Thinker Poser

     If you'd like to hear trippy music, check out the 1976 album, The Roaring Silence by Manfred Mann's Earth Band.  "Blinded by the Light" opens the album.  Track three is the vital part of the trip from an imaginary cop or private eye movie of the mid-1970s standpoint.  An instrumental, "Waiter, There's a Yawn in My Ear," the piece builds on a theme.  The song seems longer than it is, a byproduct of tightly made art.
     From Earth, Kristol, as in Bill, as in warmonger and war profiteer and war criminal, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, a failing newspaper, circulation down significantly, not even trusted by its overlord publisher to maintain the swing of things "conservative," so it hires another set of opinion makers to do the same thing The Weekly Standard is supposed to do.  How's that for Sorry Bill, you're not cutting the mustard of late.  We're not going to fire you, but we'll be seeing you edge yourself out of our building in the next six months.  You'll do fine.  Your kind always does.
     Kristol since 2016 has been operating an outfit called Defending Democracy Together.  That comes to DDT, the controversial killer--of humans also--insecticide touted in the 1940s as "so good you can eat it!"  Too dangerous to use, with residual effects on humans consuming the plants poisoned, duh!
     Not that Kristol and his ilk notice such a fine point, that their organization dedicated to overthrowing Donald Trump in 2020, first in 2016, shares a designation with poison from which some people profited handsomely.  And isn't that what Kristol's up to with his DDT?  Make money, pretend to be against Donald Trump while profiting from the president's policies.  But why is Kristol against Trump?  Because he tweets shit?  Because he behaves indecorously?  The prim, snide, cavalier life-taking demon that is Bill Kristol, frequent guest on MSNBC, as he was on Fox News, shows the establishment is still in charge of mainstream news media, else, how could such an inhuman creep get so much airtime?
     It's due to big money broadcasting "truth" to America, lying about the true horror of politics right now: those making money from our suffering and the grievous societal harms caused by the U.S. military at the behest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment struggling stupidly to maintain an empire fated to go in about ten years, are intimately connected to news media broadcasters in front of and behind the camera who themselves profit from high ratings generated by strife and chaos.
     Watch Bill Kristol.  He's often shown in still photos with his hand to his head, Thinker Pose, or I'm About To Fall Asleep Listening to This Intellectual Termite.  Index finger extended towards the Kristol cerebrum, where the neo-con stewpot bubbles, the occasional Iraqi baby arm floating up in oily brown liquids.  These shots, as for instance his pic on the DDT website, make him seem serious. This guy's intellect never got past reading Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.  When Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols or maybe The Antichrist, that it's important to learn to not react, Kristol never learned that one, as many haven't, as I struggle with it still.
     Not reacting is precisely the opposite of a reactionary.  The Kristol sneer puts me in mind of Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons.  If Bill Kristol had Burns's money he'd shrink into an armadillo-like ball and suck his own cock.
     Forget it, I've had it trying to run the world!  I'll change my ideology for fifty billion dollars, who wouldn't?  Gandhi maybe?  Not too many of him!  American Exceptionalism?  I'll say it's phony!  Like a Big Mac!  Sure, it's a big hamburger but it's really just a hamburger!  Assyria thought it was hot shit, too!  Wait until 612 BC, Assyria!  Nations you've fought in the past will gang up on you and destroy your ass!  Forgotten!  A mirage!  Overshadowed by Babylon!
     Kristol used to work for Dan Quayle.  He worked for George W. Bush.  You shall know him by the company he keeps.
     Opinion makers of the cable news circuit influence the mental judgment processes of Americans above the age of fifty.  I'm of that group, though on the young side of it.  When the Internet started I was twenty-seven.  I first used the Internet when I was thirty-one, began using e-mail at thirty-two, bought my first computer in 2000.  I'm on my fourth.  I suspect my fifth computer will be a mass of jelly I put my fingers in while my head interfaces with ads and sports results.
     Kristol is sixty-six.  He could potentially be tormenting Americans, propagandizing his sick fuck cause of dominating the world, something automatically a set-up for failure, for the next twenty years.  When is George Will going to retire or die?  He's seventy-eight.  He could go another five years, easily.  He's got another baseball anecdote in him, surely?  His sensible math teacher from 1960 ambiance, "Yes, Mr. Will," always comes across as so right-thinking, so reasonable, even viewers who vomit at what are actually Will's political views--stomp on the poor, strong military, traditional patriotic sludge, never cut taxes--like him because of his polite young man about the town manner, something in a lost draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps.
     That reminds me: I read Harper Lee's other novel about a year ago.  I read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school English class, but as her other novel, Go Set a Watchman, wasn't published until 2015, it wasn't until 2018 I read it.  Buzz about the book centered somewhat on Lee's use of the word "nigger."  The book takes place in the 1930s, I think.  That word was commonly used.  It's literary realism to have that word in characters' mouths in a novel taking place in Mississippi in the thirties.
     I thought the novel was okay, as a first draft, which it is.  Given Lee's extensively studied literary output, two novels total and I think a lot of letters, too, it impresses me and makes me feel sarcastic when I contemplate so much attention paid to, in terms of her output, a minor American author who wrote one excellent novel and one so-so first draft of another lesser novel.  She never sought to get that other novel published, but money ka-chinged in the eyes of those around her.  The long lost (except it was never lost) novel by the great Harper Lee!  I saw some of a C-Span talk given in a bookshop by a Harper Lee biographer.  She went on at length about Harper Lee's literary project involving the case Truman Capote ended up writing about, In Cold Blood.
     Harper Lee gave up on her project.  Two novels, total, one of them not even really finished.  Think of the novelists who've written not just one great book, but many, overpowering the achievement of Harper Lee.
     I'm feeling feisty.  In my movie blog, Screen Screed, I gave Watchmen, a very popular film, a harsh review.  Here, I'm questioning something not to be questioned: Harper Lee's work is more significant than Philip K. Dick's?  Than Samuel R. Delany's?
     It is the deeply felt interface between the gripping story in To Kill a Mockingbird and the girl, Scout.  It is a great novel.  I had the utmost good time reading it back in 1981, when I didn't even know who Philip K. Dick was, although he was living in Santa Ana, California then, a year before he died.  He had just finished or was still working on his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, a mainstream novel with spooky sci fi/religious underpinnings deriving from Gnosticism.  Also, a great book with a female protagonist, Angel Archer.  Scout and Angel, both worth reading.
     Infected at times by Orwell, I read about a thousand pages of a 1,400 page collection of his essays.   Around the time of World War Two, he wrote these pieces called As I Please, followed by a number.
Orwell would write about three or four things in one piece, segments unconnected thematically.  I thought it would be interesting (for me) to try to write something like that: combine, as in this post, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Harper Lee, Philip K. Dick, Bill Kristol with fifty billion dollars, curled up, a cock-sucking armadillo.

                                                                             Vic Neptune