Category Archives: current events

Lessons from Eichmann

My picture of this evil motherfucker has long been of a diligent bureaucrat, a clerk, a banal, unremarkable man, a fanatical assistant fanatically doing his infernal job.  I got the banality idea from Hannah Arendt who covered the 1961 trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem and wrote about the stupid ordinariness of Eichmann.  I read one of the long New Yorker essays that later was incorporated into the book, it may have been the essay that gave the book its famous subtitle: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  The real danger, she wrote, was not from “monsters” or evil outliers but from ordinary people doing horrible things in the name of some insane idea they slavishly, even moronically, believe in. [1]   Fucking happens all the time.  It was only recently that I understood that Adolf Eichmann was also this guy, with the death’s head on his fucking hat:

Eichmann_1942.jpg

Eichmann never completed high school, and wasn’t one of the major architects or engineers of the Final Solution, Mr. Hitler’s ultimate idea of what to do with people he imagined were inferior, terminally toxic and devoted to the destruction of the great Aryan “master race”.   Eichmann was simply the hardworking Nazi who kept the trains to the death camps packed, running on a tight schedule, made sure the killing machine was up and running full bore at all times.  Mr. Hitler, we note, was a famously insane monster, as ragingly mad as he was mediocre.   Just look at these two pictures, I think it’s enough said:

 

baby Hitler with adult Hitler.jpg

Israeli agents tracked and captured Eichmann, who was living incognito in Argentina. Thankfully, they didn’t find his location and drop a Hellfire missile on his fastidious Nazi ass from a Predator drone.  The technology didn’t exist in 1961, but the Israeli agents who caught him could have just as easily gagged him, hung him upside down, made a few deep cuts and let him die a long, slow, painful death.    Instead they kidnapped the mass murdering bureaucrat and brought him back to face justice in Jerusalem.

To face justice, let us think for a moment about what this means.   Setting out the crimes charged, publicly, in a way a jury can understand.  Making the case by presenting witnesses, victims, other documentary evidence.  Letting the accused defend himself against the charges.  Arriving at a just outcome after a fair and open trial.

Justice requires this careful process, making sure the State is only punishing someone who has been shown to be guilty of the specific crimes charged, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt.  Justice isn’t taking Saddam Hussein out of his cell in the middle of the night, after a summary secret trial, and hanging him in secret, the only record a blurry cellphone video.  That’s called Texas Justice, which is another euphemism for lynching.   Texas, the state that leads the world in executions, and before that led the world in necktie parties.   Not always after a fair and impartial trial, heh, no, not always, pardner.  Not the way justice, also known as fairness, is arrived at, needless to say.

Eichmann’s trial made must-see TV in 1961, it was filmed live by a camera crew, directed by an American filmmaker who’d been blacklisted during the dark days of McCarthyism, and broadcast daily.  It was broadcast worldwide (in over thirty countries)  by an American television network.   The BBC made an excellent film about the televised trial, The Eichmann Show, that incorporates Eichmann himself maintaining his grim composure in that glass cube and includes some of the horrific footage shown to the world for the first time during that trial.  You can see the movie on Netflix, I recommend it.  Eichmann sat in the specially constructed bulletproof glass  booth, two armed guards behind him.  He sits there listening, usually impassively, sometimes looking like this:

 

Eichman 1960.jpg 

The banal bureaucrat, who made sure millions were shipped out to be murdered with maximum efficiency, showed little emotion as a hundred and twelve survivors described the living hell Eichmann had done his best to make possible.   Then he was forced, along with the people packed into the gigantic courtroom in Jerusalem and the rest of the worldwide viewing audience, to watch clip after clip from movies taken by the Nazis, showing life and death in the death camps.  

These clips were shown on TV, the monstrous images broadcast everywhere to be seen by the world for the first time.  Walking skeletons, a bulldozer pushing a hundred jiggling skin-covered skeletons into a burial pit, hopeless, emaciated faces, expressionless, dragging dead comrades.   The kind of visceral, moving images that, in a much smaller dose, made me projectile vomit when I first saw them as a kid.  [2]

In 1961, for the first time, the world saw the visual proof of what the Nazis actually did to fulfill their murderous Fuhrer’s wildest dreams during their Thousand Year Reich.  What doomed Eichmann was not merely the stories told by the one hundred and twelve traumatized survivors who testified, it was also the documentary footage shot by the Nazis themselves.  The Nazis considered what they were doing God’s work, as their type always does.  God wanted them to kill all Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Homosexuals, Intellectuals, non-fascist leadership, genetic defectives and enemies of every kind.  Hitler told them so, and clearly, Hitler, chosen by God Himself as Germany’s savior, knew best what God wanted.   Eichmann appeared to have no regrets, he was only doing his job and he did it at a very high level, a level he seemed to be proud of.  Not everybody can handle overseeing the killing of several million people!   He bragged about being ready to leap laughing into his grave, so satisfied at the millions he’d killed.

 

Eichman quizzical.jpg

The young state of Israel did not have the death penalty.  When Eichmann was found guilty, apparently still convinced he’d committed no crime, the Israeli judge said that although they did not have the death penalty in Israel they’d make an exception in Mr. Eichmann’s case.

Shortly before he was executed, after his appeal failed in the Israeli Supreme Court, Eichmann wrote a request for clemency.

EICHMANN-simian fear grin and handwriting.jpg

That’s part of his clemency request, I love the photo, his great expression, and the way someone has composited it next to his meticulously neat handwriting. Here is the last paragraph of his request for clemency [3], written in a slightly more harried hand:

Eichmann request for clemency.jpg

The request was denied.

My thoughts went from Eichmann in Jerusalem to Jerusalem today, the divided, bitterly contested holy city that now is home to the new U.S. Consulate General in Israel.   A former lunatic fringe right-wing extremist member of Israeli Parliament, Avigdor Lieberman, a Jew from the Soviet Union, is now Defense Minister of Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Lieberman’s party is called “Israel is our home”, meaning, for their purposes, “not your fucking home, Arab scum”.   He has had many radical, often ugly, proposals for how to deal with Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories he believes God gave to Israel.  Under his orders Israel now shoots to kill anyone who opposes Israel or its eternal, aggressive, often brutal occupation of land captured in the 1967 war.   God, apparently, told Mr. Lieberman it was fine.  

Instead of rubber bullets or water cannons to break up demonstrations, assuming a government has a right to use those brutal, but non-lethal forms of violence against unarmed civilian demonstrators, just shoot these fucks with live ammunition.  It’s fine.  Shoot them in the thigh, in the chest, shoot them without worrying about it, because, as Lieberman says, there are no innocent people in Gaza.   Call them all terrorists and kill as many as you want, let the world’s anti-Semites criticize, they always do, they irrationally hate us, no matter what we do.  Gaza is sometimes called the world’s largest, most densely packed, open air concentration camp.  Only by anti-Semites, according to the Avigdor Liebermans of the world.

It is generally a bad idea to compare people to Nazis, it’s incendiary and tends to end rational conversation.  You wind up arguing the fairness or unfairness of comparing the person or policy to fucking Nazis instead of talking about what you were trying to address before the other N-word came into it.  The Nazis, to a Jewish person, a Gypsy, any perceived enemy of the Nazi state, those who believe in anything but Nazism, were just plain inhuman.  Sure, Eichmann played with his kids after a hard day at the office, a hard day visiting Auschwitz or Treblinka, hearing about the latest poison gas used to exterminate these vermin, but the man was also irredeemably evil, or less emotionally, a war criminal, I think most people would agree.  

Unless, I guess, you like the idea of killing Jews, and the more the merrier.  There are, I do not doubt, people like that.   Very fine people, the finest people, no doubt. Who love their kids, and tell jokes, and strive to help their neighbors, as long as they’re not Jews, Blacks, Immigrants, Muslims, terrorists, union members, intellectuals with their fucking nuance, homosexuals, insatiable parasites on the government tit, people who hate our freedom and don’t want to see our country made great again.

What lessons does the Israeli right wing government take from history, from our own Jewish history?   It is worth thinking about.  You dehumanize an enemy and then it is no problem to have snipers kill as many as necessary to make them shut the fuck up.  In fact, shoot special bullets that explode on contact, causing the most grievous possible injury.  Nothing says somebody wearing a medic’s tunic, or a press vest, is any less subject to being shot in their smug face than the people they are trying to help, the ones throwing rocks, molotov cocktails, trying to cut the wires on the border fence, the ones screaming Death To Israel, the ones demanding, most intolerably, the right to return to their former homes.  Nothing to fucking see here.  One more reason to shoot the press.  No pictures, no problem.  

Ask Eichmann how he felt about those fucking Nazi documentaries of the death camps.  He’d probably have a regret about that. After all, he was a devoted servant only following his master’s orders, trying always to do his very best in the Nazi hierarchy.  Why would his master not destroy those incriminating films? Damn. Everybody now knows, the first thing you do, you burn that shit that could make you face justice.  Shit…

I wonder if Eichmann was thinking about that as several stoic Jews led him to the gallows that long ago night in Jerusalem.  Eichmann apparently conducted himself with dignity at the end, spouting a few final idiotic cliches before he was hanged.

 

[1]   From Amos Elon’s introduction to the republished Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that apparently met with harsh criticism in some quarters  

Screen shot 2018-06-05 at 6.13.59 PM.png(c) Penguin Books 2006

[2]  The kind of visceral moving images Holocaust Deniers claim is propaganda made by the infernally manipulative Jews themselves. (And truthfully, who among us has not faked his own atrocity films, just to viciously exploit others?)  These historical revisionists also deny any malicious motive for rewriting the historical record, you know, some of their own lawyers and accountants are fucking Jews.  At most, these dodgy history revisers insist, a couple of hundred thousand Jews may have died, maybe, and certainly not as a result of any German policy, if anything those policies were designed to protect the Jews, died not by the Nazis’ hand but of contagious diseases contracted and spread because of their filthy ways.   So much for those never-rinsed asshole ‘historians’.  Don’t even know why I mentioned the little shit stains.   

 

One more from Amos Elon’s intro, to cleanse the palette:

Screen shot 2018-06-05 at 6.44.37 PM.png

and this little gem, from the same intro:

The Israeli psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.”

[3]  Eichmann’s handwritten clemency request, not released to the public until almost fifty years after his execution, reads in pertinent part:

  • “[The judges] made a fundamental mistake in that they are not able to empathize with the time and situation in which I found myself during the war years.
  • There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.
  • Had I been, as the judges assume, the fanatical driving force in the persecution of the Jews, this should have been reflected in a promotion and other rewards, but I was never granted any benefit.
  • I am not able to recognize the court’s ruling as just, and I ask, Your Honor Mr. President, to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.”

source

Grey Skank, on the case!

As much as I sometimes disparage the venerable journal of record, it is one of the most important and influential sources of news in our society.   Recently, because of some shenanigan by Sekhnet who subscribes to the Times for an elderly former neighbor who lives in an institutional hell, isolated, against her will, we both get NYT news clips sent to our phones.   The other day this one arrived.  

The story had been meticulously set out in a long New Yorker profile HERE, (and I wrote about it, more briefly, HERE)  but the NY Times had several more sickening details, gathered recently.

The NY Times headline: 

Origins of an Epidemic: Purdue Pharma Knew Its Opioids Were Widely Abused

the lede: 

A confidential Justice Department report found the company was aware early on that OxyContin was being crushed and snorted for its powerful narcotic, but continued to promote it as less addictive.

by Barry Meier

Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkiller’s growing abuse until years after it went on the market.

But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information.

The rest of the article is HERE

Not to fear, a deal was made to keep those responsible out of legal jeopardy back in 2006 and Purdue Pharma’s paid lying fuck had this to say in response to the NYTimes recent fake news story, all evidence to the contrary (and there’s apparently a shitload from before the DOJ let the Sacklers and their company off the hook more than a decade ago):

A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, Robert Josephson, declined to comment on the allegations in the report but said the company was involved in efforts to address opioid abuse.

“Suggesting that activities that last occurred more than 16 years ago are responsible for today’s complex and multifaceted opioid crisis is deeply flawed,” he said in a statement.

Deeply flawed, yes, of course, good line, bitchface, no wonder they pay you the big bucks.  Like corporate cousin Exxon, first to research and find the connection between burning fossil fuel and catastrophic climate change, then funding decades of climate change skepticism.  Deeply flawed to blame a powerful, highly addictive multi-billion dollar profit center, relentlessly and falsely marketed as a safe alternative to the addictive forms of the same drug, for fueling the Opioid Crisis.  Even if, and I say IF (though there is absolutely no ‘if’, as the newly leaked evidence shows), Purdue and the Sacklers knew from the beginning that they were lying to sell a boatload of the highly addictive stuff in every possible way.  

I wonder if Josephson was the former FDA official, later hired by Purdue Pharma, who approved the false and misleading marketing/package insert for Oxycontin that launched the powerful opioid’s meteoric rise to the top of the lucrative opioid drug pyramid [1].  The marketing continued, we know now, long after Purdue and the Sacklers knew all about the widespread abuse of its miracle drug.

The Sackler family, owners of Purdue, always plead ignorance and hide behind a corporate veil, as their ilk always does.   They feel, no doubt, that they’ve already suffered more than enough, having paid an outrageous $653,000,000 in corporate profits back in 2006 in a deal to end the merciless federal witch hunt against them.   If there’s any doubt that these psychopaths are lying about what they knew and when, there’s this:

Then in 1998, as OxyContin’s marketing campaign was taking off, Purdue Pharma learned of a medical journal study that appeared to undercut its central message — that OxyContin, as a long-acting opioid, had less appeal to drug abusers.

In the study, which was published in The Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, researchers from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver interviewed local drug dealers and abusers to learn what legal drugs sold for on the black market. They found that MS Contin commanded the highest price of any prescription opioid with a 30-milligram tablet that cost $1 at a pharmacy bringing up to $40 on the street.

In an accompanying editorial, a Canadian physician, Dr. Brian Goldman, wrote that the findings turned thinking about the supposed safety of long-acting opioids like OxyContin on its head by showing that drug abusers “coveted” such drugs.

“This should ring alarm bells,” Dr. Goldman, who was then a paid speaker for Purdue Pharma, wrote in the editorial.

Purdue Pharma did not send the Canadian study to the F.D.A. or tell its sales representatives about it. Instead, one sales official testified later to a federal grand jury that the company gave him an older survey to show doctors that had concluded that drug abusers were not attracted to time-release opioids.

Mr. Josephson, the Purdue Pharma spokesman, said it was not required to tell the F.D.A. about the Canadian study or editorial. He added that the company did not consider the small study’s results significant because it was already known that morphine could be abused.

The real question, of course, is what kind of fucking traitor leaked these “classified” reports, pages that show the guilty parties had full knowledge of the bad shit their lucrative, fraudulent, abuse-prone baby was causing years before Dubya and Cheney’s DOJ let them quietly off the hook with the corporation paying all fines?

This piquant passage should not pass by un-noted:

The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time, Alice S. Fisher, did not respond to emails seeking comment about the decision not to pursue indictments. That decision followed meetings with a Purdue Pharma defense team whose advisers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, a onetime United States attorney and former New York mayor. Mr. Giuliani, who was then regarded as a potential Republican presidential candidate, is now a legal adviser to Mr. Trump.

Oh, how far the mighty have fallen.  What a fucking country!   God bless these fucking all-powerful, unaccountable winners we have here and God bless these United States of Exceptional Avarice, Death and Shamelessness.  Have a brilliant day!

 

[1] There would have been a neat symmetry to that, but, no, the former FDA weasel for hire was a scumbag named Dr. Curtis Wright:

The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

source

The War on Drugs

Like the War on Terror, the War on Drugs depends on breaking down doors in the middle of the night, dragging people off and putting all the bad guys out of commission.   The war metaphor underscores the idiocy of this massive program which has locked up tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders in American prisons. [1]  War is a violent reaction to a thing that can most often better be addressed in other ways.   Most war is waged, let us be frank here, for the profit of certain powerful parties who have others die for them in noble battle.  When war is not profitable anymore, the lion will lie down and let the lamb snuggle against it.   In the meantime, locking Americans up in privatized prisons is lucrative for the owners of those private prisons.   We need to keep the beds full, or the entire industry could collapse.

Speaking of war as the answer to all problems, at one time we had a War on Poverty here too, until, as Ronald Reagan cracked, “poverty won.”    It did indeed.

This is a somewhat random rant, as I have opined here several times about the moronic nature of this somewhat random War on selected criminalized drugs.   As a society America is very fond of drugs, we are dependent on a host of medicines.  If you have any medical condition whatsoever, we use drugs to cure it.  Ads for various drugs are ubiquitous on television: Ask your doctor if Asseffex is right for you.   If you are depressed: antidepressants.   Anxious: anti-anxiety drugs.   Can’t sleep: sleeping pills.  Need to unwind after a stressful day: alcohol or a tranquilizer. Do you fart?  take this.  Does your leg sometimes shake?  This drug cures RLS.  The list is endless.  

Let us be fair– which would you rather do, take a pill or delve into painful things and make hard choices about your life?   Chronic sleeplessness cured by a pill or by doing the unpleasant work involved in understanding what is actually keeping you sleepless and making needed changes in your life?   Go for the pill.   I’m no-one to talk, I’ve been convinced to take a daily blood pressure lowering pill and a statin to control borderline high cholesterol.  Would I need these if I lost the twenty pounds I need to lose?   Hard to say, and something I may never know.  A doctor friend convinced me to take these medications, she and her husband do.  She made some convincing arguments and I was convinced.   It’s very easy to take the two small pills every evening.

The War on Drugs is a war against certain mood-altering substances that the law chooses to criminalize.   The prevailing attitude among national lawmakers about drugs that only serve to get a person high is that folks should talk to their doctors, or bartenders.  Liquor stores are also a legal and readily available option.   Meanwhile, countless poor bastards have been locked up for the crime of procuring or selling illegal drugs, including marijuana.  The annual price tag for this lost War on Drugs was over $15 billion as of 2009.   When you’re preventing evil, the sky’s the limit, I suppose.    

Why do people become dependent on drugs?  Despair, difficulty with feelings of hopelessness, anger, worthlessness.  People take mood-altering drugs in an attempt to make themselves feel better.   The moment when the effect of the drug is felt is a moment of relief for the drug user, the only time in their day when they momentarily feel OK.   The moment when the effect wears off it’s back feeling shitty again for the user.   It is not hard to identify these impulses.   The hard thing is to be in the middle of a war on the thing that makes you feel a little better, in addition to all your other problems.    Not to say people who get addicted to drugs don’t need help managing their pain, they certainly do, but being hunted and locked up does nothing to help nonviolent people who take something everyday because they feel shitty.

In the case of the futile, destructive, perpetual American War on Drugs, the efforts of our government to use criminal laws and punishment as the only cure for a deep psychological problem only reinforces what right wing extremists have been saying for years: shrink the government and drown it in a bath tub.

We have a fairly shitty medical system here in the U.S., almost nothing as far as our medical records is standardized.  That’s because private enterprise is in charge. Our medical records are considered by these private corporations as proprietary information.   The company that provided the service owns them, may charge you for copies of your own medical records in some cases.  Here’s a hilarious, if also somewhat sour, note in our American medical records song and dance.  

I went for a pre-colonoscopy visit to a gastroenterologist’s office.    The first thing the person interviewing me asked was if I’m still taking oxycodone.   That prescription popped up immediately on the screen when she put my name in.

I’d had the side of my nose sliced open in December, by a surgeon removing a basal cell so tiny it could not be detected by the dermatologist.  I didn’t really understand why the eyebrow length incision was necessary, but I immediately understood, once the anesthetic wore off, that I was in considerable agony.   The surgeon called in a prescription for tylenol with codeine.   I took a pill and the pain quickly subsided.  I took another one four or six hours later, whatever it said on the label, and a third before I went to sleep.  I felt no appreciable high, but the pain was gone.  I felt fine the next day and put aside the bottle with the remaining tablets in it.

“Are you still taking oxycodone?” the pretty receptionist asked.

No, I said, and explained about the intensely painful incision on the left side of my nose.   The opioid prescription was the only medical information that popped up about me when she put my name into the medical database.   I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I am thinking of it now:  good old Jared Kushner!   The president had appointed him to cure the Opioid Crisis (which killed more Americans last year than military veteran suicides [2], homicide by firearm and many other common causes of American death) and, by God, Jared is on the case!  

God bless these United States!

 

[1]  Almost half of all federal prisoners are locked up for drug offenses.  

“Among sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities on December 31, 2015, 15% (197,200 prisoners) had been convicted of a drug offense as their most serious crime.”

source

[2]  Check out the shockingly high number of suicides among female veterans, almost 600% the rate of female civilian suicides 2000-2010

 link 

Why so Pissed, El? (final)

There are many reasons to be angry, no doubt.  Many reasons to be grateful for the miracle of life, also, though those reasons seem not to be as compelling, as demanding of action, as the reasons to be mad.  I’m thinking about the myths we are fed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Not that every nationstate does not have its myths, every culture its signature values, but… fuck.

I think about the record disparity in income we have here now in the land of the American Dream.  Men with $35,000 toilet bowls and others, homeless, arrested for shitting in an alley.   What kind of disgusting person do you have to be to shit in an alley?   Can you blame a cop for roughing up a despicable fucker like that?  

America is ruled by advertising, has long been, but now the ads come directly to our pockets, targeted by algorithms that single us out by expressed preferences.  We elect our public representives  based strictly on advertising, branding and marketing.   Everything we see or hear is “brought to you” by some corporation with the money to bring it.   Sponsors pull out, the show is over.  Ten million people used to watch that shit every week, then something that couldn’t be spun quickly enough is said by the host and, bye bye.   Corporations taking principled stands.  We will not support a celebrity who makes a stink when everybody else on TV supports the next war.  Fuck that, we are Americans!

As individuals, we are powerless in the face of what is done in our names.   The champions we are sometimes allowed to vote for, and I think of recent liberal icons who have been devoted, flexible servants of the status quo, Bill Clinton (the “best Republican president of the 20th century”, our “first black president”) and Barack Obama (“the first black president”), are also men who will make every necessary compromise without flinching.  Every president has to pass the psychopath test before being put on the ballot of one of the major parties.  Some are better than others, but each of them, in crunch time, will do what needs to be done.  Usually that involves dropping some massive fucking bombs and selling billions in the latest killing technology to despots.  Few of us get excited about it anymore.   “It’s just the president being presidential,” spoken in the way disgusted but resigned Red Sox players and fans used to say “that’s just Manny being Manny”, referring to the mercurial superstar’s self-centered childishness.

So we cultivate honesty in our dealings with others.  Sometimes that is more fruitful than at other times.  Not everyone is comfortable with everything being on the table.  Honesty, really, what is that shit actually?  How fucking honest do we want to really be, anyway?

Many people I know have stopped watching the news.  You have a famously rabid bullying (though obsequious to superiors, allegedly) war hawk from the Cheney-Bush administration, elevated to sit at the president’s right hand, foaming at the mouth about Libya-style regime change in Iran.  Everyone recalls how well that went.   The Koch brother’s personal former congressman, elevated to Secretary of State recently by the world’s greatest deal-making winner, vows the most severe sanctions in history if Iran does not stop pursuing nuclear deterrence against the U.S., does not stop meddling in the Middle East.  He announces this with a straight face:  Iran must get the fuck out of fucking Yemen or we will fucking fuck you up.   Says this as we are giving massive military support to our close democratic friends in the House of Saud as they pour the explosions and famine on impoverished Yemen.   So, to avoid massive aggravation, you tune out, turn off the news.  Go on a nice vacation, come back, feel a bit better that life is still good.

Not a bad move, my friends.   Take a nice trip, recharge your batteries.  Look after your health.  If there is nothing we can do about the kind of country we live in, the kind of world we leave to the future, at least grant us the serenity to accept that and try to live as well as we can.   Our lives here are only the wink of an eye, after all, and each of us is suspended by a strand of a spider’s web during that wink.   It behooves us to look within, find peace, be grateful for every beautiful thing in our lives, do a little good wherever we can.  It does. 

There is something perverse in me that cannot look away.  I am driven to gather the available facts, try to understand, to put the jagged puzzle pieces together in this dark, stinking room.  I am fucked up.  I get that.  But it is my life, and my world, and it burns me sometimes that, no matter how clear and convincing the truth is, that mere truth doesn’t mean shit against a nicely spun pile of steaming horse shit.  Hell, in our new post-factual world, you don’t even need to spin that shit– just keep it constantly coming.  Heh, you completely dizzy yet, motherfuckers?

A theory

I was thinking idly the other day, as I so often do, when an obvious theory presented itself to me as I walked.   What makes a man a power-crazed, misogynistic, narcissist?   How does a person become a rigid, sadistic asshole?   As George Grosz famously said, to know this we have to study the humiliations the person underwent.

I had a friend who was the youngest of three boys.   He never felt he got enough attention.  His father seemed indifferent to him and his mother, a charming woman, apparently did not give him quite enough undivided attention when he was young.   I’m not a psychologist, nor do I play one on TV, but I could eventually see by the way he lived his life — intent on adoration, constantly disappointed and betrayed, rigid in any conflict, incapable of useful self-knowledge, needing to get the very best out of any and every deal– that he was a deeply damaged person.  He could not avoid conflict, no matter how gently he tried to control the situation.

In the end these traits made him insufferable.  It was his lack of insight into how extreme his personality was, as much as his quirks themselves, that finally tipped the balance.   I later learned, from his oldest brother, that he has been unable to keep any friends.   SAD!, yes, but not that big a surprise.

This poor devil had unrealizable expectations of life.  He expected to be recognized for his musical genius (he was quite talented) and it burned him that even those closest to him did not give him the props he deserved.   His father, for example, was unable to sit still for a long recital of recent piano works.  Father and adult son sat together in a cousin’s apartment where the concert was played for an audience of one.   As the composer played, his father, seated behind him, began flipping through the CDs on the rack next to him.   He reported how his blood ran cold as the cases clacked, how his spine stiffened as he bitterly forced himself to play the remainder of the new opus for a father still totally unable to focus on his youngest son.   I couldn’t help identifying a bit with the man forced to sit for as long as it took for him to finally recognize his son’s undeniable brilliance.  

We, many of us, have unrealizable expectations of life.  Others manage to realize these unrealizable things, which can serve to stoke our own unrealistic dreams.   At times, it appears, these fabulous accomplishments lead one to sourly ponder the old “be careful what you wish for.”   A terminally unhappy person, dreaming that climbing a certain mountain will make them happy, often finds empty bitterness at that peak as they stand there in what should be blissful triumph.   Certain holes in the soul cannot be filled by accomplishments, no matter how lofty.

I was thinking of the most powerful man in the world.   The first man in his job who is constantly attacking people from his phone.   “The president attacked…” is a common daily lede for current news stories.  He is an innovator, of a certain type.   He has made himself part of history.   From my point of view, my opinion only, he is not making himself a very inspiring part of history.  He is, from all appearances, a bully unconstrained by anything but his own need to dominate others.   How does a person get this way?   Walking uptown last night I had a theory.    

His father was known as something of a tyrant.  He had inherited a small fortune, from a truly entrepreneurial father, and, from an early age (the father died when he was a young teenager) began single-mindedly building that small fortune into a huge fortune.   His methods were sometimes unscrupulous, he cultivated political favors, took advantage of government programs for grants and tax breaks, but he built a huge fortune on his real estate empire.  He had a beloved oldest son who had too much of a conscience, from what I can glean, to take the family fortune to the next level.   They had a falling out, the heir apparent quit (and eventually drank himself to death) and the father had to go to his second choice, a younger son who was a discipline problem.

Much has been made of the relationship between the overbearing mentor father and his tiny million dollar loan and the boy sent to military academy to get some discipline, to become a man.  The kid had crossed a line in his bullying when he bought a batch of switchblades, the better to rule his private school schoolyard, I suppose.   After military academy the grooming of this young mogul-to-be began in earnest.   I had a sudden thought last night– what role did the boy’s mother play in all this?    

The man’s father was born to some wealth, and soon acquired fantastic wealth of his own.   The mother had been born poor, was an immigrant.  It is reported that she went personally to the laundromats they owned in her mink coat, driven by a chauffeur, to collect, and then count, the quarters from the washing machines.  Nothing particularly unnatural about this, I think.  I then thought of the effect on her children of this kind of grasping, coin-counting desperation to feel wealthy and important.  The effect on the young son, seeing his dynamic mother trying to act like an aristocrat.  What values could she have instilled in the boy?  We can only judge these by the man’s behavior.

This very public man has made virtually no mention of his mother, outside of canned comments he repeated over the years about her being beautiful and brilliant.  “An amazing woman,” he will say, using the same adjective he used to describe his Healthcare for All plan, the Wall to keep Mexican rapists out, the record size of the adoring campaign crowds who cheer him and every other product he offers for sale.  I can only imagine, by his overt contempt for women (one only has to picture him lurking menacingly behind his hated rival Crooked Hillary during a debate) that his mother, in some fundamental way, gave him only conditional love and support.   The kind of thing that plants lifelong bitterness deep in the heart.   If love depends on being a certain way… well, what the fucking fuck?  I’ll fucking be that way in fucking spades, bitch.  I’ll show you that certain way!    Goddamn it, you want a certain fucking way?   Here you fucking go, you amazing woman.

(Amazing as my long inability to excavate this desk… find an agent, get to the top of that little mountain of dung I sometimes find myself daydreaming about.)

Why so Pissed, El? (2)

We live in a culture ruled not by a desire to meet everyone’s basic human needs, or even recognize them, but by an unreasoning competitive lust to acquire more than we can possibly use.   We all need food, shelter, clothing, exercise, love, sex, companionship.   We get tasty, cheaply produced toxic foodstuffs, overpriced shelter that is a burden, (if also a major investment), for many citizens, clothing made in countries where labor is cheapest and health and safety regulations least intrusive.  Instead of walking, most of us drive everywhere in fossil-powered cars whose pollution is destroying the planet.  

There is sadly little love in our society, for most people, in part because advertising creates impossible dreams as divorce rates soar.  Sex is often a commodity in our pay to play culture, pornography is readily available to every adolescent with a phone.   Companionship, in the sense of mutually respecting friends spending time together, having a few laughs, exchanging views, is more and more rare.    Look at me right now, I’m typing these words into a void instead of chatting with a friend.   More and more of our communication, as a society, is via what is grotesquely known as Social Media.   It isn’t hard to see why people become internet trolls in this kind of inhuman environment.   Why not take out your frustrations by shitting on your countrymen when nobody can look into your pathetic eyes?

Why so mad, El?  This sick shit is the only game in town, unless you make herculean exertions to get off the grid.   If you choose not to participate in what is euphemistically called the Rat Race, the competition for wealth, you find yourself a sucker betting against the house.   When I was young banks paid a substantial interest rate to hold your money.  If you had a sum you were saving, you could put it into a long-term, federally insured, bank account that paid 10% interest.  This way you could live on a budget and keep up with inflation without putting your savings on a crooked roulette wheel.  Today banks have merged with investment houses and insurance companies, the whole game is a casino.   Rather than FDIC insurance for your life savings in the bank, you have the federal government turning a willfully blind eye to the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our financial industry-driven economy.

In fairness to the ass-dicking architects of this system [1], I have heard there is nothing like taking a dump into a $35,000 toilet bowl.   It may be nice to own as many homes as you want, I suppose, although you have to wonder about why that might be.  In order to allow these masters of the universe to live such lavish lifestyles there are certain sacrifices the rest of us must make.   Not long ago they came up with a brilliant fraud to ensure that this sacrifice by the 95% would be perpetual.   I refer you to Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, pages 38 and 39, for a clear, concise description of the details [2].

You create a system where large sums of money are continually flowing in.  This is necessary for any Ponzi Scheme.  You need a steady flow of money coming in, to pay off people, to pique their greed, to make them invest more, to keep the shell game profitable.   Some unprincipled geniuses realized there was a huge reservoir of money in the housing market and came up with a scheme to defraud unsuspecting losers of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars.   For all of its intricateness, it is deceptively simple.  You package and sell misleadingly labeled debt.

You allow millions of people to take mortgages they can not possibly afford to keep paying.  Give them “liar’s loans”, it’s not a problem, the point is to create mountains of debt you can package and sell, the more the better.  Make the initial mortgage payments small, it doesn’t matter, you can always add a clause for balloon payments that nobody will read, or understand.   As long as housing prices are going up, these poor suckers can always sell or borrow more money against the rising price of their homes, to keep their nostrils above water.   Meantime, you package these debts into huge bundles you can sell as rock solid investments, sliced into tranches of collateralized debt obligations, or whatever you want to call them.  

To make these bad debts attractive to investors, you get the ratings agencies to assure buyers that the derivatives they are investing in are AAA-rated, nothing safer than a triple A-rated investment product.   You make the transfers and investment opportunities for these toxic assets insanely complicated for anyone outside of the financial sector to begin to understand.   It doesn’t matter as long as you keep paying high interest rates on these toxic investments in the short term.  You make this golden investment opportunities irresistible.  Then you sit back, skim off the vast profits, and wait for more foreclosures to bundle and sell.  

Since we live in a culture where winners are rewarded with obscene wealth, and losers can go fuck off and die, all this makes perfect sense.   Obama’s justice department, along with not holding John Yoo, Mitchell and Jessen, Cheney and the other creators of our torture program accountable (come on! you will say, that would have been politically impossible– and besides, Cheney would have killed everyone), prosecuted nobody for this massive systemic financial fraud against millions of Americans, a fraud that resulted in the loss of gazillions of dollars for pension funds, senior citizens’ life savings, etc.  Suckers walk, yo.

Why so fucking angry, El?  This has always been the way of the world.  You think the serfs had it any better under feudalism?   Why blame perfect presidential candidate Barack Obama for not seriously addressing the most horrific failures of the system? He was no bomb thrower, he was a pragmatist.  He joked about making some “serious Tubmans” when he was out of office.  I have confidence in his abilities, I’m certain he will be the first ex-president to monetize his talents and status to become a billionaire.  Why not dream huge in the land of the American Dream?  

While we have Obama on the waterboard, I understand that the deep hatred he inspired in much of the country, merely by being “biracial”, may have led him to be more cautious than he would have been in a more just, less racist, society.   He faced a racist lynch mob every day of his presidency.  The most vocal leaders of that lynch mob are literally running the Executive branch today.  OK, leave my man out of it, then.

Why am I so fucking mad?  Because of how little choice there is in how to live by merciful human values in a corrupt, morally bankrupt, insatiably appetitive society like ours.  It is nothing to turn children into charred chopped meat somewhere thousands of miles from here, if you spin it as done in the cause of freedom and democracy.  Collateral Damage.  Sanctions against Iraq over the years cost many thousands of Iraqi children their lives, long before “Shock and Awe”, a perpetual war of aggression for no moral or legal reason.  Nothing to see here.   Drones replace “boots on the ground”, American lives are saved.  It’s all good!  We torture… some folks… call us pisher, as my grandfather used to say.   The bottom line is the economy, stupid.  The Stock Market hums along, practices largely the same as they were right before the big transfer of wealth in 2008 that was disastrous to many millions of people worldwide.  

“Nothing to fucking see here, commie bastard.  You want humble people to be left alone?   Where does that ever fucking happen?  I thought you wanted everyone’s basic so-called human needs taken care of?   How does that happen if you want to be left alone?  Asshole.  Grow some balls, go compete, monetize something, instead of whining to nobody about the infernal unfairness of life among the wise apes.  Nobody cares, do you understand me, you stupid loser fuck?  More than that, nobody is even fucking listening.”

I sit here, sucking my teeth, petulant.  I’m mad, yo.  Get me to a laughing academy, eh?  

And, smartly on cue, the spotty but expensive internet service provided by a duopoly headed by the highest paid CEO in the world, winks out.   God bless.

 

 

[1] Apologies to any loving, consensual practitioners of anal intercourse out there.  I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s sexual preference, I just get tired of using “motherfucker” to describe these ruthless motherfuckers.  “Cocksucker” is subject to the same offensive limitations as ass-dicker.  What a fucked up world… I suppose men who behave like the genteel “Planters” of old who raped their slaves for fun and profit are best described as what they are, motherfuckers.  Keep it simple.

[2] On the second of those pages, Taibbi writes:

It was a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale.  Big banks took great masses of straw (i.e., the risky home loans of the poor, undocumented and unemployed) and spun it, factory style, into gold (i.e., AAA-rated securities).   They used a technique called securitization that allowed banks and mortgage lenders to take vast pools of home loans belonging to underemployed janitors and immigrants and magically convert them into investments that were ostensibly as safe as Microsoft corporate bonds or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg, but more lucrative than either.

Then we have this “fun fact” about the robust federal investigation into the causes of this great fraud, from page 407.  Try to read it without clenching your jaws after the punchline:

Fun fact:  When the economy crashed in 2008, the federal government formed an investigatory group to look into the causes.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee was given a budget of $9.8.  Committee chairman Phil Angelides acidly noted that this was “roughly one-seventh of the budget of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

Meanwhile, that same year the federal drug enforcement budget leaped from $13.275 billion to $15.278 billion.  That meant that just the increase in the national drug enforcement budget for the year of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression was roughly two hundred times the size of the budget for the sole executive branch effort at formally investigating the causes of financial corruption.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Last night I was making a bookmark for a friend I promised months ago I’d send some bookmarks to.  I’d made them months back.  A few were nice, but I’ve mislaid them here in the quivering paper quicksand in this house of constantly shifting stacks of paper.   Most had gibberish writing on them, among the colors and drawings.  I decided to use my fancy Namiki Falcon to inscribe more meaningful words on the new bookmarks.  I made one with the Seven Deadly Sins on it, for handy reference. [1]    

Pride
Greed (avarice)
Lust
Envy (jealousy, covetousness)
Gluttony
Wrath (anger)
Sloth (laziness)

Reading the list I had a minor revelation.  Below the sins I wrote “7 for 7, impressive!”

I don’t have to say any more than that, I think.  Except perhaps to state the obvious, what is lacking in someone who exhibits all seven of these bad traits.

Pride keeps a person thinking they are more important than everybody else, removes empathy.

Lust turns other people into mere vessels for gratification, removes mutuality, makes the objects of lust disposable.

Greed speaks for itself, it places the desires of the self about all else.

Envy, as corrosive an emotion as there is, is an enemy of peace and driver of malice, it keeps bitterness and ill-will simmering.

Gluttony means you will covet and steal someone else’s portion to overfeed yourself.

Wrath is the same as just being mad, fucking nuts — it is the opposite of prudence, if you think about it, since an angry person literally cannot think straight.

Sloth may be the slipperiest sin.   It means you are perpetually too lazy to do the hard work that needs to be done.

Seven for seven! You’ve got to hand it to the motherfucker.   Every cardinal sin on the list and the pious Christian right loves him.  Now that is a unique species of fucking genius!

20180518_005809 (1).jpg

 

 

[1]   The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings. … These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one’s natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one’s desire to eat).   source

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

As we walk through this world of darkness certain things become clear if we live long enough.  It is better to be mild with upset people whenever possible.   Particularly when confronted by someone who is angry, it is best to remain calm, keep your eye on defusing rather than escalating anger.   It’s not easy, and not always possible, but is generally a better way to walk through a violent place than flipping the bird at every one of the many angry, deserving jerks you will encounter here.

Then there is the calculated use of strategically applied reasonableness to attain a desired goal.  Not exactly the same thing as described above, but it’s a smart play. Interim CIA director Gina Haspel, who repeatedly denied the incendiary charge that stripping prisoners naked, freezing or overheating their cages, slamming them against walls, depriving them of sleep for days on end, blasting deafening music, making them engage in forced mock sex (for the cameras), using electrodes, stress positions, hanging with feet barely touching the ground, other fear and terror inducing techniques, amount to torture, backed off ever so slightly in her denials of government wrongdoing.  

These things were all perfectly legal when the CIA did them, Gina Haspel insisted repeatedly, if not 100% uncontroversially, during her confirmation hearing.  “Bloody Gina,” by all reports, was pretty gung-ho about the new freedom to roughly interrogate granted by the top secret Torture Memo[1]  and the $80,000,000 manual of best arguably non-torture practices painstakingly laid out by two patriotic American psychologist/torture tutors, Jessen and Mitchell.  To my knowledge she did not deny that she destroyed evidence of torture conducted under her watch at a “black site” in Thailand.

It was going to be a tight vote for the president’s nominee for CIA director, Ms. Haspel and her allies realized.  So she wrote a heartfelt letter to the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner.  The magic words:

While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the C.I.A. should have undertaken.

source

It seems to have done the trick, precatory (non-legally binding — she promises nothing, , admits nada) language and all.   She should now, with Mark Warner’s vote and a couple of others, have enough votes today to become America’s Next Top Spook.   It is petty, I know, to parse such sincere words as though they were crafted with the help of a lawyer and other partisan hacks, but I can’t help but note just a couple of things.   After-the-fact snideness is about all we get to exercise, much of the time, here in our great, participatory democracy.

I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls

It’s a nitpick, but I love use use of the word “that” to refer to those who insisted torture was legal.  “That,” while acceptable as a reference to a person, is also exclusively used to refer to animals and inanimate objects; “who” is exclusively used for people.   A telltale slip.  Nothing to see here.  Yes, OK, Dick Cheney was a bit of an inanimate object, as were the steely men who made “these hard calls”.   Kind of like a corporate “person”, not something you’d want watching your back in a fox hole, or babysitting for your kids, or meeting in a dark alley.

I also love the principled refusal to condemn the architects of the recent American torture program.  You go!

and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected

So Gina Haspel is sticking to her guns, a woman of principle!  In contrast to the reasoned opinion of every intelligence expert I’ve ever heard on the subject, she is suggesting that torture works.   She will not say it’s not a damned good way to get evil fucks to give up valuable intelligence.   Nope.  The regrettable part, to Haspel and her higher morality, is that it makes us look bad to be secretly doing things that, when leaked, make us look like monsters no better than the people we are torturing, er, interrogating in an enhanced, perfectly legal, or at the very least arguably legal, manner.

Since we are good, and evil people, or people we suspect may be evil, are evil, or quite possibly evil in the case of mere suspects, well, our American secret agents hold themselves to a much higher moral standard than standard morality requires. You see, we only secretly torture us some folks to preserve our higher moral values.  

It is important to grasp this distinction.  Only then can you understand why our highly principled UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, walks out when the Palestinian delegation complains about the fog of tear gas rained from Israeli drones and the dozens of demonstrators killed and many hundreds wounded on the Gaza border with Israel. The NY Times headline today refers to “scores” of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the last two days.  Typical liberal crap– “scores,” while technically accurate, suggests way more than a mere sixty or so, eh, Nikki?

US ambassador Haley defended Israel’s amazing “restraint” in killing and maiming so few of the people who publicly massed to openly hate their freedom.  No other country, she insisted, could have behaved with more restraint.  Then she got up and left as the Palestinian representative began to speak.   The perfect way to show the world how much America cares, how willing we always are to listen.  How much more moral we are than those who self-righteously, hypocritically, attack our higher morality.

“Just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go dow-own,
the medicine go down,
just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down
in the most delightful way!”

 

[1]    Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.”     source

U.S.A.!! U.S.A.!!!!

I wish I could remember my father’s exact arch remark every time something shameful was revealed about our country and its people.  He said it the same way each time.   “Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?” may have been it, though it could also have been “Makes you glad to be an American….”    Words to that effect.   I heard him say it many times, but, sadly, I can’t be sure which words composed the exact phrase.

I’m thinking of this because my sister alerted me to an imagination beggaring “informercial” she’d seen on TV.   While I was talking to her I found the two minute video ad, which I pass on to you without further comment.  Except to say, order your’s today, supplies are limited — and satire is now officially dead in America.

 

 

Thank You, Amy

Democracy Now! opens today’s headlines with the 25 [1] Palestinians killed, and over a thousand wounded, by Israeli bullets yesterday.  The Palestinians are protesting the U.S. Embassy being moved to Jerusalem, on the day Ivanka and Jared land in Israel for a ceremony opening the new embassy.   Jared will get right back to work on Middle East peace, one of several important tasks he’s been given by President America’s Got A Complete  Asshole.  The protesters are massing by the highly fortified border between Gaza and Israel, where they are also contending with tear gas, dropped from Israeli drones over Gaza.   Meanwhile, right wing fanatics applaud the Israeli violence as moral and just, or at the very least, necessary.

We are used to this America RIGHT OR WRONG stance from years of black-and-white thinkers defending atrocities.  “If we committed atrocities– and I say IF, because we are basically good and our enemies are evil— they WERE FOR A VERY GOOD FUCKING REASON!   Look how evil those fucks we ‘tortured’, threw out of helicopters, burned, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, shoved feeding tubes up their assholes— only evil can fight evil.   Like you never had a fucking evil thought, you self-righteous piece of shit!  Go live in Roosha, boy, if you hate our freedom so much”

As I walked into a concert for peace the other night, Arab and Jewish Israelis, Arab and Jewish Palestinians, showing how to make beautiful music across bitter and deadly historic disagreements, there was a small knot of protesters outside the venue.    They were chanting that the synagogue where the concert was being held was anti-Semitic.  They chanted some catchy little rhyme about hate.  

I walked over to them, and learned that they feel that since one of the groups sponsoring the concert, New Israel Fund, is apparently against the proposed U.S. law that would make it a felony to support BDS, Boycott, Divest, Sanction and that, therefore, the concert was propaganda for haters of Israel, self-hating Jews, etc..   There was really no talking to them about the issues involved.   Arab lives simply don’t matter to these zealots, anyone questioning Israel’s right to enact any policies whatsoever are the moral equivalent of Nazis.

Those who hate Israel are able to make certain apt comparisons between Israel’s state policies under Netanyahu and those of the NSDAP in Germany, the group history remembers as the Nazis.  There is collective punishment.  One member of your village takes a shot at one of us and we raze all the houses on the block.   There is a casualness about deadly violence directed at the people being occupied.   Settlers and occupying soldiers have a right to shoot Arabs who hate them in a provocative way.  It’s like here, the way racists think of angry blacks.  They’re scary and who can blame you if you flinch sometimes and shoot one?   They want to kill you, so go ahead and shoot them before they do. 

I don’t hate Israel, not at all.  As an idea, as an ideal, as a reality, Israel is very important to me as a Jew, particularly in a world where anti-Semitism is on the rise, along with all kinds of racism.  That said, the current governing coalition in Israel, with its long tactic of the Iron Fist, the abandonment of Jewish morality about helping the weak, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, etc. (notably not about protecting Jews at the expense of everyone else) is the Israeli equivalent of Trump’s America.  There is the same level of nuance, of empathy, of vision of the future.

Israel, right or wrong.  USA!   USA!!!!   It cannot be, though it very often is, that creatures with such simplistic views carry the day.  These things are complicated, you will say, there are millions of Palestinians, in camps, generation on generation of hopeless rage.   You solve the problem by being strong, making sure your iron fist can crush whatever comes, at whatever cost is necessary.   This is a recipe for a self-perpetuating eternal war.  It’s like The War On Terror or the War on Drugs.  These zero-sum policies are moronic non-solutions to real, pressing human problems.

“Duh, if we, uh, kill all the terrorists, and all the drug dealers, and all the people who think the terrorists might have legitimate grievances, and all the people who buy the drugs from the drug dealers, well— eventually these evil fucks will get the point.  We will kill all of them, and done.  Is that simple enough for you?”    Very much simple enough, yes.  The only problem is that imbecilic, violent “solutions” only create more despair, violence, motive for retaliation, hopelessness, rage, killing. 

Aside from that, it’s the best possible way to deal with a complicated problem– kill all the fuckers who complain too loudly.  You’d want that done to you, if you had legitimate grievances, despair, rage, hopelessness.  Isn’t that true?

 

[1] by the following day the numbers were 61 Palestinians dead and 2,700 wounded, as reported by Democracy Now!    Reports vary widely:  

Gaza protests – as it happened: Two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in second day of deadly violence      The Independent · 20 mins ago       source
Gaza braces for protests and funerals a day after at least 58 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops      Telegraph.co.uk · 14 hours ago    source
Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Border as U.S. Embassy Opens in Jerusalem
New York Times · 18 hours ago
Dozens of Palestinians killed in Gaza clashes as US Embassy opens
CNN · 1 day ago