Turkey Trot

     I missed Trump's swearing-in, his speech.  As far as I know, he didn't promise he wouldn't grab women's pussies while president.  General Mad Dog Mattis got sworn in as Secretary of Defense.  An old player in the military/industrial establishment, he'll ensure smooth flow of contracts and continuing violence.  Melania Trump wore a conservative up to the neck powder blue dress at the inauguration.  My mother said she looked "gorgeous," as I'm sure many mothers in America did.  For at least a day, even anti-Trump women can take a moment to admire the new First Lady, an immigrant from Slovenia, herself, according to investigative journalists last year, working illegally in the U.S. in the mid-1990s.  Melania Knauss's past illegal status by itself, if true, doesn't bother me.  Salma Hayek, the "gorgeous," although I mean really gorgeous Mexican actress was for a time an illegal alien.  Melania's husband Donald added ironic spice to the matter of his third wife's past, however, by commencing his presidential campaign in June 2015 by bringing up illegal immigration, promising to build a wall that "Mexico will pay for" along America's southern border.
     When Trump brought this up publicly, did Melania feel a twinge of unease, remembering her own time two decades ago as a young woman modeling in the U.S. without proper credentials?  She didn't know Trump then, but now her husband acts as a cover for anything that might now look bad.  Trump covers his entire family, his elder two sons now in charge of his business, supposedly disconnected from ever communicating about said business while their father runs the free world.  The Trump effect is one of a rich, charismatic man with no morals bulling his way through all proprieties, making into his servants a fourth estate that's lapsed totally in its obligation to the people to be objective and report on what's really going on.
     Last night, "liberal" Rachel Maddow on supposedly left-wing MSNBC, pointed out during a one minute long piece between ads the split screen her director had playing.  The left side showed a large room with a mass of people at the bottom of the screen: the "Liberty Ball," the first of two balls to be attended by Mr. and Mrs. Trump.  (The second was called the "Freedom Ball.")  After remarking that those two names could be used this Thanksgiving as names to call the turkeys traditionally "pardoned" by the president, an inane personal observation of her own, Maddow said that the upcoming celebration for the new president was sharply contrasted by protests across the nation.  The right-hand side of the screen showed police clashes with protestors in Portland, Oregon, one of many cities seething with anti-Trump discontent.  Today, Days of Trump +1, massive gatherings of women in numerous countries have come together to protest the elevation of a misogynistic pig dedicated to reversing women's rights, human rights, environmental protections, and boosting the worst habits of capitalism, himself a partaker in big money concerns.
     Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump will advance their father's business, won't they?  Will do so in compliance with what they know their father wants to accomplish.  They've had strategy sessions about this, have they not?  Are we supposed to believe that President Trump won't be far richer when he's done holding office than he was yesterday?  What was the true purpose of Taiwan's president's phone call to President-elect Trump, anyway?
     Rachel Maddow and her director showed the contrast of a celebration for a new president with citizens on the streets making noise about their discontent with the new order of things.  Maddow had nothing to say about the two images, other than her suggestion for naming the turkeys.  Shitty journalism is a disservice to the people and a boon to tyranny.
     What else happened?  Two days ago, the day before Obama moved on to his vacation in Palm Springs, California, he bombed Libya.  I'm glad the war with Libya got wrapped up in a period of weeks, like he promised it would a few years back.  Obama, like other recent presidents, revisits crime scenes.  Trump has inherited the war with ISIS, a renewed U.S. troop presence in Iraq, conflicts with Yemen and Somalia, an alliance with a loathsome Saudi Arabian government destroying the people of Yemen, the Syrian disaster, and the continuous-since-9/11 war in Afghanistan.  I'm likely leaving some violent engagements out, maybe because my mind is so overburdened with thinking about the horrible actions of men and women who plan things on this planet, that I can't think about all of it in the space of one essay.
     I saw a curious meme last night.  A picture of Osama bin Laden with the caption, "Osama bin Laden, Jenga World Champion 2001."
     In Jenga, a tower is built with wooden blocks.  Players take turns removing blocks and replacing them on the topmost level.  The winner is the player who successfully removes and replaces a block last before the tower falls.  If Osama bin Laden is "Jenga World Champion 2001," he removed blocks from the World Trade Center Tower(s), but he didn't collapse it.  The conspiracy theory about the Towers collapsing from already in-place charges, blown by official government orders, comes into focus in the sly meme.  I don't claim to adhere to the conspiracy theory about the destruction of the Towers, I just point out that whoever came up with the bin Laden Jenga world champion idea is pretty clever.
     One thing I will say, though, is that the U.S. government, in its record of making official statements about controversial events, often lies.  The Pearl Harbor attack, for instance, has been shown, convincingly by a sober historian, John Toland in his book Infamy, to have been allowed to happen by the Roosevelt administration for the purpose of pushing the U.S. into the war.  In October Surprise by Barbara Honegger, we learned that the Reagan campaign tampered with the 1980 election by negotiating with the Ayatollah Khomeini to delay the release of the fifty-two American hostages held for over a year by that point--the bane of Jimmy Carter's presidency.  Reagan and his people wanted to prevent an "October surprise," wherein Carter might pull off a rescue or diplomatic coup, securing the hostages' release.  The hostages were released at exactly the moment Reagan took the oath of office.  This theory was attacked for many years, but the term, "October surprise," entered the lexicon of every newsman and -woman in the U.S. whenever they talk about something coming along to upset a candidate's momentum.  The term was even used to describe Trump's bragging about his pussy-grabbing habits, the tape on which he said this released in October 2016.
     The John and Robert Kennedy assassinations, like the Martin Luther King assassination, are riddled with flaws in the official theories.  Not even many members of King's own family believe the official story that white man James Earl Ray shot the civil rights leader.  Members of the King family attended Ray's funeral, believing that an innocent man was being laid to rest.
     The rationale for the Iraq War (Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction) turned out to be hokum.  Not even a dumbass like Hillary Clinton believes in it anymore.  President Woodrow Wilson in his 1916 re-election campaign promised that the U.S. wouldn't get into the big war in Europe.  He lied.  By April 1917, the country was committed, and after the war, Wilson admitted that the endeavor's purpose on the American front was to make money.  I guess you have to lie when the truth is that disgusting.
     If 9/11 had "inside job" characteristics, or if bin Laden hit the jenga tower but he didn't knock it down, lies would naturally follow, so the official version (which is bad enough, considering that the 9/11 Commission laid out a scenario amounting to a sequence of cascading incompetence and blindness by people failing to act on reports of bizarre information, like men who wanted to learn how to fly a jetliner but didn't want to know how to land it) amounts to a series of "facts" that must be looked at with skepticism at best.
     I don't know what happened, but I do know that a 1998 document for a think tank called The Project for the New American Century speculated that "nothing short of a major event, like Pearl Harbor, will get the U.S. on track to taking its place as the coming century's most significant power," or so I paraphrase.  Paul Wolfowitz, deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush, was a member of the Project, along with a bunch of warmongering fucks who've never been shot at or bombed.  The mention of Pearl Harbor, given the evidence of Roosevelt's foreknowledge, is particularly apt, if Wolfowitz and crew were thinking along the lines of a future attack allowed to happen.  Considering U.S. intelligence and its intimacy with such entities as al-Qaeda (dating to the Soviet-Afghan War), it doesn't boggle my mind too much to consider the possibility that bin Laden was working, at least for a time, for the United States.  Today, U.S. forces attack terror groups of all kinds, ignoring some for a while, concentrating on others intensely, and then moving on, using shifting alliances in a big strategy that probably is comparable to a corpse sewn together from many different bodies in a horror film.
     In effect, whatever you hear on mainstream American news, it's likely you're probably being fucked with at least a good portion of the time.
     Yeah, it's really a good idea that a guy named Mad Dog is going to head the Defense Department, the biggest arms dealer in the world.  You want a gun, you go to Mad Dog.  Mad Dog reports to the Businessman, the blonde guy with orange skin married to the Slovenian, they live in a big white house and they keep a tower on the side.  People believe in the Businessman.  He's going to solve our problems.  He's going to give us a bigger military, one the size of Ares' cock.  He's his own Minister of Propaganda--the news networks report all the crap that shits from his mind.  They're in thrall to the Businessman.  He's high ratings, he's rising stocks, he's the sparkly candle on America's cake.  He loves guns.  Everybody should have a gun.  They should make little guns for babies.  We live in a dark but hopeful time.  Only the Businessman can save us.  He's got plans.  Nobody can look at his taxes.  He's got too much to hide.  He has awkward connections to some shady motherfuckers in other countries.  He's very sensitive about his smaller than average hands.  He assures us he has a big penis.  A seventy year old man with a big virile penis, imagine that.  He lies all the time.  He lies so much that every once in a while a truth pops out.  He accused the former president of being from another country, he did that a lot, and he built up a base of racist support that way, pretty fucking clever.  He proposed the pie in the sky idea of building a 1,900 mile long wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and making Mexico pay for it.  The audacity!  He proposed one crazy shit idea after another, never got into details, and everything he said got reported on by the sensation-hungry news media.  He's ratings, he's rising stocks.  Curiously, in a country obsessed with appearance, no one in the mainstream news media talks about how ugly and un-photogenic he is.  Even Eisenhower was better looking.  You'd think that the shallowness of this country's standards when it comes to judging people in the limelight would hurt the Businessman, but no, even though he's on tape discussing his pussy-grabbing technique, no female journalist bothers to tear him up for saying that.  The Businessman dances with the Slovenian at the Liberty Ball, cops with armored codpieces stare fearfully at citizens who expect their sophisticated nation to not surrender so easily to the worship of power and money.
     Jenga.

                                                                              Vic Neptune