I gave an example, in yesterday’s post, of how much anger can be put into a few paragraphs of snappy prose.   It detracted from the larger idea of that post on understanding and learning to overcome angry reactions, and so I severed that part of what I posted yesterday and am re-writing it here, as an example of how anger and fear (and obfuscation by those who profit from those things)  play an outsized role in human affairs, in politics, in why solving a terrible problem can be made to seem overwhelmingly complex.  

And to give myself the opportunity to imagine Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association, shot through the voice box with a perfectly placed small caliber bullet as he is spouting his shit about how guns don’t kill people and only lying fucking Jew agitators like sneaky unAmerican Saul Alinsky could even claim that they do.

America leads the First World in gun violence by a very healthy margin.  In America, our gun homicide numbers are off the world chart for similarly wealthy nations (some very poor countries have higher per capita gun murder numbers than we do, but we’re working on that).   Year after year we are alone as number one in death by gun among the high-income countries, by a gigantic margin.  We lead the industrialized world in the same Bunyanesque way that the year Babe Ruth first shattered his own home run record he hit more home runs than any other team in the American League [1].

Those who love guns, and those who profit handsomely from their unfettered sale, are, eh, up in arms about the unfairness of including the vast number of American gun suicides in the U.S. statistics of annual gun deaths.   Suicide by method other than gun is a shaky proposition, the success rate is surprisingly low.   Suicide by gun has an 82% success rate.   In contrast, overdose and poisoning have a less than 2% chance of success (1 in 50) of killing the would-be suicide.  Don’t take my word for it, here’s a Harvard study.

It’s unfair to lump gun suicide and gun homicide together, claims the NRA, because including the thousands of desperate losers who kill themselves every year with guns artificially inflates the gun death numbers to make it look like we have a plague of gun violence in America, when actually it is only mentally ill people who misuse guns to kill themselves that make it falsely seem that way.  Less than half the total deaths are the murder of somebody else, (and many of those killings are justified, probably) argues the NRA, and so it’s misleading and very unfair to include in gun death statistics the deaths of those who kill themselves with a gun.  Also, very unfair to point out that the majority of suicide attempts are unsuccessful while the vast majority of gun suicide attempts are successful.

We can bat statistics back and forth, as we do, but every time there is a slaughter by a deranged white man with a military assault rifle, usually acquired legally, the sickening public conversation is identical.   A majority of Americans want restrictions on the number of mass killing assault weapons legally available to violent men.  Congress always votes any restriction on gun ownership down.

The sanctity of gun ownership, extending to assault weapons capable of spraying deadly fire over a large area, was established not that long ago by a convoluted Supreme Court ruling in which the brilliant, evil Antonin Scalia construed an absolute right of individuals to own guns from his learned reading of the Second Amendment, which begins:  A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state…  Scalia took from this language the intent of the framers to create an unassailable, constitutionally guaranteed right of every individual American to keep and bear whatever kind of arms he wants.   The NRA has the Second Amendment as its catchphrase, but, full-disclosure, they only use the dependent clause.  Their version reads simply, like the version Scalia endorsed:  The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.  

Guns are seen as the ultimate personal protection by many Americans.  They feel they need protection from intruders, lawless thugs, even, God forbid, a government run by an illegitimate African Muslim intent on prying their guns from their cold dead hands.  It is fear that makes Americans crave powerful weaponry to keep themselves safe, anger and fear that makes them reach for their guns.   It’s as if these patriots don’t realize how easily a truly repressive government could send a Hellfire missile, launched out of a drone, to take out you and your ten well-armed buddies making a stand for the sacred Second Amendment with your AR-15s, even if you each had a hundred high capacity clips and a bump stock for each of those assault rifles. 

The National Rifle Association cries that it is unfair, unAmerican, yea, unChristian, to restrict the rights of an American to own any kind of gun he wants.  Guns are not the problem, says the NRA over and over.  The problem, according to the NRA, is that some people, a statistically tiny percentage of the tens of millions of responsible gun owners (who own the more than 300,000,000 privately held American guns), misuse guns to sometimes do unspeakable things, like shoot their mother in the face and go to the local kindergarten and spray the classroom walls with the blood of young children.  The problem is not guns.  The problems is that fucking liberals, fucking clueless about the violence we are all up against, constantly try to “exploit tragedy for political gain”.  It’s not the fucking guns that are the problem, it’s the fucking misguided bleeding hearts.

source

Everybody who goes somewhere with a gun intent on killing as many people as he can is always in a rage.   He is mad.  He can’t think straight.  We are the only wealthy democracy in the world whose lawmakers will not address this homicidal madness.  We easily lead the rest of the high-income world combined in annual gun murders, even leaving out the thousands of suicides.  After every massacre those who profit from gun sales tell us it is not time to talk about keeping guns out of the hands of violent maniacs, out of respect for the poor families of the victims of the random violent maniac.

It is easy for the average citizen to get mad about this NRA rope-a-dope bullshit that the NRA and its generously paid minions do every single time after a mass killing, though anger by itself is not very effective for fighting back.   Propaganda, mass media spin, a powerful political machine and massive campaign contributions work better in this particular debate, apparently.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre had this typically defensive comment about so-called American gun violence, in the aftermath of the most recent mass shooting in an American school, the slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where one severely disturbed asshole with a semi-automatic weapon (never used in hunting or conceived of by Scalia’s infallible Founding Fathers) killed seventeen while wounding everyone else at the school:

“As usual, the opportunists have wasted not one second to exploit tragedy for political gain.  Saul Alinsky would have been proud, the break back speed of calls for more gun control laws and the breathless national media eager to smear the NRA”.

What a whining whore LaPierre is, him and his almost $1,000,000 annual salary as the chief spokesman for the freedom of some Americans to kill other Americans, or themselves, with guns.   I thought dropping the name of that Jewish idealist and community organizer in there, as symbol of vicious haters of our God-given American freedom, was a very nice touch and a cool dog whistle to his red meat eating base.  Much better than openly calling all of us who want an end to America’s violent gun culture a bunch of sneaky fucking America hating Jews, in my opinion.

I wonder how old Wayne would feel if somebody shot him in his smug fucking face, or one of his kids (if any) in theirs.

Better still, what if the shot didn’t kill Wayne, just destroyed his larynx, a surgical shot from the side, with a small caliber gun, just rendering him permanently incapable of speech, shutting him the fuck up?  There’d be a tad of good old American frontier justice in that, would there not?

There is no simple end game for gun violence in a country like ours, with as many guns as citizens (some own 100 guns, many own no guns).   For starters, instead of an extremist-imposed national right to concealed carry of hand guns even in places that have banned them, I’d like to see a ban on guns in America, except for traditional weapons for hunters.  I’m not a hunter, but I know a few who are decent, law-abiding citizens, responsible gun users — and staunch environmentalists.  To enforce the gun ban I’d impose mandatory prison time on those insisting on their phantom Scalia-created right to own and wield the most powerful legally available military assault weapons and hand guns, especially semi-automatic ones.  

Well, since that ban won’t ever happen in a competitive, commercial nation where the gun lobby is so powerful, I guess I’d settle for fucking Wayne LaPierre’s voice box being ventilated by a good shot with a precise knowledge of human anatomy.   We should all remain aware, if that terrible thing ever happens, that it won’t be the gun that renders LaPierre speechless, it will be a bad guy with a gun, no matter how good his intentions may be.

(Angry enough for yuh?  Ahimsa is sometimes a wrestling match with killer passions.   The hardest part of trying to be truly non-harming is having to listen to supremely certain motherfuckers like Wayne LaPierre and other constantly whining victims of the Liberal Conspiracy Against Real American Values.)

[1] there was one NL team in 1920 whose players combined to hit more home runs than Ruth that year.  The Philadelphia Phillies, led by a player who hit 15 home runs and one who hit 14 (nobody else in double figures, though outfielder Casey Stengel added a career high 9), hit 64, as a team, to Ruth’s 54.  No other major league team equalled Mr. Ruth’s home run total in 1920.

barring gun purchases by people on the terrorist no-fly list

You would not think something like this would be controversial in a nation that girds itself against terrorist attacks and has long been ravaged by regular mass shootings, at schools, workplaces, movies, malls.   You would not think something like this would be a partisan issue, anywhere.   If the government has the right to maintain a list of people it suspects of terrorist ties, what theory ensures the right of these possible terrorists to have and to hold the most deadly guns the law allows?

Is it just me?  I know back in the day a well-regulated state militia was essential for putting down slave revolts.  I am well aware of the mythical American hero, the unblinking rugged individual putting his life on the line without a shiver, standing in the center of dusty Main Street, facing down evil with a Colt 45.   I get that one man with a gun, with no hesitation to kill, has always been the equal of several more powerful men with legitimate grievances.   I understand the outsized role the gun has played in American history, and how the gun has been romanticized and fetishized.

What is controversial about:  barring gun purchases by people on the terrorist no-fly list?   Maybe fucking Wayne LaPierre can explain that to me and my stymied countrymen.

Years back, when I was studying the Nazi rise to power in Germany (which is what my work in history often boiled down to) I found and read Mr. Hitler’s famous pages about how essential galvanizing propaganda is to any great cause.   Propaganda, he pointed out in a surprisingly coherent section of his hastily dictated Mein Kampf, must enflame the passions of its audience.   For that reason Hitler applauded the ruthless, lying propaganda of the Allies in World War One which made Allied soldiers righteously hate the Germans.  Propaganda must arouse strong feelings and inspire fervent faith in the rightness of the cause.

That’s propaganda in a nutshell.   

Back in the days before the internet, when research was conducted in libraries, I pulled down and read through books that referred to other books.  You would consult the bibliographies, jot down the titles and authors of other books that promised to deal more directly with the exact question you wanted to grapple with.   In one such book I found that the word “propaganda” was first used by a Pope who decided to use the mass media of the day to propagate the faith.   If you were so inclined, you could find the encapsulated story, the exact year, the name of the Pope and all that, in seconds, by saying a few words into your phone.  [1]

Pope Gregory XV was late to the party.   The first to arrive was a highly principled monk named Martin Luther, who propagated his faith almost a hundred years before Pope Gregory XV coined the phrase.   I saw a documentary about the life of Martin Luther recently that opened my eyes.   I’d read quotes of Luther’s over the years about the Christian duty of obedience to rulers that made him sound like an authoritarian type.  He’d stated that the duty to obey one’s masters was clear because God had not put a fox tail in the hands of the rulers, but a knout.  Here is what a knout looks like:

I also knew him as something of a famous anti-Semite [2].  I watched the biographical movie with great interest, it was very well-done.  Here is what I gleaned.

Young Martin Luther studied law.  His father wanted him to become a lawyer, to assist him with his business troubles.   At some point the Lord called Martin Luther and he abandoned his legal studies.  His father, feeling betrayed and bereft of the badly needed brilliant legal counsel his son should have provided him, was furious.   Martin Luther felt intense guilt over his decision to abandon his father.  Luther did what any devout Christian monk with a troubled conscience would do, he mortified his flesh, flogged himself, fasted for days, wore a hair shirt, burdened himself with heavy chains, and he prayed.   One assumes that none of this made a favorable impression on his disappointed father.

Martin Luther took a principled stand against the corruptions of the Catholic church of his day.   It burned him, for example, that rich people could buy “indulgences” which exempted them from penance for certain types of sins.   He preached against these corrupt practices and eventually was given the choice of publicly recanting his blasphemies or facing excommunication, which sometimes came with a gruesome execution.  He braved the consequences, stuck to his principles, and his faith in God, and was not flayed or burned to death by the Church.

He had begun writing about his beliefs, and apparently had a genius for it.  Gutenberg’s new printing press, invented 43 years before Luther’s birth, would become the vehicle for propagating Martin Luther’s writings.  The filmmakers suggested that it was the popularity of his writings, mass distributed in the manner of sixteenth century Europe, that may have saved the heretic Luther from gristly death at the time of his excommunication.  The world’s first best-selling author, writing powerfully on matters of conscience, Christ, and the relation of humans and God, he was simply too popular, too loved by many in the rabble, for local authorities to burn at the stake.  The filmmakers didn’t mention it, but it probably didn’t hurt that he spoke with authority of the rabble’s duty to obey those who wielded the knout.

We are told that Luther preached a message of liberation to the masses that millions of hardworking Christians were delighted to hear.  You pray directly to God, not through a paid, corrupt, intermediary.  A poor man has the same access to his Creator as a baron or a king.  You don’t need a priest to interpret what God expects of you, read God’s words for yourself, in your own language.  Luther himself translated the scriptures into the vernacular. 

All over Europe people would read his writings and rush to set more copies in print, churn them out on the printing press, the Twitter or Facebook of its day.  Luther himself was shocked at how quickly his writings spread.  He was, apparently, an inspirational writer who wrote things like:

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

So, but for the invention of the printing press, which spread Luther’s ideas to every corner of Christiandom, who knows if there would have been a Protestant reformation?  It certainly would not have gotten underway during Luther’s lifetime, anyway.

Propaganda can be as tricky to identify as pornography.  It can be slippery to describe.  People of good faith may differ on what is pure manipulative propaganda and what is good information to base your decisions on, but we can all say, as a famous Supreme Court justice wrote in a famous ruling on pornography, “I know it when I see it”.  Leaving aside, of course, as in any discussion of The War on Terror, the jarring fact that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.  

The world is complicated.  Propaganda makes it easy to understand.  Vote for me and I’ll set you free.  Ball of confusion, that’s what the world is today. [3].

[1]  today any snot-nosed bastard can come off like an authoritative genius, the accumulated knowledge of the world one click, or voice command, away:

The term “propaganda” apparently first came into common use in Europe as a result of the missionary activities of the Catholic church. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV created in Rome the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

[2]  The filmmakers took some trouble to explain the unfortunate strains of anti-Semitism in Luther’s later writings.  It appears he expected the Jews, once the corruptions of the Pope’s church were cleared away, to flock en masse to his perfected version of Christianity.  He’d been quite nice to the Jews in the beginning, in expectation of welcoming them as brothers and sisters in Christ.  The Jews, for their part, stubbornly refused to give up their ancient religion and convert to Luther’s.   After that, understandably, Luther had little use for the Jews and concluded there was no saving them.   He began to write mean things about them, but, the filmmakers suggested, you shouldn’t really hold those unfortunate writings against him.

[3]    Ball of Confusion   (1970)     The Temptations

Often you can trace a line from what’s happening now, back through a series of events that made it not only possible, but, in hindsight, inevitable that the things taking place now would be taking place.  Along the way the steps may be indiscernible, although looking back afterwards, the patterns often seem hard not to see.  Some sense of history, cause and effect, is important for avoiding the worst of our past collective mistakes.

One trouble with tracing these lines, how we got from point A to point W, is that the world of human affairs is as complicated as the cellular and sub-cellular maze of the human body.   Even though  science has solved many terrible puzzles in the case of the human body, it is still a bit hazy about a lot of things that go on in and among our intricate, interactive body systems. 

I am being treated, for example, for an idiopathic kidney disease.  “Idiopathic” means cause unknown.  Western medicine doesn’t know how people get this disease.  We know that shooting certain chemicals at it sometimes cures it, or puts it into remission.  We don’t know exactly how this works, but it often does.  We don’t keep data on the percentages of cure, remission and failure, because… I don’t know, patients might not want to spend $88,000 for a drug that only works, say, 26% or 18% of the time.  There is no point giving this depressing number, whatever it might be.  You want the cure?  Yes or no.

I am writing here about history and our culture’s consistent failure to make thoughtful connections as events unfold.  Add to the complication of human affairs the essential roles of irrationality, chance, short-sighted greed, basic stupidity.   Many reason, not unreasonably, that since there seems to be so little an individual can do about this gigantic unfolding, there is no reason to get bent out of shape about it. 

Until, to the shock of perhaps 65% of the country, we get a boastful, angry, insecure, impulsive con-man as our president.  On his desk, the button to instantly kill millions of people.  

“How can Americans be so fucking stupid?” cry a chorus of hand-wringers from all over the political spectrum, gnashing their collective teeth.   

I don’t purport to answer that question.  I would just like to trace a few points, to show that this president, while undeniably unusual as a personality, is not a complete outlier as president.  He is continuing the work of his predecessors, including some of the ongoing work of the beloved champion of freedom and justice, Mr. Obama, and his equally gifted, equally compelled by the tides of history, predecessor, William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton.  Not to mention, of course, Ronald Reagan and the presidents Bush, father and son and every other previous chief executive.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Risen, now working at The Intercept, reveals some key details of how we got to this era of “Fake News” in his recent long article about the seven years’ long government prosecution of him (by Bush and Obama) for writing about the government’s massive, illegal, top secret surveillance program, the one that Edward Snowden eventually revealed the details of.   Risen’s excellent, thought-provoking article is here.   Risen writes:

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.

Risen’s federal prosecution began during the second term of the Bush Administration.   Risen had been reporting for the New York Times when he learned, from sources within the CIA, of the government’s illegal secret domestic surveillance program, being conducted by the NSA.  He began writing about it during the lead up to the Bush-Kerry presidential contest of 2004.   

The Bush administration requested that the New York Times not publish this detailed account of the top secret program. The details, they argued, if revealed, would undermine U.S. prosecution of the existential War on Terror.   Bush himself eventually told Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger that he would have “blood on his hands” if the Times published the story, because the secret program was so effectively squashing terrorism.

The hierarchy of the Grey Lady, ever the sober, measured, compliant, even-handed journal of record (of our beloved status quo), that genteel colleague of the powerful, agreed to keep Risen’s story out of the paper, and did so for a year.   After all, revelations of widespread illegality by the Bush Administration, like conscience curdling reports on its unaccountable, secret torture program [1] and false causus belli for the war in Iraq, would only be cynically exploited by their political enemies in the upcoming election. 

The Times held the story as the 2004 election campaign wrapped up, as the votes were cast and counted.  Risen, in frustration, had been writing a book about some of the Bush administration’s excesses in the so-called “War on Terror”.  It contained a chapter detailing the routine illegal surveillance of millions of Americans. 

The Times eventually reported Risen’s NSA surveillance story, just before Risen’s book was released.  Bush and Cheney, meanwhile, had won the 2004 election.  Risen and Eric Lichtblau, his co-reporter on the NSA surveillance stories, won Pulitzer Prizes for their work.  The Bush/Cheney Department of Justice set about investigating and prosecuting James Risen in connection with his use of leaked classified material.

Risen writes in his Intercept article of the Valerie Plame case, and how it demonstrated to the Executive branch that, given the right optics, the public would not get excited about courts ruling the First Amendment doesn’t apply to journalists, that journalists could be forced to reveal the identities of their anonymous sources who had leaked sensitive information and that the court had a right to hold reporters in contempt, and lock them up, for refusing.   New York Times reporter Judith Miller actually went to jail after being found in contempt of court for refusing to identify a confidential source in the Plame case.   (Miller, one could argue, deserved to be locked up for being Cheney’s ambitious, credulous shill and writing his bullshit in article after front page article for the NY Times, though Risen, gallantly, doesn’t mention that.) 

Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent, working to monitor loose nukes, whose husband, Joe Wilson, publicly disputed what turned out to be straight up lies by the Bush Administration about Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD program.   In apparent fury over Wilson’s Op Ed piece, someone in the Bush Administration revealed Plame’s secret identity. 

It was a peevish, rash, rage-driven reaction worthy of President Trump himself.   President George W. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of the revelation that someone in his administration had “outed” a covert CIA agent, vowed that if anyone in his administration had committed this treasonous act they would be punished to the fullest extent of the law.   

Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was, almost certainly, the source of the leak.  Cheney’s assistant, “Scooter” Libby, later took the fall for ‘obstruction of justice’ for lying to cover up the source of the leak and nobody was ever punished for the act itself.   Cheney, as evil a motherfucker as this sad world has ever seen, was later reportedly furious when Bush commuted Libby’s sentence instead of pardoning him outright. 

Risen points out that the opposition to Bush and Cheney led many to applaud Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s no holds barred investigation of the leak, including the jailing of Judith Miller for refusing to divulge her source in reporting the story. Few saw at the time, Risen writes, the lesson those in power would draw from this clampdown on freedom of the press. 

Obama went just as hard against Risen as Bush and Cheney had.  Obama was infamously aggressive toward leakers and journalists who revealed inconvenient truths.  He used Woodrow Wilson’s harsh 1917 Espionage Act, with its death penalty and no defense regarding intent, against more citizens than all previous administrations combined.   Risen writes of Obama’s legacy for freedom of the press in the federal court that covers Maryland and Washington, D.C.:

That debate [Obama DOJ’s position that ‘reporter’s privilege’ was not a defense against the reporter being forced to testify in a criminal case — overturning the ruling of the trial judge] became moot in 2014, when the Supreme Court refused to take up the case. That allowed the appeals court ruling to stand, leaving the legal destruction of a reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit as Obama’s First Amendment legacy.      source

The things that go on at the highest levels of power are often unspeakable.  The people at the top are insulated by many levels of bureaucracy, and, in most cases, protect each other.   There are plenty of fall guys below to take the heat, when necessary.   Why bring Rumsfeld or Cheney into a legal discussion of the American torture program, or the White House lawyers who twisted language and decency to argue that torture was fine, as long as we were torturing terrorists (or even the two psychologists paid $81,000,000 to design the torture program, for that matter)  when a couple of low level, selfie-snapping grunts, acting on orders traceable directly to Rumsfeld and Cheney, can be prosecuted and jailed for participating in the torture program at a notorious Iraqi prison?   Justice done.  Case closed.

When it was discovered that General David Petraeus had revealed a large trove of sensitive, classified information to his mistress/biographer, he was not prosecuted.   He was forced to resign from his government post and went, unmolested, into an extremely well-paid position in the private sector.    Even as journalists were increasingly threatened for revealing sensitive leaked information that embarrassed the Executive branch or could compromise the lucrative interests of war profiteers.

I am extremely vexed by habitual, deliberate obfuscation, in private life as well as public life.  The opposite — honest openness —  is frequently called ‘transparency’.   It is impossible to discuss anything intelligently without transparency.  Transparency is increasingly curtailed when frank and open dialogue is undesirable for any reason.  A lack of transparency is essential for the continued operation of truly unspeakable practices.

A transparent government operates by law, laws which have been publicly debated and passed, in adjusted form, by our elected representatives, who cast yays and nays in our names.  That is the theory of representative democracy, anyway.  Corners are often cut, of course, as powerful monied forces exert pressure on campaign donor-dependent lawmakers to cut deals advantageous to their mutual financial interests.  The key to cutting these corners is keeping unpopular details secret until after the law is passed and there is nothing the average citizen can say or do about it. 

As was done with the recent 51-49 party-line Republican Tax law.   As had been done by Mr. Obama with the TransPacific Partnership agreement, which no legislator was allowed to take notes of, photocopy or share with constituents before the “Fast Track” up-down “yay-nay” vote on approving its countless secret provisions.   As was done days after the attack of 9/11 with the massive and far-reaching Patriot Act.  Extended public debate on any of these bills would have had a dramatic impact on the final form of the proposed laws.   Which is the point of participatory democracy, so that no minority (or silent, powerless majority, for that matter) gets screwed too vigorously by their elected representatives.  Democratic decision making, which includes protections for minorities and the weak, is never supposed to be done by strict 51-49 majority rule.   Lack of information makes it easier to whip up the emotions of people who already feel overwhelmed and full of anxiety.  Turn up the anxiety enough and people will shrug at just about anything.

Journalism is our only way of being informed of the things being proposed and done in our names, of things being done to others acting in our names.   The flow of information we get via journalists has been severely curtailed by increasing corporate consolidation of the mass media.   Very few corporations now operate most of the mass media, the place where most Americans get their sketchy information about what is being done in their names.

The consolidated corporate media is a conspiracy of silence only in the sense that very wealthy media corporations have a common interest in keeping the machine running the way it brings in the most profit.  War and mayhem are always good for business, except when they are clandestine wars, as many today are, in the global War on Terror.   

The CEO of CBS corporation commented during the presidential campaign that while the candidacy of Donald Trump might raise some troubling issues, DJT was a goddamned cash cow and the station was making a shitload of money off the tireless tabloid extrovert’s ubiquity across mass media.  Viewers were drawn irresistibly to the freak show of his candidacy — we couldn’t help ourselves, he was that good.  Trump stories were great for ratings and advertising revenues.  Trump had made his name in the tabloids.

There are good reasons to keep shameful things secret.  You can trace secret, evil shit done in our names going back as far as you’d like to go in the history of our great republic.  From the wink and two nods in the Constitution that ensured the rights of slaveholders would be protected by law in perpetuity, to the “Removal” of the “Indians” under our laws, to unprovoked wars of naked conquest against Mexico, against Spain, to the two unnecessary atom bombs dropped on Japan, down through the years to the secret overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Iran, Chile, the Congo, who knows how many other places.  COINTELPRO, a long time FBI program to intimidate, marginalize and imprison suspected American dissidents exercising their First Amendment rights, was only revealed when activists broke into a local FBI office and stole files that proved its existence.   The sensational patriotic propaganda following the “friendly fire” death of American hero Pat Tillman (only debunked years later due to the tireless courage and persistence of his family) is another example of lies shoved directly down the throats of Americans kept in the dark by a cynical, goal oriented administration.  The recent examples are too many to detail here.

My point:  you cannot productively look at the mess we are in now without examining the many concrete steps that led us inexorably to the mess we are in now.   When chickens come home to roost, as the cancerous, zombie chickens of our failure to heed the small steps toward the world of shit we now find ourselves in have, well… what can we say?

“Yo, we, uh, we didn’t fucking know?   Wait … wasn’t Obama supposed to reverse all this shit?”   

Obama, in one instance when he wasn’t misusing his great talents, told us himself that we would have to push him to do the things we needed him to do.   Too many organized, disciplined, well-funded people hated him for much of the hope and change he promised to work, maybe, but, still, he had a good point.   

It’s on us.  In the end, it is always on us.  How we do it is a difficult question, but it is a question that is on each of us to do our part to answer.

[1] How many Americans today remember the horrifying case of Maher Arar, Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, detained at JFK airport early in the War on Terror?  Pulled off an airport line where he was waiting with his family, he was locked up and interrogated for two weeks before his “extraordinary rendition” by CIA jet to Jordan en route to Syria, shackled, blindfolded, drugged, diapered and jump-suited.  He endured almost a year of torture at the hands of Syrian masters of torture before his eventual, long-delayed release.  No charges were ever brought against him.   

Maher Arar’s imprisonment without charges (not to mention his torture) was a clear violation of fundamental legal norms in the West dating back to the Magna Carta (1215 A.D.).  The Canadian government conducted an inquiry, heard from 85 witnesses, and exonerated Arar of any connection with terrorism.   

Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Arar for Canada’s role in what the prime minister described as his “terrible ordeal.” In January 2007, the federal government [of Canada] awarded Arar $10.5 million in compensation, and another $1 million to cover his legal costs.

“On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you, Monia Mazigh and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003,” Harper said. “I trust that, having arrived at a negotiated settlement, we have ensured that fair compensation will be paid to you and your family. I sincerely hope that these words and actions will assist you and your family in your efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in your lives.”  source

US courts threw Arar’s lawsuit out, citing “national security” reasons related to the ongoing, and endless, War on Terror.

One principle often cited in philosophical discussions of capital punishment is that it is better for many possibly guilty persons to escape punishment altogether than for one innocent person to be executed.   Ditto for torture, no? 

There is no doubt that many, many people — and many innocent people turned in for rewards, for grudges, by sloppy work, were tortured in our names.   “We tortured some [no more than a thousand or two -ed.] folks”, as our former president wanly admitted a few years ago, with impressive  maladroitness.