes agitated by people like Trump, John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ted Cruz, all of whom have used a non-violent form of terrorizing the minds of Americans into believing they're more in danger from "radical Islamic terrorists" than they are from a teenager driving a car while texting, or a drunk driving, or lead in a city's water supply.
In psychosis, patterns become all-consuming. Someone says, "I ate at Taco Bell," and the psychotic has just heard a bell rung in a film; bell becomes an important point to ponder, until it's covered over with another obsessive string of cognition. Everything conforms, in the psychotic's mind, to a grand purpose, ever evolving to account for new information, which eventually can sometimes come in the form of the neutral-voiced responses of the cop driving the psychotic to the hospital.
In more normal circumstances, pattern recognition serves capitalism: the brilliant red Coke banner, sometimes neon-lit in big cities, stimulates subliminally even as its bloody color and flamboyant lettering declare something almost religious; the name of a god prominent in the lives of everyone, since Coke has been around since 1892, before anyone alive now yet existed. Coca Cola precedes cinema, and it contained cocaine. Recognize the pattern: cocaine addiction, soft drink popular with the masses, competition with Pepsi, no more cocaine but sugar and caffeine addictions, corporate capitalism, Times Square remodeled into an advertiser's nest. Buy. Get used. Get slowly killed by cancer unleashed by corporations profiting from misery and death. Laboratory animals abused and killed in cancer treatment experiments. Cigarettes.
The Buddha, from what I understand, sought to stop the mind's flow through meditation. Make the water still. The idea mentioned above in Gibson's novel about looking at images, or footage, as if one has never seen images before, is very hard to do, but it's possible for anyone to just look at something without giving it an immediately seized upon meaning. The opening shot of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a gull shot by the camera from below, hanging motionless on a momentarily suspended air current, is, by itself, a striking image moving a viewer, perhaps, to a grunt of admiration for its beauty. Then, since it's a motion picture, the patterns start: it's a rocky beach during the Middle Ages. A knight and his squire prepare to make another day's ride, but the knight is interrupted by the appearance of a black-cloaked and -hooded man who says he's Death, and the knight's time is up. The knight says he's seen images of Death (pattern recognition) playing chess and challenges him. They begin a chess game that recurs intermittently throughout the film. Thinking back to the film's opening shot, pattern-wise, we can see that Bergman has opened his movie with a bird, wings outspread, hanging in space, not because it's an interesting shot by itself, but because the Angel of Death is a major character in the film.
The inevitable lead-up to death is, of course, something we can all recognize in its patterns. I get sick, I worsen, I die. I go to a nightclub, I get shot by a maniac, I die. I drive, a goddamn fool not paying enough attention sideswipes me, I die.
In politics, the pattern of demagogues and their slanders; in professional sports, the pattern of young men given too much money; in personal relations, the pattern of failed sustainment of connections with significant others; in bands, the pattern of breakups--Geri Halliwell was once a Spice Girl, and she's currently 43, the next prime number after 41.
Vic Neptune
After many years of not reading his work, I'm reading a William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, from 2003. I have little to write about it now, since I'm only on page 37, a prime number; thus, part of a pattern continuing with 41.
Gibson maintains on page 22 that "Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition...a gift and a trap."
In the preceding paragraph, he writes, "Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films that you've been assembling, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure."
This fresh eyes perspective seeks to override pattern recognition, that tendency of the mind to seize perceived phenomena and form individual units of image, thought, feeling, into structures with multivalent connectivity. That's Vic Neptune's definition of pattern recognition, not Gibson's, but I assume the famous author would at least argue with me about my way of putting it. Gibson's mind works as a sharply focused details-describing poet. Surfaces figure prominently in his novels. He bothers to describe the belt a minor character wears, mentioning the manufacturer by name. Such hyper-attention fits with the novel's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter," someone who predicts marketing trends. Curiously, from the standpoint of Gibson's own work, the name Cayce (she's a woman in her thirties whose name is pronounced "Case") features in his celebrated first novel, Neuromancer, in which the young male protagonist, Case, is a cyberspace hacker.
Gibson said in an interview that the detective novels and stories of Raymond Chandler influenced his own attention to detail, noting how Chandler's detective character Philip Marlowe sees everything when he walks into a room. This characteristic is common to private detectives, cops, and film directors, as well as some writers.
This noticing of things infuses Cayce in Pattern Recognition. Since I'm stuck with this characteristic myself, I can attest that it is, indeed, "a gift and a trap." I'm exceptionally adept at finding lost objects. My driving ability is above average because I pay attention to driving itself and the environment I drive through--I don't talk on the phone or text while driving.
I'm prone to obsessive-compulsive thoughts, too. Last night, for instance, my mind wouldn't settle, darting about like a gnat. The yield of such mental exertion amounts to the intellectual production of a gnat trying to figure out the nature of twilight. Fortunately, I don't always experience this useless cerebral maundering. However, the mechanism by which these rambles draw their power is the same brain operation linked to pattern recognition.
The Nike symbol on a pair of shoes, like the twin sky-linking columns of the former World Trade Center, are part of patterns Western Civilization's peoples and those of other lands buying (and making) casual footwear are deeply familiar with, the Towers and their fall connected to worldwide strife still affecting everyone, fourteen years along history's thread to now--a bulked up string of patterns comprising war, capitalism, trade, and energy strategies.
When Donald Trump bellows about "radical Islamic terrorism," this verbal pattern is immediately recognized by his followers, all of whom have a visceral reaction derived from what happened on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda, the group perpetrating the 9/11 attacks, though largely scattered and killed, has inspired other, more vicious groups, like ISIS. Pattern recognition doesn't just operate at the level of buying coffee at Starbuck's; it also functions where fear and irrationality is stirred up, sometimes agitated by people like Trump, John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ted Cruz, all of whom have used a non-violent form of terrorizing the minds of Americans into believing they're more in danger from "radical Islamic terrorists" than they are from a teenager driving a car while texting, or a drunk driving, or lead in a city's water supply.
In psychosis, patterns become all-consuming. Someone says, "I ate at Taco Bell," and the psychotic has just heard a bell rung in a film; bell becomes an important point to ponder, until it's covered over with another obsessive string of cognition. Everything conforms, in the psychotic's mind, to a grand purpose, ever evolving to account for new information, which eventually can sometimes come in the form of the neutral-voiced responses of the cop driving the psychotic to the hospital.
In more normal circumstances, pattern recognition serves capitalism: the brilliant red Coke banner, sometimes neon-lit in big cities, stimulates subliminally even as its bloody color and flamboyant lettering declare something almost religious; the name of a god prominent in the lives of everyone, since Coke has been around since 1892, before anyone alive now yet existed. Coca Cola precedes cinema, and it contained cocaine. Recognize the pattern: cocaine addiction, soft drink popular with the masses, competition with Pepsi, no more cocaine but sugar and caffeine addictions, corporate capitalism, Times Square remodeled into an advertiser's nest. Buy. Get used. Get slowly killed by cancer unleashed by corporations profiting from misery and death. Laboratory animals abused and killed in cancer treatment experiments. Cigarettes.
The Buddha, from what I understand, sought to stop the mind's flow through meditation. Make the water still. The idea mentioned above in Gibson's novel about looking at images, or footage, as if one has never seen images before, is very hard to do, but it's possible for anyone to just look at something without giving it an immediately seized upon meaning. The opening shot of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, a gull shot by the camera from below, hanging motionless on a momentarily suspended air current, is, by itself, a striking image moving a viewer, perhaps, to a grunt of admiration for its beauty. Then, since it's a motion picture, the patterns start: it's a rocky beach during the Middle Ages. A knight and his squire prepare to make another day's ride, but the knight is interrupted by the appearance of a black-cloaked and -hooded man who says he's Death, and the knight's time is up. The knight says he's seen images of Death (pattern recognition) playing chess and challenges him. They begin a chess game that recurs intermittently throughout the film. Thinking back to the film's opening shot, pattern-wise, we can see that Bergman has opened his movie with a bird, wings outspread, hanging in space, not because it's an interesting shot by itself, but because the Angel of Death is a major character in the film.
The inevitable lead-up to death is, of course, something we can all recognize in its patterns. I get sick, I worsen, I die. I go to a nightclub, I get shot by a maniac, I die. I drive, a goddamn fool not paying enough attention sideswipes me, I die.
In politics, the pattern of demagogues and their slanders; in professional sports, the pattern of young men given too much money; in personal relations, the pattern of failed sustainment of connections with significant others; in bands, the pattern of breakups--Geri Halliwell was once a Spice Girl, and she's currently 43, the next prime number after 41.
Vic Neptune
Monday, June 13, 2016
The NRA Gets Another Boner
The ex-wife of the man who killed fifty people and wounded fifty-three others in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub last night, June 12, said he was mentally ill, "bipolar." He was abusive towards her, and unstable; her family got her away from him.
He reportedly saw two men in Miami kissing each other in public. This was enough, supposedly, to set him on the course to acquiring, legally, more than 700 rounds of ammunition and driving two hours with his pistol and assault rifle to a specific spot, the Orlando gay nightclub.
He sought to kill gays; thus, a hate crime. He opened fire, and hours passed before a SWAT team resolved the issue by shooting him to death in a gun fight. Approximately 320 people were in the club when he opened fire. He terrorized, using maximum capacity clips lobbied for by the National Rifle Association, a group dedicated to disallowing all encroachments on "the right to bear arms" guaranteed by the Second Amendment. God forbid ordinary citizens should be prevented from obtaining and using weapons of warfare against each other. NRA lobbyists in Washington are, after all, not to be denied, for politicians' fear of losing elections.
The guns-have-more-rights-than-people component of this latest massacre, "the worst in U.S. history," has been covered over by the killer's stated affinity for the cause of ISIS. Whether or not he was in touch with that organization isn't yet known, but that hasn't stopped news outfits like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN from titling the event in go-to-commercial banners, Terror in Orlando.
That the nightclub's patrons were terrorized is beyond dispute. That terrorists, motivated by the quest for political change, use violence against civilians as an important tool to accomplish their goals is well established in history. Nation states and non-state armed outfits use terror for political aims. Ordinary people with guns, shooting up a crowded location, terrorize in the sense of spreading fear and panic. These same people do not necessarily have any affiliation with a non-state racket like ISIS or a nation state like Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, or Israel, all three of which use terror to exert control through the management of chaos, as guided by carefully aimed sophisticated weaponry that profits those who make it, with the expending of rounds, missiles, and bombs requiring the need for frequent replacement, thus profits.
In this light, with the relationship of weapons, fear, money, it should be noted that the NRA and small arms manufacturers profit from gun massacres like the one last night and the Sandy Hook killings of children a few years ago that so sickened the soul of President Obama, to the extent he's done practically nothing to fight the grotesque overreach of the NRA.
Nor will Orlando's tragedy move him to fight the NRA. Terrorism, though, as it's commonly understood in the U.S. as a practice of foreign criminals, especially Muslim ones, has already seized news media attention, interviews with politicians, pundits, and "terror experts" focused on the Orlando incident as a possible (therefore likely, given how much airtime the idea receives) hit on American soil by ISIS, even though it took that group a while to express solidarity with it, and only after the killer's sympathy for ISIS was revealed in the news.
It's too early to say what really motivated the man: religious fanaticism inspired by ISIS-approved ideologies, mental illness, a past life of violent tendencies, homophobia, or, as is also possible, all of these.
He was, like Timothy McVeigh, an American citizen. I saw on the news a selfie, taken by the killer himself, indulging in a common practice of the young. The interview excerpt with the ex-wife showed her to be a sympathetic, articulate person, clearly devastated by her former husband's actions. His father said his son was mentally ill. He lived in Florida, a state run by a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who opposes gay marriage, who, when interviewed about the massacre on CNN, wouldn't acknowledge the killings had anything to do with homophobia, but used the automatic go-to, that it was "clearly" terrorism and nothing else.
Donald Trump decided he could help by tweeting. He insists that President Obama should "step down" for not using the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism." Hillary Clinton, according to Trump, should quit the presidential race for the same reason.
"I am trying to save lives and prevent the next terrorist attack," Trump boasts, with no proof he could actually do that. "We can't afford to be politically correct anymore."
The following tweet demonstrates Trump's superiority complex, pride, and the pleasure he gets from acts of terrorism, since they increase his ratings:
"What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the [Muslim immigration] ban. Must be tough."
To correct the compulsive tweeter, he didn't "ask" for the ban on Muslims entering the United States. He proposed it during a speech on December 7, 2015, using the symbolic anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the event that drew the U.S. into war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. His "ban" was in response to the massacre carried out by the married couple in San Bernardino, California. He's since called the ban "just a suggestion," although the original Trump campaign release read:
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
In the tweet above, he says he "called it and asked for the ban." He implies his ban would've prevented what happened in Orlando. The killer, as I point out above, was an American citizen: he was already here. People with guns turning them on others and firing is something that occurs often in this country. Trump himself spoke recently at an NRA meeting, affirming his support for an organization with a lobbying power comparable in its effectiveness to that of the oil industry. A Trump presidency will not decrease gun deaths in the United States. Rhetoric using the word "terrorism" will continue to thrive, used by Trump, Hillary Clinton, and all politicians seeking to maintain a war that's become necessary to an economy that requires disasters to thrive.
Vic Neptune
The ex-wife of the man who killed fifty people and wounded fifty-three others in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub last night, June 12, said he was mentally ill, "bipolar." He was abusive towards her, and unstable; her family got her away from him.
He reportedly saw two men in Miami kissing each other in public. This was enough, supposedly, to set him on the course to acquiring, legally, more than 700 rounds of ammunition and driving two hours with his pistol and assault rifle to a specific spot, the Orlando gay nightclub.
He sought to kill gays; thus, a hate crime. He opened fire, and hours passed before a SWAT team resolved the issue by shooting him to death in a gun fight. Approximately 320 people were in the club when he opened fire. He terrorized, using maximum capacity clips lobbied for by the National Rifle Association, a group dedicated to disallowing all encroachments on "the right to bear arms" guaranteed by the Second Amendment. God forbid ordinary citizens should be prevented from obtaining and using weapons of warfare against each other. NRA lobbyists in Washington are, after all, not to be denied, for politicians' fear of losing elections.
The guns-have-more-rights-than-people component of this latest massacre, "the worst in U.S. history," has been covered over by the killer's stated affinity for the cause of ISIS. Whether or not he was in touch with that organization isn't yet known, but that hasn't stopped news outfits like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN from titling the event in go-to-commercial banners, Terror in Orlando.
That the nightclub's patrons were terrorized is beyond dispute. That terrorists, motivated by the quest for political change, use violence against civilians as an important tool to accomplish their goals is well established in history. Nation states and non-state armed outfits use terror for political aims. Ordinary people with guns, shooting up a crowded location, terrorize in the sense of spreading fear and panic. These same people do not necessarily have any affiliation with a non-state racket like ISIS or a nation state like Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, or Israel, all three of which use terror to exert control through the management of chaos, as guided by carefully aimed sophisticated weaponry that profits those who make it, with the expending of rounds, missiles, and bombs requiring the need for frequent replacement, thus profits.
In this light, with the relationship of weapons, fear, money, it should be noted that the NRA and small arms manufacturers profit from gun massacres like the one last night and the Sandy Hook killings of children a few years ago that so sickened the soul of President Obama, to the extent he's done practically nothing to fight the grotesque overreach of the NRA.
Nor will Orlando's tragedy move him to fight the NRA. Terrorism, though, as it's commonly understood in the U.S. as a practice of foreign criminals, especially Muslim ones, has already seized news media attention, interviews with politicians, pundits, and "terror experts" focused on the Orlando incident as a possible (therefore likely, given how much airtime the idea receives) hit on American soil by ISIS, even though it took that group a while to express solidarity with it, and only after the killer's sympathy for ISIS was revealed in the news.
It's too early to say what really motivated the man: religious fanaticism inspired by ISIS-approved ideologies, mental illness, a past life of violent tendencies, homophobia, or, as is also possible, all of these.
He was, like Timothy McVeigh, an American citizen. I saw on the news a selfie, taken by the killer himself, indulging in a common practice of the young. The interview excerpt with the ex-wife showed her to be a sympathetic, articulate person, clearly devastated by her former husband's actions. His father said his son was mentally ill. He lived in Florida, a state run by a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who opposes gay marriage, who, when interviewed about the massacre on CNN, wouldn't acknowledge the killings had anything to do with homophobia, but used the automatic go-to, that it was "clearly" terrorism and nothing else.
Donald Trump decided he could help by tweeting. He insists that President Obama should "step down" for not using the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism." Hillary Clinton, according to Trump, should quit the presidential race for the same reason.
"I am trying to save lives and prevent the next terrorist attack," Trump boasts, with no proof he could actually do that. "We can't afford to be politically correct anymore."
The following tweet demonstrates Trump's superiority complex, pride, and the pleasure he gets from acts of terrorism, since they increase his ratings:
"What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the [Muslim immigration] ban. Must be tough."
To correct the compulsive tweeter, he didn't "ask" for the ban on Muslims entering the United States. He proposed it during a speech on December 7, 2015, using the symbolic anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the event that drew the U.S. into war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. His "ban" was in response to the massacre carried out by the married couple in San Bernardino, California. He's since called the ban "just a suggestion," although the original Trump campaign release read:
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
In the tweet above, he says he "called it and asked for the ban." He implies his ban would've prevented what happened in Orlando. The killer, as I point out above, was an American citizen: he was already here. People with guns turning them on others and firing is something that occurs often in this country. Trump himself spoke recently at an NRA meeting, affirming his support for an organization with a lobbying power comparable in its effectiveness to that of the oil industry. A Trump presidency will not decrease gun deaths in the United States. Rhetoric using the word "terrorism" will continue to thrive, used by Trump, Hillary Clinton, and all politicians seeking to maintain a war that's become necessary to an economy that requires disasters to thrive.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Voting for Shapes
I lay in bed for a while listening to birdsong moving towards me from the east. I went to bed earlier than usual, woke up at 1:54 A.M. I read the second half of Jean Genet's play, The Blacks, and then a chapter of The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey. The latter is a good history, published in 1949, of the hunt for witches in and around Salem in 1692. Sitting up in bed, my room the only lit space in the house during the quietest period of the night, reading books engaging to the imagination, makes me feel like an enchanted island. Words of others making neurons spark in my brain, giving me new knowledge, stimulates hunger for more ideas, stories, and moments experienced by those who are dead.
During my reading of the Salem book last night, I was most struck by the brief account of the execution by hanging of the first "witch" to be so condemned:
"On June 10, High Sheriff George Corwin took her [Bridget Bishop] to the top of Gallows Hill and hanged her all alone from the branches of a great oak tree. Now the honest men of Salem could sleep in peace, sure that the Shape of Bridget would trouble them no more."
Bridget Bishop was a tavern keeper accused by the prepubescent and adolescent girls who started the whole thing of being a witch capable of projecting her "Shape" to others, especially men who offered testimony about being visited by her in the night while lying in bed. To us, this sounds like they were having sexual dreams. Simple things that bother us not can, in another time and place, seem unnatural or demonically derived. Differences in cultural mores can mean that in one country a woman driving a car is as mundane a sight as hearing a lawnmower in the distance. In Saudi Arabia, a woman driving a car risks severe punishment by the state. Some women of that country nevertheless defy the law and drive, a political act in a nation in sore need of an effective civil rights movement.
Bridget Bishop, the first person in Salem executed (murdered) for the crime of witchcraft, "had," continues Starkey on the same page as the passage quoted above, "been convicted for little more than wearing scarlet, countenancing 'shovelboard,' and getting herself talked about..."
Her death beneath the oak tree was a way of getting the devil out of her. It never occurred to her executioner, or those ordering her persecution, imprisonment, and death, that hanging her by the neck was an effective way of inviting devils into their own hearts, having snuffed the life of an innocent woman, first of many, while in thrall to imaginary prods derived from a belief system suspicious of nature, with the vast seventeenth century continent sprawling before them, a land still quite wild and mostly untainted by Christianity's Manichaean judgments. I recall Bruce Beresford's film, Black Robe. The lead character, a young priest, has a hell of a time coming to grips with the New World. He's in Quebec in the seventeenth century. In one scene he looks at a river, jagged cliffs, trees, all untouched and undeveloped, and he decides it's a land controlled by the Devil.
Otherness. That person's religion is strange. Those people have dark skin. Irish Catholics are scum. Haitians are lower than dirt. Anyone who opposes the state of Israel is in league with terrorists. Walls will keep out the criminals crawling from the south like beetles. They're not prisoners of war, they're enemy combatants, so we can treat them like sides of beef. Bridget Bishop's Shape sat on my cock while I slept.
Worrying about things that don't exist is a real motivator in human affairs. Three nights ago I lay in bed fretting for a half hour about whether or not my health insurance provider had gotten everything taken care of when I called to renew, as I must do each May. With my insurance working, my medications are very cheap. A few days before I'd gone to the pharmacy and was unable to get one of them, since that medication's expensive without my co-pay. The pharmacist had said something about my insurance not paying for it until some date. When he said this, I was in a mental fog for some reason, so later on, lying in bed a few nights later, I couldn't recall what, exactly, the pharmacist said. I imagined my insurance wasn't working since I'd failed to do something vital to keep it going past the end of May. I created an imaginary situation, as real as Bridget Bishop riding my cock, involving a misunderstanding when I spoke on the phone with the woman at the insurance organization. She'd missed something when updating my information, perhaps, or had said I had to do something to finalize the renewal and I just forgot about it. I couldn't call the pharmacy at two in the morning to get a clarification on why I couldn't obtain my drug, so I lay there, ensorcelled by a fantasy generated from my own head. The next day I picked up my medication, with regular co-pay. There was a bit of a delay since I had renewed my insurance when I did. That's the reality of that story. The noose around Bridget Bishop's neck was also real, but she was not a succubus.
On June 6, 2016, honoring, with a tweet, the "fallen heroes of D-Day," Donald Trump, the tackiest piece of shit who's ever lived, accompanied his message with an archived photo, supposedly an image of the Normandy landings. A Getty image, the picture is not from D-Day, but from a January 1943 training exercise. This man, who wants to "build a wall," to "make America great again," to tell China where they can put their chop sticks, to create jobs, strengthen infrastructure, restore national pride, make the U.S. military "the greatest in the world," can't even do a basic search (a matter of seconds) for a real photo of the Normandy Invasion.
Now that Hillary Clinton has established herself as the Democratic presumptive nominee, the race is on, and Trump's support in the Republican Party is shaky due to his pride. Between the two of them, illusions will clash as in a battle between a witch and a warlock. Both of them have highly developed abilities to bullshit people. Their manipulations of belief systems felt by and shared among Americans should not be seen as remarkable. Presidential candidates always work with illusions. Hillary Clinton's carefully constructed public life has withstood decades of attacks from adversaries. Donald Trump is just a liar who doesn't give a shit about anyone.
An image comes to my mind of Bill and Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump's wedding to his third and current wife, Melania. They're very friendly and amiable in the photograph. At that level of social power, do such humans play a game based mostly on the flow of money? Trump, a past contributor to Hillary Clinton the politician, has to be hidden somewhere in her mind's memories as a man who's helped her in the past; given her some attention in the never-ending orgy attended by the kinds of people who run things.
Vic Neptune
I lay in bed for a while listening to birdsong moving towards me from the east. I went to bed earlier than usual, woke up at 1:54 A.M. I read the second half of Jean Genet's play, The Blacks, and then a chapter of The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey. The latter is a good history, published in 1949, of the hunt for witches in and around Salem in 1692. Sitting up in bed, my room the only lit space in the house during the quietest period of the night, reading books engaging to the imagination, makes me feel like an enchanted island. Words of others making neurons spark in my brain, giving me new knowledge, stimulates hunger for more ideas, stories, and moments experienced by those who are dead.
During my reading of the Salem book last night, I was most struck by the brief account of the execution by hanging of the first "witch" to be so condemned:
"On June 10, High Sheriff George Corwin took her [Bridget Bishop] to the top of Gallows Hill and hanged her all alone from the branches of a great oak tree. Now the honest men of Salem could sleep in peace, sure that the Shape of Bridget would trouble them no more."
Bridget Bishop was a tavern keeper accused by the prepubescent and adolescent girls who started the whole thing of being a witch capable of projecting her "Shape" to others, especially men who offered testimony about being visited by her in the night while lying in bed. To us, this sounds like they were having sexual dreams. Simple things that bother us not can, in another time and place, seem unnatural or demonically derived. Differences in cultural mores can mean that in one country a woman driving a car is as mundane a sight as hearing a lawnmower in the distance. In Saudi Arabia, a woman driving a car risks severe punishment by the state. Some women of that country nevertheless defy the law and drive, a political act in a nation in sore need of an effective civil rights movement.
Bridget Bishop, the first person in Salem executed (murdered) for the crime of witchcraft, "had," continues Starkey on the same page as the passage quoted above, "been convicted for little more than wearing scarlet, countenancing 'shovelboard,' and getting herself talked about..."
Her death beneath the oak tree was a way of getting the devil out of her. It never occurred to her executioner, or those ordering her persecution, imprisonment, and death, that hanging her by the neck was an effective way of inviting devils into their own hearts, having snuffed the life of an innocent woman, first of many, while in thrall to imaginary prods derived from a belief system suspicious of nature, with the vast seventeenth century continent sprawling before them, a land still quite wild and mostly untainted by Christianity's Manichaean judgments. I recall Bruce Beresford's film, Black Robe. The lead character, a young priest, has a hell of a time coming to grips with the New World. He's in Quebec in the seventeenth century. In one scene he looks at a river, jagged cliffs, trees, all untouched and undeveloped, and he decides it's a land controlled by the Devil.
Otherness. That person's religion is strange. Those people have dark skin. Irish Catholics are scum. Haitians are lower than dirt. Anyone who opposes the state of Israel is in league with terrorists. Walls will keep out the criminals crawling from the south like beetles. They're not prisoners of war, they're enemy combatants, so we can treat them like sides of beef. Bridget Bishop's Shape sat on my cock while I slept.
Worrying about things that don't exist is a real motivator in human affairs. Three nights ago I lay in bed fretting for a half hour about whether or not my health insurance provider had gotten everything taken care of when I called to renew, as I must do each May. With my insurance working, my medications are very cheap. A few days before I'd gone to the pharmacy and was unable to get one of them, since that medication's expensive without my co-pay. The pharmacist had said something about my insurance not paying for it until some date. When he said this, I was in a mental fog for some reason, so later on, lying in bed a few nights later, I couldn't recall what, exactly, the pharmacist said. I imagined my insurance wasn't working since I'd failed to do something vital to keep it going past the end of May. I created an imaginary situation, as real as Bridget Bishop riding my cock, involving a misunderstanding when I spoke on the phone with the woman at the insurance organization. She'd missed something when updating my information, perhaps, or had said I had to do something to finalize the renewal and I just forgot about it. I couldn't call the pharmacy at two in the morning to get a clarification on why I couldn't obtain my drug, so I lay there, ensorcelled by a fantasy generated from my own head. The next day I picked up my medication, with regular co-pay. There was a bit of a delay since I had renewed my insurance when I did. That's the reality of that story. The noose around Bridget Bishop's neck was also real, but she was not a succubus.
On June 6, 2016, honoring, with a tweet, the "fallen heroes of D-Day," Donald Trump, the tackiest piece of shit who's ever lived, accompanied his message with an archived photo, supposedly an image of the Normandy landings. A Getty image, the picture is not from D-Day, but from a January 1943 training exercise. This man, who wants to "build a wall," to "make America great again," to tell China where they can put their chop sticks, to create jobs, strengthen infrastructure, restore national pride, make the U.S. military "the greatest in the world," can't even do a basic search (a matter of seconds) for a real photo of the Normandy Invasion.
Now that Hillary Clinton has established herself as the Democratic presumptive nominee, the race is on, and Trump's support in the Republican Party is shaky due to his pride. Between the two of them, illusions will clash as in a battle between a witch and a warlock. Both of them have highly developed abilities to bullshit people. Their manipulations of belief systems felt by and shared among Americans should not be seen as remarkable. Presidential candidates always work with illusions. Hillary Clinton's carefully constructed public life has withstood decades of attacks from adversaries. Donald Trump is just a liar who doesn't give a shit about anyone.
An image comes to my mind of Bill and Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump's wedding to his third and current wife, Melania. They're very friendly and amiable in the photograph. At that level of social power, do such humans play a game based mostly on the flow of money? Trump, a past contributor to Hillary Clinton the politician, has to be hidden somewhere in her mind's memories as a man who's helped her in the past; given her some attention in the never-ending orgy attended by the kinds of people who run things.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Funeral Home Makeup Artists
GOP establishment reaction to Donald Trump's typically petty invective toward Gonzalo Curiel, a federal judge presiding over part of the investigation into the Trump University fraud case, seems to show the presence of spine in some Republican authority figures. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called Trump's comments--lame suggestions that the judge, being of Mexican heritage, should recuse himself--"textbook racism." Ryan did not, however, say he's withdrawing his support for the Republican presumptive nominee. This is typical. I'm aware of only one Republican politician so far, Mark Kirk, who endorsed Trump before, but now "unendorses" the man.
Asked by journalists if Trump's comments about the judge are racist, luminaries of the right like Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich condemned the words, but wouldn't go so far as to say they're racist, much less call the presumptive nominee a racist. Trump clearly is a racist and a bigot who blows abundant air on the fuel powering the hearts and minds of American racists and bigots. This condition of Trump's character has been obvious from the start of his campaign, when he accused Mexican illegal immigrants to the United States as being "criminals" and "rapists." His policy suggestion that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, though not yet carried out, betrays a desire on his part to persecute hundreds of millions of people entirely because of their faith, a power fantasy he shares with the leaders of ISIS.
Trump's loathsome belief system, his daily displays of immature behaviors similar to those of the under the age of ten set, his attacks, his grudges, his commitment to lying in the face of facts, the very grotesqueness of his self-importance, all point glaringly at something Republican leaders like McConnell should've realized for at least a year by now: Trump is a stubborn, irredeemable shit. The Republican Party, stuck with him, now tries to shame him into behaving, giving their pooh-poohs on television news about how Trump shouldn't have spoken so about the judge.
It didn't move McConnell and the others much in the past year when Trump took successive shits on Mexicans, POWs, women, Muslims, his fellow GOP candidates. However, now that challengers like Cruz and Rubio are out of the picture, Trump is the man, and he must be scolded publicly, but carefully. Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House during the Clinton administration and talked about as a possible Trump running mate, said Trump's words about Curiel were bad, but wouldn't say "racist."
Why are Gingrich, McConnell and others afraid to say "racist," when talking of Trump's frequent racist language? I suggest it's because they have hopes for him. He's the presumptive nominee--destroying their party, but still, he's the one who secured the necessary number of delegates, and Cleveland, there they will go. Even Ryan put the word "textbook" in front of "racism," instead of just saying "racism." I would ask Ryan, "Never mind the textbook--what is racism in your judgment?"
It remains to be seen, but I think the Republican Party, a majority of whose Washington establishment have already endorsed Trump, wants to grind its teeth through this process taking the country to November. They can hope, as they have in the last two elections, that their nominee will win the White House away from the Democrats as they keep control of the House of Representatives, leaving them in a two out of three split, with the Democrats holding onto the Senate. President Trump will then behave himself, executing the Republican agenda, guided by Ryan.
The Republican establishment, though, has developed a sense that they can succeed, even though their agenda for the American people is toxic. Their doomed quest to win the White House in 2008 looks now more obvious to mostly everyone as a lame effort against history's current, too stupid to be noble, to elevate a war hero with no integrity and a babbling lunatic from Alaska, to high office. Four years later, Romney, an out of touch blasé multi-millionaire and his VP selection, Paul Ryan, a young screw-the-poor-and-uninsured idealist, stood forward in their party's eyes, ready to ascend, unaware of the majority hatred for their inhuman governing and social ideas.
I've mentioned this failure of the Republican Party to take the Oval Office a few times in the last several posts. I don't like to beat a point to death, but this aspect of the current election is important to consider. Trump himself is a major problem for the Republican Party. They can't control him, for one thing. One inelegant tweet barfed from Trump Tower at 3:15 A.M. can produce a wave of journalists with microphones asking GOP authorities for comments. The key problem, though, is the ground from which Trump grows: the Party itself, which has welcomed him, and never in the past rejected him. Their lack of concern about Trump's hatred of Muslims, the poor, Latinos, even women, has already revealed the general GOP regard of their man, who they look to in order to "prevent Hillary from becoming president." They had to finally say something when Trump went after a federal judge. That Trump insulted the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife led none of them to say, "What an adolescent piece of shit Donald Trump is for saying that."
The mention of Heidi Cruz may seem like the pointing out of one of Trump's most minor infractions, but it's a single offensive moment directly attributable to him--there are many such instances. Piled up, they make a mountain that has rested on the shrugging shoulders of the body of the Republican Party, an institution willing to tolerate one of the worst human beings in the country as its man of the year. That their support for this lying vermin disquiets them now reveals mainly their lack of wisdom, cupidity, and a depravity inherited and developed from the George W. Bush years.
Vic Neptune
GOP establishment reaction to Donald Trump's typically petty invective toward Gonzalo Curiel, a federal judge presiding over part of the investigation into the Trump University fraud case, seems to show the presence of spine in some Republican authority figures. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan called Trump's comments--lame suggestions that the judge, being of Mexican heritage, should recuse himself--"textbook racism." Ryan did not, however, say he's withdrawing his support for the Republican presumptive nominee. This is typical. I'm aware of only one Republican politician so far, Mark Kirk, who endorsed Trump before, but now "unendorses" the man.
Asked by journalists if Trump's comments about the judge are racist, luminaries of the right like Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich condemned the words, but wouldn't go so far as to say they're racist, much less call the presumptive nominee a racist. Trump clearly is a racist and a bigot who blows abundant air on the fuel powering the hearts and minds of American racists and bigots. This condition of Trump's character has been obvious from the start of his campaign, when he accused Mexican illegal immigrants to the United States as being "criminals" and "rapists." His policy suggestion that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, though not yet carried out, betrays a desire on his part to persecute hundreds of millions of people entirely because of their faith, a power fantasy he shares with the leaders of ISIS.
Trump's loathsome belief system, his daily displays of immature behaviors similar to those of the under the age of ten set, his attacks, his grudges, his commitment to lying in the face of facts, the very grotesqueness of his self-importance, all point glaringly at something Republican leaders like McConnell should've realized for at least a year by now: Trump is a stubborn, irredeemable shit. The Republican Party, stuck with him, now tries to shame him into behaving, giving their pooh-poohs on television news about how Trump shouldn't have spoken so about the judge.
It didn't move McConnell and the others much in the past year when Trump took successive shits on Mexicans, POWs, women, Muslims, his fellow GOP candidates. However, now that challengers like Cruz and Rubio are out of the picture, Trump is the man, and he must be scolded publicly, but carefully. Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House during the Clinton administration and talked about as a possible Trump running mate, said Trump's words about Curiel were bad, but wouldn't say "racist."
Why are Gingrich, McConnell and others afraid to say "racist," when talking of Trump's frequent racist language? I suggest it's because they have hopes for him. He's the presumptive nominee--destroying their party, but still, he's the one who secured the necessary number of delegates, and Cleveland, there they will go. Even Ryan put the word "textbook" in front of "racism," instead of just saying "racism." I would ask Ryan, "Never mind the textbook--what is racism in your judgment?"
It remains to be seen, but I think the Republican Party, a majority of whose Washington establishment have already endorsed Trump, wants to grind its teeth through this process taking the country to November. They can hope, as they have in the last two elections, that their nominee will win the White House away from the Democrats as they keep control of the House of Representatives, leaving them in a two out of three split, with the Democrats holding onto the Senate. President Trump will then behave himself, executing the Republican agenda, guided by Ryan.
The Republican establishment, though, has developed a sense that they can succeed, even though their agenda for the American people is toxic. Their doomed quest to win the White House in 2008 looks now more obvious to mostly everyone as a lame effort against history's current, too stupid to be noble, to elevate a war hero with no integrity and a babbling lunatic from Alaska, to high office. Four years later, Romney, an out of touch blasé multi-millionaire and his VP selection, Paul Ryan, a young screw-the-poor-and-uninsured idealist, stood forward in their party's eyes, ready to ascend, unaware of the majority hatred for their inhuman governing and social ideas.
I've mentioned this failure of the Republican Party to take the Oval Office a few times in the last several posts. I don't like to beat a point to death, but this aspect of the current election is important to consider. Trump himself is a major problem for the Republican Party. They can't control him, for one thing. One inelegant tweet barfed from Trump Tower at 3:15 A.M. can produce a wave of journalists with microphones asking GOP authorities for comments. The key problem, though, is the ground from which Trump grows: the Party itself, which has welcomed him, and never in the past rejected him. Their lack of concern about Trump's hatred of Muslims, the poor, Latinos, even women, has already revealed the general GOP regard of their man, who they look to in order to "prevent Hillary from becoming president." They had to finally say something when Trump went after a federal judge. That Trump insulted the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife led none of them to say, "What an adolescent piece of shit Donald Trump is for saying that."
The mention of Heidi Cruz may seem like the pointing out of one of Trump's most minor infractions, but it's a single offensive moment directly attributable to him--there are many such instances. Piled up, they make a mountain that has rested on the shrugging shoulders of the body of the Republican Party, an institution willing to tolerate one of the worst human beings in the country as its man of the year. That their support for this lying vermin disquiets them now reveals mainly their lack of wisdom, cupidity, and a depravity inherited and developed from the George W. Bush years.
Vic Neptune
Friday, June 3, 2016
The Burning Hats of the Persecuted Persecutors
Donald Trump gets satisfaction from putting his surname on things. Trump Steaks, Trump Corporation, Trump Books LLC, Trump Caribbean LLC, Trump Drinks Israel Holdings LLC, Trump Ice Inc., Trump Marks Mattress LLC, Trump Wine Marks LLC, all of these selected from a long list. As far as I know there isn't an entity called Trump Condoms, or a company called Trump Snacks, but we can nonetheless wonder what he'll do with all of his holdings if he becomes president. Is it beneath the dignity of that office to be in charge of something called Trump Panama Condominium Management LLC?
What about Trump University? This organization, investigated currently by the Attorney General's Office of the State of New York as a scam intended to defraud money from gullible and earnest people sorely affected by the recession caused by the 2008 economic collapse, itself caused by the greed of the kinds of people Donald Trump associates with, was never a university, but an alleged presentation of the money-making ideas of Donald Trump. Trump claimed he would pick the teachers, although in a sworn deposition he said he had nothing to do with those selections. He now stands by Trump University, and would like to get it going again after the case against him is dropped.
The main hobgoblin standing in Trump's way regarding this case is a federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump refers to as "Mexican." How a Mexican citizen could get a job in the United States as a federal judge hasn't been explained by Trump, although he needn't explain such illogic to his followers, who boo at his rallies on cue whenever the crafty Latino judge is mentioned. Trump goes further, claiming that Curiel should recuse himself from the Trump University fraud case because, "I'm building a wall. It's an inherent conflict of interest."
In other words, he has a fantastic (as in "remote from reality") idea about building a nearly 2,000 mile long wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, if he becomes president. He is not actually, currently, building such a wall, but somehow this non-existent structure (i.e. dirt-moving project) conflicts with the interest of Judge Curiel, a Mexican who somehow managed to become a U.S. federal judge in the same way, perhaps, that Barack Obama, a Kenyan, managed to become a U.S. president.
Trump "believes" Curiel is Mexican, but research, which I just conducted, taking me less than twenty seconds, shows me that Curiel was born in East Chicago, Indiana, to Mexican-born parents. He received higher education in Indiana and was appointed as a federal judge by Obama in 2012. He's Mexican in the sense that Donald Trump is German.
Nevertheless, Judge Curiel is, according to the aggrieved presumptive Republican nominee, "a hater of Donald Trump...a total disgrace."
I propose a new organization: Trump Hates LLC. Whatever or whoever Donald Trump hates would be focussed on here: women, Latinos and Latinas, Muslims, poor people, former, current, and future POWs, journalists, anyone interested in the truth, families of alleged terrorists.
I observe Donald Trump like I observe anyone in the news or in history. I try to understand them in ways that make sense to my particular way of looking at things, admittedly influenced by many years of thinking about the world and its people. I've encountered and studied bullshit in political discourse for many years. Trump's rhetoric is always self-serving bullshit. Anyone who hasn't figured this out is putty in his little hands. He gains sympathy from his followers by playing a victim. If you don't see a billionaire's claims of victimhood as a trick you may have a brain incapable of perceiving truths beyond mutable surface realities.
In stroking the beliefs of his followers, Trump always sounds like an idiot. He finds himself in a legitimately served fraud case. He attacks the federal judge in charge of the case for his heritage, a sure way of agitating the already established racism of his followers. His argument for the judge's recusal makes no sense: "I'm building a wall..." Who's building a wall? Is it some event detailed in a novel? By using fiction instead of fact to make his case, Trump Bullshits LLC tingles the limited imaginations of his hair-trigger racist followers simply by saying the words, "wall," and "Mexican," applying the latter word to someone who's actually American, thus proving he's capable and ready to lie to make things happen for his benefit, like he allegedly did when defrauding desperate people of their money seeking to learn his "secrets" by applying to Trump University, which is not a university (another lie). The man lies so often that every time you hear about some accomplishment of his (told about usually by himself) it's a safe bet to assume he's far afield of the truth. I used this assumption on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from 2001 to 2009, and they always came through as diabolically devious schemers, always up to no good. When the Iraq War vote was debated in Congress, it was quite obvious to me that attacking Iraq was a bad idea, in part because Bush and Cheney wanted it to happen.
Trying to get Trump followers to see him clearly isn't likely to happen. In San Jose, California, last night, Trump supporters clashed with anti-Trump people after a rally. A woman wearing a Trump tee shirt got pelted with eggs, Trump red hats were stolen and burned, cops stood by, apparently not knowing what to do. Trump's popularity in California is not vigorous. The high Latino population makes it likely he'll have a hard time garnering much support there in the general election. As far as I can tell, Trump banked nearly a year ago on the idea that it was better to court the fading white racist/bigot vote than the growing Latino vote; thus, he made his "Mexicans bring crime, they're rapists..." line infamous at the start of his campaign. He purposely went after the dumbass portion of the white blue collar vote, those feeling unmoored in recent years, the less keen believing it's Barack Obama's fault, when in fact it's very difficult to run a successful country that's continually at war, that also collapsed economically in 2008 due to the depredations of shits like Donald Trump, who now pretends to be their white knight, a Galahad bringing a Holy Grail in the form of a mass-produced hat called Make America Great Again.
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump gets satisfaction from putting his surname on things. Trump Steaks, Trump Corporation, Trump Books LLC, Trump Caribbean LLC, Trump Drinks Israel Holdings LLC, Trump Ice Inc., Trump Marks Mattress LLC, Trump Wine Marks LLC, all of these selected from a long list. As far as I know there isn't an entity called Trump Condoms, or a company called Trump Snacks, but we can nonetheless wonder what he'll do with all of his holdings if he becomes president. Is it beneath the dignity of that office to be in charge of something called Trump Panama Condominium Management LLC?
What about Trump University? This organization, investigated currently by the Attorney General's Office of the State of New York as a scam intended to defraud money from gullible and earnest people sorely affected by the recession caused by the 2008 economic collapse, itself caused by the greed of the kinds of people Donald Trump associates with, was never a university, but an alleged presentation of the money-making ideas of Donald Trump. Trump claimed he would pick the teachers, although in a sworn deposition he said he had nothing to do with those selections. He now stands by Trump University, and would like to get it going again after the case against him is dropped.
The main hobgoblin standing in Trump's way regarding this case is a federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump refers to as "Mexican." How a Mexican citizen could get a job in the United States as a federal judge hasn't been explained by Trump, although he needn't explain such illogic to his followers, who boo at his rallies on cue whenever the crafty Latino judge is mentioned. Trump goes further, claiming that Curiel should recuse himself from the Trump University fraud case because, "I'm building a wall. It's an inherent conflict of interest."
In other words, he has a fantastic (as in "remote from reality") idea about building a nearly 2,000 mile long wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, if he becomes president. He is not actually, currently, building such a wall, but somehow this non-existent structure (i.e. dirt-moving project) conflicts with the interest of Judge Curiel, a Mexican who somehow managed to become a U.S. federal judge in the same way, perhaps, that Barack Obama, a Kenyan, managed to become a U.S. president.
Trump "believes" Curiel is Mexican, but research, which I just conducted, taking me less than twenty seconds, shows me that Curiel was born in East Chicago, Indiana, to Mexican-born parents. He received higher education in Indiana and was appointed as a federal judge by Obama in 2012. He's Mexican in the sense that Donald Trump is German.
Nevertheless, Judge Curiel is, according to the aggrieved presumptive Republican nominee, "a hater of Donald Trump...a total disgrace."
I propose a new organization: Trump Hates LLC. Whatever or whoever Donald Trump hates would be focussed on here: women, Latinos and Latinas, Muslims, poor people, former, current, and future POWs, journalists, anyone interested in the truth, families of alleged terrorists.
I observe Donald Trump like I observe anyone in the news or in history. I try to understand them in ways that make sense to my particular way of looking at things, admittedly influenced by many years of thinking about the world and its people. I've encountered and studied bullshit in political discourse for many years. Trump's rhetoric is always self-serving bullshit. Anyone who hasn't figured this out is putty in his little hands. He gains sympathy from his followers by playing a victim. If you don't see a billionaire's claims of victimhood as a trick you may have a brain incapable of perceiving truths beyond mutable surface realities.
In stroking the beliefs of his followers, Trump always sounds like an idiot. He finds himself in a legitimately served fraud case. He attacks the federal judge in charge of the case for his heritage, a sure way of agitating the already established racism of his followers. His argument for the judge's recusal makes no sense: "I'm building a wall..." Who's building a wall? Is it some event detailed in a novel? By using fiction instead of fact to make his case, Trump Bullshits LLC tingles the limited imaginations of his hair-trigger racist followers simply by saying the words, "wall," and "Mexican," applying the latter word to someone who's actually American, thus proving he's capable and ready to lie to make things happen for his benefit, like he allegedly did when defrauding desperate people of their money seeking to learn his "secrets" by applying to Trump University, which is not a university (another lie). The man lies so often that every time you hear about some accomplishment of his (told about usually by himself) it's a safe bet to assume he's far afield of the truth. I used this assumption on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from 2001 to 2009, and they always came through as diabolically devious schemers, always up to no good. When the Iraq War vote was debated in Congress, it was quite obvious to me that attacking Iraq was a bad idea, in part because Bush and Cheney wanted it to happen.
Trying to get Trump followers to see him clearly isn't likely to happen. In San Jose, California, last night, Trump supporters clashed with anti-Trump people after a rally. A woman wearing a Trump tee shirt got pelted with eggs, Trump red hats were stolen and burned, cops stood by, apparently not knowing what to do. Trump's popularity in California is not vigorous. The high Latino population makes it likely he'll have a hard time garnering much support there in the general election. As far as I can tell, Trump banked nearly a year ago on the idea that it was better to court the fading white racist/bigot vote than the growing Latino vote; thus, he made his "Mexicans bring crime, they're rapists..." line infamous at the start of his campaign. He purposely went after the dumbass portion of the white blue collar vote, those feeling unmoored in recent years, the less keen believing it's Barack Obama's fault, when in fact it's very difficult to run a successful country that's continually at war, that also collapsed economically in 2008 due to the depredations of shits like Donald Trump, who now pretends to be their white knight, a Galahad bringing a Holy Grail in the form of a mass-produced hat called Make America Great Again.
Vic Neptune
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)