Mr. Hitler, one of a small, select group of abused children I love to hate, eventually came to believe it was the Jews, not his violent, enraged, authoritarian father, who had fucked him up.   Hitler blamed the Jews for betraying the glorious German army in November of 1918, the army that was never defeated on the battlefield but only by the “stab in the back”, Jews wielding their fiendish powers to force a victorious, superior army to surrender to their inferiors under humiliating terms.   There are klansmen who feel the same way about the end of the Civil War– that it was the goddamned Negroes… somehow… to blame, for all the horrific shit that followed the unjust loss in the South’s heroic war for control of their homeland, their genteel way of life.   Horrific shit that irrationally angry, out of control Blacks are still trying to blame the damn Whites for, according to the Klan.   These fanatical bigots blame the Blacks for forcing the bigots to intimidate and lynch them so they don’t run amok.   Animals!  Violent revenge is the only answer, scream those who dream only of violent revenge.

One of Hitler’s more perceptive followers, it may have been the club-footed Poisonous Dwarf, master of the casting couch Dr. Josef Goebbels, commented that if the Nazis were victorious they would be seen by future generations as all-time great statesmen, while if they lost the war they started they’d be regarded as history’s greatest criminals.  A smart way to put it, I think.   The third possibility never occurred to the fanatical fuck: we can lose the war, and be regarded as history’s most despicable criminals, and win the peace by influencing the next hundred years of history in profound ways unimaginable now as I execute my children, our dog, my wife and prepare to shoot myself in the mouth following the Fuhrer’s final divinely inspired (or mad — it is not our place to question) order.

After the war, many prominent Nazis were secretly recruited by our country’s new secret intelligence agency, now heading into a long Cold War, for their expertise in dealing with Communists.   These Nazis exerted a certain influence in their adopted country, on the ruthless calculations of the organizations they worked in, but it is more the working methods pioneered by the Nazis in their own country that I am thinking of.  

I will get back to the many common daily experiences in our modern world that are proofs of how profoundly the lessons of the pioneering Nazi media machine have influenced all sorts of commercial, corporate, political and military behaviors that affect all of us every day.  I will argue, for example, that corporate customer service, where you almost never get to speak to the supervisor who can actually do something for you, owes a lot to the Nazi model.  In that model the expendable individual is an afterthought, unless he’s privileged, in which case, you know, he must be helped.  It is the corporate imperative, the needs of the leader, that must always be served.  How these common corporate policies translate into increasing rage, powerlessness, dehumanization, a hopeless willingness to blow everything up, even if it means authoritarianism, is worth having a look at.  I’ll return to this main point in part two.

I am listening to a spirited reading of Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous account of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, published in 1963.  The reader, Wanda McCaddon, reads it wonderfully.   It feels like I am hearing the voice of the author herself, who is also a gifted and expressive reader of her own work.  It is hard to stop listening, it is endlessly fascinating, I love it.   I am falling hard for Ms. Arendt (1906-1975), who, quite apparently, didn’t give a rat’s ass who she offended in her quest for the deeper truths of Eichmann’s show trial.  

She shot from the hip, she was hip, she was brilliant, arch and sincere by turns, deeply read in the historical matters she discussed (a native German speaker she devoured primary sources — including the 3,500 page transcript of Eichmann’s pre-trail interviews, in German, and understood every word and nuance Eichmann and the Court, three German-Jewish judges, exchanged), she wrote beautifully, saying clearly whatever was on her mind, managing to offend everybody, and clearly seemed fine with that.  

One example:  in passing she notes that the anti-Semitic Eichmann had been required to read, and been impressed by, Zionist icon Theodore Herzl’s manifesto Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), the only book the mediocre, uncurious Eichmann had ever read, according to Arendt.  Google refers to the book as a pamphlet, which is even better.

She gives some credence to Eichmann’s claim that the “Final Solution” (kill all of them, especially the babies, the ghastly method arrived at and set forth at the top secret Wannsee Conference, once the previous solutions proved insufficient) was possibly not his preferred way of dealing with the Thousand Year Reich’s intractable Jewish problem.  Eichmann was personally very squeamish, had never killed anyone himself, couldn’t watch gassings or shootings when invited to by death camp commandants,  and hated the idea of mass murder, or so he insisted (Arendt seems to back him up on all but the last of these– he clearly had no problem with mass murder, whatever distaste to the contrary he might have expressed as his life hung in the balance).

The Nazi official initially tasked with getting all Jews to emigrate out of Germany, Eichmann spent a long time formulating various emigration plans.  His basic plan was to get all of the Jews out of Germany, out of German controlled territories, and send them to a Nazi-controlled Jewish State.  Madagascar was one place the Nazis  considered, just send 4-5 million fucking Jews there and let them fight it out with the 4 million fucking Africans already living there, all overseen by impartial Nazi overlords.  

Zionists were understandably outraged by Arendt’s tart suggestion (an ironic aside, clearly) that Eichmann had been, for all intents and purposes, a pragmatic Zionist. She had other unflattering things to say about Zionist leaders, some of whom made pragmatic deals with the Nazis during the war.  These leaders, naturally, preferred less conversation about those pragmatic deals.    Much of what people excoriated Arendt for (many of her most vocal detractors had apparently never read her book)  related to how cooly she seemed to approach the horrendous history she brilliantly outlined, how she used phrases like “grotesque silliness” to refer to some of Eichmann’s more asinine pronouncements, including the stream of cliches he spouted as the noose was placed on his neck.   Her book was not published in Israel, in Hebrew, until 35 years after it’s publication in the U.S.   

I can’t resist an Arendt-tinged thought:  Eichmann’s dream of a Nazi-controlled Jewish state… hmmm… tempting to opine about how, in an odd way, his dream may have come perversely true, at least as shown by the current state’s defense of its most controversial policies, policies that involve the indiscriminate murder of civilians and maintaining concentration camp conditions for many of the millions under their occupation.

What makes a Nazi type is blind obedience to power, a willingness to do whatever is required to show loyalty to your superiors, to advance the infallible leader’s program, and your own career. The Nazis had a word for it, fuhrerprinzip*,  the absolute duty to obey the orders of your supreme leader, orders that are always wise, just and beyond question.   If you are in the party inner circle, the SS, for example, you swear a blood oath of personal loyalty to the leader, loyalty to the death.  No national, moral or personal consideration is of higher value than serving your master with unwavering loyalty.  In fact, you’ve expressly agreed to die before putting anything above the Fuhrer’s commands.

There were, obviously, great rewards for those who climbed the Nazi hierarchy, distinguished themselves by their fanatical devotion to the Fuhrer.    There was not even a need for a highly enough placed Nazi to make any hard sacrifice of beloved things, even if those things were expressly forbidden by Nazi policy.  Hermann Goring, a bloated morphine addict, had a large collection of plundered, incredibly valuable “degenerate art,” art works explicitly banned from Germany.  Vice is fine, if you’re cool, and in a powerful enough post.  Fucking Eichmann had a Jewish mistress in Vienna, although “rassenschande” (“race disgrace”, an anti-miscegenation law like the ones here in the USA for decades) was a serious crime under Hitler.  Just because Nazi policy was at one point to execute homosexuals as degenerates doesn’t mean a high enough ranking Nazi with a taste for boys couldn’t have as many handsome, fit, willing young men as he could requisition.  It just had to be done discreetly.   The rules are always flexible at the top, in any hierarchy, particularly in a corrupt one.  The higher you go the fewer consequences you face, except, perhaps, if you lose the war and face trial for war crimes.  God, how much does that suck?

One looks in vain for a rational “ideology” in any totalitarian state.   The role of the citizen in an authoritarian regime is not to understand the changing whims of her superiors, or the ostensible reasons for them, in fact, the real reasons are rarely, if ever, revealed to citizens.  The citizen’s only duty is obedience to authority and for that reason commands are put in the simplest, most compelling terms.   The choice is obedience or severe punishment, often death. 

The roster of top Nazis, people with the arbitrary power of life and death over everybody under their authority,  is a Who’s Who of disturbingly mediocre and often disturbingly disturbed individuals.  Don’t look for consistency, or a coherent worldview in the Third Reich, outside of power and blind ambition.  Look for ambitious, morally flexible people twisted by a charismatic sociopath’s shabby revenge fantasy, thirstily chasing their dream of power and a chance to be a major player on the stage of world history.  How many followers would Mr. Hitler, the world’s most photographed man in his day, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938, a mega-celebrity in the pre-television age, eventually a super-villain to rival any,  have had on Twitter?   I shudder to think.  

Speaking of unwavering consistency in one’s iron-clad beliefs, we learn from Arendt that Hitler himself, history’s most virulent and prolifically mass murdering anti-Semite, had literally something like four hundred Jews (356, actually) he personally spared, for one reason or another.  I thought about this for a long time before coming to the obvious answer.   The reason Hitler exempted hundreds of Jews from his death sentence was the same reason he killed millions of other Jews– because he was insane.

Eichmann, when he was read into the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference, where he acted as secretary, taking the minutes of the secret meeting (which were, of course, destroyed) became officially designated a “bearer of secrets.”  This designation meant he had to strictly abide by strict Language Regulations, use only the Nazi sanctioned euphemistic language to refer to the secret mass-murder, words like sonderbehandlung (special treatment) instead of “expedited trip to the death camp,” mild phrases like “resettlement in the east” (Auschwitz).   Lying this way was required of all “secrets bearers” and everybody else.  

The Nazis were cynical masters of euphemism, they seemed to get a kick out of it, a kind of Nazi puckishness at work.   This Nazi tic has been widely imitated by many of today’s leaders and industries, who speak reassuringly out of their asses while committing unspeakable secret evils.  Here in the USA the proposed Clear Skies Act [1], is as good an example as that famous Nazi sign over Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei (work liberates).   Goldman-Sachs, major players in, and beneficiaries of, the massive systemic  financial frauds of  a decade ago, are sponsors of the great Terry Gross’s Fresh Air.  The Koch Brothers, now sponsors of the NY Yankees broadcasts, tout their commitment to a level playing field for the permanent underclass.

The Nazis were famous for the audacity of their lies.  Why tell the truth when a lie can immediately galvanize a nation, if it is told over and over and anyone who contradicts it can be given special treatment, or resettled in the east?  The “Big Lie” was a technique pioneered by Reichsminister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, lady’s man Dr. Josef Goebbels.  You repeat the most inflammatory lie you can think of, the one that will cause maximum fear and rage against the enemy, over and over.  The bigger the better, say it over and over in the mass media, hammer it every day, many times a day.  If people don’t actually believe it, the constant repetition of the lie wears down their ability to actively disbelieve it after enough repetitions.  The only thing that is needed for the Big Lie to become the practical truth is to silence all other voices when you broadcast the lie.

The Nazi state immediately Nazified one profession after another (gleichshaltung — “coordination”) and took complete control over the mass media.  Every newspaper article, magazine piece, radio broadcast and newsreel was prepared and supervised by Nazis.  Every news source told the same story.  Truthfulness and lying in the mass media become irrelevant if there is no way for a citizen to hear an opposing view or verify as fact anything claimed on the state run mass media.  Dictators appreciate the flexibility that kind of control of public opinion affords.

Tell an audacious lie, a shocking lie.  Your hated opponent is planning a vast betrayal!  Here is the fake proof, look!   Here is one of the conspirator’s full confession, with pictures of the guilty looking malefactor.   Dress some German political prisoners in Polish uniforms, shoot them at the German-Polish border et, voila, casus belli for invading Poland!   Doesn’t matter what the lie is, as long as it makes your followers’ blood boil, prepares them for the just, merciless retaliation of the State that will be done in their names.   Things like children being plucked from their mother’s arms, thrown on the ground as the wailing mother is shot…. nobody needs to know about something like that.  You know?  Cattle cars crammed full of doomed “enemies of the State” continuously running to massive death factories in the East, merely lies told by those who hate our Nazi freedom.

The first thing a dictator must do is destroy the credibility of his enemies.  Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  Sheesh.   The mass murder of the fucking Jews?  Really?  Are you kidding me? Who would do something like that? Fucking Jew propaganda, don’t fall for it, son.  You know what they’re like, how treacherous they are.  They’ll stop at nothing to seduce or rape all our women, our daughters, our mothers, our sisters, our wives, dig up the corpses of our grandmothers, rape them, these fucking people…. obsessed with corrupting our DNA, you know what they’re like!  Why would you believe them when your Fuhrer is standing right here, telling you what you already know, that they’re fucking liars?

Can I get a nice “Heil Hitler!” mein friends?

 (to be continued)

[*]  The Führerprinzip [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp]  (German for “leader principle”) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the governmental structures of the Third Reich.

[1]    The beautifully named law Dubya Bush proposed would have allowed industrial polluters to spew toxins in the air if the cost of not doing so would be prohibitively expensive to the polluters:

 Environmentalists were already worried about a 2003 EPA rule that weakens the “New Source Review” provision (1977) of the Clean Air Act.  This means that when industrial facilities make upgrades to plants that increase air pollution, even by hundreds of thousands of tons, if the improvements cost less than 20% of the replacement value of the “process units,” the plant doesn’t have to install modern pollution controls. According to one study, the failure to install modern pollution controls at 51 plants (involved in enforcement cases) is responsible for 5,000 to 9,000 premature deaths and 80,000 to 120,000 asthma attacks every year.

 source

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:  

The president’s pick to head the CIA is thirty-three year CIA veteran Gina Haspel, known by her CIA colleagues as “Bloody Gina”.  (I can hear Stephen Colbert reading the Trump tweet:  So unfair!   She’s a WOMAN……. how dare they disrespect….. wait….blood coming out of where?…. SAD!).   The top CIA spot is open because the president drafted the most recent CIA director, Mike Pompeo, the Koch brothers’ erstwhile personal congressman from Wichita, Kansas, to replace the former CEO of Exxon as America’s Top Diplomat (America’s Got TALENT!).  

The CIA, currently being run on an interim basis by Ms. Haspel, is apparently sending out social media messages expressing its love and support for Bloody Gina. Ms. Haspel is also, apparently, the one at the CIA who decides what parts of her record are highly classified and what can be revealed to the public.    She has been (big deal, yawn!)  implicated in participating in/observing torture at a “black site” in Thailand (apparently she liked it) and in the infamous (also completely unpunished) destruction of video evidence of American torture, which a couple of tenured-for-life weasels, Mssrs Yoo and Bybee, torturing the definition of ordinary language, rebranded as something else in a secret memo making the brutal practices, illegal under international treaties against torture, the Geneva Conventions and common decency, 100% legal, arguably, when performed secretly by the CIA and its contractors under secretly specified conditions.

At the confirmation hearing yesterday California Senator Kamala Harris asked Haspel two simple questions the acting head of the CIA  refused to answer. (wherever things are not in quotation marks I’m paraphrasing Senator Harris and Gina Haspel)

Harris:   “Do you believe the previous interrogation techniques were immoral?” 

Well, Senator, as I have stated, the program was legal…. etc.

It’s a yes or no answer.

“Senator, what I believe sitting here today is that I support the higher moral standard we have decided to hold ourselves to…” (Harris interrupts as Haspel tries to dribble more time off the game clock)

OK, I see you refuse to answer that question.     Do you believe that torture is effective in extracting actionable intelligence?

Senator, I have stated my beliefs, which are that among the legal tools we used, and I have to speak very carefully because…  you are a former prosecutor and it probably won’t be enough to pause… continue to call you “Senator” each time, make a steely, determined face… wait out the very short, loudly ticking clock you have there (a tip of the hat to the indignant Condoleeza for showing us all how it’s done), which I notice is almost out …  I repeat, all of the legal tools we had at the time allowed us to prevent major terrorist operations, to get the intelligence needed to save American lives, so, no, there’s no way of knowing if particular interrogation techniques were useful or not.

This is American politics in 2018, a kind of deadly reality TV show where the underlying facts of the important matters under discussion often just get in the way of a good dramatic story arc.   We had a two term president who, although holding nobody legally or even morally responsible for the torture program, made the brave public admission, during his second term, that, with the best of intentions “we tortured some folks.”  

We, you know, we, uh, tortured some folks.  Just folks like you’d have over for a cookout in your backyard, folksy kind of folks, the kind of folks, folks, that you know, I have to be honest here, folks, we, in hindsight, maybe shouldn’t have done those terrible things to.   Any fair-minded person would have to call the things we did to these folks torture, but it’s not my job to make sure the US sticks to its treaties and obligations under American and international law.   I don’t want to get fucking assassinated!  There are folks out there who would flat out kill me.  I don’t want a needle-induced fatal heart attack while I’m lying in my bed!  Do any of you folks?

The Republicans, who hold a razor thin majority in the Senate,  because of a lone holdout and a medically absent senator who himself was tortured [1], don’t have the votes to make Haspel the next CIA director.  They will need a few votes from Democrats if Bloody Gina is to lead Trump’s CIA.  They already have one, Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. has already said he’d vote for Haspel.   This article lists the many undecided Democrats  (including both NY Senators and NJ’s Cory Booker)  who can’t decide whether to vote to confirm Gina Haspel as America’s Top Spook.   A fairly sickening list of folks, I’d have to say, folks.  

Read the list and shake your head.   Then contact your senator if he or she is on this list.   If you’re in NY:  Schumer: (202) 224-6542 (nobody picks up his phone); Gillebrand:  (202) 224-4451  (a bit of a wait on hold to speak to a staffer, but worth it).  

Send them emails.  The contact info for the rest of these spineless weasels is here:  https://www.senate.gov/.   I composed this for Gillebrand, while I was on hold:

Senator:

I was dismayed to find your name on the recently published (CNN) list of Democrats “undecided” about confirming Gina Haspel as CIA director.

Ms. Haspel is an unapologetic advocate of “enhanced interrogation.”  She participated directly in the CIA’s destruction of evidence of the torture program.  She is known by her colleagues at the CIA as “Bloody Gina,” presumably for her lack of squeamishness about brutality and violence.

Nominated by a president who insists, against all evidence, that “waterboarding” is not torture, and is an enthusiastic supporter of torture as part of American policy, Ms. Haspel’s background as a supporter, and concealer, of these techniques is very dangerous.

Vote no, I urge you.

(feel free to cut and paste this one for an email to your spineless representative)

A rep at Gillebrand’s office informed me that she is voting NO, that three days ago she expressed her vigorous opposition Haspel for her participation in torture and its cover-up.  

So I’ll send this email to Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck Schumer whose office does not even allow you to stay on hold while you compose a few words for an email.

But we should really, to be fair, try to see it from the president’s point of view, a president who has already stated, emphatically and with apparent sincerity, that he is a big fan of torture, promising to do things much worse than essentially harmless “waterboarding”.  He’s only trying to keep a campaign promise!

As every young child knows, in America the president makes all the laws, carries them out, decides everything.  So why should these corrupt, dishonest partisan buttinskis in the Senate have anything to say about a qualified appointee the president legally chooses?  UNFAIR!

I note, because its hard not to be paranoid in a nation leaning so markedly toward authoritarianism (see list of “undecided” members of the “opposition party”) that every time I am unable to resist and write the word “Trump” in a post, or treat the hideous subject in any way, I suddenly get a small flurry of emails from a series of new “followers”– anonymous folks with long random sounding handles and always “outlook.com” at the end.    If you ever hear that I have committed suicide, assume it was an expertly assisted suicide and make sure the coroner checks between my toes for a tiny needle mark.

[1]

There was a long running network TV series called Scandal that I just learned about.  Netflix has its many, many episodes, available for on-line viewing and I’ve been watching it.   It is a non-partisan, though highly charged, political soap opera and very, very engaging.   Well-acted by a fine ensemble cast, led by a charismatic and beautiful protagonist, the story churns along irresistibly in the page turner, cliff-hanger fashion my mother and grandmother used to love about the soaps they watched.  The over-the-top heroics of the superstar main character, a character who will boldly gamble everything and never lose, are the stuff of comic books.

The show is to real political insight what a bag of potato chips is to a complete and healthy diet.   And, anyway, political insight might as well be a dead language as far as the culture is concerned, it is, at best, a vestige of a time when there was actual debate on issues, prior to our age of media-driven partisan branding.  That said, and needing the distraction, I’ve had a hard time staying off the tasty visual junk food of Scandal in recent days (when internet service permits).

I had a series of unsettling thoughts about real-life political events as I compulsively watched this show about a Washington D.C. fixer, Olivia Pope, a flawed genius played by a beautiful actress with a remarkable talent for evoking sympathy.   This beautiful fixer simply will not lose.  Is she perfect?  Hah!  Far from it, she’s got a closet full of painful skeletons that would immobilize most people.  Yet she bravely fights a series of obscenely powerful monsters, and against all odds, and her self-doubts, manages to spin a just, happy ending to her immediate criss in every episode.

The unsettling thoughts while I watch the show involve what are now called “optics”, Olivia Pope’s stock-in-trade: getting out in front of the story and spinning it, from multiple, completely different angles, if necessary, using whatever leverage comes to hand to have things come out her client’s way.  It turns out, if you are wealthy, smart, (not to mention beautiful), have personal connections to everybody of any importance in D.C., there are always strings you can pull to have the story told in the light most beneficial to what you need. 

I had the thought, watching the fictional president’s chief of staff hire someone to commit murder, the president himself kill a retired Supreme Court justice on her deathbed, Olivia’s own staff occasionally doing a little minor torture and killing, and having everything come out OK, due to the genius of Olivia Pope and Associates, that Trump must have loved this show.   If you are a true born superstar, there are no consequences, they let you do it, they let you do it!   I could picture him watching it every week, taking in another personal lesson about how the game is played– like that aha! moment when Olivia suddenly realizes that she can keep her private boutique fixer firm running and more profitable than ever, even as she is poised to become First Lady in Season Five.

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Trump watching a show where a woman is the star, the indomitable protagonist.   Who knows, though?   I’m sure he would love it, if he could get over that.   What I am absolutely certain about is that this show had to have been a favorite of many of the young wannabes who wound up working for the great man’s campaign, which is still in full swing.  Trump, don’t forget, prefers campaigning to anything else related to the presidency.  An adoring crowd is what keeps him moving indomitably forward.  He declared his candidacy for 2020 very soon after taking office in January 2017.   My man.

Not that the show invented any of the gambits it relies on week after week, the very ones used daily by Trump and Associates in our real, post-factual world of fake news and very fine Klansmen and Nazis.   It goes, almost without saying, that if you, like the fictional Olivia Pope, have the CEO of every mass media company on speed dial, and have filthy kompromat on several of them, it is not a big deal to get them to delay a headline until you can publicly change the story enough to give the appearance of exonerating your client, or making allegations disappear.   How a story is reported is the difference between a guilty verdict and a widespread public pronouncement of “nothing to see here.”

Joe Arpaio, America’s Sheriff, the fellow who boasted about his private open-air Auschwitz there in the relentlessly hot, arid Arizona desert.   Roasting small time criminals in inhuman outdoor prison camp conditions while humiliating them?   Law and Order, motherfucker.  That’s one view of the man, from his supporters.  Another way to see Arpaio is as an unrepentant racial profiler who essentially told a federal judge to shut the fuck up if you feel there’s a problem with the way I do my elected duties.  He was found in contempt of court for disobeying the court’s rulings against him and his extremist policing practices.  

President Trump immediately pardoned Arpiao, which Sheriff Joe was later surprised to learn was tantamount to admitting he was guilty as charged (the precondition for accepting a pardon, apparently.  Who knew?)   The important thing, optically, was how the president demonstrated his loyalty to polarizing high profile contemnors (a person or entity who is guilty of contempt before a judicial or legislative body)  like Arpaio.  Let that be a lesson to all you whining bitches and would be snitches!

The discussion should always, of course, be about what actually happened, who was actually wronged, what the decent result is, what just laws should require.   That, of course, is not how the game is played in a world run by advertising spin and the tsunami of dollars it generates.  

President, ten years before he runs for office, has consensual sex with a porn actress, his own business.  Does it make him a saint, doing this shortly after his youngest son is born?  No.  But nothing to see here, you know?  Except that days before the election he has somebody, a bumbling “fixer” who thinks of himself as fictional macho man Ray Donovan (who, spoiler alert, commits suicide from PTSD after years of an unsupportably violent life) pay the porn actress to dummy up.   Now, if everybody abides by the ironclad non-disclosure agreement, there is truly nothing to see here.   But, whoa!   This porn actress with the big fake breasts has suddenly hired a lawyer!   An aggressive and smart one who loves the TV cameras.  They both quickly become media superstars in the real life soap opera that is the genius of reality TV’s presidency.

America’s embattled CEO brings in a one time star of the American Law and Order (yeah, you heard that, you people) Right: former federal prosecutor and one-time America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani.  Giuliani is so excited to finally be in the president’s inner circle that he can’t help but make the rounds of the talk shows.  On those shows he comes off as demented, or possibly drunk, as he points out that, in spite of the president’s own claims to the contrary, obviously, the president reimbursed his lawyer for paying off the woman he fucked ten years earlier, and of course he knew very well what he was paying him for, that’s why they signed the non-disclosure agreement.  The fact is, these women are… well, that one is a porn star!  I rest my case, even as I can’t get my eyes to stop bugging out of my head or my eyebrows from wildly shooting upwards.  As a matter of plain fact, the president could have any woman in the world, every woman, they let him, they let him do it.  He probably has, muses Rudy, his eyes wild, probably has fucked all of them.  There could be fifty more nondisclosure agreements out there, who knows?  Who cares?  Next question?  Should we bomb the fuck out of Iran?  Absolutely.  And that’s not just my opinion, ask John Bolton!

Giuliani, the president reminds everybody after Rudy’s alarming talk show appearances, is still “getting up to speed”, meaning he doesn’t have the agreed on public narrative down yet.   The president expresses great confidence in Giuliani, who will get the story straight after enough briefings with the people who run the president’s spin department.   Trump often expresses great confidence in people right before he has one of his surrogates fire them for not having the sense to dummy up when it’s time and stay out of the megalomaniacal reality TV superstar president’s spotlight. 

Optics, everything in our pay to play media world is all, or largely, a matter of optics.  Olivia Pope, the superstar political fixer, broods about an unfixable mess, there is truly no way out, even the dumbest member of the audience can see this.  Then, out of the blue, inspiration, the stroke of genius.  It will mean throwing this person under the bus, the torture and/or death of these couple of arguably evil fucks, blackmailing that one, a good and decent man, but it is doable.  The main thing is to win.  

As the episode ends, although Olivia is now in great danger from an enemy from Season Three, back from the dead, she modestly takes her bows.  Then, finally alone in her apartment, she flashes that expression that shows how supremely, critically, helplessly vulnerable she really is.   A beautiful, hurt little girl with self-admitted Daddy Issues (her father is “command” a mass murdering rogue intelligence officer played with great nuance by Joe Morton) aching deep inside but doing the best she can.  Doing the best she can!!!

The Grey Lady, our nation’s journal of record, is so much like the best of our great nation itself.   The evil institutions that undergird the well-to-do status quo are seldom addressed in any depth in the pages of the Times, it seems to me.   The Times has a reputation for even-handedness, which is well deserved, especially if you are an educated, relatively prosperous citizen. It portrays the world through a distinct point of view, the point of view of the upper middle class professional.   The articles and editorials are written at the reading level of a high school graduate, a much higher reading level than most of our public discussion is held at.   Exposition in The Times is refined.   The editorial standards are high, rarely will you read a speck of bad prose in the NY Times.  

I don’t want to write much more about why I dislike this fine publication.   My father loved the NY Times, a paper he read cover to cover daily.  I know he took certain things with a grain of salt, read other publications to cover the gaps left by Times coverage, but he basically trusted the Times to give him his news.  I may just be a fucking malcontent, a professional underachiever, a person who cannot accept much of what has long been institutionalized here.   But tell me if I’m crazy after you read this randomly selected article.  In fairness, remember that it’s a report on findings from a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control, so there’s also that. 

read it here, it’s a quick and interesting read

The article purports to give the good news that the recent CDC study shows blacks are now living, on average, only three and a half years less than whites.  Black life expectancy is going up, in part, because blacks who (against the odds) live to be 65 (“weathered” blacks, according to the CDC)  have a longer life expectancy than whites of the same age.  

Why have blacks been dying so much younger than whites for all these years?   Poverty and an unhealthy lifestyle, junk food and cigarettes, as well as an off the charts homicide rate, are killing many blacks in America.   The article notes the homicide rate among blacks is nine times (900%) the homicide rate for whites in the 18-34 demographic, then it goes down to only five times (500%) higher for blacks 35 and older.   The recommendation, more healthy food and more consciousness about the grievous harms of smoking.  Hard to argue those are not good ideas, yet the story remains incomplete.

Reading the short article reminded me of searching my pocket copy of the Constitution for the legal foundations of American slavery, skillfully and marginally inserted between other clauses in the blueprint for our democracy.   At one point I searched the index for “African” “slave” “black” “involuntary servitude” and every other term I could think of.  Nada.  “The importation of such  persons as the States shall see fit to admit” [1] was one of three or four subtle yet irrefutable pillars of a century of violent, perfectly legal, race-based slavery at law.

Could the stress of being born into a despised, formerly enslaved minority whose people emerged from slavery with nothing but sometimes well-intended promises similar to the ones America gave the Native Americans have anything to do with the alarmingly high death rates for younger blacks?   Not if you read the Times, reporting objectively on the CDC study.   The Times article makes no mention of factors like widespread racism or the unbearable stress of being born into generations of hopeless poverty and the violence often attendant thereto.   Living longer is a matter of eating more green vegetables and making smarter health choices, says the Grey Skank sensibly.    

Here are the factors the NY Times sets out in its Health Section piece, citing the CDC:

Black Americans as a group have lower levels of education and homeownership as well as higher rates of poverty and unemployment, all factors linked to poorer health.

Individual behaviors like smoking are more common among younger blacks, compared with whites, and they contribute to higher death rates in younger age groups.

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Thought this footnote deserved its own post, in relation to the States’ Rights discussion:

Special shout out to major league asshole Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA.  LaPierre advocates a federal law allowing citizens of states that allow concealed carry of firearms to bring their concealed guns into all other states.   This insane shit idea is actually being debated and has a lot of votes in the Congress.

 These highly principled gun rights advocates have banned guns from an upcoming address  by Koch puppet and Trump’s VP Mike Pence at the NRA’s annual national convention.   All those good guys with guns who can stop a bad guy with a gun will be prevented from carrying guns when they go hear Mike Pence address the upcoming pro-gun rally in Dallas.  Way to go, Wayne!

In fairness to Wayne and his murderous ilk, the Secret Service, assigned to guard Pence against assassination, will not allow guns at the event.  The NRA is only following the law.  One still must wonder why the president’s own men have become such anti-gun freedom haters.

High school students, some of whom hate LaPierre’s freedom, pile on:

“Wait wait wait wait wait wait you’re telling me to make the VP safe there aren’t any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere?” Matt Deitsch, a Parkland student who helped organize the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., wrote on Twitter. “Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids.”

source