Invasive Species
The grocery store boy bagging my purchases today griped to a friend standing nearby about the weather:
"A couple days ago it was in the sixties, now it's in the twenties and it snowed, too."
I stood waiting to pay, thinking, Climate change. I also thought that if I had interjected with that statement it would've seemed trite. One can have good intentions while making observations. One can also annoy with the obvious.
Someone I spoke with on the phone a few days ago scoffingly said the words, "Global warming," while referring to this year's unseasonably cold and snowy weather where he lives.
I remarked, "You have to take the whole planetary system into account."
The topic died there. It's a complex subject, but if one looks at "hottest year on record" charts one should notice that the hottest, worldwide, was 2016; the hottest before that, 2015. We're part of an upwards moving arc that, logically, will establish 2017 as the hottest year on record, with 2018 even hotter. On the warm day the young man at the grocery store was referring to, I did my errands with my car's windows down and sunroof retracted. The day's sunshiny February loveliness seemed like something out of late April for this part of the world, and, it still being winter, I was shivering in ten degrees Fahrenheit wind chill two days later.
Climate change deniers in power and big business (including President Trump) have a vested interest in being stupid about humanity's fate on a planet turning inexorably into an alien world. Their economic concerns override the needs of the majority, as has always been the case. Arctic ice melting will help the oil industry. Antarctica may someday become a heavily protected, and warm, luxury conglomeration of tax free mini-states with their own laws, allowing certain types of wealthy sadists to do anything they want to people kidnapped and brought there for their pleasure, a la Pasolini's film, Salò.
Resource wars over water, crops, still fertile territories, will become the norm, as has been recognized by Pentagon theorists, who are not climate change deniers.
The Arctic Rivieras, north and south, are coming. Most of us will be in the class of the drink servers and room service attendants, the eaten killed and served to those wealthy ones who want to try cannibalism. Yet, sometimes, as we should know from history, when backed against a wall, a people can make changes, usually through traumatizing and bloody resistance.
Another Spring, like the Arab one a few years ago, is upon us. People are networking and protesting, speaking out loudly against motherfuckers in power who need to maintain their favored status quo. They need it, for they are afraid of us. Because the motherfuckers in power want to keep their hold over us, they resist in the only way their brutal minds know--unleashing militarized cops, beefing up border patrols and militaries, increasing vile hate speech against resisters, and revving up their propaganda machines to near tachometer red.
A favorite propaganda tactic of theirs is to scare people into believing "they," the terrorists, or illegal immigrants, are out to get us or take our jobs, or spread disease and import illegal drugs. These same propagandists support a U.S. government that exports more weapons than any other nation. Keeping the world chaotic works on behalf of the motherfuckers in power. A common people of the United States, to use my own country as an example, fearful of terrorism is less likely to worry about important and far more impactful issues, like the income gap, health care, women's equality and rights in general, the rights of all who get regularly abused by the state and police, racism, corporate greed and the lack of punishment inflicted properly upon corporate criminals like the Wells Fargo Bank higher echelons who ripped off their customers in a deliberate scheme to rob them, ruining the savings of countless people.
That last example occurred during the Obama administration. I'm not suggesting he never spoke out against the Wells Fargo criminals, but I can't recall any strenuous objection on the former president's part. When it comes to white collar crime, Obama is contemptibly mild in demeanor. He did bail out Wall Street after all--there lie his priorities. He also made it impossible for any Bush administration members to be prosecuted for committing war crimes.
We must look forward, as American politicians like to say. Their forward, though, is not ours.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Monday, February 20, 2017
Committing the President
I don't watch the news like it's a program, an episodic narrative filling a time slot. I focus in on bits of it, watching a few minutes or less of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, news broadcasts on CBS, NBC, ABC. These sources provide glimpses into mentalities managing "the straight dope," or, in too many instances to count, of propaganda in line with the prevailing American narrative that we're number one, we can do no real lasting harm to other peoples of the world, and in any case, when we do something bad, it's "a mistake."
These days, but in fact for a long time, the slogan "America first!" dominates the attitudes of the political establishment and some of its left and right wing news media helpers. Talk of the Trump administration's sloppiness, its chaotic operations, the fact that his first national security adviser has already been fired and is under FBI investigation, doesn't focus on the endless war, but accepts it as a done deal that must continue because "bad guys" are out to get us, when actually the nation's defense and security priorities, as well as the incompetence and immorality of its leadership, cause a slow implosion, America retreating into its own asshole as it practices the idea of being dominant in an increasingly decentralizing world.
Trump, walking by himself in the dark, but lit up by newsmen's follow-the-leader lighting apparatuses, crossed the White House lawn a short while ago, having spent a "long weekend" in Florida at his palace and golf resort (as he does every weekend) and also talking his shit at a campaign rally. He resembled a Dickens character, and not one of the nice ones; slumped forward a bit, face sagged into his usual grump-look. This man, I thought, not for the first eerie time, is president of the United States. He got away with a con, and perhaps conned himself. Would he not rather be preparing a news network, along with Steve Bannon, a project Trump had been developing on the side in case he didn't beat Hillary Clinton? Does he want the headaches of a job a billion times more complex than anything he's ever done?
At the weekend rally (is this a campaign event for 2020?) he warned us about "what happened last night in Sweden." Referencing a Fox News story about Syrian refugees in Sweden, as he later clarified using his home masturbation machine--his Twitter account--he revealed to anyone who wants to think deductively about it that he relies on Fox News more than he does on Presidential Daily Briefings, i.e., morning intelligence summaries for the man running the country. Swedish officials found his statement baffling. Foreign governments and leaders are faced with a new phenomenon: an American president who's also a dumbass. George W. Bush, not all that smart either, at least followed protocols as best he could. He could fake being president most of the time whereas Trump, whose image is all important to him, tries to seem presidential but looks like the manager of an insurance office with a bad hairdo and ill-fitting clothes.
The Russian government, according to MSNBC, is compiling a dossier on Trump's psychological makeup. For a bunch of rubles I'd be willing to save them some trouble: Trump's father was distant towards him as the boy grew up. He had no decent fatherly role model (a condition he shares with Hitler, incidentally). Being unappreciated by his dad, Trump developed an emotional need to put his stamp on the world. His name adorning so many buildings and businesses resulted from this. He identifies mostly with himself, making him lacking in compassion, always thinking of his own greedy needs first. Over the years, developing into a wheeler dealer, he learned that convincing people to part with their money is easy, given the right hook. This con artist element to his character goes hand in hand with contempt for those conned, thus, his supporters are lowly pigs to him; senators, congressmen and -women who supported him or spoke against him during his presidential run, are to be humiliated for their lack of belief in him in the latter case, rewarded for loyalty in the former.
Trump loves gold furnishings, he has the wretched taste of an Arab sheikh who's never heard of French Impressionism. He claims he's far richer than he is; Forbes magazine estimates his hoard at around four billion dollars--Trump claims closer to ten. He may not even be a billionaire, one reason he's refused to release his taxes. This deals with his sense of status. Handing the presidency to such a status-monger was a fucking crazy thing for the electoral college to do.
He's insecure, obsessed with surfaces, he loves celebrity and Hollywood and the news media, in spite of his excoriations against these things. He himself is a celebrity, he's acted in films, he's a reality TV star. These experiences helped him hone his skills at playing a role. When he became vehement in 2011 about Obama's birth certificate, he wasn't speaking from conviction. He didn't believe, like his followers, that Obama was born anywhere outside Hawaii. He used this lie to stir up a growing base of racists and shallow thinkers who would help him in the 2016 presidential race.
If something or someone picks at him, he has to react. He never learned calmness, his personality is one of proneness to agitation. Vladimir Putin's easy-going and quiet dealings with Trump so far have worked for Putin, but if the Russian leader were to speak out against Trump, our new president might shit himself, a diarrhea of tweeting.
Trump is not the kind of person who realizes, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing." As president, he really doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, but all problems in his administration ("running like a fine-tuned machine," he said) are caused by others, i.e. the news media, "the enemy of the American people."
He is, in a way, right. This nation's news media do not focus much on real issues. Heard any stories about the Flint water crisis on CNN lately? Does MSNBC cover the North Dakota Standing Rock Reservation pipeline story, with protesters there enduring big government intrusions, police violence, and corporate greed? Trump, though, with his tie always hanging down over his cock like a codpiece, makes for a "good" and reliable daily series of stories, some of them, like the Sweden gaffe, providing hours of fun for corporate journalists who seem to have forgotten that the war on terror, fifteen years and going, is a fucking disease that's helping the human race die.
Vic Neptune
I don't watch the news like it's a program, an episodic narrative filling a time slot. I focus in on bits of it, watching a few minutes or less of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, news broadcasts on CBS, NBC, ABC. These sources provide glimpses into mentalities managing "the straight dope," or, in too many instances to count, of propaganda in line with the prevailing American narrative that we're number one, we can do no real lasting harm to other peoples of the world, and in any case, when we do something bad, it's "a mistake."
These days, but in fact for a long time, the slogan "America first!" dominates the attitudes of the political establishment and some of its left and right wing news media helpers. Talk of the Trump administration's sloppiness, its chaotic operations, the fact that his first national security adviser has already been fired and is under FBI investigation, doesn't focus on the endless war, but accepts it as a done deal that must continue because "bad guys" are out to get us, when actually the nation's defense and security priorities, as well as the incompetence and immorality of its leadership, cause a slow implosion, America retreating into its own asshole as it practices the idea of being dominant in an increasingly decentralizing world.
Trump, walking by himself in the dark, but lit up by newsmen's follow-the-leader lighting apparatuses, crossed the White House lawn a short while ago, having spent a "long weekend" in Florida at his palace and golf resort (as he does every weekend) and also talking his shit at a campaign rally. He resembled a Dickens character, and not one of the nice ones; slumped forward a bit, face sagged into his usual grump-look. This man, I thought, not for the first eerie time, is president of the United States. He got away with a con, and perhaps conned himself. Would he not rather be preparing a news network, along with Steve Bannon, a project Trump had been developing on the side in case he didn't beat Hillary Clinton? Does he want the headaches of a job a billion times more complex than anything he's ever done?
At the weekend rally (is this a campaign event for 2020?) he warned us about "what happened last night in Sweden." Referencing a Fox News story about Syrian refugees in Sweden, as he later clarified using his home masturbation machine--his Twitter account--he revealed to anyone who wants to think deductively about it that he relies on Fox News more than he does on Presidential Daily Briefings, i.e., morning intelligence summaries for the man running the country. Swedish officials found his statement baffling. Foreign governments and leaders are faced with a new phenomenon: an American president who's also a dumbass. George W. Bush, not all that smart either, at least followed protocols as best he could. He could fake being president most of the time whereas Trump, whose image is all important to him, tries to seem presidential but looks like the manager of an insurance office with a bad hairdo and ill-fitting clothes.
The Russian government, according to MSNBC, is compiling a dossier on Trump's psychological makeup. For a bunch of rubles I'd be willing to save them some trouble: Trump's father was distant towards him as the boy grew up. He had no decent fatherly role model (a condition he shares with Hitler, incidentally). Being unappreciated by his dad, Trump developed an emotional need to put his stamp on the world. His name adorning so many buildings and businesses resulted from this. He identifies mostly with himself, making him lacking in compassion, always thinking of his own greedy needs first. Over the years, developing into a wheeler dealer, he learned that convincing people to part with their money is easy, given the right hook. This con artist element to his character goes hand in hand with contempt for those conned, thus, his supporters are lowly pigs to him; senators, congressmen and -women who supported him or spoke against him during his presidential run, are to be humiliated for their lack of belief in him in the latter case, rewarded for loyalty in the former.
Trump loves gold furnishings, he has the wretched taste of an Arab sheikh who's never heard of French Impressionism. He claims he's far richer than he is; Forbes magazine estimates his hoard at around four billion dollars--Trump claims closer to ten. He may not even be a billionaire, one reason he's refused to release his taxes. This deals with his sense of status. Handing the presidency to such a status-monger was a fucking crazy thing for the electoral college to do.
He's insecure, obsessed with surfaces, he loves celebrity and Hollywood and the news media, in spite of his excoriations against these things. He himself is a celebrity, he's acted in films, he's a reality TV star. These experiences helped him hone his skills at playing a role. When he became vehement in 2011 about Obama's birth certificate, he wasn't speaking from conviction. He didn't believe, like his followers, that Obama was born anywhere outside Hawaii. He used this lie to stir up a growing base of racists and shallow thinkers who would help him in the 2016 presidential race.
If something or someone picks at him, he has to react. He never learned calmness, his personality is one of proneness to agitation. Vladimir Putin's easy-going and quiet dealings with Trump so far have worked for Putin, but if the Russian leader were to speak out against Trump, our new president might shit himself, a diarrhea of tweeting.
Trump is not the kind of person who realizes, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing." As president, he really doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, but all problems in his administration ("running like a fine-tuned machine," he said) are caused by others, i.e. the news media, "the enemy of the American people."
He is, in a way, right. This nation's news media do not focus much on real issues. Heard any stories about the Flint water crisis on CNN lately? Does MSNBC cover the North Dakota Standing Rock Reservation pipeline story, with protesters there enduring big government intrusions, police violence, and corporate greed? Trump, though, with his tie always hanging down over his cock like a codpiece, makes for a "good" and reliable daily series of stories, some of them, like the Sweden gaffe, providing hours of fun for corporate journalists who seem to have forgotten that the war on terror, fifteen years and going, is a fucking disease that's helping the human race die.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
Double Date
Donald Trump and his wife had dinner with Senator Marco Rubio and his wife. During last year's edifying (not) Republican presidential campaign seasons, a desperate Rubio, overshadowed in the news every day by Trump, resorted to weak insult comedy, making fun of the Republican frontrunner and eventual leader of what's for some reason called the free world.
Unable, due to his untreated mental illness, Trump reacted with ridicule towards his opponent, calling him "Little Marco," a mirror insult to Rubio's jibe about Trump's "small hands," as in, "You know what they say about men with small hands..."
What do they say, Senator Rubio? Did that topic come up at your dinner in the White House with the Trumps? Small hands, small penis, is that what you were getting at?
Trump has small hands in relation to the rest of his overweight out of shape seventy year old body. His son, Donald, Jr., has a small nose in relation to his face. His other adult son, Eric, is normally proportioned, and his daughters are shaped exactly like attractive women, blessed by the accident of genetic combinations that made them favor their mothers' sides of their respective families, rather than getting revolting characteristics from their ugly father. I only mockingly refer to someone as ugly if I hate that person's guts. Donald Trump is an ugly motherfucker, and his son, Donald, a more arrogant piece of shit I've rarely ever contemplated, has a tiny nose.
It's petty of me to focus on the dear leader's appearance now and then, but I'm not alone. Two days ago an old friend whom I hadn't seen since the presidential election brought up Trump's physical hideousness. I suspect that by the end of his presidency he'll be about as attractive as England's Henry the Eighth during that king's final years.
What did the Rubios and the Trumps talk about? Did it seem ironic to Rubio that he, who only two years ago thought he had a very good chance of winning the presidency, lost to a master of bad taste with no scruples about being a bully in a public, constantly watched arena? I suspect that Trump's sensitivity about his virility (all powerful men obsessed with image worry about this, something Putin and Trump share along with Henry the Eighth) gave him an inner push to conquer his opponents; "Little Marco" touched the one nerve Trump felt most threatened by: the reality of his probably normally sized seventy year old unimpressive penis hanging, almost unnoticeably, beneath a mass of presidential gut flesh.
Having the Rubios over for dinner is similar to what Trump did with Romney when the latter was being considered for leading the State Department. Trump shows like he cares, but really, it's a game of humiliation: "Look, Little Marco, this could have been yours, the big airplane, the house, the bunker underneath, the attention."
And really, these two former enemies of the campaign trail, still hating each other, got together with their wives in the White House because neither one of them has any moral integrity or personal standards.
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump and his wife had dinner with Senator Marco Rubio and his wife. During last year's edifying (not) Republican presidential campaign seasons, a desperate Rubio, overshadowed in the news every day by Trump, resorted to weak insult comedy, making fun of the Republican frontrunner and eventual leader of what's for some reason called the free world.
Unable, due to his untreated mental illness, Trump reacted with ridicule towards his opponent, calling him "Little Marco," a mirror insult to Rubio's jibe about Trump's "small hands," as in, "You know what they say about men with small hands..."
What do they say, Senator Rubio? Did that topic come up at your dinner in the White House with the Trumps? Small hands, small penis, is that what you were getting at?
Trump has small hands in relation to the rest of his overweight out of shape seventy year old body. His son, Donald, Jr., has a small nose in relation to his face. His other adult son, Eric, is normally proportioned, and his daughters are shaped exactly like attractive women, blessed by the accident of genetic combinations that made them favor their mothers' sides of their respective families, rather than getting revolting characteristics from their ugly father. I only mockingly refer to someone as ugly if I hate that person's guts. Donald Trump is an ugly motherfucker, and his son, Donald, a more arrogant piece of shit I've rarely ever contemplated, has a tiny nose.
It's petty of me to focus on the dear leader's appearance now and then, but I'm not alone. Two days ago an old friend whom I hadn't seen since the presidential election brought up Trump's physical hideousness. I suspect that by the end of his presidency he'll be about as attractive as England's Henry the Eighth during that king's final years.
What did the Rubios and the Trumps talk about? Did it seem ironic to Rubio that he, who only two years ago thought he had a very good chance of winning the presidency, lost to a master of bad taste with no scruples about being a bully in a public, constantly watched arena? I suspect that Trump's sensitivity about his virility (all powerful men obsessed with image worry about this, something Putin and Trump share along with Henry the Eighth) gave him an inner push to conquer his opponents; "Little Marco" touched the one nerve Trump felt most threatened by: the reality of his probably normally sized seventy year old unimpressive penis hanging, almost unnoticeably, beneath a mass of presidential gut flesh.
Having the Rubios over for dinner is similar to what Trump did with Romney when the latter was being considered for leading the State Department. Trump shows like he cares, but really, it's a game of humiliation: "Look, Little Marco, this could have been yours, the big airplane, the house, the bunker underneath, the attention."
And really, these two former enemies of the campaign trail, still hating each other, got together with their wives in the White House because neither one of them has any moral integrity or personal standards.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, February 9, 2017
The Liar
During the Super Bowl, Fox News aired Bill O'Reilly interviewing his friend, President Donald Trump. Trump, friends also with Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, probably pre-taped the interview so he could watch the Super Bowl. He was a co-founder of the short-lived 1980s pro football league, the USFL. I watched some of those games thirty years ago, they were entertaining. At that time I'd never heard of Donald Trump because I didn't live in New York. I didn't know about his penchant for elongated buildings or his use of ghost writers to put his messages across in books he emblazoned his name upon. I didn't know he had a Czech wife who later claimed in divorce court he raped her. I didn't know he would someday infect America with the impulsively projected thought patterns running through his self-obsessed psychotic mind.
O'Reilly and Trump had an exchange that created affronted comments from numerous pundits, politicians, and news anchors. O'Reilly, mentioning Vladimir Putin, called him "a killer." Trump said that we have our killers, too, adding that "we're not innocent."
Having ordered a raid on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula members in Yemen, the death of one Navy Seal focused on solely by politicians and news media here while the civilians killed, including women and children--Anwar al-Awlaki's eight year old daughter among them--got just the standard lack of compassion we must expect from corporate and state tools, President Trump, too, is "not innocent." By her own account, he raped his first wife after feeling rage over getting a bad haircut; now, he's culpable in the deaths of Yemeni women and children, just like Barack Obama, who made it into the news yesterday because he went wind-surfing, proving that getting away with mass murder and running a surveillance state can result in fun times in the sun.
Trump was talking about what happens under another sun when American foreign policy guides destinies of people in other countries minding their own business. Pundits, politicians, and news anchors condemned or shook their heads at Trump's supposedly shocking claim that U.S. leaders commit egregious acts. He mentioned as an example the Iraq War, an event most journalists will no longer accept as having been a good idea; yet, a president saying such a bad thing about America rubs even liberals the wrong way, partly because it's Trump saying it, and they hate him, but also because "we're not innocent" scrapes the hide of the wishful idea that this great country is just trying to do good at all times. It's not the country, as such, but the sons of bitches who've been running it long enough to create an institution not responsive to the needs of common citizenry. Hence, punishing American civilians with bomb attacks (Boston, for example) or gun massacres (Orlando nightclub) is as stupid, evil, and counter-productive as bombing without regard to civilian well-being in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yemenis have every right to wish for the criminal prosecution of Barack Obama, but targeting civilians in terror attacks is the same thing the U.S. "defense" establishment does to innocent people who live in lands that America tries to control.
I recall a passage in Carlos Fuentes's The Orange Tree, in which he questions the idea that Americans have of being innocent, newly sprung, a young and vibrant democracy with no hostile intent towards other nations. He asks if America was innocent in the Mexican American War, which expanded U.S. territory like a big snake swallowing a pig. In our time, I ask the journalists offended by Trump's statement if Reagan's use of the Contras to destabilize Nicaragua was the act of an innocent man, utilizing innocent "freedom fighters," as Reagan called them. Was it our innocence that contributed to Eisenhower and Kennedy wanting to unleash the CIA in Laos, a war lasting fourteen years, making Laos the most bombed country in history? Were Nixon and Kissinger innocent when they decided to bomb Cambodia? Is Dick Cheney an innocent man?
One of the tasks of psychoanalysts is to help patients discover the illusions they have about themselves, face them, and learn from them. Donald Trump, with his offending statement to Bill O'Reilly, said the first true thing he's said since Inauguration Day. Having ordered a mission that killed little children, he now knows what Barack Obama knows: long-distance murder is a serious thing, and easy, and he, Trump, gives as much of a shit about those Yemeni kids as does our wind-surfing ex-president. The way to get emotional distance from the first taste of committing mass murder is to do more mass murder. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, she would've had no problem slaughtering children. Her husband, after all, withheld medications from Iraqi children during the 1990s embargo, resulting in the deaths of about half a million of them. If your husband murdered half a million children, and you never tried to seek justice for those kids, even by just speaking out about it, what kind of person are you if you stay married to him? Monica Lewinsky's blowjobs got a sordid grand volume of attention even while Bill Clinton was killing Iraqi children, evidently with his wife's, and U.S., consent.
The photograph of the Clintons smiling broadly in the company of the newly married Melania and Donald Trump over a decade ago shows two First Ladys and two presidents. I don't have much of a problem with Melania. She's married to a wealthy and unwisely powerful piece of shit. In that photograph she stands with three contemptible people who have contributed vastly to world opinion against America, causing some to fight back, creating enough damage (9/11 the spark in this century) to aid American war profiteers in their endeavor to convince us we need them, thus, the security infrastructure and dedication to the law of the bomb and the gun.
The really bad shits of the world, here and elsewhere, are few in number. All the people who died in World War One, fighting for dying aristocracies and capitalistic democracies, had no chance, had they survived, of gaining much benefit from the spoils reaped by the motherfuckers who made that war a prolific goldmine. This pattern, constantly repeated and carried out by Woodrow Wilson in World War One, to people like Dick Cheney in the present day, uses the idea of slogans like "Protect Our Freedoms," and "If You See Something, Say Something." We're being protected, supposedly, by these greedy disgusting wealthy things while they profit from conflicts they create. America will only change away from this habit when leaders are elected who want to help, rather than manipulate. For me, one of Obama's most offensive characteristics is his contribution to an Orwellian way of running the country. Pol Pot went to the Sorbonne. Intellectuals sometimes are horrible leaders. What made Obama think it was ever a good idea to go along with the trend in post-9/11 security psychosis, especially after coming across, when just a Senator, as a potential leader not interested in perpetuating war or making his country a surveillance state?
Obama spoke beautifully in his speeches, his personal talk in interviews was measured and intelligent, he didn't act like a Trump. In his mind, though, something caved in to the idea of assassinating people, of using remote control warfare, not occupying countries, although he sent troops back to Iraq, bombed seven majority Muslim countries, didn't end the war in Afghanistan.
To use news media terms regarding Trump's honest response to Bill O'Reilly, Barack Obama is "innocent."
Vic Neptune
During the Super Bowl, Fox News aired Bill O'Reilly interviewing his friend, President Donald Trump. Trump, friends also with Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, probably pre-taped the interview so he could watch the Super Bowl. He was a co-founder of the short-lived 1980s pro football league, the USFL. I watched some of those games thirty years ago, they were entertaining. At that time I'd never heard of Donald Trump because I didn't live in New York. I didn't know about his penchant for elongated buildings or his use of ghost writers to put his messages across in books he emblazoned his name upon. I didn't know he had a Czech wife who later claimed in divorce court he raped her. I didn't know he would someday infect America with the impulsively projected thought patterns running through his self-obsessed psychotic mind.
O'Reilly and Trump had an exchange that created affronted comments from numerous pundits, politicians, and news anchors. O'Reilly, mentioning Vladimir Putin, called him "a killer." Trump said that we have our killers, too, adding that "we're not innocent."
Having ordered a raid on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula members in Yemen, the death of one Navy Seal focused on solely by politicians and news media here while the civilians killed, including women and children--Anwar al-Awlaki's eight year old daughter among them--got just the standard lack of compassion we must expect from corporate and state tools, President Trump, too, is "not innocent." By her own account, he raped his first wife after feeling rage over getting a bad haircut; now, he's culpable in the deaths of Yemeni women and children, just like Barack Obama, who made it into the news yesterday because he went wind-surfing, proving that getting away with mass murder and running a surveillance state can result in fun times in the sun.
Trump was talking about what happens under another sun when American foreign policy guides destinies of people in other countries minding their own business. Pundits, politicians, and news anchors condemned or shook their heads at Trump's supposedly shocking claim that U.S. leaders commit egregious acts. He mentioned as an example the Iraq War, an event most journalists will no longer accept as having been a good idea; yet, a president saying such a bad thing about America rubs even liberals the wrong way, partly because it's Trump saying it, and they hate him, but also because "we're not innocent" scrapes the hide of the wishful idea that this great country is just trying to do good at all times. It's not the country, as such, but the sons of bitches who've been running it long enough to create an institution not responsive to the needs of common citizenry. Hence, punishing American civilians with bomb attacks (Boston, for example) or gun massacres (Orlando nightclub) is as stupid, evil, and counter-productive as bombing without regard to civilian well-being in the Middle East and elsewhere. Yemenis have every right to wish for the criminal prosecution of Barack Obama, but targeting civilians in terror attacks is the same thing the U.S. "defense" establishment does to innocent people who live in lands that America tries to control.
I recall a passage in Carlos Fuentes's The Orange Tree, in which he questions the idea that Americans have of being innocent, newly sprung, a young and vibrant democracy with no hostile intent towards other nations. He asks if America was innocent in the Mexican American War, which expanded U.S. territory like a big snake swallowing a pig. In our time, I ask the journalists offended by Trump's statement if Reagan's use of the Contras to destabilize Nicaragua was the act of an innocent man, utilizing innocent "freedom fighters," as Reagan called them. Was it our innocence that contributed to Eisenhower and Kennedy wanting to unleash the CIA in Laos, a war lasting fourteen years, making Laos the most bombed country in history? Were Nixon and Kissinger innocent when they decided to bomb Cambodia? Is Dick Cheney an innocent man?
One of the tasks of psychoanalysts is to help patients discover the illusions they have about themselves, face them, and learn from them. Donald Trump, with his offending statement to Bill O'Reilly, said the first true thing he's said since Inauguration Day. Having ordered a mission that killed little children, he now knows what Barack Obama knows: long-distance murder is a serious thing, and easy, and he, Trump, gives as much of a shit about those Yemeni kids as does our wind-surfing ex-president. The way to get emotional distance from the first taste of committing mass murder is to do more mass murder. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, she would've had no problem slaughtering children. Her husband, after all, withheld medications from Iraqi children during the 1990s embargo, resulting in the deaths of about half a million of them. If your husband murdered half a million children, and you never tried to seek justice for those kids, even by just speaking out about it, what kind of person are you if you stay married to him? Monica Lewinsky's blowjobs got a sordid grand volume of attention even while Bill Clinton was killing Iraqi children, evidently with his wife's, and U.S., consent.
The photograph of the Clintons smiling broadly in the company of the newly married Melania and Donald Trump over a decade ago shows two First Ladys and two presidents. I don't have much of a problem with Melania. She's married to a wealthy and unwisely powerful piece of shit. In that photograph she stands with three contemptible people who have contributed vastly to world opinion against America, causing some to fight back, creating enough damage (9/11 the spark in this century) to aid American war profiteers in their endeavor to convince us we need them, thus, the security infrastructure and dedication to the law of the bomb and the gun.
The really bad shits of the world, here and elsewhere, are few in number. All the people who died in World War One, fighting for dying aristocracies and capitalistic democracies, had no chance, had they survived, of gaining much benefit from the spoils reaped by the motherfuckers who made that war a prolific goldmine. This pattern, constantly repeated and carried out by Woodrow Wilson in World War One, to people like Dick Cheney in the present day, uses the idea of slogans like "Protect Our Freedoms," and "If You See Something, Say Something." We're being protected, supposedly, by these greedy disgusting wealthy things while they profit from conflicts they create. America will only change away from this habit when leaders are elected who want to help, rather than manipulate. For me, one of Obama's most offensive characteristics is his contribution to an Orwellian way of running the country. Pol Pot went to the Sorbonne. Intellectuals sometimes are horrible leaders. What made Obama think it was ever a good idea to go along with the trend in post-9/11 security psychosis, especially after coming across, when just a Senator, as a potential leader not interested in perpetuating war or making his country a surveillance state?
Obama spoke beautifully in his speeches, his personal talk in interviews was measured and intelligent, he didn't act like a Trump. In his mind, though, something caved in to the idea of assassinating people, of using remote control warfare, not occupying countries, although he sent troops back to Iraq, bombed seven majority Muslim countries, didn't end the war in Afghanistan.
To use news media terms regarding Trump's honest response to Bill O'Reilly, Barack Obama is "innocent."
Vic Neptune
Monday, February 6, 2017
Play It Where It Lands
Here's a movie premise:
Obamaland. The former president works on his golf swing. Desert air, palm trees, intense blue sky. Wife phones Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, has her toenails done. Their rich life is unaffected by the new administration. A test flight of an exotic futuristic aircraft at Nevada's Area 51 tears a rent in the spacetime continuum. Obama's golfball disappears in midair, becomes a mini-moon orbiting a gas giant in another star system thirty-five light years away. A research team of aliens resembling land squid with legs and arms note the sudden appearance of the pocked spheroid with this written on it:
Titleist
1
They retrieve it, study it, speculate that it may be a space vessel containing tiny entities. Many mysterious objects appear in their star system. The golfball gets stored in a bin in a research laboratory. Obama, unable to locate his ball, persuades the NSA, using his dry, meandering voice, to use one of its satellites to find the lost ball. Thirteen strays are located on the golf course, but none of them lie in the vicinity where the former president's ball might plausibly have landed.
Puzzled, Obama spends six hours using his naked eyes searching for the ball. This involves more walking and standing than he's done in nearly a decade. Pooped and overheated, he returns to the presidential suite and stares at a coffee table, filling a comfortable pastel pink armchair for two hours while his wife talks on the phone about Mr. and Mrs. Trump with Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga.
Hearing his wife talk to Lady Gaga, Obama perks up. He likes the singer's tune, "Poker Face," since it reminds him of his own face; how he could, as president, praise a champion NBA team and also talk about torture while using the same blank facial expression. He wonders if a jaunt to Las Vegas, a mere 200 miles or so from Palm Springs, might yield reward at a high stakes poker tournament. It would be something to do. Right before handing the country over to Trump, he told some journalist that he wanted to spend time "being quiet." Doing nothing in a luxury resort has begun to irritate him. When idle, his mind tends to wander to picturing civilians' ruined bodies after drone strikes. It occurs to him, too, that Winston Smith is actually the sympathetic character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, not the villain.
The missing golfball, nestled within a foam-padded metal box in a laboratory's supply room at a research station on an airless moon of a gas giant orbiting Zeta Herculis B, will vex Obama for the rest of his life. Every golf game will become an obsession to keep meticulous track of not only his ball, but everyone else's on the course.
Vic Neptune
Here's a movie premise:
Obamaland. The former president works on his golf swing. Desert air, palm trees, intense blue sky. Wife phones Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, has her toenails done. Their rich life is unaffected by the new administration. A test flight of an exotic futuristic aircraft at Nevada's Area 51 tears a rent in the spacetime continuum. Obama's golfball disappears in midair, becomes a mini-moon orbiting a gas giant in another star system thirty-five light years away. A research team of aliens resembling land squid with legs and arms note the sudden appearance of the pocked spheroid with this written on it:
Titleist
1
They retrieve it, study it, speculate that it may be a space vessel containing tiny entities. Many mysterious objects appear in their star system. The golfball gets stored in a bin in a research laboratory. Obama, unable to locate his ball, persuades the NSA, using his dry, meandering voice, to use one of its satellites to find the lost ball. Thirteen strays are located on the golf course, but none of them lie in the vicinity where the former president's ball might plausibly have landed.
Puzzled, Obama spends six hours using his naked eyes searching for the ball. This involves more walking and standing than he's done in nearly a decade. Pooped and overheated, he returns to the presidential suite and stares at a coffee table, filling a comfortable pastel pink armchair for two hours while his wife talks on the phone about Mr. and Mrs. Trump with Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga.
Hearing his wife talk to Lady Gaga, Obama perks up. He likes the singer's tune, "Poker Face," since it reminds him of his own face; how he could, as president, praise a champion NBA team and also talk about torture while using the same blank facial expression. He wonders if a jaunt to Las Vegas, a mere 200 miles or so from Palm Springs, might yield reward at a high stakes poker tournament. It would be something to do. Right before handing the country over to Trump, he told some journalist that he wanted to spend time "being quiet." Doing nothing in a luxury resort has begun to irritate him. When idle, his mind tends to wander to picturing civilians' ruined bodies after drone strikes. It occurs to him, too, that Winston Smith is actually the sympathetic character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, not the villain.
The missing golfball, nestled within a foam-padded metal box in a laboratory's supply room at a research station on an airless moon of a gas giant orbiting Zeta Herculis B, will vex Obama for the rest of his life. Every golf game will become an obsession to keep meticulous track of not only his ball, but everyone else's on the course.
Vic Neptune
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