Rogue Terrorism Bad, State Terrorism Good
President Obama has vetoed JASTA, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, brought about by strenuous efforts on the parts of families of 9/11 victims who seek to sue the Saudi Arabian government for alleged participation in the 2001 terror attacks.
The Saudi government has lobbied, successfully, to prevent Obama from signing the legislation. They've threatened financial punishment. Their position in the Middle East as an adversary to Iran no doubt influenced Obama. As with police departments who kill people without sufficient cause and then cover up the true circumstances, the Saudis have secrets about 9/11 to hide. Why else would they react with threats of heavy financial punishment against the United States, if previously withheld information, like the unpublished "twenty-eight pages" of the 9/11 Report relating to Saudi Arabia, were released? There's talk now that these pages will be released, though in what form remains to be seen. Redacted text points not just to names needing to be kept secret for unknown purposes, but also to possible crimes covered up by governments and their intelligence agencies.
Perhaps they just mollify 9/11 families, an unwise-to-offend group, but Hillary Clinton, we're told, would sign JASTA if she were president. Donald Trump says he would, too. What's wrong with them? Don't they realize a massive state can't operate by doing the will of its people?
The House and the Senate (comprised of those who represent the people) have approved the legislation. Right wing hardcase, Senator John Cornyn, said he looks forward to Congress overriding Obama's veto, "[to] provide these families with the chance to seek the justice they deserve and send a clear message that we will not tolerate those who finance terrorism in the United States."
I think he meant "...against the United States," not "...in..."
Cornyn, like many politicians, speaks of sending "a clear message," but by his words doesn't make the message clear. Based on past American actions in "fighting terrorism," the message is a bloody one, of the "shoot first, ask questions later" variety, an in-the-moment practice familiar to numerous police departments when dealing with Black citizens.
Killing is policy. If Cornyn and his Legislative Branch colleagues truly seek to be intolerant of "those who finance terrorism in the United States," as he put it, they seem oblivious to their own vote to send Saudi Arabia a billion dollars worth of arms so that this suspicious, albeit anti-Iran, government can continue its obliteration of Yemenis in a lopsided war supported by most Arab nations and the United States, led by the man who doesn't want the desert Kingdom upset with us.
Israel, too, receives three and a half billion dollars a year from the United States, taxpayer-provided, as ordinary Americans help Netanyahu kill Palestinians. Blood money, indeed.
Surely, despite what Cornyn was clumsily trying to actually say, the U.S. government and military finance terrorism, and practice it. In 2003, to give one example, the propaganda lead-up to "Shock and Awe," the intense bombing campaign near the beginning of the Iraq War, was meant to put the Iraqi population, government, military, and civilian, on edge, and in fear. Spreading fear with political intent is terrorism. American news networks assisted the spread of "Shock and Awe," creating an eager sense in the U.S. of watching a hungry tiger about to pounce on a rodent.
Using U.S. drones over Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, is state terrorism. Rogue terrorism, committed by non-state groups, is a practice condemned often as "evil" by state terrorists like Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Henry Kissinger. It's like a parent, pissed off at his teenager, saying, "You didn't ask my permission to borrow my car." Terrorism must be practiced in a certain way, by nations only.
The real reason Obama vetoed the bill isn't because he wants to kiss Saudi royal ass. He's mainly concerned about the blowback that could result, wherein diplomats and servicemen may be subject to future lawsuits, with JASTA as a precedent. He, as would any other president of either party, seeks to prevent American foreign policymakers (including himself) from being legally vulnerable to foreign nationals who have suffered at the hands of those making and enacting U.S. foreign policy.
Early in his first term, Obama made it impossible for anyone in the Bush administration to be prosecuted for war crimes. Obama is hardly a left-winger. I suspect, too, he anticipates also receiving legal coverage from his successor for his war crimes. As an aside, I saw a still photo of Michelle Obama, smiling brightly, hugging George W. Bush at a recent event they both attended. Killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis after lying about weapons of mass destruction doesn't seem to prevent the current First Lady from enfolding a mass murderer in her arms.
Her husband's demonstration of his priorities by vetoing JASTA, screwing the families of those killed on 9/11, reveals the realities of the compromises in decency made by those who achieve the presidency: a job fit in these war-driven times for contemptible hellbound shits.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Is Jennifer Aniston Feeling Smug?
I watched a movie from 1969 called Medium Cool, directed and shot by Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer who had a lot to do with the look of Dennis Hopper's great film, Easy Rider. Medium Cool stars Robert Forster and Peter Bonerz as a TV news-documenting cameraman and sound man in Chicago in 1968 during the time leading to the civil insanity of the Democratic National Convention. Forster's character possesses an unsettling objectivity for much of the film, looking at the world without emotion, framing it like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up.
"I love filming," he remarks as he watches a TV documentary about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He makes no statement about the show's content and what it means for America in a year when Robert Kennedy was also killed. Earlier, as they drive in Washington, D.C. soon after Robert Kennedy's assassination, Forster points out the camera positions for the funeral procession and notices how professional the set-ups are.
"The JFK funeral gave them practice on how to do these things."
It's a cool, professional, and admiring sentiment, devoid of emotion, yet capturing a culture that weds entertainment through televised performance with violence. The Vietnam War at that time was also a dinner time TV show narrated by Walter Cronkite and other news anchors. Wexler's film reminds me of J.G. Ballard's sensibilities as written about in that great English writer's fictions. Ballard, especially in his masterpiece Crash, wrote about what he referred to as "the death of affect." Through entertainment/news media, consumers are given a money-driven presentation combining the buying of goods and services with fictional and non-fictional programming intended to occupy time, the result of which often leads to indifference towards serious matters. Now, the lines of text moving right to left across the bottoms of TV screens on news channels tell us, within the space of a few minutes or less, that the Russian military bombed a relief convoy in Syria, and that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have separated. It's readily easy to find out that "people" are wondering about Pitt's ex-wife Jennifer Aniston's reaction to the latter story, but getting a well-researched report on the relief convoy's destruction requires hunting outside the cable news channels.
This election year has given us two main candidates, both of whom are widely disliked and regarded as dishonest; basically, a pair of shits who run in the same wealthy circles and lack souls. Medium Cool, its scenes shot amid real events, including the riots, shows an America acting before the television lens, a preview of our world now. As I write this, Charlotte, North Carolina, undergoes its second night of civil unrest and protests in response to the killing by a White cop of a Black man sitting in his car, reading a book according to one account, or holding a gun according to another. The cops, in any case, have been vague with their information, and withhold details, as is typical with institutions when they're hiding damning evidence. Slow leaks of information characterize police departments when they commit wrongs. The same happens with the Defense Department. They're always slow to admit U.S. forces have killed civilians, although they're very quick to speak out against other nations that do the same.
Tear gas, a chemical weapon, has been used in Charlotte tonight. Cops in riot gear against mostly peaceful protestors. Some scuffles; seven cops, I heard, went to the hospital with unspecified injuries. Considering their body protection as compared to the regular clothing worn by protestors, I'm trying hard to imagine how they got hurt. When I see masses of armed cops looking like soldiers in a war zone, I can't feel sympathy for their side. Their very presence wearing such garments and using tear gas is an antagonizing factor, riling up crowds rather than pacifying them.
The great philosopher Donald Trump said, of the Charlotte cop killing the citizen, "I'm very, very troubled." He went on to promise that he'll "fix it." Trump, who has never demonstrated he's anything but a racist and a megalomaniac, assures voters he'll make race relations work in his America. It's a preposterous claim, like his desire to make the United States military into a behemoth that would actually only do crippling economic damage to the country, and alienate the world further against this nation.
Trump and Clinton demonstrate an emptiness of character that has logically come about from a slow at first, but accelerating decline in the quality of perception among Americans mesmerized by the surfaces of images, the realm of Medium Cool, while propagandists persuade their consumers to look at wherever the real crimes and scams aren't.
Vic Neptune
I watched a movie from 1969 called Medium Cool, directed and shot by Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer who had a lot to do with the look of Dennis Hopper's great film, Easy Rider. Medium Cool stars Robert Forster and Peter Bonerz as a TV news-documenting cameraman and sound man in Chicago in 1968 during the time leading to the civil insanity of the Democratic National Convention. Forster's character possesses an unsettling objectivity for much of the film, looking at the world without emotion, framing it like the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up.
"I love filming," he remarks as he watches a TV documentary about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He makes no statement about the show's content and what it means for America in a year when Robert Kennedy was also killed. Earlier, as they drive in Washington, D.C. soon after Robert Kennedy's assassination, Forster points out the camera positions for the funeral procession and notices how professional the set-ups are.
"The JFK funeral gave them practice on how to do these things."
It's a cool, professional, and admiring sentiment, devoid of emotion, yet capturing a culture that weds entertainment through televised performance with violence. The Vietnam War at that time was also a dinner time TV show narrated by Walter Cronkite and other news anchors. Wexler's film reminds me of J.G. Ballard's sensibilities as written about in that great English writer's fictions. Ballard, especially in his masterpiece Crash, wrote about what he referred to as "the death of affect." Through entertainment/news media, consumers are given a money-driven presentation combining the buying of goods and services with fictional and non-fictional programming intended to occupy time, the result of which often leads to indifference towards serious matters. Now, the lines of text moving right to left across the bottoms of TV screens on news channels tell us, within the space of a few minutes or less, that the Russian military bombed a relief convoy in Syria, and that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have separated. It's readily easy to find out that "people" are wondering about Pitt's ex-wife Jennifer Aniston's reaction to the latter story, but getting a well-researched report on the relief convoy's destruction requires hunting outside the cable news channels.
This election year has given us two main candidates, both of whom are widely disliked and regarded as dishonest; basically, a pair of shits who run in the same wealthy circles and lack souls. Medium Cool, its scenes shot amid real events, including the riots, shows an America acting before the television lens, a preview of our world now. As I write this, Charlotte, North Carolina, undergoes its second night of civil unrest and protests in response to the killing by a White cop of a Black man sitting in his car, reading a book according to one account, or holding a gun according to another. The cops, in any case, have been vague with their information, and withhold details, as is typical with institutions when they're hiding damning evidence. Slow leaks of information characterize police departments when they commit wrongs. The same happens with the Defense Department. They're always slow to admit U.S. forces have killed civilians, although they're very quick to speak out against other nations that do the same.
Tear gas, a chemical weapon, has been used in Charlotte tonight. Cops in riot gear against mostly peaceful protestors. Some scuffles; seven cops, I heard, went to the hospital with unspecified injuries. Considering their body protection as compared to the regular clothing worn by protestors, I'm trying hard to imagine how they got hurt. When I see masses of armed cops looking like soldiers in a war zone, I can't feel sympathy for their side. Their very presence wearing such garments and using tear gas is an antagonizing factor, riling up crowds rather than pacifying them.
The great philosopher Donald Trump said, of the Charlotte cop killing the citizen, "I'm very, very troubled." He went on to promise that he'll "fix it." Trump, who has never demonstrated he's anything but a racist and a megalomaniac, assures voters he'll make race relations work in his America. It's a preposterous claim, like his desire to make the United States military into a behemoth that would actually only do crippling economic damage to the country, and alienate the world further against this nation.
Trump and Clinton demonstrate an emptiness of character that has logically come about from a slow at first, but accelerating decline in the quality of perception among Americans mesmerized by the surfaces of images, the realm of Medium Cool, while propagandists persuade their consumers to look at wherever the real crimes and scams aren't.
Vic Neptune
Monday, September 19, 2016
The Same Kinds of Saudi Jets Bombing Yemen Also Punctuate the U.S. National Anthem
Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King has a problem with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's use of his First Amendment rights. Kaepernick, in a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers, started a controversy when he wouldn't rise for the traditional pre-game performance of America's national anthem, a song written by a slaveowner in 1814 during a battle. The song celebrates the "Star Spangled Banner," its endurance as British and American shells exploded and musket balls flew in the chaos of war. Adapted from a drinking song, with changed lyrics, the anthem has become fetishized, like other American objects (the flag, the words "In God We Trust" on money, also with, at professional sporting contests, flyovers by U.S. military jets at the anthem's final notes). The purpose of this patriotic fetishization is to give cover to those who endorse bloodshed and injustice while avoiding risk themselves.
Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback of former dynamism who played, but lost, in a Super Bowl, is now the backup to another. It's not like Tom Brady or Aaron Rogers, NFL superstars in other words, kneeled instead of stood during the national anthem. Kaepernick, however, like many quarterbacks who have been in the limelight, has received corporate endorsements in the past. By not standing during the anthem, as he did in that preseason game and in three regular season games following, he lost backers and gained enemies among the public and in the news media. Bill O'Reilly, in high blood pressure mode, said he would send Kaepernick a copy of his new book about the U.S. defeat of Japan, Killing the Rising Sun, insisting that the upstart Black NFL player "read every word," including the table of contents and copyright information, I guess. O'Reilly's point, easy to figure out since he's a rich man who's never actually risked his life or career for anything or anyone, would make us believe Colin Kaepernick is a spoiled ignoramus who should be grateful for what America has given him: fame and money, two things O'Reilly, a proud Roman Catholic, worships more than the selfless good works of St. Francis of Assisi, or the stance of Jesus of Nazareth when confronted with power while facing Pontius Pilate. O'Reilly, a friend, colleague, and apologist for and of Roger Ailes, the sexual predator whose loathsome misogynist actions won Gretchen Carlson twenty million dollars in a recent lawsuit settlement, really gives a shit about a song, that song, rather than women's rights and the First Amendment rights of a Black quarterback.
Kaepernick has been supported in his protest by other players taking a knee during the anthem. It's become a "controversy." In America it's not controversial or even much known that our government enables Saudi Arabia's continuing rape of Yemen, by now a more destructive crime against humanity than Saddam Hussein's invasion and occupation of Kuwait, which prompted so much blood and fire talk from the gung ho never-been-shot-at motherfuckers of a quarter century ago. A man kneels during the national anthem and it's somehow worse than why he's kneeling. Kaepernick's protest derives from his humanitarian objection to police brutality against the African American community. Why should he honor an anthem that's played mechanically just because it's a tradition, while the ideal of "liberty and justice for all" isn't realized in a nation infected deeply with institutional racism? In a nation where incarceration rates for Black men is much higher than incarceration rates for White men committing the same crimes? In a nation with a prison industrial complex that profits from the cruel conditions of the War on Drugs, a failed campaign that has succeeded in supplying prisons with dark-skinned humans, causing a self-perpetuating system that only exists for itself, like the Department of Defense and many big city police departments?
Kaepernick has risked his money (a formidable amount by most people's standards) and his character, the latter in the eyes of people like Bill O'Reilly and Congressman King, who said," I think Colin Kaepernick is representing the San Francisco 49ers when he puts on that uniform. When he steps out on the stage, the world stage, he's taking advantage of that, and he's undermining patriotism. I understand that he has an Islamic girlfriend and that this has changed him and has taken on some different political views along the way. This is activism that's sympathetic to ISIS."
Steve King is a member of the House of Representatives, supposedly a responsible government official. Kaepernick denies he's converted to Islam, and added that his protest touches off Islamophobia in America. King, by his own words, proves this. His statements against Kaepernick tell much about himself, and nothing about the quarterback. Kaepernick, according to King, represents his team on "the world stage,"--he's "taking advantage" of the 49ers, a team owned by John Edward "Jed" York, the thirty-six year old nephew of a former owner of the team, thus a participant in the literal definition of nepotism, a privilege of the rich. San Francisco Examiner columnist Jay Mariotti in 2015 wrote of Jed York, "It should be obvious by now that everything Jed touches turns not to metallic gold, but to an unspeakable substance." I'll write the word for him: he means "shit."
By wearing that uniform on the world stage and not standing during the national anthem, King claims that Kaepernick is "undermining patriotism." Patriotism is sometimes spoken about as if it's an entity, as is the flag. Patriotism damaged, wounded, upset, angry, depressed, unable to function. Can patriotism's foundation really be wobbled by a rich Black football player choosing to make a visual Constitutionally protected statement about a song written 202 years ago by a man who owned people the same color as the football player?
King's next statement is truly a McCarthyite tactic: bringing up Kaepernick's "Islamic girlfriend" serves the purpose of making the football player's protest into part of a larger narrative, that of the War on Terror. If I had Steve King sitting before me, I'd tell him this: "Colin Kaepernick has done the protests, not his girlfriend. You needn't mention her, because she has nothing to do with it, in spite of your pure speculation that she's influenced him, infected him with 'Islamic' ideas which you then, without evidence, link to the philosophy and practices of ISIS, an organization so extreme in its views and violent that the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject and condemn it. You call his taking a knee during the national anthem 'activism sympathetic to ISIS,' but in fact it's activism that carries out the principles of the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution, which you, Mr. King, have sworn to protect as a Congressional Representative, not undermining it to serve your own purposes as you manipulate voters by passing off slander as fact. Your objection to this whole matter is, in fact, un-American."
To do an unpopular thing for a logical reason, to be consistent about it as well, is hardly an easy thing to do on such a widely viewed "stage" as NFL football, yet Colin Kaepernick has shown he has more guts and actual patriotism than any of the white rich assholes complaining about him.
Vic Neptune
Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King has a problem with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's use of his First Amendment rights. Kaepernick, in a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers, started a controversy when he wouldn't rise for the traditional pre-game performance of America's national anthem, a song written by a slaveowner in 1814 during a battle. The song celebrates the "Star Spangled Banner," its endurance as British and American shells exploded and musket balls flew in the chaos of war. Adapted from a drinking song, with changed lyrics, the anthem has become fetishized, like other American objects (the flag, the words "In God We Trust" on money, also with, at professional sporting contests, flyovers by U.S. military jets at the anthem's final notes). The purpose of this patriotic fetishization is to give cover to those who endorse bloodshed and injustice while avoiding risk themselves.
Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback of former dynamism who played, but lost, in a Super Bowl, is now the backup to another. It's not like Tom Brady or Aaron Rogers, NFL superstars in other words, kneeled instead of stood during the national anthem. Kaepernick, however, like many quarterbacks who have been in the limelight, has received corporate endorsements in the past. By not standing during the anthem, as he did in that preseason game and in three regular season games following, he lost backers and gained enemies among the public and in the news media. Bill O'Reilly, in high blood pressure mode, said he would send Kaepernick a copy of his new book about the U.S. defeat of Japan, Killing the Rising Sun, insisting that the upstart Black NFL player "read every word," including the table of contents and copyright information, I guess. O'Reilly's point, easy to figure out since he's a rich man who's never actually risked his life or career for anything or anyone, would make us believe Colin Kaepernick is a spoiled ignoramus who should be grateful for what America has given him: fame and money, two things O'Reilly, a proud Roman Catholic, worships more than the selfless good works of St. Francis of Assisi, or the stance of Jesus of Nazareth when confronted with power while facing Pontius Pilate. O'Reilly, a friend, colleague, and apologist for and of Roger Ailes, the sexual predator whose loathsome misogynist actions won Gretchen Carlson twenty million dollars in a recent lawsuit settlement, really gives a shit about a song, that song, rather than women's rights and the First Amendment rights of a Black quarterback.
Kaepernick has been supported in his protest by other players taking a knee during the anthem. It's become a "controversy." In America it's not controversial or even much known that our government enables Saudi Arabia's continuing rape of Yemen, by now a more destructive crime against humanity than Saddam Hussein's invasion and occupation of Kuwait, which prompted so much blood and fire talk from the gung ho never-been-shot-at motherfuckers of a quarter century ago. A man kneels during the national anthem and it's somehow worse than why he's kneeling. Kaepernick's protest derives from his humanitarian objection to police brutality against the African American community. Why should he honor an anthem that's played mechanically just because it's a tradition, while the ideal of "liberty and justice for all" isn't realized in a nation infected deeply with institutional racism? In a nation where incarceration rates for Black men is much higher than incarceration rates for White men committing the same crimes? In a nation with a prison industrial complex that profits from the cruel conditions of the War on Drugs, a failed campaign that has succeeded in supplying prisons with dark-skinned humans, causing a self-perpetuating system that only exists for itself, like the Department of Defense and many big city police departments?
Kaepernick has risked his money (a formidable amount by most people's standards) and his character, the latter in the eyes of people like Bill O'Reilly and Congressman King, who said," I think Colin Kaepernick is representing the San Francisco 49ers when he puts on that uniform. When he steps out on the stage, the world stage, he's taking advantage of that, and he's undermining patriotism. I understand that he has an Islamic girlfriend and that this has changed him and has taken on some different political views along the way. This is activism that's sympathetic to ISIS."
Steve King is a member of the House of Representatives, supposedly a responsible government official. Kaepernick denies he's converted to Islam, and added that his protest touches off Islamophobia in America. King, by his own words, proves this. His statements against Kaepernick tell much about himself, and nothing about the quarterback. Kaepernick, according to King, represents his team on "the world stage,"--he's "taking advantage" of the 49ers, a team owned by John Edward "Jed" York, the thirty-six year old nephew of a former owner of the team, thus a participant in the literal definition of nepotism, a privilege of the rich. San Francisco Examiner columnist Jay Mariotti in 2015 wrote of Jed York, "It should be obvious by now that everything Jed touches turns not to metallic gold, but to an unspeakable substance." I'll write the word for him: he means "shit."
By wearing that uniform on the world stage and not standing during the national anthem, King claims that Kaepernick is "undermining patriotism." Patriotism is sometimes spoken about as if it's an entity, as is the flag. Patriotism damaged, wounded, upset, angry, depressed, unable to function. Can patriotism's foundation really be wobbled by a rich Black football player choosing to make a visual Constitutionally protected statement about a song written 202 years ago by a man who owned people the same color as the football player?
King's next statement is truly a McCarthyite tactic: bringing up Kaepernick's "Islamic girlfriend" serves the purpose of making the football player's protest into part of a larger narrative, that of the War on Terror. If I had Steve King sitting before me, I'd tell him this: "Colin Kaepernick has done the protests, not his girlfriend. You needn't mention her, because she has nothing to do with it, in spite of your pure speculation that she's influenced him, infected him with 'Islamic' ideas which you then, without evidence, link to the philosophy and practices of ISIS, an organization so extreme in its views and violent that the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject and condemn it. You call his taking a knee during the national anthem 'activism sympathetic to ISIS,' but in fact it's activism that carries out the principles of the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution, which you, Mr. King, have sworn to protect as a Congressional Representative, not undermining it to serve your own purposes as you manipulate voters by passing off slander as fact. Your objection to this whole matter is, in fact, un-American."
To do an unpopular thing for a logical reason, to be consistent about it as well, is hardly an easy thing to do on such a widely viewed "stage" as NFL football, yet Colin Kaepernick has shown he has more guts and actual patriotism than any of the white rich assholes complaining about him.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Darth Vader Also Doesn't Give a Shit About His Victims
Drunk on Spaten Optimator, a doppelbock from Munich. Saturday, almost midnight. Memory of a black Trump supporter on CNN tonight, struggling to defend his chosen candidate. Colin Powell, former General and Secretary of State, a pusher of the Iraq-must-be-invaded argument in 2003, also a black Republican who nevertheless voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. In my view that means he's a Democrat.
His e-mails got hacked. He doesn't like Trump, thinks the Benghazi hearings against Hillary Clinton are "a witch hunt." He didn't specify if he thinks Clinton is a witch or not, but I suspect he can relate to doing an important job, a cabinet position, and having to listen to lesser folk snipe at their betters after important decisions are made.
Colin Powell himself never got investigated by Congress for helping George W. Bush and Dick Cheney rape Iraq, a crime against humanity resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths with repercussions felt today in the very existence of ISIS. Republicans in Congress, rather, have focused on four American deaths in Benghazi during Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.
Four, but they were Americans. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed, displaced, tortured, all because of decisions originating in the minds of Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Powell, and every motherfucker in Congress (including Hillary Clinton) who believed their fake WMD evidence, do not matter. Yet, that is America's spiritual problem. That is a damnation carried on from this country's legacy of imperial conquest, domination, and exploitation since the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Those innocent Americans paying the price incurred by the ambitions of Bush, Powell, and others, are more linked to Washington's leaders in their deadly fate than to those in other countries stirred to rebellion by the actions of men and women in think tanks, presidential cabinets, and Pentagon world-shapers. After Tsarnaev, the younger brother, was caught in Boston after the Marathon bombing, no one in the news media or in the government talked much about the bomber's stated purpose: to inflict damage on America because of America's actions in the Iraq War.
It's utterly unthinkable, I guess, that someone should so give a shit about hundreds of thousands of Bush's, Cheney's, and Powell's victims that he, along with his brother, would inflict counter-damage.
We in America don't think too often about what our foreign policy does to other countries. This subject is not part of the nation's educational system. I never heard a thing about it in high school. One teacher in college had a textbook with a chapter or two about CIA shenanigans in Latin America, but that was a class in Religious Ethics, touching on Liberation Theology; not a required class for the typical Business Administration student, a major familiar to George W. Bush.
Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations in February 2003 to give a mendacious presentation about something that didn't exist: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the raison d'etre for the coming war. Powell didn't like the presentation given to him initially to read, so he went through it line by line with his chief aide, removing the most outrageous and unsubstantiated parts, but leaving in such later discredited sources as the man whose codename was Curveball. This source was a prisoner in U.S. custody who was tortured into saying shit that wasn't true. Powell presented this shit as fact, and went on to watch his government bomb, kill, and torture Iraqis for many years, ending up as a distinguished guest on many news talk shows, not arrested and jailed for participating in the mass murder of a nation's people.
From his leaked e-mails, he's a Republican who dreads a Trump presidency. From his voting record, I suspect he'll vote for Clinton, a candidate he can count on to wage war as consistently as Bush and Obama have done. He probably doesn't like Trump because the Republican candidate doesn't fit the mold of a politician willing to smile and pretend nothing bad is happening while little foreign children are dismembered by American missiles. Trump is too open with his hate for a gentleman like Powell. Trump, who will, like Clinton, kill lots of people if elected president, doesn't present the polite exterior so respected by people in expensive clothes, who murder people and appear on talk shows.
Vic Neptune
Drunk on Spaten Optimator, a doppelbock from Munich. Saturday, almost midnight. Memory of a black Trump supporter on CNN tonight, struggling to defend his chosen candidate. Colin Powell, former General and Secretary of State, a pusher of the Iraq-must-be-invaded argument in 2003, also a black Republican who nevertheless voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. In my view that means he's a Democrat.
His e-mails got hacked. He doesn't like Trump, thinks the Benghazi hearings against Hillary Clinton are "a witch hunt." He didn't specify if he thinks Clinton is a witch or not, but I suspect he can relate to doing an important job, a cabinet position, and having to listen to lesser folk snipe at their betters after important decisions are made.
Colin Powell himself never got investigated by Congress for helping George W. Bush and Dick Cheney rape Iraq, a crime against humanity resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths with repercussions felt today in the very existence of ISIS. Republicans in Congress, rather, have focused on four American deaths in Benghazi during Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.
Four, but they were Americans. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed, displaced, tortured, all because of decisions originating in the minds of Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Powell, and every motherfucker in Congress (including Hillary Clinton) who believed their fake WMD evidence, do not matter. Yet, that is America's spiritual problem. That is a damnation carried on from this country's legacy of imperial conquest, domination, and exploitation since the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Those innocent Americans paying the price incurred by the ambitions of Bush, Powell, and others, are more linked to Washington's leaders in their deadly fate than to those in other countries stirred to rebellion by the actions of men and women in think tanks, presidential cabinets, and Pentagon world-shapers. After Tsarnaev, the younger brother, was caught in Boston after the Marathon bombing, no one in the news media or in the government talked much about the bomber's stated purpose: to inflict damage on America because of America's actions in the Iraq War.
It's utterly unthinkable, I guess, that someone should so give a shit about hundreds of thousands of Bush's, Cheney's, and Powell's victims that he, along with his brother, would inflict counter-damage.
We in America don't think too often about what our foreign policy does to other countries. This subject is not part of the nation's educational system. I never heard a thing about it in high school. One teacher in college had a textbook with a chapter or two about CIA shenanigans in Latin America, but that was a class in Religious Ethics, touching on Liberation Theology; not a required class for the typical Business Administration student, a major familiar to George W. Bush.
Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations in February 2003 to give a mendacious presentation about something that didn't exist: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the raison d'etre for the coming war. Powell didn't like the presentation given to him initially to read, so he went through it line by line with his chief aide, removing the most outrageous and unsubstantiated parts, but leaving in such later discredited sources as the man whose codename was Curveball. This source was a prisoner in U.S. custody who was tortured into saying shit that wasn't true. Powell presented this shit as fact, and went on to watch his government bomb, kill, and torture Iraqis for many years, ending up as a distinguished guest on many news talk shows, not arrested and jailed for participating in the mass murder of a nation's people.
From his leaked e-mails, he's a Republican who dreads a Trump presidency. From his voting record, I suspect he'll vote for Clinton, a candidate he can count on to wage war as consistently as Bush and Obama have done. He probably doesn't like Trump because the Republican candidate doesn't fit the mold of a politician willing to smile and pretend nothing bad is happening while little foreign children are dismembered by American missiles. Trump is too open with his hate for a gentleman like Powell. Trump, who will, like Clinton, kill lots of people if elected president, doesn't present the polite exterior so respected by people in expensive clothes, who murder people and appear on talk shows.
Vic Neptune
Friday, September 16, 2016
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Had Class, Even Apart From Their Moves
On September 12, 2016, a dramatic and perilous incident occurred during a taping of Dancing With the Stars. Two men rushed the stage, heading for Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, a show contestant, and his dancing partner Cheryl Burke. Ms. Burke, in a lovely pink dress, and Mr. Lochte, dressed in white with black lapels and tie, were menaced by the near approach of two men with foreign-sounding names. The men, brought to the floor by security guards and muscled out of the venue, seemed to have been protesting Mr. Lochte's disgusting behavior in Rio de Janeiro during the recent Summer Olympics.
According to CNN, a spokesperson for the popular TV show said, "Two individuals stormed the dance floor tonight and were immediately subdued and escorted out of the building."
"...at least four other people yelled anti-Lochte chants." The two men who "stormed" the stage "...were," according to an LAPD spokesperson, or, in the common tongue, cop, "arrested on trespassing, this was a private person's arrest as the security at the venue made the arrest. We just accepted them and booked them."
In Brazil on August 14, Lochte and three of his fellow shithead colleagues, vandalized a Rio de Janeiro gas station, directed their American piss at anything but the men's room toilet, and were detained by security guards later identified falsely by Lochte as fake cops. He claimed the guards aimed guns at their heads; not true.
Lochte returned to the United States in a private jet with his girlfriend, leaving his three shithead friends behind in Rio, having to talk to cops about what really happened. The contrast between spending hours with cops, and sitting in a private jet next to one's girlfriend, a former Playboy playmate, is easy to picture: one situation is maddening, the other not that bad, especially if capped by a fuck.
Private security guards on the set of Dancing With the Stars made a citizen's arrest. Since the crime of trespassing involved a rich and famous (for being stupid) person, Los Angeles cops "just accepted" the perpetrators and "booked them." Non-cops, as in Rio, made the initial arrest. Lochte in his white suit got to see someone else get taken to the floor after not having actually threatened the swimmer physically, and also after not having urinated in public and committed vandalism.
Lochte told the show's emcee, Tom Bergeron (host also of America's Funniest Videos, which could, without contradiction to its title, show this video of a protest against an Olympics medalist prick with the brain of a cantaloupe), "So many feelings are going through my head right now. I'm a little hurt."
After the show, he said, "You know, at that moment, I was really heartbroken. My heart just sunk. It felt like somebody just ripped it apart." He realized "he had to brush it off."
Who ripped up his heart? The protestors? They wore t-shirts reading "Lochte," circled with a line drawn through. The Anti-Lochtes, a new political movement, perhaps.
I'm sure his brushing off of the event came easily to him. He had no problem screwing his teammates, leaving them behind to fly home with his beautiful girlfriend.
Cheryl Burke, his dancing partner, said of Lochte, using the hyperbole typical of this age, "'[I'm] completely shocked," but "beyond" proud of him.'"
If you're shocked, you're shocked. Saying "completely shocked" implies one can be nine-tenths shocked. To be "beyond proud" could mean anything. What's beyond pride in someone? Shame?
If this language comment on my part seems beside the point, bear in mind I just mention it because it's common these days for people, even the college-educated, to speak English as if they have no idea what most of the words mean. Donald Trump talks like this. Most of what he says into microphones is undifferentiated word garbage. The culture, as it pertains to communications shaped by technology, has embraced, I guess because it's easy, ways of expression that would've been derided even thirty years ago. Here's what show contestant Robert Van Winkle (the former Vanilla Ice, awakened from a twenty year sleep after great success in the music industry) said about the Lochte event on Monday:
"He won the gold medal for this country, folks. Get over the bull story, whatever. It doesn't matter. He's a hero and he's a great guy on top of that."
"The bull story, whatever." Get over it. When a foreigner vandalizes your business and literally pisses on it, "it doesn't matter." When that same person lies to the police about the incident, who cares? He's a fucking hero! He won a gold medal for America! He should be able to lay waste to the rest of the Amazon rain forest if he wants to. Committing crimes in other countries doesn't fucking matter! On top of his reprehensible behavior, he's a great guy!
Former Governor of Texas Rick Perry also competed on the show. He was the first of the seventeen Republicans to drop out of the 2015-2016 presidential race. Has he found a new calling?
He enjoyed the experience, saying before the judges, "Presidential debate ain't even in the class. Ah man, this is crazy good. This is as good as it gets."
Then, speaking truthfully on a show characterized typically by the imprecise language of this time, one of the judges said of Perry's performance, "Timing is very important when you dance."
That's as good as Rick Perry got. At least no one's calling him a hero, and he didn't piss on the stage.
Vic Neptune
On September 12, 2016, a dramatic and perilous incident occurred during a taping of Dancing With the Stars. Two men rushed the stage, heading for Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, a show contestant, and his dancing partner Cheryl Burke. Ms. Burke, in a lovely pink dress, and Mr. Lochte, dressed in white with black lapels and tie, were menaced by the near approach of two men with foreign-sounding names. The men, brought to the floor by security guards and muscled out of the venue, seemed to have been protesting Mr. Lochte's disgusting behavior in Rio de Janeiro during the recent Summer Olympics.
According to CNN, a spokesperson for the popular TV show said, "Two individuals stormed the dance floor tonight and were immediately subdued and escorted out of the building."
"...at least four other people yelled anti-Lochte chants." The two men who "stormed" the stage "...were," according to an LAPD spokesperson, or, in the common tongue, cop, "arrested on trespassing, this was a private person's arrest as the security at the venue made the arrest. We just accepted them and booked them."
In Brazil on August 14, Lochte and three of his fellow shithead colleagues, vandalized a Rio de Janeiro gas station, directed their American piss at anything but the men's room toilet, and were detained by security guards later identified falsely by Lochte as fake cops. He claimed the guards aimed guns at their heads; not true.
Lochte returned to the United States in a private jet with his girlfriend, leaving his three shithead friends behind in Rio, having to talk to cops about what really happened. The contrast between spending hours with cops, and sitting in a private jet next to one's girlfriend, a former Playboy playmate, is easy to picture: one situation is maddening, the other not that bad, especially if capped by a fuck.
Private security guards on the set of Dancing With the Stars made a citizen's arrest. Since the crime of trespassing involved a rich and famous (for being stupid) person, Los Angeles cops "just accepted" the perpetrators and "booked them." Non-cops, as in Rio, made the initial arrest. Lochte in his white suit got to see someone else get taken to the floor after not having actually threatened the swimmer physically, and also after not having urinated in public and committed vandalism.
Lochte told the show's emcee, Tom Bergeron (host also of America's Funniest Videos, which could, without contradiction to its title, show this video of a protest against an Olympics medalist prick with the brain of a cantaloupe), "So many feelings are going through my head right now. I'm a little hurt."
After the show, he said, "You know, at that moment, I was really heartbroken. My heart just sunk. It felt like somebody just ripped it apart." He realized "he had to brush it off."
Who ripped up his heart? The protestors? They wore t-shirts reading "Lochte," circled with a line drawn through. The Anti-Lochtes, a new political movement, perhaps.
I'm sure his brushing off of the event came easily to him. He had no problem screwing his teammates, leaving them behind to fly home with his beautiful girlfriend.
Cheryl Burke, his dancing partner, said of Lochte, using the hyperbole typical of this age, "'[I'm] completely shocked," but "beyond" proud of him.'"
If you're shocked, you're shocked. Saying "completely shocked" implies one can be nine-tenths shocked. To be "beyond proud" could mean anything. What's beyond pride in someone? Shame?
If this language comment on my part seems beside the point, bear in mind I just mention it because it's common these days for people, even the college-educated, to speak English as if they have no idea what most of the words mean. Donald Trump talks like this. Most of what he says into microphones is undifferentiated word garbage. The culture, as it pertains to communications shaped by technology, has embraced, I guess because it's easy, ways of expression that would've been derided even thirty years ago. Here's what show contestant Robert Van Winkle (the former Vanilla Ice, awakened from a twenty year sleep after great success in the music industry) said about the Lochte event on Monday:
"He won the gold medal for this country, folks. Get over the bull story, whatever. It doesn't matter. He's a hero and he's a great guy on top of that."
"The bull story, whatever." Get over it. When a foreigner vandalizes your business and literally pisses on it, "it doesn't matter." When that same person lies to the police about the incident, who cares? He's a fucking hero! He won a gold medal for America! He should be able to lay waste to the rest of the Amazon rain forest if he wants to. Committing crimes in other countries doesn't fucking matter! On top of his reprehensible behavior, he's a great guy!
Former Governor of Texas Rick Perry also competed on the show. He was the first of the seventeen Republicans to drop out of the 2015-2016 presidential race. Has he found a new calling?
He enjoyed the experience, saying before the judges, "Presidential debate ain't even in the class. Ah man, this is crazy good. This is as good as it gets."
Then, speaking truthfully on a show characterized typically by the imprecise language of this time, one of the judges said of Perry's performance, "Timing is very important when you dance."
That's as good as Rick Perry got. At least no one's calling him a hero, and he didn't piss on the stage.
Vic Neptune
Monday, September 12, 2016
Kaboom Ka-ching
Yesterday, September 11, 2016, marked the fifteenth anniversary of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States of America. It's called Patriot Day. Patriot Missile, Patriot Day, New England Patriots. It's a favorite word in this country, second only, perhaps, to pussy.
Donald Trump, during the primaries, agreed with a woman at a rally who shouted that Senator Ted Cruz is a "pussy" for not embracing torture wholeheartedly. Are we patriots or pussies? Should we celebrate the American war machine's actions these past fifteen years, or be critical of the havoc wrought?
Last August I saw Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, interviewed via satellite on Fox and Friends, speaking about American militarism, about war profiteering, support of illegal military aggression by Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all three nations receivers of billions of dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied weaponry used to slaughter Arabs. She may as well have been talking to mentally handicapped second graders (including Tucker Carlson). They wanted her to talk about Cuba's human rights record, but Stein countered by saying that getting upset about Cuba while not getting bent out of shape about Israel's relation with the American ideologically driven war machine, is a false comparison.
In vulgar parlance, who's the pussy? Jill Stein, who's logical and humane, or Tucker Carlson, who went from CNN to Fox, an organization run by, only until recently, by a sexual predator, Roger Ailes, who forced his will on numerous women employees, getting sued by Gretchen Carlson (who once occupied the same couch sat upon by Tucker) who gained millions of dollars in the settlement against her former horrible boss, Ailes, friend of Donald Trump, political consultant of Nixon, Reagan, the first Bush, and Rudy Giuliani?
Is Roger Ailes a patriot? Giuliani? Is patriotism such an easy thing that it merely involves having an American flag nearby, and saying cliches about the fallen of 9/11, about the necessity of sacrifice, such words coming usually from those who have never been shot at in combat, have never lost a son or daughter in a foreign land invaded for profit at the behest of oil corporations?
There was a memorial service yesterday in New York for the 9/11 dead. Trump was there; so was Hillary Clinton, the latter wearing a long-sleeved dark jacket, temperature in the high seventies Fahrenheit. She left early. The reading of names of the nearly 3,000 dead takes about four hours. I wonder if this names ceremony will be done in fifty years? Will the people running America then, the current generation of Millennials and their children, those who weren't even yet born when George W. Bush was handed his excuse to unleash chaos on the planet, bother to engage in such a formal activity surrounding a hallowed date? Does America stop in its tracks on the December 7 Pearl Harbor anniversary? No.
Hillary Clinton, according to her people, felt "overheated," and had to leave the ceremony after about ninety minutes. Imagine a presidential candidate, Trump or Clinton, standing in rising heat for four hours while names are read. What's going through their minds? What would they rather be doing? Clinton's body was definitely telling her to be prone. As she got into her black security armored van, she lost the ability to walk on her own, and sank in the grip of Secret Service agents, before being put into the vehicle, which then drove not to the hospital, but to Chelsea Clinton's New York apartment.
As Martha Raddatz on ABC News astutely put it this morning, "the hospital comes to her."
It's absurd to think Hillary Clinton didn't receive a medical checkup after this event. In Chelsea Clinton's building for about two hours, the former First Lady then emerged onto the sidewalk, waving and smiling. Staged or not, a beautiful young girl ran up to her and exchanged words with the nation's matriarch (the mother-in-law no one ever wants to be visited by).
Her apparent "I'm feeling great!" condition was written off by her aides as "dehydration," "overheating." However, a little while later, in the traditional Clintonian drip-drip style of information, they finally admitted that the Democratic Candidate and chief bulwark against a Trump presidency--with accompanying apocalypse--was diagnosed last Friday, September 9, with "pneumonia."
Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton campaigned, didn't rest, worsened her conditioned, committed herself, for appearance's sake probably, to standing by in high seventies heat for four hours during the name reading at the 9/11 Memorial. Even today, only three days after her doctor's diagnosis, her campaign chairman said, brightly, "She's back to work!" clarifying that she's doing stuff involving sitting down or up in bed. Even so, she has pneumonia! Chill out for a week, for God's sake!
She's old, Trump is old, I'm middle-aged and getting old. Her physical health gets scrutinized not nearly as much as Trump's mental health. Unfortunately, she provided him with ammunition a few days ago, saying to a group of donors that "half of Trump's supporters" are a "basket of deplorables."
They're homophobic, Islamophobic, "you name it."
Basket of Deplorables, while it sounds like the name of an upcoming Pixar film, prompted the intrepid Mike Pence to say, "they're not a basket of anything," which when analyzed grammatically, comes out as "they're a basket of nothing." I'll buy that, at least as far as their collective braincase is concerned.
Trump has seized on his opponent's contemptuous remark, comparing it to Mitt Romney's infamous and self-damaging "forty-seven percent" remark in 2012. Trump insists Clinton's statement is worse. Comparing the two, Romney was referring to "forty-seven percent" of the electorate whose votes Republicans couldn't count on, including African-American and Latino American votes; thus, "we" can write off those forty-seven percent and concentrate on persuading the remainder. Romney's logic, though cold, was at least honest as he demonstrated his, and the Republican Party's, lack of interest in the fortunes and lives of nearly half the population. This logic persists in the GOP, as well as in the mind of Donald Trump, who doesn't give a flying fuck about Black people, Latinos, the poor, or the human race generally. He's worse than Romney, because Mitt, at least, would've maintained, had he been elected president, a class-separation status quo, unjust though it is, similar to what we now have. In his out of touch, plodding way, Romney nonetheless wouldn't have behaved like an adolescent with impulse control issues.
Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark failed, logically and sensitively, because of its generalization. "Half" of Trump's supporters are total fucking useless idiots capable only of fearing and hating? How does she know this? I've been willing to write in this blog, many times, that Trump supporters are stupid. I stand by this opinion, based on the woefully ignorant shit that always comes out of their mouths whenever reporters put microphones before them, and also especially hearing the nastiness and violence of their shouted words at rallies. "Deserving strong condemnation," "Shockingly bad in quality." That's what deplorable means. Clinton "pivoted" when she made this statement, from Trump himself to his followers. I think it was pre-planned to see if it would work. The news media in general hasn't supported it, because it's imprecise, although they've been tolerant of Trump's chronic imprecision. He declared last year that Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, a remark pertaining to over a billion people, far greater a number of offended persons than the millions of yahoos who think Donald Trump actually gives a shit about them.
"Shockingly bad in quality." Yes. The two main candidates for president in Shitstorm 2016.
Clinton's health and dumb remark about "deplorables," (not a real word by the way), occupied the news cycle, instead of the meaning of an anniversary redolent with warfare, state terrorism, blowback, injustice, power concentrated in ever-smaller units, mass surveillance, and the deadliness of dark patriotism rising higher and higher in both major parties as they seek to wall off nearly everyone from their masters' wealth.
Vic Neptune
Yesterday, September 11, 2016, marked the fifteenth anniversary of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States of America. It's called Patriot Day. Patriot Missile, Patriot Day, New England Patriots. It's a favorite word in this country, second only, perhaps, to pussy.
Donald Trump, during the primaries, agreed with a woman at a rally who shouted that Senator Ted Cruz is a "pussy" for not embracing torture wholeheartedly. Are we patriots or pussies? Should we celebrate the American war machine's actions these past fifteen years, or be critical of the havoc wrought?
Last August I saw Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, interviewed via satellite on Fox and Friends, speaking about American militarism, about war profiteering, support of illegal military aggression by Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all three nations receivers of billions of dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied weaponry used to slaughter Arabs. She may as well have been talking to mentally handicapped second graders (including Tucker Carlson). They wanted her to talk about Cuba's human rights record, but Stein countered by saying that getting upset about Cuba while not getting bent out of shape about Israel's relation with the American ideologically driven war machine, is a false comparison.
In vulgar parlance, who's the pussy? Jill Stein, who's logical and humane, or Tucker Carlson, who went from CNN to Fox, an organization run by, only until recently, by a sexual predator, Roger Ailes, who forced his will on numerous women employees, getting sued by Gretchen Carlson (who once occupied the same couch sat upon by Tucker) who gained millions of dollars in the settlement against her former horrible boss, Ailes, friend of Donald Trump, political consultant of Nixon, Reagan, the first Bush, and Rudy Giuliani?
Is Roger Ailes a patriot? Giuliani? Is patriotism such an easy thing that it merely involves having an American flag nearby, and saying cliches about the fallen of 9/11, about the necessity of sacrifice, such words coming usually from those who have never been shot at in combat, have never lost a son or daughter in a foreign land invaded for profit at the behest of oil corporations?
There was a memorial service yesterday in New York for the 9/11 dead. Trump was there; so was Hillary Clinton, the latter wearing a long-sleeved dark jacket, temperature in the high seventies Fahrenheit. She left early. The reading of names of the nearly 3,000 dead takes about four hours. I wonder if this names ceremony will be done in fifty years? Will the people running America then, the current generation of Millennials and their children, those who weren't even yet born when George W. Bush was handed his excuse to unleash chaos on the planet, bother to engage in such a formal activity surrounding a hallowed date? Does America stop in its tracks on the December 7 Pearl Harbor anniversary? No.
Hillary Clinton, according to her people, felt "overheated," and had to leave the ceremony after about ninety minutes. Imagine a presidential candidate, Trump or Clinton, standing in rising heat for four hours while names are read. What's going through their minds? What would they rather be doing? Clinton's body was definitely telling her to be prone. As she got into her black security armored van, she lost the ability to walk on her own, and sank in the grip of Secret Service agents, before being put into the vehicle, which then drove not to the hospital, but to Chelsea Clinton's New York apartment.
As Martha Raddatz on ABC News astutely put it this morning, "the hospital comes to her."
It's absurd to think Hillary Clinton didn't receive a medical checkup after this event. In Chelsea Clinton's building for about two hours, the former First Lady then emerged onto the sidewalk, waving and smiling. Staged or not, a beautiful young girl ran up to her and exchanged words with the nation's matriarch (the mother-in-law no one ever wants to be visited by).
Her apparent "I'm feeling great!" condition was written off by her aides as "dehydration," "overheating." However, a little while later, in the traditional Clintonian drip-drip style of information, they finally admitted that the Democratic Candidate and chief bulwark against a Trump presidency--with accompanying apocalypse--was diagnosed last Friday, September 9, with "pneumonia."
Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton campaigned, didn't rest, worsened her conditioned, committed herself, for appearance's sake probably, to standing by in high seventies heat for four hours during the name reading at the 9/11 Memorial. Even today, only three days after her doctor's diagnosis, her campaign chairman said, brightly, "She's back to work!" clarifying that she's doing stuff involving sitting down or up in bed. Even so, she has pneumonia! Chill out for a week, for God's sake!
She's old, Trump is old, I'm middle-aged and getting old. Her physical health gets scrutinized not nearly as much as Trump's mental health. Unfortunately, she provided him with ammunition a few days ago, saying to a group of donors that "half of Trump's supporters" are a "basket of deplorables."
They're homophobic, Islamophobic, "you name it."
Basket of Deplorables, while it sounds like the name of an upcoming Pixar film, prompted the intrepid Mike Pence to say, "they're not a basket of anything," which when analyzed grammatically, comes out as "they're a basket of nothing." I'll buy that, at least as far as their collective braincase is concerned.
Trump has seized on his opponent's contemptuous remark, comparing it to Mitt Romney's infamous and self-damaging "forty-seven percent" remark in 2012. Trump insists Clinton's statement is worse. Comparing the two, Romney was referring to "forty-seven percent" of the electorate whose votes Republicans couldn't count on, including African-American and Latino American votes; thus, "we" can write off those forty-seven percent and concentrate on persuading the remainder. Romney's logic, though cold, was at least honest as he demonstrated his, and the Republican Party's, lack of interest in the fortunes and lives of nearly half the population. This logic persists in the GOP, as well as in the mind of Donald Trump, who doesn't give a flying fuck about Black people, Latinos, the poor, or the human race generally. He's worse than Romney, because Mitt, at least, would've maintained, had he been elected president, a class-separation status quo, unjust though it is, similar to what we now have. In his out of touch, plodding way, Romney nonetheless wouldn't have behaved like an adolescent with impulse control issues.
Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark failed, logically and sensitively, because of its generalization. "Half" of Trump's supporters are total fucking useless idiots capable only of fearing and hating? How does she know this? I've been willing to write in this blog, many times, that Trump supporters are stupid. I stand by this opinion, based on the woefully ignorant shit that always comes out of their mouths whenever reporters put microphones before them, and also especially hearing the nastiness and violence of their shouted words at rallies. "Deserving strong condemnation," "Shockingly bad in quality." That's what deplorable means. Clinton "pivoted" when she made this statement, from Trump himself to his followers. I think it was pre-planned to see if it would work. The news media in general hasn't supported it, because it's imprecise, although they've been tolerant of Trump's chronic imprecision. He declared last year that Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, a remark pertaining to over a billion people, far greater a number of offended persons than the millions of yahoos who think Donald Trump actually gives a shit about them.
"Shockingly bad in quality." Yes. The two main candidates for president in Shitstorm 2016.
Clinton's health and dumb remark about "deplorables," (not a real word by the way), occupied the news cycle, instead of the meaning of an anniversary redolent with warfare, state terrorism, blowback, injustice, power concentrated in ever-smaller units, mass surveillance, and the deadliness of dark patriotism rising higher and higher in both major parties as they seek to wall off nearly everyone from their masters' wealth.
Vic Neptune
Friday, September 9, 2016
When I Was Young I Looked At Maps
Because I'm tired and preoccupied, I don't the feel the sense of discipline now in writing a well-organized essay. I'm just going to write.
The Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, once the Governor of New Mexico, was asked on MSNBC's Morning Joe, "If you're president, what will you do about Aleppo?"
"What is Aleppo?"
Once it was explained to him that it's a Syrian city, one of the most brutalized places on Earth at this time, Johnson shifted into recognition mode. He described the Syrian war as "a mess."
Right now there are clothes all over my bedroom floor, disordered bank statements and oddments on my dresser, lots of books lying around--that's a mess. Carnage is something else, Mr. Johnson.
He said at one point he thought he was hearing the questioner say some acronym. I thought maybe he heard, "a lepo," and wondered, "Lepo? Is that a slur to describe lepers?"
Everyone, it seemed, in the cable news business, latched onto this boner (as in "stupid mistake"), predicting Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race, a political contest characterized by the unpalatability of two abominable candidates in the main parties. Johnson was polling at around ten to fifteen percent favorability, trying to get that up to the somehow magical number, fifteen, so that he'd be accepted as a debater sharing stages with Shit Candidate One and Shit Candidate Two. Getting the Libertarian magic out there to the TV watching masses on debate nights as we enter the final two months of this seemingly never-ending campaign season.
I thought Johnson's lapse (not knowing the name of a city terrorized by Bashar al-Assad, the Russian Air Force, and American warplanes, in a civil war so complex, with so many actors, it's impossible to speak of a solution before going to a commercial break) isn't that big of a deal, if one expects a presidential candidate to know anything about the world, anyway. Trump (and oh, how I wish he had flubbed on Aleppo instead of Johnson) doesn't know anything about foreign policy, doesn't care about anyone except himself and his daughter Ivanka's looks, and is lacking any skill required to understand real political matters other than rabble-rousing. Johnson's failure to notice the slightest headline relating to foreign matters in any newspaper or news-website shows him up as a typical American dumbass when it comes to foreign affairs and geography, but does a president really need to be intelligent?
Nicolle Wallace, an MSNBC commentator, declared that Johnson, because of his Aleppo bafflement, isn't qualified to be president. She was Special Assistant to the President and Director of Media Affairs at the White House during George W. Bush's first term. Bush, in 2000, when asked, "Who's the leader of Pakistan," responded, "General." Pervez Musharraf was the leader of that country then, a nation with an intelligence agency connected, possibly, with 9/11, and also with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Nicolle Wallace also spent time as a senior adviser on the McCain-Palin campaign. Bush, Palin...yes, Nicolle Wallace has learned how to identify dimwits, so I guess we must take her assessment of Gary Johnson seriously. Wallace herself is not stupid; she has, I think, a fine mind. Her commitment to right wing goals over the years, however, limits her vision because she's committed to a failed ideology. Interestingly, that ideology has been changing before our eyes, for those with eyes to see.
The conservative/Republican philosophy is no more. It's been replaced with ferocious capitalist doctrine that uses up and grinds people to nothing in order to make a few thousand people extremely wealthy and powerful. This punishing doctrine has existed for quite some time. Under Reagan, the extremities of its adherents' positions were confined to fantasy as they bowed to the necessity of popularity. Now, as we've seen with the selection of Clinton and Trump as our main possibilities for leader, popularity is no longer required. I well remember Reagan's, and the first Bush's, undeniable popularity in the 1980s and first two years of the 1990s. They managed to seem like decent people. Reagan was lovable. He'd starred in King's Row, looking up from his missing legs and crying out, horrified, to Ann Sheridan, "Where's the rest of me?" In the world of pretend, Reagan was effective. Americans told themselves lies about his communication skills, which were well practiced and had been honed in radio and in Hollywood. They were as phony as the myth that grew up around that hollow man, the myth now believed by nearly every politician and journalist in Washington: he was a great president. He is not regarded as such in Nicaragua, but, like Aleppo, who cares about places with funny names where people suffer due to the decisions made by powerful evil fucks as they exercise their arsenals to keep arms merchants and manufacturers satisfied.
The first Bush reached the peak of his popularity in January 1991, because he attacked Iraqi forces and seemed like a tough, patriotic son of a bitch. Hillary Clinton, seeming, to me, increasingly imperious and self-important, has been speaking of her steadiness, contrasting that quality with Trump's impulse-driven child behavior. The problem with Clinton running the country is that she's convinced that she'll do it well, when there's no evidence to suggest she will. No one knows what kind of president one is going to be. Lyndon Johnson showed his good intentions with his attention to civil rights, but then he committed himself to killing millions of people in Southeast Asia, something carried on by his successor, Richard Nixon, who also, I suspect, had good intentions and was convinced, going into the job, that he'd be great at it.
Gary Johnson didn't recognize the name Aleppo, even after it was repeated. Is that worse than knowing about that city, but doing nothing effective, beyond increasing the damage, to help it? That's been Barack Obama's Syrian policy: solve problems with bombs. Hillary Clinton, a militarist, won't be any different. Trump, a vicious psychopath, would probably try many things when dealing with the Middle East, but none of his methods would help anyone who desperately needs help, but he would magnify hatred towards the United States, something this country really wants, like surprise bombs at a marathon.
What is Aleppo? For that matter, news media assholes, what is Yemen? What are refugees? What is a non-functioning American political system? What is climate change? What are cluster bombs? What are malnourished children in Venezuela? What is Gaza City? What are Black victims of police violence? What are liars with agendas? What will Hillary Clinton say the next time Israeli Defense Forces slaughter Palestinian civilians? What is the importance of a Gary Johnson ignoramus compared with a Trump ignoramus?
Vic Neptune
Because I'm tired and preoccupied, I don't the feel the sense of discipline now in writing a well-organized essay. I'm just going to write.
The Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, once the Governor of New Mexico, was asked on MSNBC's Morning Joe, "If you're president, what will you do about Aleppo?"
"What is Aleppo?"
Once it was explained to him that it's a Syrian city, one of the most brutalized places on Earth at this time, Johnson shifted into recognition mode. He described the Syrian war as "a mess."
Right now there are clothes all over my bedroom floor, disordered bank statements and oddments on my dresser, lots of books lying around--that's a mess. Carnage is something else, Mr. Johnson.
He said at one point he thought he was hearing the questioner say some acronym. I thought maybe he heard, "a lepo," and wondered, "Lepo? Is that a slur to describe lepers?"
Everyone, it seemed, in the cable news business, latched onto this boner (as in "stupid mistake"), predicting Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race, a political contest characterized by the unpalatability of two abominable candidates in the main parties. Johnson was polling at around ten to fifteen percent favorability, trying to get that up to the somehow magical number, fifteen, so that he'd be accepted as a debater sharing stages with Shit Candidate One and Shit Candidate Two. Getting the Libertarian magic out there to the TV watching masses on debate nights as we enter the final two months of this seemingly never-ending campaign season.
I thought Johnson's lapse (not knowing the name of a city terrorized by Bashar al-Assad, the Russian Air Force, and American warplanes, in a civil war so complex, with so many actors, it's impossible to speak of a solution before going to a commercial break) isn't that big of a deal, if one expects a presidential candidate to know anything about the world, anyway. Trump (and oh, how I wish he had flubbed on Aleppo instead of Johnson) doesn't know anything about foreign policy, doesn't care about anyone except himself and his daughter Ivanka's looks, and is lacking any skill required to understand real political matters other than rabble-rousing. Johnson's failure to notice the slightest headline relating to foreign matters in any newspaper or news-website shows him up as a typical American dumbass when it comes to foreign affairs and geography, but does a president really need to be intelligent?
Nicolle Wallace, an MSNBC commentator, declared that Johnson, because of his Aleppo bafflement, isn't qualified to be president. She was Special Assistant to the President and Director of Media Affairs at the White House during George W. Bush's first term. Bush, in 2000, when asked, "Who's the leader of Pakistan," responded, "General." Pervez Musharraf was the leader of that country then, a nation with an intelligence agency connected, possibly, with 9/11, and also with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Nicolle Wallace also spent time as a senior adviser on the McCain-Palin campaign. Bush, Palin...yes, Nicolle Wallace has learned how to identify dimwits, so I guess we must take her assessment of Gary Johnson seriously. Wallace herself is not stupid; she has, I think, a fine mind. Her commitment to right wing goals over the years, however, limits her vision because she's committed to a failed ideology. Interestingly, that ideology has been changing before our eyes, for those with eyes to see.
The conservative/Republican philosophy is no more. It's been replaced with ferocious capitalist doctrine that uses up and grinds people to nothing in order to make a few thousand people extremely wealthy and powerful. This punishing doctrine has existed for quite some time. Under Reagan, the extremities of its adherents' positions were confined to fantasy as they bowed to the necessity of popularity. Now, as we've seen with the selection of Clinton and Trump as our main possibilities for leader, popularity is no longer required. I well remember Reagan's, and the first Bush's, undeniable popularity in the 1980s and first two years of the 1990s. They managed to seem like decent people. Reagan was lovable. He'd starred in King's Row, looking up from his missing legs and crying out, horrified, to Ann Sheridan, "Where's the rest of me?" In the world of pretend, Reagan was effective. Americans told themselves lies about his communication skills, which were well practiced and had been honed in radio and in Hollywood. They were as phony as the myth that grew up around that hollow man, the myth now believed by nearly every politician and journalist in Washington: he was a great president. He is not regarded as such in Nicaragua, but, like Aleppo, who cares about places with funny names where people suffer due to the decisions made by powerful evil fucks as they exercise their arsenals to keep arms merchants and manufacturers satisfied.
The first Bush reached the peak of his popularity in January 1991, because he attacked Iraqi forces and seemed like a tough, patriotic son of a bitch. Hillary Clinton, seeming, to me, increasingly imperious and self-important, has been speaking of her steadiness, contrasting that quality with Trump's impulse-driven child behavior. The problem with Clinton running the country is that she's convinced that she'll do it well, when there's no evidence to suggest she will. No one knows what kind of president one is going to be. Lyndon Johnson showed his good intentions with his attention to civil rights, but then he committed himself to killing millions of people in Southeast Asia, something carried on by his successor, Richard Nixon, who also, I suspect, had good intentions and was convinced, going into the job, that he'd be great at it.
Gary Johnson didn't recognize the name Aleppo, even after it was repeated. Is that worse than knowing about that city, but doing nothing effective, beyond increasing the damage, to help it? That's been Barack Obama's Syrian policy: solve problems with bombs. Hillary Clinton, a militarist, won't be any different. Trump, a vicious psychopath, would probably try many things when dealing with the Middle East, but none of his methods would help anyone who desperately needs help, but he would magnify hatred towards the United States, something this country really wants, like surprise bombs at a marathon.
What is Aleppo? For that matter, news media assholes, what is Yemen? What are refugees? What is a non-functioning American political system? What is climate change? What are cluster bombs? What are malnourished children in Venezuela? What is Gaza City? What are Black victims of police violence? What are liars with agendas? What will Hillary Clinton say the next time Israeli Defense Forces slaughter Palestinian civilians? What is the importance of a Gary Johnson ignoramus compared with a Trump ignoramus?
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
Thanks for the Memories
Before going to work this morning, I saw an interesting and unsettling TV ad.
Nissan Rogue, Nissan Murano, Nissan Pathfinder. The Rogue is mainly shown, a red one, driven by a cool and collected woman with a bearded male passenger, escaping from a city beset by some Marvel Comics-like storm cloud expanding and blazing with lightning. The cloud's expansion is shown from above at first, a helicopter shot looking straight down past skyscrapers at streets darkened by the swiftly moving mass. It moves like the collapsed towers' dust clouds of 9/11. What are Nissan's advertising people attempting to convey with this ad?
"Take on any road with intuitive all wheel drive," says the narrator at the end.
Indeed, the car gets splashed with heavy rain, trees fall, the driver swerves around a sparking power cable, speeds through a tunnel ahead of the cloud that's shooting along like liquid through a hypodermic. A long distance shot shows the unnatural cloud spreading over the city, a bicyclist sitting motionless on the street, watching from a sunny distance. The Rogue emerges out of the cloud through the tunnel, flanked on either side by the Pathfinder and Murano.
"Innovation that excites."
Ads that confuse.
The driver first notices something's up when heavy raindrops begin hitting her windshield, making loud plopping sounds. If this ad is a 9/11 reference, do these plopping drops symbolize the unfortunates above the fire line who jumped from the Towers' highest floors? She looks up, as New Yorkers did that day, an uncharacteristic action on their parts, because September 11, 2001, is the first day New Yorkers looked up, doing what visiting hick tourists always do.
What the fuck is going on with the Nissan ad? The overhead view of the expanding cloud is painfully similar to the Towers' fall. I saw part of a documentary many years ago, featuring footage shot by a photographer who lived near the World Trade Center. She woke up hearing Flight 11 impact with the North Tower, got her videocamera and went outside, documenting the experience, and then returned to her second or third floor apartment on a side street. The apartment's living room featured wide windows which could be cranked open and closed. The windows that morning were open, the weather was lovely. She heard and felt the South Tower's death roar and aimed her videocamera down at the street. People appeared, running fast to the right, followed by a dark cloud moving with the speed of a truck going about twenty to thirty miles per hour.
The cloud looked a lot like the spreading monstrosity in the Nissan TV ad. It no doubt overtook the running people seen by the woman through her camera lens. The cloud entered her apartment, punishing her curiosity. Blinded and choked, she ran upstairs inside the building to the top floor, where an old woman gave her temporary sanctuary in her apartment.
9/11 is now a car commercial. Patriot Day is four days away. Honor the fallen victims by buying things.
Vic Neptune
Before going to work this morning, I saw an interesting and unsettling TV ad.
Nissan Rogue, Nissan Murano, Nissan Pathfinder. The Rogue is mainly shown, a red one, driven by a cool and collected woman with a bearded male passenger, escaping from a city beset by some Marvel Comics-like storm cloud expanding and blazing with lightning. The cloud's expansion is shown from above at first, a helicopter shot looking straight down past skyscrapers at streets darkened by the swiftly moving mass. It moves like the collapsed towers' dust clouds of 9/11. What are Nissan's advertising people attempting to convey with this ad?
"Take on any road with intuitive all wheel drive," says the narrator at the end.
Indeed, the car gets splashed with heavy rain, trees fall, the driver swerves around a sparking power cable, speeds through a tunnel ahead of the cloud that's shooting along like liquid through a hypodermic. A long distance shot shows the unnatural cloud spreading over the city, a bicyclist sitting motionless on the street, watching from a sunny distance. The Rogue emerges out of the cloud through the tunnel, flanked on either side by the Pathfinder and Murano.
"Innovation that excites."
Ads that confuse.
The driver first notices something's up when heavy raindrops begin hitting her windshield, making loud plopping sounds. If this ad is a 9/11 reference, do these plopping drops symbolize the unfortunates above the fire line who jumped from the Towers' highest floors? She looks up, as New Yorkers did that day, an uncharacteristic action on their parts, because September 11, 2001, is the first day New Yorkers looked up, doing what visiting hick tourists always do.
What the fuck is going on with the Nissan ad? The overhead view of the expanding cloud is painfully similar to the Towers' fall. I saw part of a documentary many years ago, featuring footage shot by a photographer who lived near the World Trade Center. She woke up hearing Flight 11 impact with the North Tower, got her videocamera and went outside, documenting the experience, and then returned to her second or third floor apartment on a side street. The apartment's living room featured wide windows which could be cranked open and closed. The windows that morning were open, the weather was lovely. She heard and felt the South Tower's death roar and aimed her videocamera down at the street. People appeared, running fast to the right, followed by a dark cloud moving with the speed of a truck going about twenty to thirty miles per hour.
The cloud looked a lot like the spreading monstrosity in the Nissan TV ad. It no doubt overtook the running people seen by the woman through her camera lens. The cloud entered her apartment, punishing her curiosity. Blinded and choked, she ran upstairs inside the building to the top floor, where an old woman gave her temporary sanctuary in her apartment.
9/11 is now a car commercial. Patriot Day is four days away. Honor the fallen victims by buying things.
Vic Neptune
Friday, September 2, 2016
Old Gringo
Mexico City didn't welcome Donald Trump when he accepted President Nieto's invitation to meet. Trump's four percent popularity rating in Mexico added to Nieto's twenty-three percent makes twenty-seven percent, which, if doubled, tops Hillary Clinton's U.S. popularity rating. It is a time of polls and worthless leaders.
I can never forget the association of William S. Burroughs with Mexico City. In 1951 he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a small gathering, performing a "William Tell act" consisting of Burroughs aiming a gun he planned to sell. The would-be gun buyer was late, Burroughs was drunk, the sight on the gun's barrel was, according to Burroughs, misaligned, the bullet hit Joan's forehead instead of the shot glass on top of her head.
Burroughs' rationalization about the gun's "misaligned sight" wasn't his way of seeking expiation for doing something terrible and unforgivable. He just had a dry, factual way of regarding reality. The gun had a bad sight, he and his wife were both fucked up, both addicts. They lived as expatriates in a sprawling Latin American city that had the world's highest murder rate.
When Donald Trump speaks about Latinos it's usually in the way of a cannibal chef describing meat chunks in a stew. His contempt for "illegals" has only one plausible explanation: he's a racist. For an old American privileged white man to have racist attitudes shouldn't surprise anyone. His journey to Mexico two days ago, so offensive to residents of that country, was supposedly a preliminary step to get Mexican officialdom used to the idea of "paying for the wall," another way of saying, "You're gonna be my bitch, Bitch."
What nation would accept such subservience without protest, without revolt? Accepting, for argument's sake, that the wall gets built, do we also assume a subservient, humiliated Mexico doesn't have an army equipped with lots of explosives to crumble Trump's "beautiful" wall? It may as well be constructed of Graham crackers.
Chris Hayes on MSNBC asked a pertinent question to a Republican Texas congressman and Trump supporter: "Which side of the Rio Grande will the wall be on? Will Americans not have access to that river, which runs the length of the Mexican border with Texas? Will the wall be on the Mexican side? Will it be in the river?"
The congressman had no answer to that, citing his mental location out of the loop, but his overall demeanor seemed childlike when he tried to explain the world according to Trump.
Trump, standing at a podium near the Mexican president, looked like a grumpy old piece of shit trying to seem statesmanlike, listening to the translator as Nieto talked to a group of reporters. Trump, when he spoke, seemed "low energy" to me; quiet-voiced, reserved. Answering a reporter, he said the wall was discussed, but the payment issue "didn't come up." Later, Nieto tweeted that the first thing he said to Trump in their private meeting was, "Mexico will not pay for the wall."
In Phoenix that night, Trump addressed a rally of his supporters, all of whom expressed enthusiasm when their hero jokingly suggested "maybe we'll deport her [Hillary Clinton]]."
His tone sounded distinctly Brownshirt, circa 1932. Shouting most of the time, his voice sounded like all of civilization's best features collapsing. His vocal barrage, a relentless assault, amounted to a toughening of his anti-immigrant stance; his rejection of the American value of accepting outsiders into the fold, a value his own ancestors, and his wife, benefited from.
Trump insisted the wall would be built and paid for by Mexico, contradicting President Nieto. We're supposed to believe Trump when he said that payment for the wall didn't come up during their meeting. Having spent fourteen months spewing shit about this goddamn fantasy wall, riling up millions of his stupid supporters with wall rhetoric, he didn't talk about payment for the thing when he had the Mexican president in a chair in the same room with him? Believe that the subject of payment didn't come up, as Trump said, or that Nieto right away said his country won't pay for it. I believe Nieto, in spite of his twenty-three percent approval rating. At least that's nineteen percentage points higher than Trump's.
If William Burroughs knew the gun he wanted to sell had a misaligned sight, why didn't he adjust his aim accordingly? Not being a gun user, I don't know how difficult that is to do, but apparently it's not always easy to know what you're getting into when you chance the squeezing of a trigger. Trump's wall notion aims to get him elected president--it's the first thing he talked about when he announced his candidacy. The policy's (and calling the wall a "policy" is more a stretch than the wall's proposed length) misalignment, while it seeks to establish a firm, unmoving, "impenetrable" barrier, really just manages to insult and aggravate an entire people in multiple countries.
Trump, like the shot glass on top of Joan Vollmer's head, will survive intact, while the body bleeds. His rhetoric never hurts him--his ambitions maybe--but it does abuse Latinos.
Vic Neptune
Mexico City didn't welcome Donald Trump when he accepted President Nieto's invitation to meet. Trump's four percent popularity rating in Mexico added to Nieto's twenty-three percent makes twenty-seven percent, which, if doubled, tops Hillary Clinton's U.S. popularity rating. It is a time of polls and worthless leaders.
I can never forget the association of William S. Burroughs with Mexico City. In 1951 he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a small gathering, performing a "William Tell act" consisting of Burroughs aiming a gun he planned to sell. The would-be gun buyer was late, Burroughs was drunk, the sight on the gun's barrel was, according to Burroughs, misaligned, the bullet hit Joan's forehead instead of the shot glass on top of her head.
Burroughs' rationalization about the gun's "misaligned sight" wasn't his way of seeking expiation for doing something terrible and unforgivable. He just had a dry, factual way of regarding reality. The gun had a bad sight, he and his wife were both fucked up, both addicts. They lived as expatriates in a sprawling Latin American city that had the world's highest murder rate.
When Donald Trump speaks about Latinos it's usually in the way of a cannibal chef describing meat chunks in a stew. His contempt for "illegals" has only one plausible explanation: he's a racist. For an old American privileged white man to have racist attitudes shouldn't surprise anyone. His journey to Mexico two days ago, so offensive to residents of that country, was supposedly a preliminary step to get Mexican officialdom used to the idea of "paying for the wall," another way of saying, "You're gonna be my bitch, Bitch."
What nation would accept such subservience without protest, without revolt? Accepting, for argument's sake, that the wall gets built, do we also assume a subservient, humiliated Mexico doesn't have an army equipped with lots of explosives to crumble Trump's "beautiful" wall? It may as well be constructed of Graham crackers.
Chris Hayes on MSNBC asked a pertinent question to a Republican Texas congressman and Trump supporter: "Which side of the Rio Grande will the wall be on? Will Americans not have access to that river, which runs the length of the Mexican border with Texas? Will the wall be on the Mexican side? Will it be in the river?"
The congressman had no answer to that, citing his mental location out of the loop, but his overall demeanor seemed childlike when he tried to explain the world according to Trump.
Trump, standing at a podium near the Mexican president, looked like a grumpy old piece of shit trying to seem statesmanlike, listening to the translator as Nieto talked to a group of reporters. Trump, when he spoke, seemed "low energy" to me; quiet-voiced, reserved. Answering a reporter, he said the wall was discussed, but the payment issue "didn't come up." Later, Nieto tweeted that the first thing he said to Trump in their private meeting was, "Mexico will not pay for the wall."
In Phoenix that night, Trump addressed a rally of his supporters, all of whom expressed enthusiasm when their hero jokingly suggested "maybe we'll deport her [Hillary Clinton]]."
His tone sounded distinctly Brownshirt, circa 1932. Shouting most of the time, his voice sounded like all of civilization's best features collapsing. His vocal barrage, a relentless assault, amounted to a toughening of his anti-immigrant stance; his rejection of the American value of accepting outsiders into the fold, a value his own ancestors, and his wife, benefited from.
Trump insisted the wall would be built and paid for by Mexico, contradicting President Nieto. We're supposed to believe Trump when he said that payment for the wall didn't come up during their meeting. Having spent fourteen months spewing shit about this goddamn fantasy wall, riling up millions of his stupid supporters with wall rhetoric, he didn't talk about payment for the thing when he had the Mexican president in a chair in the same room with him? Believe that the subject of payment didn't come up, as Trump said, or that Nieto right away said his country won't pay for it. I believe Nieto, in spite of his twenty-three percent approval rating. At least that's nineteen percentage points higher than Trump's.
If William Burroughs knew the gun he wanted to sell had a misaligned sight, why didn't he adjust his aim accordingly? Not being a gun user, I don't know how difficult that is to do, but apparently it's not always easy to know what you're getting into when you chance the squeezing of a trigger. Trump's wall notion aims to get him elected president--it's the first thing he talked about when he announced his candidacy. The policy's (and calling the wall a "policy" is more a stretch than the wall's proposed length) misalignment, while it seeks to establish a firm, unmoving, "impenetrable" barrier, really just manages to insult and aggravate an entire people in multiple countries.
Trump, like the shot glass on top of Joan Vollmer's head, will survive intact, while the body bleeds. His rhetoric never hurts him--his ambitions maybe--but it does abuse Latinos.
Vic Neptune
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