Trumpists try to hijack "The Kingsman"...and fail

In reaction to Trump fans' use of The Kingsman church massacre scene, I wrote on FB this morning the following:

It is beyond contradictory and ironic how right wing activists created the Trump killing media people video used "The Kingsman" church massacre scene. That scene remains one of the most amazingly outrageous scenes in the entire history of cinema. As we see in the beginning of the clip (and I wish there was more of that beginning because the preacher is a hate monger right out of Trump-David Duke land), the church is a hate factory sadly not completely made up in the history of the South and near South (Kentucky). The background, for those who are not familiar with the film, is the billionaire villain--Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), speaking with a humorous lisp--has hatched a plan to rid the planet of about 1/3d to 1/2 of humanity to fight climate change, but protect the 1% (or at least those who are willing to go along with him). Valentine's solution is a Malthusian solution (note: Karl Marx was the early 19th Century's most brilliant critic of Malthus, explaining capitalism would help in resolving any issue of over population and food development, and that the issue remains one of distribution, not population numbers). The billionaire's plan is based upon his giving away free cellphones, with people not knowing the cellphones contain a frequency which, when activated, will cause people to lose all non-violent inhibitions and suddenly want to kill each other. It affects all who are in the range, as it did Colin Firth's character, who is the essence of decorum, restraint and dignity, but can fight like the dickens when necessary. 

The scene is not only a choreographically visual wonderment, but the soundtrack chosen is brilliant. It is Lynyrd Sknyrd's classic, "Free Bird,"* and the song is used from the last words in the song, "Lord knows, I can't change...." LS was a Southern rock band in the 1970s (tragically, it lost members in a plane crash in the late 1970s) which hoisted a large Confederate flag behind them in shows and were notoriously reactionary and perhaps racially insensitive in their politics (unlike the greatest Southern rock band of all time, The Allman Brothers). Infamously, LS' songwriters wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" as a rebuke to Neil Young's "Southern Man," never wanting to come to grips with the racist hatred and violence which is a main legacy of the Southern region of our nation.** If one listens carefully to the lyrics in "Sweet Home Alabama," one sees the direct rebuke to Young amidst the very catchy and great tune.*** To use "Free Bird," the real LS anthem, as the backdrop for the murderous reaction of The Kingsman (Colin Firth) right after the preacher gives his hate sermon, and the first woman killed is a horrible, hateful person spewing hatred at Firth's character, who had mischievously set forth all the things the woman hates (blacks, Jews, abortion, etc.), is a stunning stroke of brilliant creativity. I always wondered how the filmmakers, Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, got away with using LS' song in this way. I wonder if the song's copyright owners understood the use--as I saw no corporate media critics note these points and most filmgoers certainly seemed to have been unable to articulate just what was going on in the scene.

I appreciate how some smart right wing activists may have wanted to take back the scene, but all I can say is nice try, but it is a Fail. The preacher does them in every time and the woman's racist hatefulness does in any such attempt to change context. This scene in the original film has a worldview, a point of view. And the entire film is a Chomskyian version of a James Bond film, where the people who are right wingers and racists are the ones who die amidst "funny" or "ironic" music, while the nicer people, when confronted with death or are killed, have more typical somber, scary music within the soundtrack. The NY Times corporate media critic thought the film incoherent and The Guardian critic actually thought the film was right-wing. No, it was neither.  The bad guy may have been concerned with climate change, but his Malthusian solution was a typical selfish oriented capitalist accumulation in reverse. The other bad guys in the film are the British version of Rush Limbaugh-FoxNews fans who hang around in pubs and bully people--and they get theirs a couple of times at least in the film. The film also attacks the 1% who nearly all get theirs--yes, Chomsky fans--even Obama and other "corporate liberal" 1%ers get theirs, too. As I say, this is a film with a decidedly left radical bent, and it was amazing to me how hardly anyone seemed to get it, even when seeing it. 

All the Trump fans see in this scene is a glorification of violence, which is a projection of their own adoration of violence (and hate). However, the film itself is a demand we solve this climate change problem saving people, and not killing them. Even the full scene shows Colin Firth's character recognition of remorse, guilt, disgust as to what he has done and wondering how and why it occurred. And we see it in the faces of his compatriots helplessly watching the carnage. Firth's character is then shot by the bad rich guy at point blank range when he steps out of the church, with a recognition that motives may not count as much as actions in karma-based justice.

* The lyric in "Free Bird" speaks of stubborn selfishness as a virtue.  It makes Dion's self-parodying and self-ironic "The Wanderer" from 1962 seem closer to "Get Together."  

** A FB friend challenged whether LS ever recanted their worldview before the tragic plane crash, also properly noting they had a good relationship with Neil Young on a personal level--Young being a pall bearer at the post-plane crash funeral of Van Zandt.  After reading this article from Rolling Stone, I think the point made below, which is LS and Van Zandt were extolling George Wallace, and the band being fine with the Confederate (Northern Virginia flag) up through and well after the plane crash, tells us my initial point is still on point.  And, really, "the record company forced us to show the stars and bars?"  Really?  I don't believe that for a minute.  Sounds like a post-cultural moment whine.  And certainly some LS fans knew better and reacted with anger and betrayal when a recent incarnation of the band jettisoned the flag.

*** Here are a sample of the song's lyrics, which most don't even hear as the music covers it like a nice, warm blanket.  "I miss Alabamy once again and I think its a sin yes/Well I heard Mr. Young sing about her/Well I heard ole Neil put her down/Well I hope Neil Young will remember/A southern man don't need him around anyhow." 

 And here is a little tasty reminder of how right wingers viewed the Nixon scandals in the next verse of the song: 

In Birmingham they love the governor

Boo-boo-boo

Now we all did what we could do

Now watergate does not bother me

Does your conscience bother you?

Tell the truth

Sweet home Alabama

Where the skies are so blue

Sweet home Alabama

Who, first off, was Alabama's governor in 1973-1974 when this song was released in 1974? George Wallace, the face of American racism in the 1960s and early 1970s (although he was trying to show some change in 1974). One can reasonably envision LS marching in Charlottesville with those other "nice people" in 2018....

The Big Club We Are Not In

I guess what I initially found compelling about the "Should Ellen have gone to the game with GW Bush?" imbroglio is Bush does seem likable.  If I met him and especially Laura, I think I would  find them decent, though I would have to forget who they really are and what they have stood for. My initial take was admittedly selfishly humble: "Hmmm, I have long said I would have loved an evening with Richard Nixon, as I find him endlessly fascinating--even though I still consider Nixon a war criminal. And even though I know Nixon spoke in anti-Semitic terms--though Nixon was very tight with Len Garment, a definitely Jewish guy, and there was nothing anti-Semitic in Nixon's policies as I recall."

I then circled back to Ellen's "status" as a lesbian icon and wondered, what is Ellen doing? If I was gay, I think I would have been immediately upset at Ellen DeGeneres' decision, as she is a very out lesbian.  Considering that status, I think she should have more deeply considered the GW Bush administration's (1) choices for federal judges, (2) policies promoting right wing religious schools with public funds--even as those schools push anti-LGBT "doctrines" and support discriminating against the LGBT community, and (3) dog whistles to right wing voters, which were decidedly anti-LGBT.  Nixon did not appoint anti-Semitic judges as part of an expressed policy (though Carswell and the other schmuck nominee for the Supreme Court probably didn't like Jews all that much). Nixon is also known for coming to Israel's rescue during the first 24 hours of the Yom Kippur War at a time when the majority of American Jews and Israel were much more aligned than now.  Bush may have been pro-Israel, but in this century, being pro-Israel primarily means promoting oppression of Palestinians and having a satellite in the military-industrial complex rather than standing for  the "protection of the Jewish people."  As I like to say to BDSers, So, you think the Egyptians would have spared the Israeli Jews if Egypt won that 1973 war?

I think GW Bush gets a pass from the cultural elite, of which Ellen is a major member, because Bush is a hail-fellow guy on a personal level, though unlike Nixon, he is dull and banal, and definitely not endlessly fascinating. I find Ellen's defense hollow because, no matter what she says, I doubt she would have gone to the ballgame with Dick Cheney, though Cheney's personal family life made him personally pro-gay--as Cheney continued to cynically push an anti-gay agenda for Cheney's more personal monetary, and primarily imperial and fascistic designs. There is something not so nice about Cheney's personality to say the least (though I'll admit an evening with his writer wife would be fascinating for me). 

Overall, I have grown more and more to think of Mark Raffalo's points about Bush, as I recall Bush being a cruel buffoon, including Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina (which was a result of Bush-Cheney's cynical destruction of FEMA before Hurricane Katrina), the Bush-Cheney lies regarding the Gulf War II, the torture policies, pushing private prisons and the prison-industrial state, the continued dog whistles promoting racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and policies which strengthened a denial of climate change--all when Bush campaigned in 2000 as the ultimate Republican "moderate." 

I also admit to remaining most amazed at the success of the US corporate media's propaganda system that Bush and Cheney were never in danger of impeachment for their negligence in allowing the events of 9/11/2001 to occur. Had this horrific event in US history occurred under a Gore-Lieberman administration, the cry of criminal negligence would have made impeachment inevitable. However, let's note something else here: There would have been no "9/11" because Gore would have listened to Richard Clarke and John O'Neill, and would have hardened airport security, as the Europeans did in the summer of 2001 (Bush-Cheney US Attorney General John Ashcroft wanted this hardening, too, and refused to fly in commercial aircraft starting in June 2001).  But, hold on Gore fans. Gore and Lieberman were gung-ho about going after Saddam, and would likely have allowed for the promotion of the imperialist lies about WMDs, and gone merrily on the way to Baghdad. Gore was a neo-con and neo-lib of the first order in his career, before he lost in 2000 what should have been won, grew a beard, and re-read his late, great father's speeches and life career.  When we think about the events of 9/11, and recognize Bush's negligent complicity, I wonder if we can really say, Oh yeah, let's go to a ball game with that guy.

So count me more in as asking Ellen why she did what she did, especially given her status as a lesbian icon. I don't see how civility in politics was improved by her non-brave move of going to a ballgame with a former president who is personally irrelevant in current American politics. Instead, the whole thing does look like George Carlin's insight, "It's a big club--and you ain't in it."

Which Strange Bedfellow's Side Are You On?

Here is where Krystal Ball and I part company. First, people should watch this several minutes' oral and visual op-ed from Krystal Ball because she provides important information and context about foreign affairs that are not provided anywhere else in corporate owned media. 

I think Ms. Ball is spot-on correct that revolution is currently in the air around the world. For me, and I think Ms. Ball as well, this is the foreign policy equivalent to the labor unrest in our nation that corporate owned media continually ignores other than a stray newspaper headline. It is the left part of the Great Reaction against the Neo-Liberal/Capitalist Consensus of world leaders for the past 40 plus years. 

Second, I agree with Ms. Ball there can be over-coverage of the "Trump as a danger to the Republic" story, and the way in which elitist imperialist National Security State types are now convincing  Trump-bootlicking Lindsey Graham that it is maybe time to stop dancing with Trump. There is a National Security State sort of reaction going on as a result of Trump's tweets yesterday. However, that fact does not change the most straightforward fact: Trump is a danger to what is left of the republic in a way that portends full-on fascism of a very virulent and racist type. When I consider the Dominionist-Christian fundamentalist zealots and right wing racists inside the US military, I wonder if there is a further danger from Trump in the next year to push a fascist military coup and how much of the US military follows him. It will not take a majority of the military to back Trump in a coup. It never does, as we know from our Founders, from revolutionists in Soviet Russia, and in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Japan, up through our own time.  It is why I have come to the conclusion Trump must be stopped now before we reach a stage where Trump cannot be stopped when he attempts a coup for his own self-aggrandizement and the fascistic-religious zealots in the US military see an opportunity in joining him. 

Ms. Ball's commentary (strangely) completely ignores how Trump's policies are largely consistent with what I am calling the Fascist International, and, after Ms. Ball delivered her commentary, we saw Trump's pronouncement yesterday to abandon the Kurds to Turkish imperial desires and how Trump's overall policy moves play into Putin's Russian policy demands. I get that my strange bedfellow position includes people like Max Boot or some other warmongering national security state  (the link is to Vidal's 1998 speech to the National Press Club, starting at just before the 10 minute mark) elitists. I believe, however, that is a safer strange bedfellow than becoming a member of the anti-anti-Trump coalition, who end up sounding like an American Communist, circa 1940, when the Stalin-Hitler Pact was in vogue, and American Reds were calling FDR a Social Fascist again and calling him an imperialist warmonger. 

Ms. Ball also wrongly assumes the corporate media will cover these revolutionary activities if there was nothing about Trump and Ukraine. This is a false assumption and conclusion. The vast majority of American citizens still don't understand why the US was wrong in the US war against Vietnam (the failure to understand how bad Ken Burns' documentary on Vietnam, and his obscurant discussion and misinformation regarding the 1954 Geneva Accords was, is my Exhibit A). Worse, the vast majority of American citizens still do not know, let alone understand, how the US supported, trained, and subsidized killers to lead regimes in Central America in the 1980s to kill clergy, doctors, nurses, teachers, and labor leaders.* The vast majority of Americans still do not know or understand all sorts of foreign policies the US has followed around the world. To think as she does means she should also think the corporate media will suddenly find time to report on labor unrest inside our nation, or find time to fairly report on Bernie Sanders' policies and find Sanders himself a great candidate who stands for policies the majority of American support. That will not happen.  And, sorry, Ms. Ball, this is all of a single piece.

I think we are in a Gil Scott-Heron moment: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, at Home or Abroad.  Worse, we are in a moment where the elite are divided, and we, who are powerless, end up having to choose which elite with whom we align. The Neo-Liberal/Capitalist/National Security State or the Fascist International.  It is not a pretty choice.  I continue to support Bernie Sanders' candidacy, and will see how he holds up following his heart attack.  He remains the only and singular salvation as a U.S. president at this precipitous moment in U.S. history.  He is my "great leap forward," with all the ironies, contradictions, hopefulness, and the Vonnegut-ian recognition that we should, above all, value kindness.

But, for me, again:  Trump remains a clear and immediate danger to what remains of our Republic.  We do not, and should not, wait until he acts more effectively in pushing for a coup where he truly becomes the Orange Caudillo.

* Go ahead.  Try to Google an article that shows how Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary did what I said regarding the 1954 Geneva Accords, and how the U.S. created out of whole cloth a government called the "South" Vietnamese government.  Try to find a non-left wing source regarding what the U.S. did in Central America. The documents from the U.S. government itself tell these truths. Yet, the "mainstream" corporate owned U.S. media remains essentially silent in providing any narrative or context or any detailed information for the most part in such matters.  One must consult books from reporters on the ground in Central America or in Vietnam, and even then, there are limits to understanding.  One ends up in Chomsky-Zinn land and, of course, in corporate media parlance, that makes one a hopeless left-winger and possibly a left wing version of wearing a tin-foil hat.  As Gore Vidal once remarked in a letter to me, the university system and the corporate media do wonders in propagating Pax Americana.

A lesson in corporate media bias

Yesterday's LA Times had this front page story about Senator Warren's excellent third quarter fundraising haul.  The article managed to downgrade and avoid saying Warren's haul was second to Sanders. The headline should have read, "Sen. Warren's excellent fundraising haul still second to Sen. Sanders."  A sub-header could have read, in a moral universe, "Despite corporate media hailing Warren and criticizing Sanders throughout the quarter."  However, corporate media executives do not believe in a moral universe, and neither should we when reading their employees' (reporters') work.

I believe this is an excellent news article to dissect how corporate media bias operates.  In this article, the second place fundraiser, Warren, is listed first in the headline and again in the article's first paragraph. Warren is also the candidate highlighted in the first paragraphs of the article, complete with her campaign manager's effusive quote for his candidate.  This is all placed in at the beginning because people rarely read past the beginning of such articles, as people rarely go to the continued page inside the front page section of a newspaper.  The article reads as if it is completely fact based when the placement and phrasing are clearly persuasive writing designed to influence thinking beyond the article itself.

Deeper into the article, an opinion is offered through general, unsourced cherry picking of alleged polling data designed to favor Warren, again the second place fundraiser, plus one sentence about how it is good for voters to switch from Sanders to Warren because, after all, they are the same. The reporter or editor are saying, You can trust us.  We know what we're talking about.  Warren is better than Sanders.  Vote for her if you want a progressive.  

The greatest phrasing slant is how the article has to finally mention Bernie was the top fundraiser in the quarter. The third paragraph in the article states: "The (Warren's) amount is close to the haul by her Senate colleague and fellow progressive Sanders, of Vermont, who earlier in the week reported raising $25.3 million." This is very awkward phrasing, designed to avoid saying, straight up, Bernie hauled in the most money--and again, notwithstanding all those doom and gloom stories about his campaign failing that appeared nearly every day in the quarter in most leading newspapers, especially the Washington Post.

This is how the corporate media generally operates (one finds exceptions, of course, but we are talking about the overall narrative one sees with op-eds and broadcast cable news). It is standard procedure for at least 120 years. See as examples: Upton Sinclair's "The Brass Check," George Seldes' "Freedom of the Press," Chomsky/Herman's "Manufacturing Consent," Mark Hertsgaard's "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency," and Robert Parry's "Fooling America."

It is not a situation where the article contains false or "fake" news in any sense Trumpists mostly mean when they use that "fake news" mantra. Instead, what we see, as critical readers of this particular Los Angeles Times article, is a slanted headline and slanted phrasing in the article, cherry picking of information, and highlighting who corporate media has been shown to wish to promote in the past several months, Warren, and who corporate media wishes to not promote, which has fairly consistently been Sanders. See here for a Sanders' campaign compilation of only the tip of the iceberg of bias corporate media has shown. And let us note how information is simply not provided. Example: If Warren had more donors overall than Sanders, that would be mentioned and perhaps highlighted. Since that is not true, it is ignored.  And let's get specific here:  Bernie had 1.4 million donors giving an average of $18, and largely from working class people.  Warren had less than half, just over 500,000 donors, donating an average of $26, with far more in the professional classes than working classes as donors.

I remember my Dad telling me how, when he stationed in Texas and Oklahoma in 1956 during the Eisenhower-Stevenson election campaign, several newspapers would never refer to Stevenson by name. Stevenson would merely be referred to as "the President's opponent." Back then, one referred to the "capitalist press" as opposed to "corporate media." As I say, one has to translate corporate/capitalist speak in newspaper or media reporting. It is not necessarily the reporter's fault, either.  Editors often determine headlines and order of paragraphs, and edit sentences.

With this Los Angeles Times article, I expect there was probably a lot of editing work.

Overheard at MSNBC Executive Suites

The Folks say there has been hardly any coverage of Sanders' heart condition on MSDNC. I was able to get a transcript of a leaked recording over at MSNBC's executive suites:

SUIT #1: Bernie's in the hospital! I think he's getting a pacemaker!

SUIT #2: No, it's a stent.

SUIT #1: Oh. Interesting.  Anyway, let's get the coverage going. Bernie's so old. This proves it. He's toast. Let's get Kamala Harris on the air to talk about Bernie and her campaign--

SUIT #3: I don't know about that. My father had a stent put in ten years ago. He's fine. It's like saying throw out your sink and replace your pipes because the pipes need a cleaning.

SUIT #1: No way. It can't be that simple. Can it? (Pauses) I was a business major. I never took college biology. 

SUIT #2: Poli-sci.

SUIT #3: English. 

SUIT #1: So that means we're all dopes. 

SUIT #1: Hey, don't tell anyone! We make more than electro-physical cardiologists anyway. And a lot less studying....

SUIT #2: So are we covering this or not?

SUIT #3: I don't know. If we let any of our employees on the air now, they'll start into their attacks on Bernie again--and what if Bernie dies? We'll look like assholes to even our rich Democratic voter demographic. People turn quickly when someone dies.

SUIT #2: Oh boy. Now that would make my skin crawl, more than when I think of Bernie and his screaming about giving people free stuff.

SUIT #1: I know we're not supposed to speak ill of the dead--

SUIT #3: McCain. May he rest in peace. (Bows head). A warrior for peace and ethics.

(The three suits pause for silent moment in honor of St. John the McCain)

SUIT #1: I got it. We don't say anything. It's a win-win--

SUIT #2: How--

SUIT #1: Doncha see? This way, we won't have to remind our demographic of older viewers about Bernie's big fundraising haul the other day or how many individual donors he has--more than anyone, including Trump and every Democrat. 

SUIT #2: But what are we gonna fill our time with? I know we can't cover workers' strikes. I think that's against corporate Standards & Practices--

SUIT #3: Hillary's got a new book!

SUIT #2 and SUIT #1: Thank God! Book her! 

SUIT #2: (Presses button on office phone).  Megan, call Maddow. Tell her to book Hillary.  Hillary's got a new book.  Wait. What?  She did already?  God. Thank God.  Thank you.  (Hangs up)

SUIT #2 Maddow never needs a memo.  She's awesome.

SUIT #3: Well, I think we have a consensus, then. Nothing said on the air about Bernie one way or the other.  We'll fill the time.  Just repeat and rinse the same shit every hour.  It's how we roll.  Our oldest people forget anyway, and just let it drone on in the background anyway.  It's like Soma.

(Quizzical looks from other suits)

SUIT #3: Huxley.  Brave New World.  Remember?

SUIT #1 and SUIT #2:  Oh yeah.  (Muttering.)

SUIT #2: Yes. Excellent idea. Nothing said one way or the other.

SUIT #1: Yeah, that's the best strategy here. No response at all. And ya know, Bernie might just die and we can then say what a great guy he was. So honest. So straight.  Great for ratings.  We can broadcast the funeral.  You know, Republicans on Capitol Hill like Bernie as a person. They admire his guts.

SUIT #3: Don't get lost here.  If he dies, it's only great because he's no longer a threat.

SUIT #2: Yeah, what was that line from Stalin again? "No man, no problem."

SUIT #3: I'm no Stalinist, but I think I first heard that line from a Board member at Comcast when they told us to drop Ed Schultz. 

SUIT #1:  Yeah, that line works for everyone.  

The Suits laugh.

End of transcript.

How to Defend Trump, Though Trump Supporters May Not Want this "Defense"

Please read this article from Will Saletan.  Notwithstanding the points Saletan makes (and I think he forgot how Trump has played inconsistently with China and the tariff issue, first protecting certain lines of clothing articles, which incidentally protected his daughter's line of clothing, and now maybe calling a truce as Trump has to ensure he protects Sheldon Adelson's holdings in Macau), I can make a lawyer's case FOR Trump.

However the case FOR Trump involves saying the following: "Trump is part of the Fascist International (Russia, Turkey, Israel, Modi's party in India) fighting international Islamic fundamentalism.  This attack on Trump is therefore a domestic fight over the direction of foreign policy--and there is a criminalization of politics."

My take on the early stage of the Cold War has been the corporate power in the United States, fearing all the strikes that shook corporate America in late 1945 through 1946, needed anti-Communism to undermine the New Deal.  The easy pickings were those who were New Deal internationalists who sought peace with the Soviet Union (Russians) to avoid WWIII.  Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were two New Deal internationalist advisers of high repute, and needed to be taken down.  And they were.  From there, the demonization proved fairly easy to convince the returning vets to turn in their neighbors and their union leaders. The eventual undermining of New Deal values was completed by the 1970s, with hippie libertarians joining in the chorus led by corporate America that government sucks, government always sucks, and you must act as an individual and not in a union or any other "collective."  We went from national health insurance is Communism which is treason to simply believing national health insurance is treason.  It is how the propaganda continues to work on oldsters and aging Baby Boomers.  The difference in the American political discourse now is that does not work for most of the youngers.  This has led Republicans and their business backers to coalesce even  more deeply with evangelical Christians, who are fighting for the return to 19th Century Comstockery, and pushing for ever more extreme forms of gerrymandering, including holding on to the Electoral College.  It also means promoting white supremacy rule in the United States at the expense of democratic or republican values (let alone New Deal values).

Here, we can argue against Saletan's article, saying each of Trump's actions, even his bowing to Kim in North Korea, which Saletan again forgot something, such as Trump calling for a suspension of joint US-South Korean military exercises, which has incensed and caused some fear among South Korean military and civilian officials, is designed to bolster the coalition of leaders who truly understand the Islamic fundamentalist threat.

Wait a minute, I hear you cry.  How about Turkey and Saudi Arabia, then?  Aren't they led by Islamic fanatics?  Yes, they are.  But they are Muslim fanatics on the side of the International Fascist interests in fossil fuels and nuclear power.  They believe in the secular Fascist principles.  What makes the Iranians, for example, suspect is they are promoting a Islamic fundamentalist REVOLUTION, which could and likely would undermine Western fossil fuel interests.  It shares that in common with the earlier secular Pan-Arabists, who were such a danger to Pax Americana, though many foreign policy establishment advisers would love to have Nasser back at this point--irony city.*  Thus, the presence of Turkey and Saudi Arabia becomes a case of mere strange bedfellows, no different than Churchill saying he would side with Stalin in WWII against Hitler.  The bottom line is this is all consistent with the coalition's imperial or international goals.

I don't think Trump wants this "defense," at least not yet.  Trump's supporters, especially those with Lee Greenwood singing in their heads, would squirm at this "defense."  However, I think this "defense" explains a lot in a way to show more consistency in Trump's behaviors, including his attempted shake-down of the leadership in Ukraine. This "defense" gives Trump a way to say he is not a traitor to America and could allow Trump to say he simply has a different foreign policy vision than much of the less reactionary foreign policy establishment, making the Democratic House's attack on Trump no more than an alleged criminalization of politics.   

* We are in this mess with Islamic fundamentalism because our foreign policy establishment, since the 1950s, has embraced religious zealotry in the Middle East and then elsewhere, as a bulwark against secular Pan-Arabism (one may start with this thesis paper to get an understanding for this conclusory statement). This was part of why the legendary sociologist, C. Wright Mills, referred to our establishment as filled with "crack pot realists."  Of course, this is what happens when one goes off in search of monsters, as John Quincy Adams warned our nation nearly 200 years ago.  It is also why I find this several minute stretch in "Captain America: Winter Soldier" so radical.  It dovetails with Chomsky's point about Nazi foreign policy operatives insinuating themselves into American foreign policy at the time the US was protecting Nazis after WWII even as it was prosecuting some high level Nazi leaders in Nuremberg. 

Neo-Liberal Agonistes

Poor George Packer. Fooled by Bush & Cheney into supporting the Iraq War II. Fooled by the neo-liberal project. And now, afraid to confront the consequence of the neo-liberal project in New York City's public schools, where cultural radicalism reigns over issues of political economy,  Packer starts to sound like a liberal in 1968 who has been mugged. Last month, Packer extolled the execrable Michael Bennett, a squishy US Senator from Colorado (a State that has yet to do penance for its anti-union history).  Bennett wouldn't know a vision if it punched him in the face, notwithstanding Bennett being supportive of universal pre-K.  Bennett's hostility to Medicare for All and free public college tuition, his inability to understand the American Empire, and inability to speak with any passion about the need for systemic changes in this Reaganite-Clintonite-global economy, and his use of right-wing arguments, make Bennett execrable as a presidential candidate. 

The reason I write this post is not to damn Packer as another example of corporate media punditry, where no matter how wrong you are, as long as you stay within the elite corporate executive approved opinion, you always have your perch.  I write this post because I just finished Packer's extraordinary and powerful book, The Blood of Liberals (2000), which I recently found in a used bookstore. I bought the book not just because it was about his maternal grandfather (George Huddelston), a Southern Populist from the start of and into the early 20th Century, who took that road from economic radical to anti-New Dealer, falling on the sword of racism, and his own father, Herb Packer, a New Dealer who ended up in a technocratic worldview trap against his own will, and who unsuccessfully tried to stem the madness which developed in the late 1960s student movement (Herb Packer was against the Vietnam War for what seems to have been an anti-Cold War basis, which made him very different from too many of his higher education contemporaries, who kept looking at the war as some sort of one-off "mistake," instead of an imperialist pattern). I bought Packer's book because, in the back end acknowledgements, Packer stated his book was informed by the late historians Christopher Lasch and Richard Hofstadter, both of whom, for the past two years, I have been re-reading as I come to grips with the madness which has engulfed the American political discourse.  As I complete Packer's book, I can definitely say Packer is a brilliant mind and, unlike too many others, Packer has closely and accurately read Lasch and Hofstadter, which makes Packer's insight and analysis of his grandfather and father powerful, compelling, and poignant.  Packer's book is as great an introduction to the history of the American 20th Century as anything one may read anywhere.

Packer is three years younger than me, and it appears, from his discussion of his own reading, our reading has largely tracked.  Packer even read Clark Kerr's multiversity lectures-essays, which may make Packer and me one of the relative few non-academics who have read those lectures-essays in the last forty years (meaning, Packer, me, and Seth Rosenfeld). Packer's book later goes into Packer's own journeys after college, where I laughed at how we both found the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s, just when the word "socialism" had reached its nadir as the dreaded Soviet style regimes were falling under their own weight. I did not get the sense Packer read much, if at all, Michael Harrington (I ingested every Harrington book). Surprisingly, however, and considering Packer's later trajectory, Packer shows, in his economic analysis of America in the 1980s and 1990s, he understood the Harringtonian analysis.  Our lives greatly diverged during the 1980s and 1990s as Packer was in a position to journey, having both elite access and good physical health--so he did not have to maneuver inside the American medical system and seek employers who had insurance. Packer also carried within him an elite confidence which helped him as he played in the world. It is fun to read of Packer's audacity and pushing into places he may not have been welcomed.  

As with earlier sections of his book, Packer provides a reader with an acutely sharp perspective, and he is very insightful about homeless people he met, and the people he met in Africa while in the Peace Corps.  Packer is also prescient about what was happening to American society in the 1980s and 1990s, which we may term the Reagan-Clinton era. However, what was completely missing from Packer's book is any awareness of the press critics from Irwin to Sinclair to Seldes to Stone and Parry--though I think I saw one reference to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)--and how corporate media perpetuates corporate executives' worldview and limits the scope of our public discourse.  This forms my supposition as to why Packer was fooled regarding the Iraq War II and why he continues to avoid directly confronting the political-economic issues that are at the foundation of so many challenges our society faces, and forms the reason our corporate media highlights many of the cultural food fights. Had he been willing to speak of these things, he may have seen why and how those people who run the urban public schools are ultimately economic reactionaries even as they sound radical on culture and even issues of Empire.  What strikes me about Packer's still important article about his, his wife's and children's experiences inside the NYC private pre-school and later public school systems is Packer never once bothers to analyze how the neo-liberal project and global inequalities emanating from and pushing back into the United States led us to the confounding things he correctly finds so frustrating. 

But let's get personal here.  Packer never once tells us whether he and his wife considered moving out of the city and into a suburb with a good and functioning public school system.  As a powerless person who never got to write for Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, I found a simple solution to what was so clearly beyond my control.  Unlike Packer, I made a conscious decision to move our family to where it was best for our children, not myself or my wife.  My wife and I could have moved the family to a poor urban neighborhood to be with really cool people, or else, to save big mortgage bucks, moved to some rural area to allow me to write, and my wife to paint, and follow our own paths.  Instead, my wife and I (well, more me, as my wife trusted my decisions) chose to move to an upper middle class suburb, about 30 minutes from downtown San Diego, which contained one of the best public school systems in California, the Poway Unified School District.  Poway still has the highest Republican registration of any city in San Diego County, and, paradoxically has a high level of cultural anti-intellectualism, which is reflected in the idiots running the city council. However, its relative economic wealth allowed for a good and functioning public education system, which benefited our children. 

For me, Packer's article was very familiar, and again frustrating, reading, and is consistent with what I have read for the past 25 years regarding the class issues inside private pre-schools, the education administrative establishment, and cultural liberalism run amok.  Too often over the years, I have found people who style themselves "progressives" in the education establishment were the type of people at Stanford, circa 1988, screaming, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!"  With Gore Vidal, I shared a disdain for such anti-intellectualism, and those cultural radicals' inability to see the richness and continued relevance of studying the Western canon and classics (one should give credit here too for Martha Nussbaum's brilliant essay review taking down the late but unlamented Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," where she showed Bloom knew far less than he believed about antiquity and how exciting antiquity writers continue to be). I find too many cultural radicals reach for extreme cultural solutions because they are afraid to confront the economic inequalities arising from the Reagan-Clinton era and the entire economic elite's project, since the start of the Cold War, in dismantling the New Deal. Things get even more complicated when the English major lit-crits end up in charge of public schools or higher education, as these are people who essentially deny empiricism as a societal good and would get rid of all testing, instead of asking what they should be testing and why. And never once does Packer go outside his own world to ask, Why do the Finns get no-testing right? What did they do? I get it that Finns are mostly white, but really, are we that incapable of recognizing diversity is supposed to be  pursuing the pluralist philosophy that there is nothing genetically stopping an African-American, Latino, Asian, transgender, gay, etc. person from learning critical thinking, critical writing, and having multiple perspectives?  Packer ends up in a corner where my old right wing neighbors in Poway get to say to him, "See, stupid liberal?  We were right all along."  To which I say, you are certainly right-wing, but you are still wrong.  Oh, and if you think diversity has substantive meaning, such as African-Americans and Latinos, etc. can't do what I just said, then you are a racist.  Packet knows this well, but refuses to pull himself out of neo liberal and corporate capitalist traps.

Packer's passage about the school administrators making a decision to have gender neutral bathrooms also reveals Packer's self-imposed limited perspective.  He is focused on the fact the school did not give parents a chance to voice their opinions. For what? If we're going to protect transgender students, then isn't a gender neutral bathroom a consequential public policy change that flows from that protection?  I find this due process argument to be suspect.  What would we have learned from these parents at a parents' meeting other than hearing their own uninformed prejudices? Notwithstanding this, I would have set a meeting to allow these parents to vent before making the decision, and letting the anti-trans parents pull their kids out of the school if they wished. I did, though, find it amusing how, after the policy was enacted, over time, the students simply ignored the directive such that the boys went to the formerly boys' restrooms and the girls went to the girls' restrooms.  What is not stated in the article is whether there was any improvement in the treatment of transgender students along the way, as I can bet there was.

Packer builds his "liberal-who-was-mugged" argument from a poll which showed how most Americans believe "political correctness" is a "problem."  Not once does Packer wonder if this is simply a reflection of corporate media propaganda.  Not once does Packer wonder, Well, if it is problem, why aren't political candidates talking about it in terms of public policy?  Does anyone really believe "political correctness" is more of a problem than student and medical debt, more of a problem than raising the minimum wage, more important than climate change? Simply saying "political correctness" is a "problem" tells us very little.  I am a politically incorrect guy in some ways, but I also find those who are obsessed about political correctness tend to be either racist or sexist and feel threatened by the very idea of pluralism. Unfortunately, for Packer, the poll and his reaction to what he is seeing in his children's schools plays into his own worldview, which is to not directly question the political-economy that is the foundation of our society and how our society's political-economy got us here.  

It remains telling to me how people like Packer and others, so disastrously wrong about things like the Iraq War, still have their perch in corporate media.  I really do think George Packer is a brilliant mind with strong comprehension skills, particularly based upon his wide reading, his family background, which gives him a deeper perspective of American society than many other Americans, and his particularly insightful reading of historians such as Lasch and Hofstadter.  Packer is clearly superior to Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, Wolf Blitzer, and the like. However, I find Packer's judgment in this century to be no better than these mandarins and, therefore, terribly lacking. Packer could have been an adult in the room amongst these overrated pundits. For the life of me, I cannot understand how Packer gets to those conventional and elite establishment judgments, unless Packer is that concerned with the opinions of those he may meet at a NYC or DC cocktail party.  I know I would be a skunk in those rooms and, admittedly, I have been a skunk on too many occasions going back to the late 1980s, when I started talking in elite Orange County, California political circles about the NAFTA the Reagan and then Bush administrations were negotiating, how we were beggaring our industrial cities in the Mid-West and South, and how the Democratic Party was consciously stepping away from its New Deal roots. I then went against the OC Democratic Party elite by pushing for the Reform Party when it formed, seeing the working class potential behind Perot's proper anti-NAFTA rhetoric, and then moving to the Green Party when Nader was working in it and Perot's party disintegrated into xenophobia and racism when Pat Buchanan came in.  It is probably just as well I am barred from what George Carlin called The Club to which you and I are not invited.  It is significant how Carlin's bit starts out with him saying how the education system is designed to make people just smart enough to follow orders, but not to question the system. As I contemplate Packer's article, I see how reluctantly he pushes himself to fit into the class based system, and how his reaction to the private school and public school systems are perhaps related to Packer's continued poor judgments and nostrums.  His desire to be a player may explain why he selfishly put his children into a difficult school environment and why he never moves beyond acting like a liberal questioning his liberalism because he has been mugged, this time through a dysfunctional inner city public school system.  I see this, too, when Packer, earlier this year, tried to float the hapless Sherrod Brown for president.  It is clear Packer thinks Bernie Sanders has no business running for president and that Packer has been looking for somebody--anybody--to speak to white working class issues who is not a racist, despite Sanders staring him in the face.  I can see Packer saying to himself, "I just can't imagine facing my friends if I was a Sanders supporter."

As I say, Packer's The Blood of the Liberals is a deeply perceptive and insightful book, which I highly recommend to anyone and everyone. However, what I cannot recommend is Packer's insights and analyses since the publication of that book at the dawn of this new century and millennium.