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