The other night, after an exhausting trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, meeting with world leaders, the president got back on Twitter.  A fair-minded person would assume he was tired after a grueling trip and quite possibly dozed off mid-tweet, his thumbs probably hitting random keys.   The tweet was an unintelligible prelude to a complaint about the liberal media that is busily, gleefully crucifying the president, who is doing his very best to learn a very complicated job on the job. Much merriment was made over the president’s incoherent tweet, kind of confirming the very point about the media that the president was in the process of tweeting when he passed out.  

Here it is, have another laugh:  “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”.   Hilarious, yo.

The president had been greeted warmly on his first stop by the medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia.  He promised them a good deal on over $110,000,000,000 in weapons so that Saudi Arabian royalty can remain in power.   The House of Saud are Islamic fundamentalists, adherents for two centuries of  the most extreme and intolerant form of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism (they prefer to call it Salafism,  apparently), an ideology they’ve spent billions to export.     For a perspective on the consistency of the president’s worldview, google Saudi Arabia.  Third from the  the top, this summary from Wikipedia:  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocratic monarchy in which Sunni Islam is the official state religion based on firm Sharia law and non-Muslims are not allowed to hold Saudi citizenship.  [1]

The president likely intimated to our close Saudi allies that he planned to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, joining Syria (Nicaragua apparently didn’t sign on because the voluntary deal didn’t go far enough to protect the environment), a move that would ensure the ongoing value of  Saudi fossil fuel since there would be no decrease in American demand if the U.S. was no longer a signatory to the pledge to reduce carbon emissions.   Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State from Exxon, no doubt smiled about that part too, even as he publicly speaks about the need to curb rising temperatures.   In Israel, the president’s old friend, right-wing hard-liner Bibi Netanyahu, greeted the president as an old friend.  Only the Pope was bitchy to the president.  

I mean, did you see the Pope’s face, his body language?  What unPopelike behavior!  SAD!

Things went downhill for the president after that bitter cameo by the Pope. NATO countries were also bitchy to him, particularly after he called them a bunch of deadbeats.   The French president practically arm-wrestled him during an extended handshake, afterwards explicitly saying he did it to show that Europe was not prepared to take any shit from the pushy American president.  One can imagine how psychologically taxing the trip was for a germaphobe who does not like to travel, except between the D.C. White House, the southern resort White House and occasional trips to Trump Tower in New York City to see his wife and youngest child.

So the Left makes sport of the man, because of a typo.  Isn’t that just like the petty, gotcha Left?   The so-called fact-based, proof-reading fucking Left.   Very clever, one more reason that patriotic people who do not always think things through to their logical conclusions, and sometimes react out of rage, hate the fucking smug liberal elites.    Yes, you’re hilarious Samantha Bee, Colbert, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fucking Kimmel.  Laugh while you still can.

Why am I bothering to tap the keys today instead of getting about my business?  Because it was the only way I could stop myself from watching endless video clips of people opining about what is wrong with the president, how long it will be before he self-destructs, how much damage he will do to us all before he does. Better to chatter here, I figure, than to keep watching people like Dan Rather carefully say that the president is the most “emotionally troubled” president since Nixon.  Liberal smart aleck Keith Olbermann compares the behavior of our divisive, decisive, learning on the job president to notorious first century Roman Emperor Nero.  

I am troubled because, beyond the mockery, I don’t see much evidence of organized, principled opposition coming together.  I can’t picture so far how we organize it on a large enough scale to influence law and policy.   On the left, among nationally known elected officials, meaning those of the rather conservative post-Bill and Barack corporate Democratic party, only Bernie Sanders is consistently articulating a vision of needed change and specifically refuting every one of the right’s talking points.  It makes me wish that once Bernie saw which way the wind was blowing inside the Democratic party during the tilted primaries he’d opted for a third party run against the most hated and second most hated presidential contenders ever.  Even as I am well-aware of the fate of every other American third party.  This may have actually been the moment for it, given the unsavory contenders, and I’d have liked his chances.

Meanwhile, the faux-populist billionaire reality-TV star genius of branding president, although only marginally effective so far,  has managed to advance a short list of extreme right wing wet dreams.  He has gone down the greatest hits of cherished extreme right positions and taken bold steps to advance several big ones as he throws bloody meat to his base.  He is doing a lot of damage before he flames out.  There is the real possibility that, in spite of everything, he will not be held to account for anything:  winning is everything and he is exactly the kind of angry winner enough Americans voted for to make their president.  No matter how much he winds up hurting those who still believe he would stand up for them, get their jobs in the coal mines back, make America great again.

Protect the environment?  Fuck the environment, where’s the money in the environment? Appoint a man who has repeatedly sued the EPA to head the EPA.  That’s how we fucking take care of business, in your face!  Oh, and Global Warming is bullshit too, come negotiate with me, rest of the world (hats off to you on this issue, Bashir al-Assad) if you want to convince me it’s not.  What’s next?  Public education?  Fuck that shit, we’ll have the Christian fundamentalist daughter of a right wing billionaire, a generous campaign donor who has never set foot in a public school, oversee the end of that fucking scam.  The stupider and less critical-thinking people are, the easier it is for all of us.    Science?  Cut the funding, research is stupid.  Support for poor children?  They made the wrong choice in life, being born fucking losers.  Immigrants and Muslims?  Fuck ’em.  Black lives matter?  I beg to differ.  Poor people in government-supported housing, the so-called housing of last resort before homelessness?  We got a sleepy looking right wing black guy, famous as a doctor, who says he’s not qualified for the job of HUD Secretary — and he’s our man to oversee the dismantlement of those ‘entitlements’, he’ll do it because he’s a patriot.  Women want the right to control their own bodies?   Wombs don’t vote, asshole, huge blocks of Christian zealots do.  Privatized prisons open for business as the Attorney General vows to renew Nixon’s federal war on marijuana addicts and those who profit from that evil, unAmerican weed.  Go down the list, a cynical far right freak show at every stop.

I recently had a long email conversation with an old friend about America’s permanent war against “Terror”,  now almost fifteen years in.  The fact that Obama signed off on it, along with mass surveillance, secret kill lists, escalated drone strikes and many of Cheney’s other “unitary executive” policies, while paying lip service to smart wars, negotiation and “transparency”, disturbs me as much as anything President Hope and Change did or didn’t do.  My friend is a skillful devil’s advocate and he argued, convincingly, that Obama was no worse than other presidents, better than most.  

My friend, in his spirited advocacy for devilish policies, even seemed, at one point, to argue in favor of the idiocy of “kill ’em all over there so they won’t kill us over here”.  He pointed out that the president, whoever that person is, is severely constrained in what he can actually do.  The president serves at the pleasure of very powerful forces, and is also dragged along (he reminds me) by the irresistible currents of history, culture, natural disaster, ancient prejudices and constantly updated hatreds.   These larger forces will always have the final say in how much the U.S. winds up spending, and how many innocents and bad hombres alike are killed, maimed and displaced to keep the world safe for Freedom, Liberty, Democracy, the Free Market and things like that.  Hard to argue against all that.

In the end he agreed that the ruthless, endless, escalating war on multiple Islamic nations probably creates as many terrorists as it kills.  I signed on to a long list of horrifying realities that dictate American foreign and domestic policies including the vast war profits for the wealthy (nothing is more lucrative than permanent war), the tragic gullibility of many frightened Americans and how excited most Americans of both parties seem to get any time our president sets off a huge explosion that kills a lot of brown people somewhere.  I sent him this list of acknowledged horrors and he wrote back, with the beautiful brevity of a spot-on tweet:  Now you see my perspective.

That perspective is hard to miss, as is the worst side of human nature, vividly on display when times are tough and citizens are gripped by anger and a deep sense of hopelessness.  Just turn on the news– the media focuses almost exclusively on conflict and violence, the more extreme the better.  If it bleeds it leads, baby, you know the drill.  Then the only question is who is to blame for this deplorable state of affairs, and who you blame will depend on whether your baseball hat is red or blue.  

There is a large and influential industry devoted almost entirely to assigning blame and channeling anger, and it’s big money, yooge money. Though reflexively blaming, rather than seriously discussing problems and possible solutions, misses the point of the whole exercise of what democracy is meant to be, of course.   With rooting reflexively for a team there is no informed debate, no need — only die-hard loyalty is required.  Political discourse is conveniently reduced to lustily rooting for your team; it means the team with the savviest marketing, the best on-slogan market saturation and most enthusiastic rah-rah section takes home the trophy.  That the trophy is making policy that will drastically effect the lives of tens or hundreds of millions for a generation or more is easily enough missed in all the excitement.

We have arrived at a moment in our history when the American president appoints, as a top advisor, his young son-in-law, oldest son of another billionaire, whose chief experience and qualification is working for his dad.   This young man is put in charge of virtually everything important in government.  The president expresses great confidence in him.  The Pope poses disgustedly next to this personification of nepotism.  And so it goes.

Acknowledging the enormity of the horror can’t be the end of the story. Powerful people run a corrupt and evil machine that can never be stopped  — The End.  What kind of fucking movie is that?  Who’d pay to see that shit?  I had to send my friend Howard Zinn’s words, spoken while accepting an award late in his life.  Zinn explained why he studied and taught history, why he sat down to write A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

I love the fact that in America I can sit at the computer and watch smart, funny people deconstruct the destructive idiocy of these unrepentant Birthers, Flat-Earthers, Climate Change Deniers, Free-Market Trickle Down Tricksters, Post-racial, color-blind alt-racists, Creationist Science Skeptics, Homophobes, Xenophobes, gun-crazed believers that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with well-regulated militias, whatever libtards might say about it, whatever the text itself might arguably say [2], and every other sort of insister on their right to be as inconsistent, irrational or unjust as their massive wealth, or their dream of acquiring same, allows them to be.  

We can still make fun of them here in America, no matter how powerful the personifications of these idiotic beliefs become.  It’s great to live in a country where the First Amendment allows satire and comedy to flourish, no matter how challenging it is for satirists to keep pace with the straight-faced, serious-as-cancer, real-life seeming satire that happens many times a day now in the highest reaches of our pay-to-play democracy.   Humor is healthy for democracy, it is good to laugh, good to mock powerful idiocy.  It’s a release valve, it’s a start, and it’s essential, but it changes nothing, wins no hearts, minds or votes.

I hate the fact that satire seems to be the best we can do here and now in the land of the free and the home of the brave spectators.  Sit in an on-line echo chamber and laugh with a like-minded comic, or smirking pundit, while in a parallel echo chamber they deride your derisive laughter.   Rachel Madow?  Smug, rich, out of touch, super liberal bitch.  Anne Coulter?  Smug, rich, out of touch, super right wing bitch.  According to your deeply held worldview Coulter is a psycho, Madow is a psycho.  It is virtually impossible to like both, if you hold any values at all.  Those who hate one or the other agree on only one thing, the other one is a bitch.  

It behooves us other bitches to heed the words of Howard Zinn and reach for that rare but essential spirit that organizes, and fights effectively, especially when the fight seems the most hopeless.  

It’s not enough to watch like-minded pundits, laugh at like-minded comedians and wait for leaders, hoping for marginally better ones than what the big, smart, well-spoken money provides for our vote every four years.  We need open public conversation rather than the far more profitable televised debate which often comes down to “nyah nyah!!!”.   Personally, I can’t watch somebody like Tucker Carlson without wanting to punch him in the face, in spite of my commitment to ahimsa.  Bill Maher, funny as he sometimes is, same deal.  I have no problem understanding why anyone would want to sock him in that smug, adorable face, though we don’t act that way in a democracy.

It’s not enough to bark words on your social media feed, as I am doing right now, although this doesn’t reach nearly as many people as the average anonymous Facebook post.  We need to somehow get to the serious work of organizing a real alternative to solve deep and persistent problems.   “How?” is the question.

To borrow a few felicitous phrases from Howard Zinn, I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that such organizing is already happening, that I just haven’t figured out how to find and join it, and that we are, all of us, poised to participate in a fugitive moment of compassion rather than in the increasing darkness of eternal total warfare against everything that does not turn a handsome profit for the most powerful, and heedless, among us.  

NOTES

[1]  Can’t resist piling on to badmouth these murderous billionaire religious fanatic House of Saud fucks: 

The majority of mainstream Sunni and Shia Muslims worldwide strongly disagree with the interpretation of Wahhabism, and many Muslims would denounce them as a faction or a “vile sect”.^[8] Islamic scholars, including those from the Al-Azhar University, regularly denounce Wahhabism with terms such as “Satanic faith”.^[8] Wahhabism has been accused of being “a source of global terrorism”,^[34][35] inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),^[36]and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates^[37] (takfir) and justifying their killing.^[38][39][40] It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic shrines of saints, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.^[41][42][43]

[2]    The Second Amendment:  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Texas Congressman Al Green is drafting Articles of Impeachment against the president.   Green received death threats after calling for the president’s impeachment.  He played recordings of the death threats at a recent Town Hall.  Green said that hateful attempts at intimidation need to be made public, so their harmfulness can be seen and understood.  Hate must be exposed, he said, because it is more dangerous when hidden.  I agree.

A quick check shows scant coverage of these violent threats in the mainstream media.   The New York Times, for example, does not seem to have picked up the story.  Amy Goodman introduces the two short voicemail threats Green shared, they are twenty-five seconds into this clip from Democracy Now!

I draw your attention to the second of these.   We may use all kinds of words to describe a person who leaves this kind of message, and I was tempted to use some of the more disparaging ones.   But that would miss the point.  

Among the words that cannot be used to describe this caller are “well-informed,” “analytical,” and “Christian”.  The caller apparently subscribes to a worldview where things, even if proved false, can still be cited as indisputably true.

It would not surprise me to learn that this caller believes that the South never lost the Civil War, but that a fake surrender was orchestrated by the treacherous chicanery of those who unaccountably favored the rights of inferior Africans over the rights of decent, God-fearing white Americans.  

Belief does not have to be based on thought, logic, observable reality, any kind of reasoning or intelligence.  That’s the beauty and horror of belief.  All you need is a heart that aches for a thing to be true — and it’s true, to you.

His voicemail does the usual echo-chamber shuffle. You criticize my guy, asshole, hey, what about your fucking guy?  “He was not only a nigger, the Muslim wasn’t even born here, and was also the most corrupt president ever, by a long shot.”  

I’m not a fan of Mr. Obama’s, even as I realize that most of our recent presidents were worse than he was.   I voted for the soul-crushingly disappointing man twice.  The loudest, wealthiest, most visible proponent of the “Birther” Movement (similar to the bowel movement, but unnatural and the opposite of salubrious) is now our president.  Only in an alternate reality where every damaging report is “fake news”, where political debates are reduced to slogans that can fit on a hat, or in 140 characters at most, where wealth and celebrity are the coins of the realm, could a person like him be president.

It’s not about him anyway.  He is a symptom.   We must not conclude that only racists like the two who left voice mails threatening Al Green with lynching support the current president.   No reason to bring up the Ku Klux Klan endorsement or the white supremacist who became his chief strategist once the billionaire Robert Mercer threw his support and influence behind Trump.   Racists love the pugnacious, politically incorrect president but racists are not the only people in the president’s base.  

There are also plenty of people who are not racist at all.  Some are merely very wealthy and insanely rapacious.  Millions are desperately hurting people who may hate no group in particular, and may be no greedier than anyone else, but who, in their desperation for change, fell for one of the most cynical con men in American history.

Of course, it’s easy to see what die-hard supporters of the president will say.  “These so-called racist death threats are fakes, fake news!  Paid guys with fake southern accents reading a script to make the president’s supporters look bad.  Typical desperate left wing nutcase maneuver, probably paid for by George Soros, Barbra Streisand and other rich Jews who support Black Lives Matter and other black terrorist groups.  We’ll take care of those traitors soon enough…”

As far as impeaching him, I’d say it can wait until right before the 2018 election, after the Special Prosecutor has unearthed whatever evidence there is to unearth.  No sense giving Mike Pence and Paul Ryan time to pretend that, on the fundamental questions of what life is supposed to be like in our great American democracy, they are not exactly as destructive as the proudly uninformed self-promoter with his hand next to the red button.

Today is the day we dedicate to remembering and honoring our military veterans, men and women who march into the hell of war to protect our way of life.  Many of us have come to increasingly believe that the best way to support our troops is by not sending them into wars based on lies, against a shifting cast of amorphous enemies, like the long war in Iraq, the endless, senseless destruction in Afghanistan.  John Kerry’s questions resonate as loudly today as they did when he got back from his tour in Vietnam, another futile, costly faraway war against a people who posed no threat to us, premised on the shakiest of foundations.  “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?  How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

For starters, you make him volunteer.   Forced redeployments, extended tours, traumatic brain injuries (the Pentagon’s count is 320,000 from 2001 to June 2015*), amputations, quadriplegia, PTSD, poor services from the VA, countless veteran suicides — the cost of honoring our brave troops.  The ones who scream loudest about America’s need to send troops and kill them over there so they can’t kill us here are generally the most silent on these terrible costs to the troops whose service they claim to honor.

Relying on my memory yesterday, and intent on relaying the story of an innocent individual, a sixty-seven year old midwife, Mamana Bibi, killed by a U.S. drone strike in a remote village mistakenly identified as harboring terrorists, I neglected to adequately report on Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis’ chilling interview on Face the Nation.   Fortunately, CBS published a transcript, which I’ve just read and which I will comb through a bit for you.

Secretary Mattis, regarded as the “adult in the room” and a “voice of reason” in the Trump administration, described our new military posture to interviewer John Dickerson.   Mattis said “…the bottom line is we are going to move in an accelerated and reinforced manner, throw them on their back foot.” He described how we have shifted from a policy of attrition in Iraq and Syria, in our current war against ISIS, to one of annihilation.   He explained.  We are no longer going to push them back, we are going to surround and destroy them. Under this new policy we are going to kill them all over there so none survive to come and kill us here.  

Mattis described how American and Iraqi forces are surrounding ISIS in places like Racca, an ISIS stronghold.  “And once surrounded, then we’ll go in and clean them out,” Mattis said, in a phrase that brings “ethnic cleansing” to mind. I realize this is a cheap rhetorical play on my part.  “Ethnic cleansing”, of course, is the mass murder of defenseless civilians whose only crime is belonging to a certain ethnic group, Mattis is talking about killing really bad people who choose to do exceedingly evil things.   Still, ‘clean them out’ is too similar to ‘surgical strike’, the kind of positive-sounding, antiseptic language that should never be allowed in any discussion of mass killing.  

Mattis then talks about the necessity of “getting the big ideas right” as he endorses his Commander in Chief’s delegation of command decisions to the commanders on the ground.   Mattis then utters a curious and highly debatable sentence to back up the wisdom of this big idea:  “there is no corporation in the world that would, in a competitive environment, try and concentrate all decisions at the corporate level.”

He then assures America that we have not changed the rules of engagement. “There is no relaxation of our attention to protect the innocent. We do everything we can to protect the civilians, and actually lowering– delegating the authority to the lower level allows us to do this better.”  Mattis also recognizes that a certain number of civilian deaths are, unfortunately, unavoidable when fighting an evil enemy.  “Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation. We do everything humanly possible consistent with military necessity, taking many chances to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.”

In other words, pay no attention to a video of civilian rescuers machine gunned by an American gun crew while carrying other wounded civilians to a van to rush them to the hospital.  Americans are never supposed to see these kinds of videos, which are illegally released to the public by traitors like the transsexual Private Manning.   Civilians we are unable to protect are called ‘collateral damage’, and though the death of civilians has, unfortunately, increased under America’s muscular new policy, Mattis disputes whether increased American bombing, and a declared policy of surround and annihilate, actually have killed so many more civilians.  

Asked about the hundred civilians recently turned into “collateral damage” after American bombing in Mosul, Mattis was not so sure we did it.  “We believe we found residue that was not consistent with our bomb. So we believe that what happened there was that ISIS had stored munitions in a residential location. Showing, once again, the callous disregard that has characterized every operation they have run.”   Our belief that ISIS probably did it confirms that the hundred civilian deaths probably had little to do with our bombing.   He comforts with this reassurance, which includes a candid admission:   “We are the good guys. We’re not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys. And so we’re doing what we can.”

Not surprisingly, the threat to humiliate our enemy comes from the very top. Dickerson asks Mattis “President Trump has said, to defeat ISIS ‘There has to be a humiliation of ISIS.’ What does that mean?”  Mattis elaborates.  “It’s also a fight about ideas. And we have got to dry up their recruiting. We have got to dry up their fundraising.  The way we intend to do it is to humiliate them, to divorce them from any nation giving them protection, and humiliating their message of hatred, of violence.”

Mattis concludes his explanation of our  new smash-mouth policy of annihilation and humiliation with these pious and indisputable words:  “Anyone who kills women and children is not devout.  They have– they cannot dress themselves up in false religious garb and say that somehow this message has dignity.”

I’ve probably dignified these comments more than they deserve, speaking of messages that claim to have dignity.  In the fight about ideas, the side that turns a beloved sixty-seven year-old village midwife into chopped meat, and is, by its own humble admission, not perfect, probably does not hold the moral high ground.  John Kerry described routinized atrocities that he participated in while deployed in the supremely violent mistake in Vietnam.

“There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant [William] Calley, are war criminals.”    source  **   

Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we learn absolutely nothing from our own recent history.  So, that said, by all means, as we celebrate Memorial Day and honor the many sacrifices of our all volunteer armed forces, and prefer the lesser evil (to us) of remote controlled killing to boots on the ground, let’s humiliate and annihilate them over there, so they don’t humiliate and annihilate us over here.   That’s surely the best, and only, way to win this existential war of ideas.  God bless.

*   Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America at p. 57

**   Kerry said this on Meet The Press on April 18, 1971, he testified before the Fulbright Committee a few days later.   The link takes you to the minutes of the Senate hearing.  He made similar comments in his testimony before the Committee, which is timely and well worth reading, but without the direct, personal mea culpa. 

I heard an interview with an American master of war on the radio just now, describing America’s muscular new military posture.   Maybe it’s because I’ve been worrying about health issues recently, my own and our well-loved pet’s, that I find myself thinking about the endless war America has been engaged in since Islamist fanatics brought down the World Trade Towers in 2001.   Our current president has a new vision of how to deal with those violent fanatics who hate America.  The military man entrusted with spearheading his new strategy was interviewed at length, though I tuned in midway through.  

America will no longer fight a war of attrition, driving ISIS back, allowing them to regroup, fighting a smaller, more determined force in the next place.  We will now surround ISIS and destroy all their fighters wherever we encounter them.   It will still be, admittedly, a long fight, but we will cleanse the entire area of ISIS.   “Clean the area” of ISIS fighters, in that familiar jargon of people cleansers.   The military frontman spoke of humiliating ISIS, degrading their image, their brand.   ISIS may indiscriminately kill civilians, women and children, he said, because they have no concern for human life in spite of their religious pretensions, but America is always concerned with the safety of civilians and will only, regrettably, kill them when military necessity dictates it.  The war will be long, he admitted, and once ISIS is done we will be fighting other groups, new organizations founded on that flawed ideology of hatred of America, and we will teach the armies of the region to fight them to the death.

It was the phrase ‘humiliate ISIS’ that struck me.  He used it several times.  We will humiliate ISIS.   Who is this mad dog, I wondered?   After discussing the imminent threat to the United States posed by North Korea, the interviewer thanked moderate Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis.    Mattis has been called the adult in the room and the most respected member of the Trump administration.    

We will humiliate our enemies.   It has a familiar ring.  

A psychiatrist whose name escapes me, though I wrote about him briefly here at one time (James Gilligan, here’s the link) spent a long time in a prison for violent criminals studying what made them violent criminals.   He discovered one common denominator: unbearable shame.   Every violent criminal had done unspeakable things driven by this perhaps most terrible emotion.   They had been humiliated, subjected to shaming cruelty, and at some point something in them snapped and they became violent sociopaths.    So, just on a basic philosophical level, a stated policy of humiliating those who hate us seems about as sound as the old fucking for chastity strategy.

George Grosz noted that in order to understand how a man can hate and brutalize his fellow men you must study the humiliation he underwent.   Grosz was talking about members of Nazi goon squads.  The archetype for dictatorial hatred and brutality, Mr. Hitler, was raised by a violent, brutal, autocratic abuser, a complete “piece of shit” in common parlance.  Not everyone can become the Fuhrer of Germany, but anyone raised by a humiliating abuser has the potential.    Not to make idle comparisons, but Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of TRUMP: The Art of the Deal, recounts the brutality of Fred, father of our current president.  Which kind of makes sense, if you consider the son’s now familiar petulant, bullying behavior.

Sekhnet often reminds me that I need to get out in the world among like-minded people and interact, rather than just brooding and writing for the handful of people who may read these words.  She’s right.  I need to find others who are as passionate about the things I care about as I am.    Perhaps I will join Codepink.  They describe themselves as “a women-led organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect tax dollars into health care, education, green jobs, and other life-affirming programs.”  

Codepink co-founder Medea Benjamin publicly confronted President Obama about the secret policy of  indiscriminate murder by remotely piloted aircraft.  To his credit, he did not have her arrested when she interrupted his speech repeatedly.  He went off script to chide her mildly for her criticisms, “obviously she wasn’t listening to me in much of what I said” but acknowledged “but these are tough questions and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.”

OK, so we’re wrong.  So fucking what?   We continue to gloss over them.  Nobody is perfect.   We gloss over them, because, with all the troubles in the world now, a few random sixteen year-olds in Pakistan or Yemen, or a beloved sixty-seven year-old midwife, or whoever the hell else our secret signature strikes sometimes kill over there don’t amount to Humphrey Bogart’s hill of beans.  

We are on overload, constant, relentless.  The wheel is turning faster and faster, accelerated by addictive technology that splits our focus into tiny units, forcing this fragmented consciousness to constantly shove aside distractions, while being constantly marketed to, and connected to virtual communities, and polled, our preferences collected, reduced to data for sale.   What we need as human beings is exploited for demographic and sales purposes.   It comes to us as a blur of overwhelming, often maddening bullshit.   The things that are most important, fundamental human values like fairness, decency and mercy, are often lost in the noisy clutter.

Without personal contact, we are left in virtual echo chambers, looking for the avatars of likeminded souls.  Those who like reading things like this will read them, nod, find much of it beyond dispute.  On the other hand, I am chattering into the darkness of cyberspace.  How much different our lives and values are here, in the capital of steroid-enhanced materialism, than in some remote village in North Waziristan.  

The midwife in that village who brings babies into the world, sometimes saving the life of the mother, along with the new, tiny life, does what midwives have done for thousands of years.  It is no wonder this grandmother is loved in the village, she brings calm, comfort, expertise, and wisdom into the homes of anxious families.    The children in the village love her.  I am thinking of a midwife I read about in Amy Goodman’s new Democracy Now!, Mamana Bibi, blown to shreds by a drone-launched missile on October 24, 2012 in a “signature strike”.  (page 39)  There was indication of suspicious activity in that remote village that may have indicated terrorist activity.  Turned out to be a false alarm.  Shit happens in war.

So, yeah, by all means, let’s humiliate anyone who fucks with us.  Why the fuck not?  What are you going to do about it anyway, asshole?

Some lost soul, either fanatically driven to murderous violence or manipulated by someone twistedly fanatical in their faith, or simply evil, blew him or herself up in Manchester, England, killing at least 22 young people leaving a concert.    It is known that suicide bombers are often coerced into giving up their lives, some are fatally ill, some are mentally deficient, some have suffered a humiliation and are convinced murdering for the cause is a path to glory, others do it for a large cash payment promised to their family.  

I heard the American president on the radio just now, using his sympathetic and reasonable voice.  He said the people who did this horrible bombing in Manchester are losers.   They might enjoy being called monsters, he said, so he was going to refer to such people as losers.  He actually called them “evil losers”.   Fair enough, I thought.  I would like to hear violent cowards who go into schools and movie theaters and massacre people with guns referred to as ‘psychotic cowards’ or something like that, rather than ‘gunmen’.   To refer to an enraged killer as a ‘gunman’ elevates a murderous, suicidal asshole to an American icon.   It is the murderous coward’s fondest hope, to be remembered as a gunman.

“How’d the piece of shit die, Clem?”  

“To the end he was a gunman, Luke.  He died shooting, in a hail of bullets.”  

“Still a piece of shit, Clem.  Step back, I need to use the spittoon.” 

So, I applaud the president, in principle.  Deny these fucks the status they want, call them what they are.  It just got me thinking, the president is consistent about only one thing in life:  his devotion to winning and his hatred of losing. These categories, I have come to realize, as matter of psychological necessity, are somewhat fluid.  A person can win at any cost, losing everything but victory. A person can lose fighting for others.  Which person is the winner, and which the loser, is a matter of perspective.  

I had a close friend for many years who saw every encounter as a zero sum game he had to win.  It made him increasingly arid company.  There was nothing, no matter how small, that was not the subject of exacting negotiation. Either give in at once or prepare to be ground down.   He simply had to get the better of every negotiation.   In his case, the youngest of three boys, he felt he’d never received the respect, validation and unconditional love he deserved.   This is an unbearable feeling, and the intensity of his sense of personal injustice turned him into a kind of monster.  In the game of life, American Dream version, he won.  He eventually became wealthy, a self-made success who parlayed a tiny food business that began in his kitchen into a small empire.   The people who worked for him either quit or accepted a bad deal.  Some took violent reprisals against him.  Through it all, he made more and more money.

His mother died a while back at almost 100 years old.   She worried about him, how he alienated everybody, had to be right no matter what the cost.  She was distraught about what would become of him after she died.   She was right to worry.   His oldest brother contacted me before the memorial service, though I’d stopped being friends with his brother many years earlier.   He beseeched me to reach out to my former friend, I was the only person he had.  I was not surprised that he’d managed to alienate everybody he’d ever met and was terribly alone.  I reached out, because of my great love and respect for his mother, but eventually had to drive a stake deep into the poor bastard’s heart. Our suddenly revived email correspondence was excruciating and I had to put an end to it.   He was still looking to be the righteous soul, persecuted by a vicious world of people like me.  

I heard the ghost writer of “The Art of the Deal” talking about the man whose name is on the cover.   He got to know the man well over the course of collaborating on the book.   He described the man’s father, Fred, as a vicious, implacable, loveless man.   Fred was impossible to please, yet the son tried, endlessly.  I have some sympathy for this, my father was in essential ways the same kind of destructive prick.   The son’s solution was different from mine.  He was determined to become known as the world’s most fabulous winner.  It did not hurt that his unloving father left him something on the order of $100,000,000 to begin his path to winning with.  This made his constant ‘doubling down’ and upping the ante when wrong easier for him than for most people.

My former friend, a boy who also viewed all interactions as existential contests he had to win, got about two or three million dollars when his mother died.   If it made him happy in any way, I do not know.  I would not place a bet on his happiness, I’d certainly not double down on the bet, though he is, in a very tangible way, a winner.

Now back to the man who called the Manchester terrorists evil losers.  They are evil losers because they indiscriminately killed innocent children and young adults. I agree with his assessment.  Fucking losers, evil fucking losers at that.  But, if you are going to  do essentially the same thing, when the timing is right, leaving an eight year-old girl to writhe for hours dying of an American bullet in her spine, fired by US Special Forces during a botched raid you ordered to make yourself look powerful, you… well, there’s really no end to that sentence.  When you order the killing of anyone in the Yemeni compound, and a dozen of the killed happen to be children, you may be regarded as an evil loser.  Although, of course, if you are the American president, then actually you will generally be lauded as a winner.  These decisions are mind-blowingly complicated, the pressures on the Leader of the Free World are immense, he made a hard call, etc.     When you congratulate the widow of the elite special forces soldier that you ordered into a senseless, fruitless raid in which he was killed, along with a dozen or more children, the pundits will take a collective breath and call you a winner, for being so presidential and everything.  I have a pretty good idea what you really are, sir, what your deepest fear is, the thing that relentlessly drives you, has always driven you.

I thought about my former friend’s musical talent, which is substantial.  In terms of talent, and how far he has taken it, he is far beyond what I can do musically.  Yet, if I was going to play with either of us, I would choose to play with me.   You will not be surprised to learn that he is a perfectionist, and can only collaborate when everything is lined up perfectly to his liking.  He will teach you one of his tunes, which are difficult, and you will have to master it before any real music gets made.  As often as not, no music will happen, though you both sit with instruments.  

A loser like me, much more limited in his musical palette, will look for the beat, a bass line, lock into some groove, lay something down, play a blues lick.   Something will catch, something I heard you do will give me an idea, which I’ll add to whatever else is going on.  I’ll be looking for music, instead of looking for that fatal weakness that eventually translates to our inevitable death.  We may all be dying, but there’s a lot to share before we do.  I always feel that way, anyway.

I have often expressed my bitter disappointment in Barack Obama, the promising and brilliant candidate of the People who served the 1% so much better than he served the rest of us.    I was going on about his drone program the other day, with its signature strikes (we follow patterns that suggest possible terrorist activity and kill people who fit the pattern) and the apparently new classified standard operating procedure of following up with missile number two to kill any would-be rescuers/witnesses too.  

I ranted against the new presidential power, standardized by Obama, of legally killing anyone on a secret list at his sole discretion, including outraged citizens of his own country, who the president is free to declare enemy combatants worthy of mechanized assassination.  

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less, arguing successfully for a program that kills a certain, undisclosed, number of innocent bystanders, sometimes kills American citizens without trial or even specific charges.  Let’s even assume Obama did these extrajudicial murders judiciously, with a strict eye on minimizing “collateral damage.”  I hate him for passing this awesome and unappealable new power of life and death on to a giant two year-old subject to tantrums.  Hard for me to rant about it without ending with “fuck him and the whores he rode in on”.

My old friend, an attorney for the earth (a precious entity that cannot speak for itself except through natural catastrophe) gave me a good workout on every issue I raised in my recent vitriolic attack on our violent, secretive, lucrative new world order of perpetual war on “Terror” (fated to be as successful as the less known perpetual war on sarcasm), with imperial-style presidential powers embraced and enhanced by Obama.  

The goal of the drone war is simple: kill every single bad guy, bad woman and bad child in the world before they can kill us, and without the public relations nightmare of thousands of Americans being killed and maimed in the process.  Quite understandable politically, as my friend pointed out.  Laudable, perhaps, or as evil as any scheme carried out by Himmler and his men.

In the end, our correspondence produced my friend’s tightly written, comprehensive paragraph, with which I could find no fault and which deserves not to end in my gmail inbox.   Hearing no objection from him when I raised the idea of posting it here— here are his warts-first capsule portraits of the presidents of our lifetime (we were four when Ike stepped down after two terms, so he doesn’t make the list).  Here he goes:

Anyway, don’t think I don’t respect your willingness to insist on the highest standards of morality from our public servants.  I certainly do respect it, and expect no less from you. I don’t think if I were president I could meet them, so I have some sympathy for someone who seemed at least to try, at least some of the time.

back to me:

That there is the best defense I can imagine for our first post-racial, soon-to-be first self-made billionaire ex-president.

I love it, in that sick way one loves hideous things, that die-hard Republicans take credit for Abraham Lincoln, our nation’s first Republican president, and blame Democrats for creating the Ku Klux Klan and being the party of racists.   A simple matter of the historical record, they will say with a certain pugnacious smugness.

A glance at any national electoral map since LBJ signed those damnable Civil Rights laws shows the former Confederacy votes solidly red.  The same way whites hated Republicans down in the former Confederacy after the South lost the Civil War, as a voting block they now seem to hate Democrats.  For more than fifty years, the South votes solidly Republican in national elections.

In fairness to southern white voters, look at this map and imagine how intolerable their lives would have been if they’d done nothing about the Fifteenth Amendment and simply let Negroes vote.

Some eye-popping majorities would have been created by suddenly enfranchised former slaves and sympathetic poor whites.   All the more urgent that, once federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederacy, pursuant to the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, some measures be put in place to make sure vengeful Negroes were kept in their place.  With “Bayonet Rule” over the states of the former Confederacy ended, local powers enforced the rights of Negroes as they saw fit.  Those rights did not include easy access to the voting booth, obviously.

Fast forward through generations of Black Codes, poll taxes, literacy tests, fucking Dixiecrats blocking anti-lynching legislation, voting with the racially conscious right wingers across the aisle, holding the Democratic party hostage to their states’ rights, anti-Civil Rights views.  Nixon had a great strategy for all those disillusioned southerners who voted faithfully for the Dixiecrats for a hundred years, before LBJ’s stunning betrayal of the Southern way of life.  Law and Order, a militarized War on Drugs, and, most of all, a war on angry fucking Negroes.   It was called The Southern Strategy and it has been in more or less continuous use since.

This Republican administration we have now was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. The president’s chief strategist is the former boss of a hugely popular white supremacist on-line ‘news service’ called Breitbart.  Admittedly, racism was not the only appeal the billionaire reality TV star had going for him.   He was a very well-known brand.  His brand, of incalculable worth, stands for winning, and being self-made, and being a bold, even audacious innovator.    His name stood for taking no shit, for dishing it out, whether you like it or not.   His presidential run was the last chance for a dying generation of racist Americans to have one of their own in the White House, though for millions, ethnocentrism may be incidental to his other appeals.  

He may be an overbearing jerk, fond of humiliating people he doesn’t like, but he gets this reassuring tone of voice sometimes, a tone he can apparently assume at will, and our fear-whipped citizens take great solace from that tone.  He may seem, at times, to be insane, still… he can get that reassuring tone, talk softly, almost gently.   It is that ability to modulate his voice, sound very calm, as much as anything, I believe, that accounts for his popularity, among those who love what he says he stands for.   It is that soft side of his braying, bullying persona that sometimes soothes even those of us who despise his type and the inhuman values for which they stand.

Sekhnet always comments that I should not write about “current events” since topical writing soon goes out of date.   I take her point but I’ve also got breaking news for my sweetheart — most things soon go out of date.   We are rats running on an accelerating digital treadmill, technology giving us the up-to-the second illusion that we know much more when, actually, because we are always running full tilt, and living increasingly in echo-chambers that confirm our own biases, we know much less. 

How about a quick trip down non-memory lane?  It’s possible that Jeremy Scahill is wrong when he says the American citizen President Obama ordered executed by missile was not charged with any crime.  It’s possible that I am wrong in my memory of what Scahill wrote in Dirty Wars and other places.    It’s possible that this source I am about to quote was wrong:

It’s still unclear precisely which charges Al-Awlaki would have been asked to surrender to face. A State Department spokesman referred questions about that to the Justice Department. A spokesman there said Wednesday the agency “has not commented on whether there were or were not federal charges against him at the time of his death.”   source

I love a good turn of phrase as much as the next guy.  Hard not to admire the DOJ spokesman’s adroit “at the time of his death” which is so much better than “at the time we turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched from a drone”.  Whatever else one might say about Al-Awlaki at “the time of his death”, one true thing is that he was an American citizen.  At minimum one would like to think he was charged with a capital crime before his execution was ordered by the American president.  After all, we are a nation of laws, as the president who ordered Mr. Al-Alwaki’s extrajudicial execution always reminded us.    

My hatred of charismatic President “We Tortured Some Folks” is well-documented.   My largest single reason for it now, outside of the solidly right-wing government his well-talked, adroitly walked two terms left us with, are the precedents he left behind for his angry, unstable successor.   The fucking Department of Justice will not comment on whether Mr. Al-Awlaki was charged with anything “at the time of his death”?   Are you fucking shitting in my mouth?

That was a rhetorical question, of course.  They are allowed to shit in my mouth, and yours, whenever they want.  If I screamed too loudly, and got too much attention for my angry opinions, and was not born very, very rich, I could become a nuisance.  If I became a sufficient nuisance they could make any allegations they like against me.  Having made those allegations, it would be at the discretion of the current president whether or not I deserved to be killed, with or without charges against me, at the time of my death. 

They could, for example, threaten me with the publication of videos of me with prostitutes.  This would end my career as America’s fair-minded, moderate go-to TV imam after 9/11.  I could go back to my family’s country of origin, say, Yemen, and find myself picked up, at America’s request, and detained for a year and a half, mostly in solitary confinement, as America stepped up its global war against Islamic terrorists and those suspected of supporting Islamic terror.  When I got out of solitary, and took to the internet to scream against American injustice and hypocrisy, and its worldwide jihad against Muslims — well, you can see where this is going.   Everywhere you look now, everywhere, you would see me referred to as Al-Qu’aeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s number two man.    

Speaking of number two, wipe the side of your mouth, man, that’s disgusting.

Jeez, I’m sorry, I don’t know how this number two got on the side of my mouth.  

“Must you always be so disgusting?,” asked someone, at the time of my death.