An Inner Circle of Losers

NOTE: The Trump administration's shitshow is on such a roll that by the time one finishes putting two thoughts together, 80 new clusterfucks have happened. Here are some thoughts of mine about Trump's cabinet of creeps:

When I see Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, I feel that I know people like them. We've all run across them in high school, or college, or work. They are people with a huge, poisonous chip of resentment lodged deep inside their balls. They are not legion, but once in a while you run into one. A boss who sows chaos by ruling with contempt, people who thrive on division and disorder, backstabbers; in short, toxic human beings. In an unprecedented achievement, Donald Trump has recruited most of them for his Administration.

Take Kellyanne Conway. Her default mode is being on the defensive. Like her boss, she is the epitome of a sore winner. There is really nothing more base and disgraceful than a sore winner who cannot lead with poise and dignity, but who feels so insecure that they need to rub it in, even though they won. Conway deploys deliberate outrageousness so well, that she makes the newscasters who laugh at her ridiculous statements look bad. That's how insidious she is. Why not focus on the times Trump doesn't lie? she asks, treating journalists and the public as if we are morons. She has not shown a single moment of politeness, empathy, grace, or truth, for that matter. That absurd military/patriotic coat she wore to the inauguration tells us all we need to know about her: always be rubbing it in. Conway is dangerous precisely because people may not take her equivocations seriously. She fake smiles and does the girly thing to deflect the fact that she is lying. Woe to anyone who doesn't realize that she is very deliberately making our heads explode with "alternative facts".
So far, if the idea is to exhaust the American people, it may be working. As an effective communications strategy for an administration, however, it's way off the mark. Instead of bringing the media to their side, Conway and Sean Spicer are in a fight to the death with the media and currently suffering from a torrent of leaks and mediatic insurrection, not to mention general mockery. They don't seem to understand that the role of the media is not to fawn and parrot the party line, but to question and ascertain. They may be in power, but they don't know how to wield it, and they act like losers. All we know is that there is a constant shitshow brewing in the White House.
It's gotten so bad lately, it looks like keeping up with K.A.O.S. is taking its toll:

I found myself reminiscing almost fondly about back in the day when Dick Cheney was Satan and Donald Rumsfeld was Mephistopheles. But the difference between Cheney and Rumsfeld and Trump's advisors is that Cheney and Rumsfeld were never losers. They were alpha males who wielded power with supreme ease. They were not mysteriously resentful men with painful hidden complexes who are out for revenge on the world. They were insiders who belonged squarely in the corridors of power and, for better or for worse, spent their lives in public service. What we have now is a bunch of bitterly resentful outsiders running the show with mind-boggling incompetence.
The feeling I get when I read about Steve Bannon's worldview, and his mediocre agitprop movies -- a bunch of defeatist "Judeo-Christian" mumbo jumbo about how the world is coming to an inevitable clash of civilizations -- is that he's a deranged fanboy. Wasn't there a quote from a comic book villain in the "American carnage" inaugural speech, a speech so hideous only a delusional loser could have written it? They say Bannon reads a lot. Well, too much literature is bad for you if what you're reading are obscure Italian fascists and the writings of Charles Lindbergh.
It's like when people say Hitler was very intelligent. Sowing chaos, destruction and the murder of millions of people, including your own citizenry because of an ideological brain fart doesn't strike me as smart. Quite the contrary, it strikes me as the apex of human stupidity. People like Steve Bannon or Hitler are not intelligent: they do nothing of any real usefulness with their depraved thoughts.
Bannon is clearly out of his depth, a third-rate alt-media (all alt-media is third-rate) operative who has no clue of how government and the law are supposed to function. He may have done a good job convincing a bunch of ignorant yahoos and self-serving conservatives to vote for Trump, but that's not the same as running a country. If he's truly smart, he'll learn to use the system to his advantage, not make it explode in his face; if he thinks that he has anything to learn, that is. To judge from his past pronouncements about emulating Lenin and blowing up the world, he doesn't strike me as the sort who resorts to humility when the shit hits the fan. He may borrow from Charles Lindbergh, but Bannon is no Charles Lindbergh. He's a schlub.

People who harbor a passionate conviction for kooky theories, be they antisemitic, racist, or of world domination by others, tend to be a particular kind of loser. They may be right-wing nutjobs, or left-wing dogmatists who feel there is a Zionist Jew behind every conspiracy; in the end, they're all the same. They thirst for a power they feel is eternally out of their grasp and being hogged or abused by someone else (the media, the Jews, liberals, the government, George Soros, Wall Street, immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, feminists, etc). These people suffer from arrested development and do not have the emotional maturity to deal with reality, which requires the recognition of nuance, complexity, and compromise. They also have a misplaced sense of entitlement -- someone is always taking something away from them. They are small-minded, miserable haters.
Most of these people tend to hide among us, nourishing their hatreds in secret. Once in a while, like in the case of Hitler or other totalitarian obsessives, they reach a position of power. But the cancerous chip on their balls remains firmly in place and metastasizes. All those impressive Nazi rallies were designed to hide the fact that Hitler was a non-Aryan-looking ugly little creep with a ridiculous mustache, greasy hair and boundless reserves of self-hatred.  The rest of the nazis just hitched their wagon to his thirst for power; some adoringly, some resentfully, some cynically, some spinelessly, much like most of the members of the Republican party today. It's a good thing our nazis can't even muster half a crowd for their inauguration.

We all harbor prejudices. It is human and inevitable. But people who spend their energy being racist have a sickness. Sane people do not allow these ideas to become obsessions. We hide our racist thoughts in the back of our minds and feel a little queasy when we catch ourselves forming them. If we are self-aware, we may even get to question them, find them untrue and ditch them. The United States is the most racially aware country on Earth. If you are a card-carrying racist in the US, you choose to be purposefully so.
Stephen Miller seems to be a garden variety racist with a penchant for grandiosity. Even in high school, he was hateful enough to object to Cinco de Mayo celebrations and such manifestations of inclusiveness. I can understand people who have no patience for political correctness, because quite frankly neither do I, but someone who chooses to lecture his fellow classmates on Americanism in his high-school yearbook seems like they are under the grip of a disturbing obsession. Fast-forward to the same guy, now advisor to President Trump, speaking on national TV last week:

"Our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."

Miller was blathering on network TV about how the judiciary usurped power from the president! Who does he think he is? Goebbels? Here he is, a 31-year-old, way in over his head, who reminds me of the Charles Atlas ads in the back of comic books. His performance at the news show circuit made him sound as if he was delivering a radio address in nazi Germany. He also is associated with the cruel and incompetent executive order banning travel from seven Muslim countries for refugees and people with valid visas and green cards. Miller really seems like a throwback to the glorious days of assholes like J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Roy Cohn. Make America Great Again, indeed!
I don't understand Nazi Jews. I don't understand when fear of persecution turns to hate and aggression and you forget that there but for the grace of God, or a humane and coherent immigration policy, go you.

Which leads us to Jared Kushner. The media pronounced that this handsome cipher might bring a semblance of moderation and professionalism to the White House and somehow save the day. Perhaps Kushner thought so too, in his ambitious naivete. There are reports, however, that he loves what Bannon is doing. So who knows? We're still waiting.
Kushner saw it fit to invoke his family who perished in the Shoah when his campaigning father-in-law was cozying up to antisemites, but Kushner uttered not a peep, let alone raised holy hell, when the Trump administration not only deliberately left Jews out of the Holocaust Remembrance Day presidential statement, but then mockingly gloated about it, appallingly, under the pretext of inclusiveness. "A lot of people were killed in the Holocaust", explained Reince Priebus.
Was Stephen Miller the author of such a revolting statement and its nauseating explanation? Was Bannon? Priebus? Kushner may not have been born a loser, but hitching his wagon to the Trumps has turned him into one.

As for the biggest loser of them all, the truth about Donald Trump is that our current nightmare may be the summit of a lifetime of accumulating slights and grudges from a guy who became president thanks to all kinds of suspect foreign machinations. That is, he is not legitimate and will never be. The approval he craves will always elude him. He will never be as rich as the truly capable billionaires of America, he will never be accepted into any of the elite inner sanctums he lusts after, be they social, political or showbiz, and he's always going to be the crass barbarian, conman, clown, and spoiled brat from Queens (no offense to the hardworking citizens of that fine borough). He may have convinced a segment of the population that feels forgotten and entitled to more by dint of being white by bullying everybody else, but we all know Donald Trump is nothing but a tool. A convenient puppet for Putin, for Bannon, for the Republican Party. We're all waiting to see when this bunch of cowards and traitors have enough of this dangerous farce.

President Steve Bannon and Donald Trump in the Oval Office

Meanwhile, we must do all we can to take our country back from this cabal of deranged losers. Resist, protest, demand accountability and vanquish the Republican party in 2018.

Response To A Long Time Reader

I got a comment from "A Long Time Reader" relating to my post on gender discrimination in the advertising business. You can see the post and the comment here.

This is my response:

Thanks for reading, Long Time Reader.
Don't you find it a little naive to think there are no women out there making it on their own? Have you heard of the gal who wrote the Harry Potter books? Oprah Winfrey? I know several women entrepreneurs that have started their own businesses, totally on their own, without expecting anything from anyone but respect and a fair shake, and they have it much tougher than the guys. Lines of credit don't open as easily for them, people don't listen as seriously. They are hardworking, intelligent risk-takers. They are not any less capable than any guy. In fact, they have to work harder to overcome stereotypes and ingrained attitudes. It is not their fault. We just happen to have a deeply ingrained, millennial culture that assumes that men are natural leaders and women are not, because for centuries, women were not allowed to read, study in universities, vote, have professions, have their own businesses, or simply be independent human beings. They were supposed to stay home, breed, and obey the male. How could one compete? To this day, some men still believe they get to decide on what women do with their own sexuality and their pregnancies. The nerve.
At this point, the discrimination, the patronizing, the looking down on women, are embedded in our cultural DNA. It may not always be conscious, or malicious, but that's the way it is.
Look at porn. Porn is a good example of the imbalance between the genders.
Why is it always the woman who is shown to be acted upon, penetrated, manhandled, increasingly with more violence and alienation? Why isn't there a more equal porn where both men and women are objects of erotic desire? Because that is how men look at women. And men don't want to look at other men. And women have been taught that they can't really express themselves sexually. That they should be pure and chaste and not sluts. It's a man's world. And now, there are entire generations of kids who grow up thinking that the ridiculous, ugly, pounding sex in porn is normal sex. You guys are not doing a good job.
Women who object to this state of affairs are called "whiners" by people like you.
I agree that women have to fight hard for equality and fairness. As I said in my post, we have to start our own fight. But men will defend their status quo tooth and nail. Why? Because men know, as the fanatics of every religion that wants to keep women down know (pretty much all of them), that the minute women have truly equal footing, this will mean real freedom, real democracy, real civilization, real human progress. Keeping women down is the first, most basic, most intimate form of human oppression. It is the essence of barbarism.
The question we should be asking is why women have tolerated and abetted this through the ages.
But in this day and age, when religious belief is utterly irrelevant, and we are not hunting Mammoths and living in caves, women have every right to demand equality, fairness and respect. That is not whining or begging, that is plain dignity.
Modernity, however, is no guarantee of civilization. Look at the Holocaust. Look at every genocide since then. Look at the American South up to the 1960's. Look at two young football players who gang raped a girl recently and bragged about it all over social media. Someone on CNN was sorry that their brilliant future careers were over.
It is still imperative for those who are treated unfairly to fight for equal opportunity and justice.
As for your opinions about begging blacks and grousing Jews, they seem to me pernicious and naive generalizations. There are many successful black people, like our very own President Obama; and there are countless Jews who beg and don't have a pot to piss on.
If certain groups don't have the political, economic, or social power to change their situation, what are they supposed to do? If Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement had not "whined" and demanded, would there still be segregation and lynchings in the South? If women had not demanded the right to an education, to vote, to equal pay? We'd all be attending mindless Tupperware parties in Stepford.
That's not progress. That is regression.
In short, I think we do not protest enough, but I suspect that we have very different worldviews. Thank you for your readership.

Make Kony Famous?

This 30 minute ramble of a video by Invisible Children is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. It made me both cry and cringe. Problem is, I cringed far more than I cried. And I cried.
The good intentions are beyond reproach, as usual. Who doesn't want to bring a monster like Joseph Kony to justice? Or better yet, kill the bastard. Its humongous viral reach is now beyond discussion. But I sat there utterly flummoxed as it unfurled, way too slowly and randomly, over 30 minutes of can-do American pizzazz. It was so gnarly, it captured my attention.
I agree with the video that the internet and social media are capable of giving the public across the world the power to exert pressure for change in an unprecedented way. So far so good. Then there is this ominous voiceover by Impossibly Handsome, Well Meaning, Not a Little Self-Enamored Dude that the next 27 minutes are an experiment and in order for it to work we have to pay attention. Treat me like a 6th grader, but okay, still with you. Next? Footage of the birth of this dude's son. A full minute or more of his cute little coddled son doing cute things, like fake bombing someone's ass with a special effect (they both love to make movies, the film will have you know). A lot of me myself and I and my golden child so far. Then finally, around minute 8, the actual story of Jacob the Ugandan kid. This is the part where you cry and want to give Invisible Children all your money, you want to go into the jungle and kill that motherfucker Kony by the most painful means at your disposal. This is all that was needed.
But then the silliness starts: we are going to stop African warlord Joseph Kony and Dude is going to tell us exactly how to do it: with posters and bracelets and a lot of enthusiastic high school kids asking the US government to militarily aid a foreign army. Hmmm... Oh, and by tweeting Rihanna and Lady Gaga, among other celebrities. Celebrities. Wow. I'm sure this and tweeting policy makers like George Bush and Condi Rice will bring Kony to his knees.
Then, in what I consider the most cringeworthy segment of all, Dude brings out his poor son again (there seems to be a daughter in there somewhere, but she is ignored) and supposedly explains to him about "the bad guy". You can self-aggrandize all you want, but why bring your child into this? It feels staged and willfully naive and is terribly unseemly. After all, you are talking about helping children who live in a nightmare of poverty, war, disease and violence. Get your spoiled kid out of the picture.
That the kid and his dad seem to have almost the same simplistic notions of morality is a little scary and quite telling, albeit unintended, I'm sure.  In the United States we live in a universe comprised of moral absolutes. The rest of the world understands life is a gray area.  But here is the kid talking about the bad guys in Star Wars, and it seems in Dude's worldview there is not much difference between that and a horribly complicated African civil war. The over-simplification of the American "bad guy" ethos is what gets the US in hot water most of the time, after all.
I could not help but notice every time they showed the International Court most wanted list, the second guy after public enemy number one Kony was also an Ugandan. Another Bad Guy. What about him?
The biggest problem is the marketing aspect of the whole thing. It sounds, smells and looks like one of those integrated campaigns that win advertising awards at the Cannes Lions every year. This one is glib, simplistic, banal, self-aggrandizing, willfully naive, tasteless and embarrassingly tone deaf. Don't get me wrong: the Dude has tried to make a difference with great amounts of passion and persistence for 9 years, and his operation is as buff and shiny and beautifully produced as a Hollywood movie. I don't begrudge him his commitment. In fact, I waver between admiration and queasiness, because I am trying to do something similar for a more modest social issue concerning kids (getting Mexican high school students in NYC to finish high school). And I had the same idea, being a creative person, to use creative tools and talent to raise awareness. A lot of what I saw in the IC video is admirable, and worth emulating, but I found most of the creative strategy and execution quite disturbing. More schools and mentors, education and support for Ugandan kids? Awesome. Bring it. Cheerleading the US to interfere with the Ugandan Army? Is that the only option? I'm not so sure.
I thoroughly despise the concept of "make Kony Famous". I find the posters that Shepard Fairey has designed to be so cool as to make desirable the icons of the "bad guys" (Kony, Bin Laden and Hitler, another reductio ad absurdum). Does Fairey have only one visual idea left? It looks just like his Obama poster!
I find the whole thing naive in the worst kind of way. And I'm not even discussing the realpolitik aspect of it, which I barely understand.
Clearly a lot of the money has gone to produce this highly polished piece of work, which is extremely well done, beautifully shot and edited, as is the website for the organization. These guys are communicators, not policy makers. They may have succeeded in bringing attention to the issue, but the fact they are being harshly criticized points to an extremely flawed communications problem.
In short: the campaign makes little sense. The posters of donkeys and elephants merging with a dove with a Kony 2012? Confusing. This might work stateside, but what does the rest of the world care for the GOP and the Dems? It makes it seem like Kony is a third party candidate, an option even worse than Santorum, which until now was inconceivable. Don't be surprised if some yahoos actually think Kony is  running for office. This beside the fact that it is way too American-centric, instead of aiming for a more global reach.
Buried in all that slightly revolting can-do all-together-now spirit is a tagline that makes sense: "the one thing we can all agree on". A global campaign could be built around this idea, beyond our pathetic two-party system. However, it's lost among all the aimless American self-congratulation. The bracelet? Let's not even go there. Tweeting Ryan Seacrest? Barf. And the idea of making this criminal famous? Abhorrent. This is the plan to bring Kony to justice: under cover of night we are going to paper our magnificent cities in posters. Now the entire world will know about Joseph Kony. Is this going to make him come out of the jungle waving a white flag? He is probably relishing the notoriety as we speak. Terrorists love fame. That's how they terrorize. Is this the best way to bring the guy to our attention, let alone the plight of Africa? No. It is the glibbest, the most vulgar, the most unfortunately attuned with our own farkakte, assbackwards American celebutard values, but that doesn't mean it's good.

I'm Floored with the Debt Ceiling

I don't pretend I understand everything about this topic but I know one thing: I am extremely disappointed with President Obama. With the Democratic Party I am just further infuriated. I never thought this would be possible, but they are the gift that keeps on giving.
Even though Obama never promised to be a diehard liberal, he spun enough liberal platitudes in his campaign to lead people to believe that we would be at least a moderate liberal. Being who he is, one would have thunk he'd have the interests of the majority of Americans at heart. He does not.
The day the debt ceiling debacle is averted, Wall Street still plummets. Why? Investors don't have confidence in the economy. Why? Not because now everybody's celebrating that the ultra rich and the corporations will not pay higher taxes, but because, from what I've read, it is a really bad idea to make huge spending cuts in a depressed, recessionary economy without raising revenue. Of course cuts are necessary. Cuts to our obscene military spending, for instance, would make sense. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't get the feeling that the idiotic wars we are mired in are boosting our economy, like in WWII.
What happened to the stimulus package? What happened to raising infrastructure? Now services to the people are cut and not one cent is raised on corporate taxes. Where are all the brilliant economic minds that are supposed to be advising this president? Oh, sorry, they are cashing their checks on Wall Street. 
Some ardent admirers of Obama think he won the political strategy battle with this pathetic debt ceiling circus. They may be right. He may win another election. But will he be able to reverse the descending course he has set for this country? The banks (who are still not lending, still reaping huge profits) were treated to the most lavish free meal in history, while at the same time the victims of the criminal excesses of American capitalism, that is, the American people, were punished. This instead of fighting for a more just society. Is this going to be Obama's legacy?
Does the economic and political health of the country have to be sacrificed for an election strategy? This is what convinces me, to my deepest regret at having been so gullible, that Obama is a politico like the rest of them snakes. He is not a leader.
Making the Republicans look bad should not be considered such a momentous achievement. They are extraordinarily adept at doing this on their own. Presiding over the country as the gap between the rich and the poor widens abysmally, and not only not doing anything to stop it but encouraging it to happen, this is not what makes a good president. I am also deeply unhappy with his hypocrisy about immigration law, Guantanamo detainees, and gay marriage. Commit to something, man. Have the balls.
That he comes on the heels of the Worst President Ever should be no consolation. With Obama, people were expecting something in terms of domestic policy along the level of an FDR or an LBJ (hey, maybe we're idiots). All his achievements, as important as they may be, fall short. The health care bill is a case in point. What the fuck is it? Because universal health care it is not. His achievements are deeply compromised by his insistence on talking down to the Republicans, instead of fighting them. He's like a schoolteacher who chides a bully but lets him get away with murder. His sanctimonious self-righteousness prevents him from rolling up his sleeves and doing what we put him there to do, what he promised he would do. He was always going to be unpopular with the other side. What good is it for him to be unpopular with his own supporters?
I am deeply unhappy with a president who, 4 years into his tenure, is still acting like a candidate.
On the killing of Bin Laden, I give him some brownie points. However, the other day I was remembering the capture of Adolf Eichmann. The Israelis nabbed him all the way in Argentina, where he hid for years, and gave him a trial and ample opportunity to defend himself. Then they hanged his ass (the only time they ever used the death penalty). This is what democratic countries with solid institutions do. I understand that the cost (legal, political, human, economic) of putting Bin Laden on trial could be prohibitive. But we are becoming less civilized than we think we are.
I know there are movements out there that are trying to change the political dynamics in this country because our Congress is a stupid whore who sucks corporate dick, on both sides. We need a strong third way. We need more political pluralism, a reformed campaign system and less institutionalized corruption. Otherwise, we're going to the dogs.

Armchair Protests

I got wind that there is going to be a demonstration in support of healthcare reform today at noon. If you are thinking the great lawn at Central Park or the Mall in Washington, you are sadly mistaken. This is on the corner of 37th and 8th Ave.
WTF?
Why is it that racists and bullies and haters can show up at the White House happily and unimpeded and liberals are constitutionally incapable of organizing their own ass?
After that appalling circus from the right wing nut jobs, shouldn't there have been a massive counter protest in the same place drawing the purported majority of Americans who demand public healthcare? Everybody kvetches, but no one wants to do anything about it. Wouldn't it be rich if we had one of those concerts with pop music superstars to demand better healthcare for Americans? Instead, we are supposed to meet at 37th and 8th Ave.
It's pathetic.

Antisemites Bore Me

The New York Times reports today that one of the most hunted Nazi war criminals, Albert Haim, nicknamed Dr. Death for his gruesome, sadistic experiments on inmates at Matthausen, died of colon cancer a few years ago in quiet retirement in Cairo. In fact, it turns out that many Nazis sought refuge not only in South America, but also in some Arab countries.
However, Heim was captured by Americans after the war and he was released, one hopes, by mistake. He lived quietly in Germany and had a family and everything, until he had to flee. The man was a sickening sadist, and I will refrain to mention the horrible things he did, because people have a morbid fascination with abject topics like this (Nazis are always at the top of the list, after Mexican Japanese peanuts, in this blog). You can read the article here.
I went into the comments section, because it's always fun to see what comes out of the woodwork, and sure enough, among the many heartfelt expressions of outrage, there they are, the inevitable, pesky antisemites, who can't leave it alone after 5000 fucking years. You'd think they'd given up already. You'd think somebody would have realized by now that it is a futile, fruitless endeavor to hate the Jews.
But there is the classic guy who compares the Nazi Holocaust with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and even worse, someone offering a link to the Institute for Historical Revision, which is, you guessed it, a hateful site insisting on denying the Holocaust and other vile antisemitic drivel.
The sheer amount of energy and stupidity these people spend on spewing crap is astounding. I am almost fascinated by people who must be so mentally, morally and emotionally weak, that all that sustains them is the irrational hatred of Jews. Pathetic, annoying, utterly boring pests.
Meanwhile, the very Pope, he with the breakfast name, got into a shitstorm (and rightly so) for rehabilitating some hideous excommunicated antisemitic priests who belong to a hideous antisemitic order inside the Catholic Church (so what else is new?). Priests that hated the Second Vatican Council that sought to mend the damage done by said Church to Jews throughout history. Priests that deny the Holocaust. He claimed, are you sitting down, "compassion". All hell broke loose in his birthplace, where even Angela Merkel criticized him for siding with, plainly, the wrong guys.
And then we have Hugo Chavez, cheap imitator of cheap tyrants, allowing antisemitism to escalate in his country (fanning the flames with his irrelevant anti-Israel rhetoric), for no other reason that it gives people enough distraction to blame all that reeks on the Jews. The oldest synagogue in Caracas gets viciously vandalized, by like 15 men with firearms, and then he blames it on the opposition trying to make him look bad. Geez! Antisemitism may look like good PR to bastards like him and Ahmadinejad, but it's really not that great a strategy.
I know that Jews in Venezuela are concerned and fearful. I wish they were deeply defiant.
Fuck the antisemites.

Mexican Japanese Peanuts vs Shocking Nazi Photos

Who will win this fight to the death of most searched subjects in this humble blog?
So far the Mexican Japanese Peanuts have been the undisputed champions. But this week there is a clamoring for the Nazis, who can always be counted to bring in the crowds. MJP: fight back!

At the risk of being horribly politically incorrect:

I saw the picture of Barack Obama visiting Yad Vashem. When I was a college student living in Jerusalem, my friends and I used to make fun of the fact that every time a visiting dignitary alighted in the Land of Israel, the first thing they would do with him or her was take them to Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Mobutu Sese Seko -- Yad Vashem, Queen Beatrix of Holland -- Yad Vashem, George Bush Pere --Yad Vashem. If Che Guevara, Napoleon and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile were alive, that would be their fate as well.
We used to joke that they didn't even let the poor visitors finish wiping themselves with the freshening towelette, when they were already hurling them towards Yad Vashem. We used to say the airport should be at Yad Vashem. We were of course crude, cynical and exaggerating wildly, but there was something (and I bet half the people will beg to differ and the other half will use this as antisemitic fodder) kind of funny about the laying on of the guilt trip as soon as the foreign machers hit the ground. I think of my dearly departed friend Martine, with her caustic Dutch sense of humor, and I can't help but think she would be getting a kick out of the picture of Obama with his yarmulke, visiting the haunting, overwhelming hell that is that place.

Hitler Beheaded

We wish! A little too late, for my taste. But it must have felt great for the guy who did it.
This headless Hitler was a wax figure at Madame Tussaud's in Berlin. They put him behind a desk in his last days in the bunker right before he offed himself, the coward, (so that people couldn't pose with him). Before his head was chopped off, they made him looked pissed, as he was comme d' habitude. I think that if they already went through all the trouble of making a wax dummy of Hitler, they should have had a little more fun and imagination and should have put him in a gallows, or a Nuremberg trial, or behind bars, or in a contraption from the Spanish Inquisition (wouldn't that be rich?) or burning in a circle of hell designed just for him and those who loved him, who were plenty.
But this is what they get for playing dummy with this putz. If they have any sense, they should leave the wax figure like that, with the head wherever it happened to land. That would be more suitable.

First Hitler...

...then this.
I love it how Austria paints itself as this innocent little country, totally stunned (stunned!) about the creeps that live in its midst. If I'm not mistaken, Austria was not so outraged when native son Adolf Hitler waltzed in to a warm welcome way back when. The only country in Europe that did not put up a fight.
So give me a break about rescuing Austria's image.

"One of those Hitler things"

No lighthearted posts for Easter, I'm afraid, my dears.
In preparation for the release of Standard Operating Procedure, the new Errol Morris film about Abu Ghraib, The New Yorker has an article by Morris and Philip Gourevitch, about Sabrina Herman, the soldier who took the infamous pictures at that horrid jail. This article should be required reading for every citizen of the US. It provokes, besides untenable outrage, several very interesting topics for pondering.
It's hard for me to write about this without flying into a shapeless rage, but I will attempt:
The writers concentrate on the power of the photographic images to make a larger point about this dark episode in the history of the US. When one of the national guardsmen attempts to describe the state of that jail when they first got there, he calls it "one of those Hitler things".
This is a kid who, like many others, joined the National Guard primarily to get money for college, so one supposes he had not read Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil. If it wasn't for the photographic documentation the Nazis, and later on, the liberating armies, took of the German extermination camps, this poor dude would not have a frame of reference for the hellish conditions he encountered in Abu Ghraib. This is why getting people acquainted with the infernal images of the Holocaust (or any other gross human misconduct) is essential. It opens our eyes and minds to the historical precedent of human evil. One would hope it gives us a moral compass; the images are so brutal and inhumane, one reacts with shame and disgust. One knows this is wrong. One refuses to debase oneself to that level.
But if you are soldier at war, trained to obey orders, if you are given orders that come from high levels and that nobody seems to question, what do you do? Reading the testimony of Sabrina Herman and others involved, I extrapolate that this is how many Nazi rank and file must have coped and lived with themselves after executing their daily duties of humiliation, torture and murder of other human beings. The Nazis invented a sophisticated apparatus of dehumanization to help themselves achieve their goals more efficiently, and the criminals of the US military intelligence, in their own modest way, did exactly the same thing. They deliberately sent to Abu Ghraib National Guard soldiers who were untrained in the handling of prisoners, who were not aware of the laws of the Geneva Convention, whose job description never mentioned enforcing torture in jail. They sent these poor, ignorant kids, who joined the National Guard to get ahead in life, perhaps with a sense of patriotic duty enhanced by 9/11, to do the dirty job for them. These kids paid with court martials and suspensions and demotions and the loss of their jobs and military careers, while the people who gave them the orders are still running around with not a care in the world, including Donald Rumsfeld, Satan himself (Dick Cheney) and even the president of this country, who has condoned and defended all of this.
As much as I abhor torture, I can't help wishing it, excruciatingly and until the end of eternity, on these gargoyles.
We all have been appalled by the photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. The pictures Sabrina Herman took of herself smiling in front of Iraqi corpses are equally, if not more shocking. They provide an interesting parallel to the recently unearthed pictures of Nazis having a good time in Auschwitz. How can you sing songs and smile under the circumstances? What process has taken hold of your psychology that allows you to function emotionally in such conditions?
If you see the pictures without reading the article, you feel a sense of revulsion for this woman. She seems to be mocking the dead. She embodies the arrogant ignorance of America. But there is a story behind the photos. The article explains how a sane, young American woman can end up abetting torture and trying to live a "normal" life in the process. By making the conditions in Abu Ghraib commonplace, her superiors turned those kids into sadists. Into little Nazis.
So this is the other outrage of Abu Ghraib: American soldiers were brazenly abused by their own superiors (going all the way up to their Commander in Chief). They were demoralized with terrible living conditions, asked to perform orders that were not in their field, they were debased, mistreated and lied to. And then, when the scandal broke, they were publicly humiliated and disposed of.
If I were these people I would sue the Army, the government, The Axis of Weasel, God, someone.
I doubt that they have any recourse.
It is not easy to forgive someone like Sabrina Herman and her buddies. One is loath to exculpate people who perform cruelties in the line of duty, because then anything goes. "Oh, poor Nazis, they were just trying to cope". No. However, one must remember that before he even touched one Jew, Hitler abused, debased and sacrificed his own people by making them do his bidding (that many of them were happy to comply should be a warning for our own complicity and complacency).
In trying to destroy the Jews, he also destroyed the Germans. So when America engages in these criminal behaviors, under the pretext of national security, we need to remember that American soldiers and citizens, all of us, are victims too.
One would like to think that in Sabrina's shoes, one would act the Hollywood hero and refuse to follow orders, the Army be damned. But it is not so easy. Instead, these soldiers detached themselves from the prisoners, and some took their wartime frustrations out on them. Just as the prisoners were dehumanized, so were their captors, as they became numb to the humiliation and the abuse they had to mete out.
Sabrina, knowing there was something very wrong with this picture, took pictures.

I Find Patriotism Offensive

Patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. And so if Republicans are going to attack Obama because he won't wear a pathetic American flag on his lapel, or he won't put his hand on his heart while singing the national anthem (puhleeze), anybody with two working brain cells understands that this is not what patriotism is about.
The man is running for president. This is patriotic.
If his wife said that this is the first time she felt proud about her country, we should appreciate the honesty. What should she be so proud about a place where there were no rights for people like her until after the mid 60's?
Patriotism is a cheap, fake, highly dangerous manipulative ploy. Totalitarian regimes are crazy about patriotism. The Nazis took patriotism to the nth degree.
When words like patriotic or patriotism start appearing, (as for instance in many cases wrongly and shamefully after 9/11), it's time to be very concerned. It means a full-blown bullshit attack is under way and we need to be protected from it. The Patriot Act. "Homeland" Security. We've been had, people.
On the opposite side of patriotism are common sense and a clear view of reality. You do much more for your country if you wear both in abundance near your lapel.

Department of Newfangled Fears

O, Brave New World that has spawned things like facebook and DNA decoding.
Somebody was telling me she has a friend who is afraid of facebook because anyone can post a picture of you vomiting in the taxi cab and then prospective employers will see that picture and not hire you. The woman in question checks identities for a living. Corporations pay her to find out everything she possibly can about potential hires. Hey, is that legal?
Me, I'm afraid of facebook because it is such an intrusion, not so much by my friends or prospective employers, but by corporations. I'm also afraid of facebook because I don't want to be slapped, hi-fived, kissed, hugged, or bitten. Please leave me alone with those damn things! I am afraid of facebook because the interface is fucking chaotic and drives me crazy.
Listen, I write this blog. My opinions may not be amenable to lots of people. My blog address is in my business cards, and I certainly hope that prospective employers will be kind and smart enough not to use the blog against me. In fact, I'm looking for those who will use it for them, for those are the people it would be cool to work for. I can see I have readers in all corners of the world. It is thrilling and it is also a little scary. Who are they? I realize my posts live forever in the internets. I have people from Albania still complaining about me making fun of Fushe Kruje. This is a new world where we have chosen to open up our identities to millions. And yet, I hope it is all rather banal.

DNA decoding. If you didn't see it coming, I don't know what planet you live in. Now that you can buy sperm or ovules, guess what happens? The buyers tend to pick from people they think are going to be either super smart or super good looking or super athletic. I know someone who had a dilemma whether to pick ivy league egg donors for their brains or California donors for their already genetic Hollywoody looks. People want to know if you have the gene for alcoholism, or homosexuality or, in the case of a despicable white woman from Germany, she wanted to buy somebody with black genes because she loved tanning and she didn't want her baby to have skin cancer. Another idiot wanted a man who had no genes for hair loss in his family, and good eyes so her child wouldn't look like a nerd. Certainly, oversimplified DNA discourse can lead to Nazi sounding shit.
But what if you find an ivy league genius and you don't know that he may have the gene for schizophrenia? Used to be, when you had a kid or you adopted a baby, you could not control the genetic baggage. This randomness is part of life, and as much as genetic science can help us fight disease, we should be very careful on trying to control and change this randomness. The Nazis hated random and look what happened.

Shocking Nazi Photos

Forget about the usual horribly morbid pictures of Jews in Hell.
Quite astonishing are the pictures of the Nazis who ran Auschwitz frolicking happily around at the camp in their merry SS uniforms, playing the accordion, etc.
The pictures are quite chilling.

Mob rule

Knowing full well that talk of the nazis makes readers run away, as opposed to talk of Paris Hilton, which makes them click in droves, this horrendous item of what happened in Austin puts me in mind of the pictures I saw in the Holocaust museum in Washington. In Austin Texas an angry mob beat a man to death because they thought the car he was a passenger in (he wasn't even the driver) ran over a child.
The nazis understood the psychology of mob rule and they used fear, intimidation and their special breed of savagery to instill mob behavior in ordinary citizens. You see picture after picture of soldiers, police and regular citizens taunting and humiliating Jews and other unfortunates. You see mobs whipped to a frenzy by the hysterical growls of Hitler or Goebbels.
There is safety in numbers, which is why the nazis were able to do what they did.
Now, I may be jumping the gun here, because I have not heard more details about this bizarre, idiotic lynching, but the victim was Hispanic, to judge from his last name, Morales. I posit that the recent anti-immigrant discourse and mood in this country, which must be at a fever pitch in the border states, has something to do with this terrible thing.
There is huge resentment against Hispanics and though that is certainly not the sole reason for this crime, there seems to be some form of dehumanization going on. These kinds of things are not supposed to happen in this country and they better not start happening now.

Hell on Earth

At this point in my life, I think I've been to three Holocaust Museums. The one in Israel, Yad Vashem, the new one in Berlin and the one in Washington.
It is interesting to think about the contrasts between them. Yad Vashem I visited like 20 years ago and since it was the first one, I think it is still the one that made the biggest impression on me. The fact that it is in Jerusalem, in Israel, adds to how powerful the experience of visiting it is. After all, the fact that it is there is a testament to the failure of the Nazis to rid the world of us.
The very new one in Berlin is fascinating because of the psychology of it. First of all, it is underground, below the monument to the 6 million Jews murdered by the nazis. (Which took the Germans until like two years ago to finally commit to, after a lot of internal kvetching). Compared to the one in Israel and the one in Washington, it really is rather discreet in regards to the photographic material it exhibits. The unbelievable, bestial, inhumane cruelty the Nazis proudly documented themselves is not so in abundance. What's in abundance are exhaustive, sober explanations of how the Nazis came to power and then, and I guess fittingly, discreet, exhibits about the number of Jews murdered and the fates of 10 Jewish families.
I can understand why the Germans are so demure. When you see the footage, not only of what the liberating armies found as they arrived to the concentration camps, but the Nazi footage of medical experiments and pretty much everything they filmed, when you see a room full of human hair, I don't know how you would be able to live with yourself as a country. They should have followed their beloved leaders and committed seppukku en masse.
The Washington museum does a great job of explaining everything. Not only the fate of the Jews, but also what the Nazis did to everybody else, which was plenty. Surprisingly, and correctly, the museum does not shy away from talking about the very remiss attitude of the United States towards the atrocities: the refusal to bomb Auschwitz, the refusal to accept refugees, etc. I also learned that, before the Nazis, the US had the largest enforced sterilization program in the world.
Just looking at images of the Nuremberg rallies of compliant, hysterical masses, is enough to make your hair stand on end. For all those people who complain that we Jews are obsessed with the Holocaust, I can't think of a better reminder, not for our own suffering, but for the need to always protect individual liberties and to raise awareness that the most dangerous threat to human dignity and human life is their erosion.

Ball and Chain Letters

I just realized this is the perfect venue for me to vent my bilious frustration at those people who use emails to send inane, moronic chain letters. No matter what the subject, whether national jokes, Jews in peril, great heroic causes, one can safely say that 95% of chain letters are retarded. If you are a friend of mine who does this and you are reading this right now, you now know what I think. I hope it does not affect our friendship.
I got two today. One claims that the British are going to stop teaching the Holocaust at schools because it offends Muslims. Mr. Ex-Enchilada warned me about this one. He got it in Mexico. I got it from a source here. It is obviously making the rounds. There are no sources for this piece of news. Like manna from heaven, this news fell directly from the sky into the internet. If this is indeed true, I want to know the source, because it sounds like an utter fabrication. My instinct is that it is one of those internet legends for Jews and by Jews that, as far as I can tell, only serve the purpose of keeping Jews safely paranoid about everything.
The other letter was a link to an Israeli video with a rap song about the Holocaust. The sender was concerned that people would find it offensive. What was offensive was not that some Israeli rapper is rapping the story of the Shoah, which is fine by me; what is offensive is the tackiness, the bad taste, the sight of artsy modern dancers smeared in ashes contorting themselves, a woman violinist dressed in some hideous folk dance garb, the entire thing with the look and the sound and feel and maturity of a very bad junior high school production. That is what bottles the mind, as Will Ferrell would say in Blades of Glory.
My favorite internet legend involves a supposed letter written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez at a time when he was very sick. This letter sounded like it was written by a bored housewife who had read way too many Hallmark cards. In it Garcia Marquez told us to enjoy every sunset, smell every flower, look at every seagull. Only an alien from another planet would confuse this sentimental snot with anything that this man ever wrote. Only an idiot would actually believe that this man would stoop so low and write something so hideous. It made the Reader's Digest seem like Cervantes. But that didn't prevent people from forwarding it ad nauseam.
Don't get me started on the ones that threaten you with terrible luck if you don't forward them. You are lucky I don't own a submachine gun.

Eggs Benedict

Pope Benedict XVI is turning out to be a major pain. First he goes to Auschwitz and wasn't going to mention the Jews in his speech except someone in his camp told him he had to (as was reported in the New Yorker). Then he offends Muslims by quoting some obscure medieval text where it says something to the effect that nothing good has ever come of Islam, inciting riots:

...many of the Vatican correspondents who, like Politi, travelled to Regensburg with Benedict doubt that there was anything accidental or inadvertent in the citation. They had received copies of his speech at six in the morning of the day he gave it, and, at ten, they assembled in the university’s makeshift pressroom and informed the Vatican spokesman, a Jesuit priest and Vatican Radio director named Federico Lombardi, that the passage was going to be incendiary. “The point is that at 10 A.M. somebody got the message that the text was explosive,” Politi told me, adding that when the Pope had gone to Auschwitz to speak, last May, “we got copies of that speech, too, and it never mentioned the Shoah, so we said, ‘Hey, where is Shoah?,’ and he changed it.” Putting aside the obvious question of whether reporters should be in the business of saving Popes from embarrassment, the question remains whether Benedict got the message.

Now he wants to go back to a Latin mass where there are prayers for the conversion of the Jews. He wants to backtrack from the reforms of Vatican II, which for the first time in centuries tried to mend the horrific, inexcusable, murderous, antisemitic attitudes of the Catholic Church towards the Jews. The BBC reports:

Concern is now focused on traditional mass's Good Friday liturgy which contains a prayer "For the conversion of the Jews". The prayer reads: "Let us pray also for the Jews, that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ."It refers to their "blindness" and prays for them to be "delivered from their darkness."

Well, I have news for Benedict: You wish. It ain't gonna happen.
Why the hell should Jews convert to a religion that has brought them death, persecution and nothing but grief for 2000 years?
Benedict is supposed to be an intellectual and a theologian, but I just think he is not interested in human beings or human suffering or human reality. His church is on decline. It has become irrelevant for a lot of people, for a number of reasons; from pedophilia scandals, to intransigence about issues of basic human nature, to displays of pomp and power but not of pity. He thinks that making it hardcore is going to make people flock back to it. Whatever.
I just hope that when they pray this stupid prayer, they don't provide translations. The last thing Jews need right now is a Catholic Church that rears its ugly antisemitic head again.

Book report 2

War is sick and I'm sick of war. And luckily, I, nor any of you, I assume, have suffered it in our lifetimes yet. We should count ourselves lucky and blessed and hope that it never comes to our doorstep.
A Woman in Berlin is the anonymous diary of a German woman who lived through the "liberation" of Berlin by the Soviet troops at the end of WWII in 1945. Apparently it is not a generally known fact, because it was in the interest of both the Soviets and the Germans to suppress it, that when the Russians rolled into the Germany they raped everything that moved, in some estimates up to 130,000 German women and not once, but almost usually several times. They raped in exchange for food and in exchange for safety from other rapists. They raped as revenge for the horrors the Nazis inflicted on them and they raped under the permission of their leaders. In order to rape they had to get drunk first and so they drank like cossacks and they raped their way through Germany.
So this woman, who used to be a journalist and who spoke a little Russian, apparently wrote a diary of her life under the Russians in Berlin. One wonders if it is authentic. It certainly sounds so, too intelligent and subtle to be a work of propaganda. The history of how the book was received after it was written is as interesting as the book itself, because it came out in 1954, first in English and other languages and only in 1959 in Germany, where it was received "with hostility and silence". "Some accused it of besmirching the honor of German women". The nerve.
The Germans simply didn't want to know about the massive rape of their women. They did not want to know that many of the babies born were not of the pure aryan race they had cheered for. They did not want to know that these babies were the product of drunken rape, and they did not want to be reminded of their humiliating defeat. And as Hans Magnus Enzenberger points out in the preface, it didn't help that the author shows no self-pity and she casts a cold, hard look at her fellow citizens. It wasn't until the seventies that the book was rescued and reedited.
Her account of survival boils down to how to stave off hunger and rape. She is a strong, smart woman, and meticulous in her accounting of the endless routine of survival. Her observations about her fellow Germans and about the Soviets are sharp. Basically, most Soviets are portrayed as backward, primitive peasants, except one or two higher ranked soldiers who are educated and polite.
Under duress, every German turns into a stealing, conniving wolf, even formerly regal dames. The German men are either all at the front, or old and withered and useless (and hiding, for many are card carrying nazis) and not one steps in to prevent a rape. The women, according to her, are resourceful and strong, but if there is any sense of community it is only when there is a chance for survival. The minute somebody becomes a threat to the common survival, they are sometimes cast away. She shares the plentiful food she gets from sleeping with Russians with a widow and an older guy who is just a pathetic leech. When the Russians leave and there is no more food, the widow and the leech cast her out to near starvation. So much for good neighbors.
At this stage of perdition, people finally turn bitterly against "Adolf", once they realize they've been sold a terrible bill of goods (which they happily bought, not too many questions asked). They've been left to die and fend for themselves by their nazi leaders, who were so crazy arrogant that they refused to evacuate the women and children of Berlin when it was clear that the Russians were coming and there was no more milk for the children. The Nazis destroyed their own people. Which is logical; anybody with such abhorrent ideas about others is inherently self-destructive.
This woman's account is quite harrowing, and for those people who think the Germans didn't pay for their crimes, it provides a small, chilling comfort. It looks like some of them paid. It is an interesting companion piece to If This is a Man, aka Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi. Levi was a great writer and a man with a solid moral conscience and a heart. But also, he was an innocent, and this woman knows that she and her nation cannot feign innocence. And that is a major difference in the telling. Still, hunger is hunger, whether experienced by a Jew or a German, and the fight for survival is the same in the lager and in the bunker, though the lager was obviously much worse.
I find it fascinating that Jews are barely mentioned in this book. Perhaps because of shame. She mentions twice in passing that the Russians transmit news of the concentration camps. Her reaction:

Our German calamity has a bitter taste -- of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress stuffing, soft soap, felt mats...

She is constantly amazed by the German need and capacity to obey. She keeps saying, with no little irony, that Germans are so orderly, that someone gives an order and there they are, following it.
I guess obedience without conscience is a mark of evil. And the Germans obeyed, most of them without giving it a second thought, for which they deserve whatever destruction came their way.

Patience!?

As our increasingly retarded POTUS has the gall to ask for patience in Iraq, you can read a very disturbing article in the NYT magazine about the fallout for women soldiers in this hellish, civil war made in the USA.
It is not news that women in the military suffer constant sexual harassment and abuse. This should be punished with the most draconian measures and it usually isn't. But if this happens even in enemy territory in wartime, the damage is multiplied to the nth degree. Soldiers raping civilians is horrifying. Soldiers raping their peers is mindboggling. And yet it happens. All the time.
According to the article, this Iraq war has seen the number of women in combat grow exponentially. In this war there will be about 40,000 women performing combat duties, more than ever before. Many of them have started experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, not only because of what they've had to deal with on a par with their male counterparts, but because in many instances these army males abuse them, demean them and rape them on top of everything. And the Army, although it has tried to improve on the way it handles this matter, still hasn't found an effective way to prosecute and punish offenders, and worse, to prevent rape from happening at all. It is a disgrace.
Rape is a fact of war, as we now sadly know from barbaric acts committed in the name of ethnic cleansing in places like Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda.
I am reading A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary of a Berlinese woman who captures the "liberation" of Germany by the Soviets at the end of WWII. The Soviets raped around 100,000 German women, many of them repeatedly, as revenge for the suffering inflicted on them by the Nazis. There will be a report coming soon on this fascinating book. In the meantime, all I can say is war seems to be a particularly male habit of destruction and reading this book you just lose all faith in humanity (if you happen to have any. I don't).
Rape is a form of deep humiliation and subjugation, and in war it is used to inflict damage on the male side of the population as well. As far as I'm concerned any rapist should be shot in the balls and left to bleed to death. But again, if rape happens between peers I can only imagine the bewilderment of the victims, who are sacrificing so much already, who are putting their lives at risk, who are sharing the experience with soldiers of their own country, only to be destroyed by them.
And what is it about men that they can't keep their cocks in order? Is it so terribly impossible not to force yourself into violent sex with an unwilling partner? Can't you use your fucking hand? Are you worse than an animal?
The article gingerly touches upon a reality of this particular war. Iraq is no Vietnam. That is, there are no local whores to be had by servicemen, no brothels, no women prostituting themselves for favors, like in other wars.
Maybe the Army should provide prostitutes (God knows we have plenty of them here at home) to service these randy assholes if they can't keep their dicks in. Draft some whores and have them do something useful for a change. Soldiers will be thrilled, whores will travel and get paid, female soldiers will hopefully be left alone. But the Army should protect its female soldiers from that kind of harm. It is not what they sign up for when they join.