Murderers
One can write a novel set during a famous historical period, like the Great Depression or the French Revolution, have well-known people of those times as characters. Franklin Roosevelt or Maximilien Robespierre would make good characters; Adolf Hitler, too, and J. Edgar Hoover, Marie Antoinette and Georges Danton. I've seen films featuring all of these as characters. It's tempting to think of history as the story of great and wealthy people. By "great" I don't mean "good." Great, among other definitions, means "above the average." People who "make their marks on history" are standouts. Pens, bottles of ink, typewriters, cameras, microphones, served as media to immortalize Robespierre and Roosevelt, yet millions of no longer known historical players have been forgotten because history doesn't examine the lives of ordinary people unless they impact "the great."
We know a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald because he was accused, without being tried in a court of law, of assassinating President John Kennedy. Had he not become mixed up in that mess, it's likely Oswald would've remained unknown. A popular postmodern American novelist, Don DeLillo, wrote a good novel about Oswald called Libra. DeLillo took on as subject matter a controversial American, offered his own take--admittedly a difficult task getting into the mind and life of Oswald, a man regarded in so many different ways by so many different theorists, official and otherwise. Many people have opinions about Oswald; the assassination and its investigations created a jumble of possibilities, leaving behind a broken trail of evidence making it impossible to find out the truth. That's a practice of the CIA and other intelligence agencies worldwide: disseminate disinformation, "muddy the waters." (Note that the government's official 9/11 theory is not airtight and suggests plausible alternatives).
I do not accuse the CIA of killing Kennedy, but I do accuse that agency in 1963 of behaving exactly like itself: of creating discord, screwing with governments, planning and carrying out coups, participating in covert activities here and abroad.
Dan Rather, then of CBS News, once asked, in a televised interview, former CIA Director Richard Helms if the agency was in any way involved in the Kennedy assassination. Helms, of course, said "No."
As far as the dumb minds in the CBS building were concerned, Helms's answer put the question to rest. Still, even and especially today, former CIA officials and operatives are regularly asked for their viewpoints on MSNBC, the alleged liberal cable news network. If not the CIA, former Bush administration officials are frequent guests, their Bush/Cheney era views normalized. David Frum, a speechwriter for Bush who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" to group together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--three countries not linked together--appears often on Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC show. Frum, a Republican, finds Donald Trump unsatisfactory, a position shared by MSNBC's new pundit, George Will, and by Fox News pundit, Charles Krauthammer. Neoconservative and warmonger Bill Kristol also doesn't like Trump. This makes them seem like the kinds of men a regular old Democrat could have a conversation with, joke around about the nutty piece of shit who runs the Oval Office.
Anti-Trump views, like those of Conservative Hugh Hewitt, will get you a show on MSNBC, even if you also believe Planned Parenthood should be defunded and millions of women and girls should be left without health care options. It seems to be more important to Phil Griffin, who runs MSNBC, to bash Trump and spend inordinate amounts of airtime on the current president's apparent buddy-buddy relationship with Russia, wasting wind on discussions about Trump's weird personality, than on focusing on issues of actual concern to most Americans, like health care.
The Republican machine continues to relentlessly attempt to repeal Obamacare, offering no sensible and humane replacement. Each bill they try to pass represents the depth of their evil, for they are willing and eager to deprive millions of people of health insurance. Trump, too, wants this. Supposedly, the American people want it, in spite of polls revealing that only about twelve percent actually want millions of people to be fucked over and condemned by their own government.
Senator John McCain, who ran for president unsuccessfully in 2008, has brain cancer. Nevertheless, he got up from his recovery bed (after a risky surgery) to fly to Washington where he cast his vote in favor of depriving 22 million people of health insurance. Entering the Senate chamber, every politician applauded him. His "courage" was remarked upon, made into a "story" on the news. Barack Obama praised the Senator in a tweet. Obama didn't comment on McCain favoring the deprivation of health insurance for millions of Americans.
The bill didn't pass, and neither did the one following it. They've had seven years to figure out how to get rid of Obamacare, to come up with a plan that would succeed it, and they can't do it, so far. It reflects badly on Trump, who criticized McCain, though not by name, for joining with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (both of them Republicans who might actually be worth a damn) in a "No" vote on last night's Obamacare killing bill. McCain may have voted in the negative this time because the weakened thing didn't have a chance to pass, earning it the silly nickname, "Skinny Repeal."
The anxiety caused by these motherfuckers trying to destroy health care, doing only that instead of the many other things they should be trying to do, like fixing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, withdrawing from Afghanistan, has kept me awake for sure. Millions of others, whose health and monetary concerns are being irritated by this loathsome crew of degenerate politicians, are the people of history not mentioned by name and eventually forgotten. It could be that the majority of people mentioned in history books were horrible, at least some of the time.
McCain's appearance in Washington to vote after brain surgery wasn't courageous. Applauding him wasn't, either. Newspeople who celebrate McCain (they are the majority) may in the end, in history, get their man regarded as a hero, overlooking his viciousness. Yet, his "greatness" is the same as that of Bill and Hillary Clinton, of Obama, of Bush and Cheney and other bloodletters of history, while the people they make bleed have no names.
Vic Neptune
Friday, July 28, 2017
Thursday, July 20, 2017
Out of Bounds
O. J. Simpson, NFL first round draft pick in 1969, Buffalo Bills running back--one season in San Francisco--and star of fourteen theatrically released films, has been entertaining us for about fifty years. His clumsy cop role, Nordberg in the three Naked Gun movies, brought mirth to this writer. When I saw them, I didn't know yet about Simpson's most famous role to come: accused ex-wife-murderer. 1995's "trial of the century," a televised hit, lasted eight months, resulting in Simpson's acquittal.
To this day, I don't know the truth of the matter. The assailant, Simpson or someone else, knifed Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman to death. Simpson explained the scar on his finger as the result of hearing about her death. He said he was holding a glass with a beverage. The news of his ex-wife's murder upset him so much, he claimed, that he squeezed the glass, shattering it. I've long regarded this story as made up, simply because it's so Hollywood, something out of a movie. That being his (possibly fanciful) explanation for the finger cut, I believe the small wound was caused by the circumstances of a different situation: Simpson engaging in a fight (involving a sharp knife) with Ron Goldman, a healthy young man defending his friend Nicole.
Still, that finger cut story of Simpson's nagging at me is just a deduction based on a belief, not evidence. There are other elements of concern regarding Simpson's possible guilt, such as Nicole's call four days before her murder to a shelter for women suffering domestic abuse. From evidence not admitted in court, Nicole told the shelter worker that O.J. Simpson was "stalking her."
These tidbits don't point to guilt, but for me, information that sticks out in an odd way, like the CIA initially claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't interrogated by them when he returned to the United States after defecting to the Soviet Union (an incredible claim later proved false), makes me wonder sometimes about official versions of the truth. Today, news of Simpson's parole board granting him a release from prison in October (he's served nine years for participating in an armed robbery), occupied many hours of cable news screen time. Gray-haired, seventy years old, he plans to live with his eldest daughter in Florida for a while. Pundits, including Alan Dershowitz, one of his lawyers in 1995, advise Simpson through the distance of television that he should "just vanish. Don't call attention to yourself. Live an anonymous life."
Impractical advice for a man who will require a great deal of money, since he owes approximately fifty-two million dollars in damages, determined in the civil suit brought by the Brown and Goldman families. What's anonymous O.J. supposed to do? Get a normal job? A cook? A cab driver? A tour guide? Dershowitz suggested that he not do any interviews. Is it likely Simpson will not have a sit down with a prominent TV newsperson this fall after he's released from prison? He'll need money. Even without the millions he owes to the Brown and Goldman families, Simpson will need money to return to at least a small level of comfort; to have his own house, to play golf, to hobnob, to return to some degree of prominence, which was granted to him by the news media today by covering his parole hearing in full, something not done for Charles Manson, whose hearings have been periodic for decades, a colorful lunatic who qualifies as a truly remarkable killer.
Simpson, however, is a star: as an NFL running back, a movie and TV actor, as someone the rich and famous (like Donald Trump) enjoyed partying with, as an accused murderer acquitted by a system that let him off partly because he was rich. After 1995, he played golf, continued exhibiting the arrogance and cockiness of a man who at least knows he made it through an excruciatingly difficult legal process. In the twenty-first century, Simpson became more desperate for recognition, producing a book, a "hypothetical confession," called If I Did It. Here was Simpson saying, "I didn't kill her and her friend, but had I done so, this is how I would've done it." The bizarre book was published but the profits went to the Brown and Goldman families.
In 2008, in Las Vegas, Simpson and a friend participated in a pathetic attempt to "recover" Simpson-based sports memorabilia from a dealer in that trade. Simpson's friend brought a gun, a detail that added years to O.J.'s prison sentence. Again, we saw Simpson, but this time in the sartorial garb of a prisoner, facing a judge and getting the hard law thrown his way in a much less complicated case than the 1994 murders. Simpson went to prison while George W. Bush was president and he'll get out during the Trump era. What Trump thinks about his former friend getting out is anyone's guess. The president probably appreciates anyone who can occupy a news cycle, blanking out, at least for a few hours, the relentlessly bad stream of news about a world leader who wanted, in 2008, before Simpson got arrested, to put O.J. in Celebrity Apprentice, bragging to radio host Howard Stern that such a move would make huge ratings.
Simpson attended Trump's wedding to Marla Maples in December 1993. Five months later, he either cut his ex-wife's throat, or he didn't. Simpson by the time of the wedding had already hit his wife, domestic abuse charges filed against him in 1989. Today I saw a photo of Trump at his wedding, O.J. Simpson next to him, the current president holding his twelve year old daughter Ivanka closely before him by the arms. By then, according to Trump's first wife Ivana in her divorce deposition, he had beaten and raped her after receiving a bad haircut, a claim she later, not under oath, retracted. In domestic abuse cases, I believe the women almost always aren't making up their stories. The photo at Trump's second wedding shows two men, both wife abusers, both bullshitters, both rich, in positions of dominance over less fortunate others and also over justice itself.
Today, some Republican senators, who all, servile-fashion, supported Trump in 2016, speak of their doubts about a president who doesn't seem to understand how justice in this country works. Trump has spoken against Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal from the Russia investigation, bitching about Sessions not bringing up the recusal issue when Trump first considered him for the job. Whatever the reason for Sessions' not mentioning his closeness to the Russia boondoggle, he was right in recusing himself--a punch in the jaw to Trump's concept of loyalty, an emotional response suited to a dictator.
The photo of Trump and Simpson simply shows men who walk all over people and think nothing of it. That decent human beings have problems with such behavior is merely an annoyance to them, something to find contemptible, to be ridiculed.
If Simpson did kill two people in 1994, Trump has already killed thousands with bombs and missiles. Their court of justice may not come until some afterlife arena of judgment, a place only makers of fiction can imagine. Simpson, too, strikes me as a fiction-maker. That story about breaking the glass and suffering the mysterious cut on the finger attached to the hand that gripped the football when he ran all those thousands of yards in glory days is also, I suspect, fiction. If he lied about that cut, he killed his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.
Trump is the kind of man who, to increase ratings and make money, would have put the author of If I Did It on his glitzy tacky show. Trump and Simpson, entertainers both, have given us ample examples that they are scum. Yet, we give them the power accrued that comes from attention, and we wonder why things in America are always fucked up.
Vic Neptune
O. J. Simpson, NFL first round draft pick in 1969, Buffalo Bills running back--one season in San Francisco--and star of fourteen theatrically released films, has been entertaining us for about fifty years. His clumsy cop role, Nordberg in the three Naked Gun movies, brought mirth to this writer. When I saw them, I didn't know yet about Simpson's most famous role to come: accused ex-wife-murderer. 1995's "trial of the century," a televised hit, lasted eight months, resulting in Simpson's acquittal.
To this day, I don't know the truth of the matter. The assailant, Simpson or someone else, knifed Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman to death. Simpson explained the scar on his finger as the result of hearing about her death. He said he was holding a glass with a beverage. The news of his ex-wife's murder upset him so much, he claimed, that he squeezed the glass, shattering it. I've long regarded this story as made up, simply because it's so Hollywood, something out of a movie. That being his (possibly fanciful) explanation for the finger cut, I believe the small wound was caused by the circumstances of a different situation: Simpson engaging in a fight (involving a sharp knife) with Ron Goldman, a healthy young man defending his friend Nicole.
Still, that finger cut story of Simpson's nagging at me is just a deduction based on a belief, not evidence. There are other elements of concern regarding Simpson's possible guilt, such as Nicole's call four days before her murder to a shelter for women suffering domestic abuse. From evidence not admitted in court, Nicole told the shelter worker that O.J. Simpson was "stalking her."
These tidbits don't point to guilt, but for me, information that sticks out in an odd way, like the CIA initially claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't interrogated by them when he returned to the United States after defecting to the Soviet Union (an incredible claim later proved false), makes me wonder sometimes about official versions of the truth. Today, news of Simpson's parole board granting him a release from prison in October (he's served nine years for participating in an armed robbery), occupied many hours of cable news screen time. Gray-haired, seventy years old, he plans to live with his eldest daughter in Florida for a while. Pundits, including Alan Dershowitz, one of his lawyers in 1995, advise Simpson through the distance of television that he should "just vanish. Don't call attention to yourself. Live an anonymous life."
Impractical advice for a man who will require a great deal of money, since he owes approximately fifty-two million dollars in damages, determined in the civil suit brought by the Brown and Goldman families. What's anonymous O.J. supposed to do? Get a normal job? A cook? A cab driver? A tour guide? Dershowitz suggested that he not do any interviews. Is it likely Simpson will not have a sit down with a prominent TV newsperson this fall after he's released from prison? He'll need money. Even without the millions he owes to the Brown and Goldman families, Simpson will need money to return to at least a small level of comfort; to have his own house, to play golf, to hobnob, to return to some degree of prominence, which was granted to him by the news media today by covering his parole hearing in full, something not done for Charles Manson, whose hearings have been periodic for decades, a colorful lunatic who qualifies as a truly remarkable killer.
Simpson, however, is a star: as an NFL running back, a movie and TV actor, as someone the rich and famous (like Donald Trump) enjoyed partying with, as an accused murderer acquitted by a system that let him off partly because he was rich. After 1995, he played golf, continued exhibiting the arrogance and cockiness of a man who at least knows he made it through an excruciatingly difficult legal process. In the twenty-first century, Simpson became more desperate for recognition, producing a book, a "hypothetical confession," called If I Did It. Here was Simpson saying, "I didn't kill her and her friend, but had I done so, this is how I would've done it." The bizarre book was published but the profits went to the Brown and Goldman families.
In 2008, in Las Vegas, Simpson and a friend participated in a pathetic attempt to "recover" Simpson-based sports memorabilia from a dealer in that trade. Simpson's friend brought a gun, a detail that added years to O.J.'s prison sentence. Again, we saw Simpson, but this time in the sartorial garb of a prisoner, facing a judge and getting the hard law thrown his way in a much less complicated case than the 1994 murders. Simpson went to prison while George W. Bush was president and he'll get out during the Trump era. What Trump thinks about his former friend getting out is anyone's guess. The president probably appreciates anyone who can occupy a news cycle, blanking out, at least for a few hours, the relentlessly bad stream of news about a world leader who wanted, in 2008, before Simpson got arrested, to put O.J. in Celebrity Apprentice, bragging to radio host Howard Stern that such a move would make huge ratings.
Simpson attended Trump's wedding to Marla Maples in December 1993. Five months later, he either cut his ex-wife's throat, or he didn't. Simpson by the time of the wedding had already hit his wife, domestic abuse charges filed against him in 1989. Today I saw a photo of Trump at his wedding, O.J. Simpson next to him, the current president holding his twelve year old daughter Ivanka closely before him by the arms. By then, according to Trump's first wife Ivana in her divorce deposition, he had beaten and raped her after receiving a bad haircut, a claim she later, not under oath, retracted. In domestic abuse cases, I believe the women almost always aren't making up their stories. The photo at Trump's second wedding shows two men, both wife abusers, both bullshitters, both rich, in positions of dominance over less fortunate others and also over justice itself.
Today, some Republican senators, who all, servile-fashion, supported Trump in 2016, speak of their doubts about a president who doesn't seem to understand how justice in this country works. Trump has spoken against Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal from the Russia investigation, bitching about Sessions not bringing up the recusal issue when Trump first considered him for the job. Whatever the reason for Sessions' not mentioning his closeness to the Russia boondoggle, he was right in recusing himself--a punch in the jaw to Trump's concept of loyalty, an emotional response suited to a dictator.
The photo of Trump and Simpson simply shows men who walk all over people and think nothing of it. That decent human beings have problems with such behavior is merely an annoyance to them, something to find contemptible, to be ridiculed.
If Simpson did kill two people in 1994, Trump has already killed thousands with bombs and missiles. Their court of justice may not come until some afterlife arena of judgment, a place only makers of fiction can imagine. Simpson, too, strikes me as a fiction-maker. That story about breaking the glass and suffering the mysterious cut on the finger attached to the hand that gripped the football when he ran all those thousands of yards in glory days is also, I suspect, fiction. If he lied about that cut, he killed his ex-wife and Ron Goldman.
Trump is the kind of man who, to increase ratings and make money, would have put the author of If I Did It on his glitzy tacky show. Trump and Simpson, entertainers both, have given us ample examples that they are scum. Yet, we give them the power accrued that comes from attention, and we wonder why things in America are always fucked up.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, July 8, 2017
Let Them Eat Ivanka
Clashes between police and protestors in Hamburg, Germany, site of the G20 Summit. Melania Trump "trapped" in her hotel because her Secret Service protection determined it wasn't safe for her to go outside among those who want freedom from oppressive capitalist philosophies.
These summits get protested regularly. In America, a capitalist haven where questioning the prime economic philosophy of this nation, even at the dinner table, is a no-no. The mere idea of anti-capitalism is a non-subject in the news media and in political debate. Instead, we just see protestors and heavily armored cops, the former being attacked by the latter. A CNN reporter on a Hamburg street holding a microphone, making his report to headquarters, wore a helmet, identifying himself thereby with the police, rather than with the protestors and their unprotected heads, filled with brains so troubling to the state they need to be concussed and gassed so that rich garbage (Melania Trump and her husband, for example) can be "protected" inside their luxurious cocoons.
Is there something wrong with capitalism? Are the G20 leaders aware of the chaos outside? Did Melania Trump spend time looking at humanity from her perch? Did she wonder what motivates people to rebel against a system that keeps most of humanity from developing? A system designed to benefit one percent of the human race?
Did the CNN reporter bring that helmet to the protest, or did the cops require him to wear it? Do the cops know that the possibility of violence increases when armed police are present in whatever situation?
Melania Trump tweeted her hope that no one suffers any harm in this situation. She has no ideas, I'm guessing, about what causes these situations. About why some people find gatherings of leaders of the wealthiest and most irresponsible nations--because they're in the best position to help the world but they consistently don't--such an insult to human dignity. The news of my nation focused excessively on "the handshake" between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Chris Matthews of MSNBC called Putin "Vlad the Impaler," after the fifteenth century Wallachian prince who strove against the Turks and unwittingly leant his family name, Dracul, to Bram Stoker's vampire character, a florid comparison worthy of a hack, not a real journalist.
Trump's handshake was analyzed by a body language expert on Inside Edition. She concluded that Trump got the better of Putin, who seemed more passive--or, in my view, Putin was nonplused by Trump. Trump only has (according to Forbes) four billion dollars, while Putin is richer by several magnitudes. Putin is experienced in politics, in playing the long game. Putin joked on camera with Trump about the latter's problems with journalists asking pesky questions. Trump liked that, aware or unaware (it's hard to say with Trump) that Putin has persecuted Russian journalists, had at least one that I know of poisoned. Is this behavior worse than Obama and Trump dismembering Yemeni children with Hellfire missiles? Are leaders of nations good people? On a smaller but still important political stage, is Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority leader, a good man? McConnell wants to deprive twenty-three million people of health care so that the rich can receive tax cuts they don't need. Surely that deserves a prison sentence?
Or not, if we accept that capitalism is that philosophy which puts a cushion between practical living and evil. No one on the news ever calls McConnell or Trump, or Obama, or George W. Bush evil. Lately, with Putin in the news so much, Trump is expected by commentators on the corrupted Left, to get on the Russian leader's case about Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, assaults on free speech, meddling in the American 2016 election. In the last two days I've seen and heard State Department people past and present, former CIA people, all condemn Russia for doing the exact same things America does to many other nations. None of these disingenuous fuckers seem to be aware of the Iraq War, how Saddam Hussein's government did not have weapons of mass destruction, how hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead because of Bush and Cheney's decision to attack Iraq based on manufactured evidence, a choice embraced by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and a majority of American politicians active in 2002-2003, backed also by a majority of American citizens (but not by me--I also was against the war in Afghanistan beginning in 2001).
George W. Bush, after his time in office, took up painting. He did a recent series of portraits of veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, both conflicts of his own creation. Fox News's Sean Hannity, servile demonic goblin of right wing authoritarians, interviewed former President Bush and one of the artist's subjects, a retired wounded soldier of multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. The soldier didn't seem to have a problem sitting next to the man who caused his brain injury. Bush seemed blithely unaware of irony, as if the wars existed in some vacuum apart from cause and effect.
War serves economic interests but due to its unpleasant nature those interests are unmentioned on conventional news programs. Ares, the Greek god of war, delighted in strife, made no secret of his exultation in the practice of violence, of nations clashing, civilizations falling, rising to fall again. That lack of shame makes former views of war more honest than what we have now. American "interests" wanted Iraq's oil resources (eleven percent of world supply) and used the pretext of 9/11 to go after that goal. Weapons of Mass Destruction attributed falsely to Hussein was, in Alfred Hitchcock's vocabulary, the "McGuffin," the thing that gets you hooked into the story but it doesn't ultimately matter. The WMD McGuffin and even the Iraq War itself, which spawned the War with ISIS and the general disorder in the Middle East during this century, have entered a phase on even left wing news (MSNBC, which is actually trending right wing) in which no commentator is willing to admit the irony of scolding Russia about Ukraine and Syria while America bombs Syria, killing massive numbers of civilians, and bombs also half a dozen other countries, a feat Kim Jong-Un hasn't taken up, let's realize. Has North Korea been attacking other countries on a daily basis for fifteen years? No.
The failure of capitalism lies in its deafness to the trends of history. The Seattle World Trade Organization riots happened in 2000. Now, it's an expected people power thing, aided exponentially by social media developments. It'll just get more amazing, and more violent as the powers that be struggle with their fear. Of us.
How poignant that Melania Trump, like Marie Antoinette, had to ponder the disquieted citizens from a height, trapped in her guest suite. That, as small a moment in history as it is, represents a victory. The wife of the president of the United States got stuck by people protesting the economic philosophy she and her husband use to fuck over the dreams of ninety-nine percent of the human race.
Vic Neptune
Clashes between police and protestors in Hamburg, Germany, site of the G20 Summit. Melania Trump "trapped" in her hotel because her Secret Service protection determined it wasn't safe for her to go outside among those who want freedom from oppressive capitalist philosophies.
These summits get protested regularly. In America, a capitalist haven where questioning the prime economic philosophy of this nation, even at the dinner table, is a no-no. The mere idea of anti-capitalism is a non-subject in the news media and in political debate. Instead, we just see protestors and heavily armored cops, the former being attacked by the latter. A CNN reporter on a Hamburg street holding a microphone, making his report to headquarters, wore a helmet, identifying himself thereby with the police, rather than with the protestors and their unprotected heads, filled with brains so troubling to the state they need to be concussed and gassed so that rich garbage (Melania Trump and her husband, for example) can be "protected" inside their luxurious cocoons.
Is there something wrong with capitalism? Are the G20 leaders aware of the chaos outside? Did Melania Trump spend time looking at humanity from her perch? Did she wonder what motivates people to rebel against a system that keeps most of humanity from developing? A system designed to benefit one percent of the human race?
Did the CNN reporter bring that helmet to the protest, or did the cops require him to wear it? Do the cops know that the possibility of violence increases when armed police are present in whatever situation?
Melania Trump tweeted her hope that no one suffers any harm in this situation. She has no ideas, I'm guessing, about what causes these situations. About why some people find gatherings of leaders of the wealthiest and most irresponsible nations--because they're in the best position to help the world but they consistently don't--such an insult to human dignity. The news of my nation focused excessively on "the handshake" between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Chris Matthews of MSNBC called Putin "Vlad the Impaler," after the fifteenth century Wallachian prince who strove against the Turks and unwittingly leant his family name, Dracul, to Bram Stoker's vampire character, a florid comparison worthy of a hack, not a real journalist.
Trump's handshake was analyzed by a body language expert on Inside Edition. She concluded that Trump got the better of Putin, who seemed more passive--or, in my view, Putin was nonplused by Trump. Trump only has (according to Forbes) four billion dollars, while Putin is richer by several magnitudes. Putin is experienced in politics, in playing the long game. Putin joked on camera with Trump about the latter's problems with journalists asking pesky questions. Trump liked that, aware or unaware (it's hard to say with Trump) that Putin has persecuted Russian journalists, had at least one that I know of poisoned. Is this behavior worse than Obama and Trump dismembering Yemeni children with Hellfire missiles? Are leaders of nations good people? On a smaller but still important political stage, is Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority leader, a good man? McConnell wants to deprive twenty-three million people of health care so that the rich can receive tax cuts they don't need. Surely that deserves a prison sentence?
Or not, if we accept that capitalism is that philosophy which puts a cushion between practical living and evil. No one on the news ever calls McConnell or Trump, or Obama, or George W. Bush evil. Lately, with Putin in the news so much, Trump is expected by commentators on the corrupted Left, to get on the Russian leader's case about Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, assaults on free speech, meddling in the American 2016 election. In the last two days I've seen and heard State Department people past and present, former CIA people, all condemn Russia for doing the exact same things America does to many other nations. None of these disingenuous fuckers seem to be aware of the Iraq War, how Saddam Hussein's government did not have weapons of mass destruction, how hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead because of Bush and Cheney's decision to attack Iraq based on manufactured evidence, a choice embraced by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and a majority of American politicians active in 2002-2003, backed also by a majority of American citizens (but not by me--I also was against the war in Afghanistan beginning in 2001).
George W. Bush, after his time in office, took up painting. He did a recent series of portraits of veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, both conflicts of his own creation. Fox News's Sean Hannity, servile demonic goblin of right wing authoritarians, interviewed former President Bush and one of the artist's subjects, a retired wounded soldier of multiple deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. The soldier didn't seem to have a problem sitting next to the man who caused his brain injury. Bush seemed blithely unaware of irony, as if the wars existed in some vacuum apart from cause and effect.
War serves economic interests but due to its unpleasant nature those interests are unmentioned on conventional news programs. Ares, the Greek god of war, delighted in strife, made no secret of his exultation in the practice of violence, of nations clashing, civilizations falling, rising to fall again. That lack of shame makes former views of war more honest than what we have now. American "interests" wanted Iraq's oil resources (eleven percent of world supply) and used the pretext of 9/11 to go after that goal. Weapons of Mass Destruction attributed falsely to Hussein was, in Alfred Hitchcock's vocabulary, the "McGuffin," the thing that gets you hooked into the story but it doesn't ultimately matter. The WMD McGuffin and even the Iraq War itself, which spawned the War with ISIS and the general disorder in the Middle East during this century, have entered a phase on even left wing news (MSNBC, which is actually trending right wing) in which no commentator is willing to admit the irony of scolding Russia about Ukraine and Syria while America bombs Syria, killing massive numbers of civilians, and bombs also half a dozen other countries, a feat Kim Jong-Un hasn't taken up, let's realize. Has North Korea been attacking other countries on a daily basis for fifteen years? No.
The failure of capitalism lies in its deafness to the trends of history. The Seattle World Trade Organization riots happened in 2000. Now, it's an expected people power thing, aided exponentially by social media developments. It'll just get more amazing, and more violent as the powers that be struggle with their fear. Of us.
How poignant that Melania Trump, like Marie Antoinette, had to ponder the disquieted citizens from a height, trapped in her guest suite. That, as small a moment in history as it is, represents a victory. The wife of the president of the United States got stuck by people protesting the economic philosophy she and her husband use to fuck over the dreams of ninety-nine percent of the human race.
Vic Neptune
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