... look into that child's eyes. ... Look at the expression written there: Where are you taking us? Why are you doing this? What will happen to me?Will you tell them, when you put your pistol to their head, burn them alive, drop your 500-pound bomb on their encampment, kill their siblings and friends in front of them, that it's for a greater good? For the glory of a faith? Because your wife or husband, brother or sister, your parent or cousins or friends, were killed and revenge demands that now this child's life has to end?
Monday, March 11, 2024
I Lift Up Mine Eyes To The Hills, Not Disposed To Mercy
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Reprint Heaven: Brutality
(From June, 2022: Still meaningful today as it was in the olden times.)
This doesn't have much to do with the little screed which follows. Oh, maybe a little -- I'm in my own corporate / retirement merry-go-round cul-de-sac at the moment, wondering when They will send a hit squad after America; how long the current precarious balance of all things will last. Who knows.
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
The Bomb In The Backyard: A 2023 Coda
Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Their outside metal is corroded, but the internal mechanics are clean as a new watch. In some, glass vials filled with fluids, vaporizing when the shell detonates -- Mustard, Phosgene -- are protected and intact. Explosive Ordinance Disposal teams, Démineurs, stop on farm roads to pick up shells neatly stacked by farmers. There are fields across northeastern France and southern Belgium where compasses spin uselessly, there is so much iron in the earth below your feet.
... Sometimes, in a cafe, he heard the news on a radio. Nothing, he realized, could save them from losing the war. He left the roads, walked across springtime fields... He shared a campfire with an old man with a white beard, a sculptor, he said, from Brittany somewhere, who walked with a stick, and got drunk on some yellow stuff from a square bottle... "We'll all live deep down, now," the sculptor said, throwing a stick of wood on the fire. "Twenty ways to prepare a crayfish. Or, you know, chess. Sanskrit poetry. It will hurt like hell, sonny, you'll see."
... Trying to understand Trumpism is like asking a hoarder why she/he hoards. ... The questions assume there are rational answers when rationality has nothing to do with it. For his followers, Trumpism is about how they feel...UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild tells The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson that Trumpism “exists beyond the logic of policy“... Hochschild wrote in her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land” that there is a “deep story” playing out with a large faction of Americans:The deep story went like this: You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. “It’s scary to look back,” Hochschild writes. “There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time.”Now you’re stuck in line, because the economy isn’t working. And worse than stuck, you’re stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And what’s this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a promise. There is order in the fact of a line. And if that order is coming apart, then so is America.Hochschild tested this allegory with her Republican sources and heard that it struck a chord. Yes, they said, this captures how I feel. In the past few years, she’s kept in touch with several of her connections from the Deep South and keenly tracked their philosophical evolution.She’s watched the locus of their anxiety move from budgets ...to the entrenched and “swampy” political class. She also witnessed the Trumpification of everything. “There used to be a Tea Party,” she said. “Now it’s all Trumpism.”The logic of policy has nothing to do with it. Trump is a kind of dancing orange dinosaur who has captured the imaginations of his base. He gave shape to their feelings. He gave voice to them.Hochschild explains, “From his first rallies, Trump’s basic message has always been ‘I love you, and you love me, and we all hate the same people.’”
Friday, September 29, 2023
Reprint Heaven: Still Darkness At The Edge
Edge Of America
[From September, 2020. It's curious, three years on, how little seems to have changed. Even with all the legal actions, the shutdown, the mock-impeachment. We're still on the edge.]
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this old town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start
.. thinking about Bruce Springsteen. Not any specific music of his; just, how it's always reminded me of the America I grew up in: small-town, white boy America, next to the ocean. Not all that far from-big-city USA. Chamber of Commerce, Future Farmers, Boy Scout and Kiwanis America; Pleasantville.
Bruce's music always felt more East Coast, for obvious reasons; the Beach Boys' music was supposed to be speaking for life at the edge of California. I liked Pet Sounds, thought "Little Deuce Coupe" was cool (though that got replaced by Hendrix and the Airplane and Mothers Of Invention soon enough).
Where I came from, we didn't have the Eastern version of mills and factories, but we understood working-class expectations. We knew where our families were in the local pecking order, and those who mattered in town -- the people you didn't want to make unhappy. We knew, without being told, that our experience wasn't shared by Blacks, Latinos, Asians; they weren't even part of the equation. And all that reflected the larger image of America, a larger pecking order, with so many layers above and below.
Monday, September 11, 2023
Twenty-Two
Nine-Eleven
(Redux of a post originally published in September, 2010)On November 22, 1963, I was outside for a 10:00AM break between classes at my Junior High School when it was announced the next class would begin prematurely. Immediately. We were told to sit quietly at our desks. When asked, our teacher told us nervously that President Kennedy had been shot.
Where were you when JFK was shot? A standard question a large number of Americans (now discarded as 'Useless Boomers') have asked each other, due to the magnitude of the event and because it was shared in real-time by the primary media of the early 1960's -- radio and television.
So, September 11th, 2001: Where were you on 9-11? I had gotten up to go to work around 5:30AM here in California, and turned on KQED-FM's NPR news. Getting out of the shower just before 6:00, I heard a report that a "plane" appeared to have crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.
NPR suddenly updated its report, using the words "jet aircraft" -- which immediately moved the entire event from a tragically wayward Cessna into the category of Well-This-Was-No-Boating-Accident.
Turning on CNN, I sat watching an image of the WTC towers from the roof of CNN's Manhattan headquarters, roughly two miles away. Both towers looked like chimneys, topped by boiling clouds of grey-black smoke drifting away at an angle into a clear, morning sky.
By the time I had sit down, two airliners had slammed into the WTC towers. Aside from profane shock, the only thing I recall thinking was, This is what it had been like, standing at the curb in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, watching the Archduke Franz Ferdinand being shot. This is history.
Work closed down at Noon. At a friend's, we sat watching CNN -- clips of the second Tower being struck, and of each one collapsing, were replayed endlessly. I made a few phone calls, primarily to The Last Of The Old Unit ("Fuckin' glad we're not eighteen right now," one observed).
I remembered another image from this same period, within a day or two of the attacks: video of an Iranian soccer pre-game event, where both teams playing sang 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. I've looked for the footage, but AI sucks and Google sucks. I still know what I saw.
It was a crossroads moment. Our choices mattered. But, the government was run by men who had no interest in anything except power (personal, partisan, and financial) and policies that meant the use of force in furthering that power.
And, they believed it would be 'Roses All The Way', 'Greeted As Liberators' ... so, no one planned for occupation, or fighting an insurgency for seven years; or for the effect on individual soldiers of multiple redeployments and 'stop-loss' denials of separation. They never conceived of failure; therefore, it wouldn't happen. The arrogance behind this conceptualization is stunning.
It was an utterly unnecessary, even illegal invasion of Iraq, supported by intelligence about WMD's invented by right-wing operatives to create a causis beli, and pushed by
And let's not forget the $12 Billion in cash (at least; no one really knows), piles of U.S. currency shrink-wrapped and paletted and airlifted to Iraq. 363 tons of it. Some $9 billion of that cash simply can't be accounted for. But, there was plenty of money to be made from the war, and tax breaks to the wealthy. It was a good time to be part of the Carlyle Group -- a founder of which was George H. W. Bush, who gave the Group its intimate connection to the House of Saud.
And there was Guantanamo, CIA 'black airlines' flying suspected terrorists to secret prisons, and the extra-legal, secret program of 'renditions'. Let's not forget Abu Ghirab. Let's not forget people like John Woo, whose written opinions created what he still claims is a "legal" basis for torture as national policy.
And what followed wasn't just secret prisons and a lack of due process for terrorist suspects, but a matrix of information based on unprecedented data-mining of domestic email and cellular telephone traffic, banking records and public record databases. It became a government/corporate State surveillance and intelligence apparatus that outstrips the wildest dreams of the Gestapo and the KGB.
We had an economic collapse in 2008, then eight years of neoliberal nothing, followed by four years of proto-Fascism. After a three-year pandemic, an attempted coup -- roughly 37% of America's adult population claim to believe that 4chan posts by an anonymous fraudster are more real than mathematics, science, or common sense. That over 60% of those on the Right trust what Trump says over and above their own family members.
We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: In history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause)Is that appropriate as an epitaph for those who wish to do America harm? Or, does it speak to how we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, and led; will it end up being our epitaph, a closing quote for the United States Of America?
-- George W. Bush, Address To Joint Session Of Congress
There is no ‘populist’ version of a world where some few are born booted and spurred, and the many are born saddled, and ready to ride, and that's precisely the world which conservatism is trying to preserve.
_________________________________
Sunday, August 20, 2023
The Adulation Of Crowds
[Trump] voters repeatedly [use] very violent, warlike rhetoric... [from] otherwise normal people, normal Americans... And it’s one person after the next – these aren’t just a few random individuals...
In October [2022 at a Trump rally] outside Mesa, Arizona… a man came up to me; he wouldn’t [speak] on camera … then said, “You seem like a nice guy. But you’re with NBC.” Then he said, “I just want you to know -- the corporate media are going to be among the first to go.” And it took me aback; I didn’t know how to respond; ‘Among the first to go’.
...When Trump talks about revenge, and retribution – people are listening to him.
-- Vaughn Hilyard, NBC Reporter; “Fast Politics” podcast, 8/17/23 (Paraphrased)
For a time I stood against the [ship's] rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years... It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had meaning and had borne hope -- until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man's hope and decency.
-- William L. Shirer; Returning to America from nazi Germany; "Berlin Diary" (1941)
____________________________
While from a Proud Tower in the town / Death looked gigantically down-- Edgar Allan Poe, "City In The Sea" (1845)
As for the nazis; well, they're more like pigs than humans, if you think about it... I'm talking about real pigs: pink, overweight. Quite intelligent, certainly smarter than dogs... They do want what they want, and lots of it, and right away, and then when they get it they're happy. Blissful.-- Alan Furst, Dark Star (Paraphrased), 1991
There was a fever over the land... Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow; fear of our neighbors; and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us. Because he said to us... "There are devils among us... Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed."-- Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster); Judgement At Nuremberg (1961)
- Trump dies during GOP primary season (and the world mourns)
- GOP finds another candidate
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- Trump faces incarceration for any reason before / during GOP primaries
- He calls for help from the Maga faithful; they show up, with guns
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- [Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump loses the GOP primaries to a challenger
- Challenger wins General Election; pardons Trump
- Challenger executes Project 2025
- << Game Over / America >>
- Challenger loses General Election
- [Maga Revolt / Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump wins the primaries; the GOP nominates him
- Faces incarceration for any reason before General Election
- He calls for help from the Maga faithful; they show up, with guns
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- [Maga Revolt / Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump loses the General Election
- He contests; Maga faithful protest. Ugly, but gradually recedes
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- Trump's legal escapades end in prison
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- Trump flees; goes into exile (Russia, Hungary)
- << Game Over / Trump >>
- [Maga Revolt / Flynn / Bannon / Prince / 'christian' coup attempt]
- (Not good - anyone's guess where this ends)
- Trump wins the 2024 General Election (lawfully, or not)
- He executes Project 2025
- << Game Over / America >>
- Trump wins 2024 General Election but dies before Inauguration
- Trump's VP executes Project 2025
- << Game Over / America >>
He who writes this book, in which hate is not hidden, was formerly a pacifist...For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. It struck with such violence, that he thought himself no longer the same man. And yet, as it seems to him in this state of hatred, that his conscience becomes diminished -- he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.-- Emile Verhaeren, Belgian Poet; Dedicating a book of his poems to his former self, 1915