Virtual JFK

I’ve never been seduced by the Kennedys, for I came to political awareness much too late for that. The best thing to be said about JFK and RFK was that they could bend with the tide of history, as when the civil rights movement forced them to respond. People are always looking for leaders, but it is only when they make their leaders act that we get anything real done.

The documentary Virtual JFK suggests that President Kennedy would not have escalated military involvement in Vietnam. There were only “advisors” in-country at the time of his assassination; LBJ sent in combat troops; then, Nixon, whose election-year claim of a peace plan was bullshit, presided over the final years of slaughter. The movie’s thesis is based on earlier incidents in which JFK did not follow the recommendations of his war-mongering advisors during these crises: Bay of Pigs, Laos, Cuban Missile, Berlin Wall. That took some balls for a young, seemingly lightweight guy who’d only been a Senator briefly. (Of course, judging from all that shtupping, he had moy mucho cojones.)

In Oliver Stone’s hyperactive JFK, it’s argued that the military and LBJ team up to whack the President so that the war would go on. This doc is certainly more interesting than that nonsense. You can second-guess anything, of course, but I think a couple of things are missing in Virtual JFK, as well as in the 1000 days mythology in general. Kennedy was a hardcore Cold Warrior. He played up a non-existent “missile gap” with the dreaded Reds to win the 1960 election (of course, it was the dead of Cook Co. who won it for him), showing he knew the value of politicizing national security, and how important it was to undercut the GOP on that front. (Recall that the GOP had savaged the Democrats for “losing,” as they so presumptively said, China. Could JFK stand up to the charge of “losing” Vietnam during the 1964 election? As McPalin knows, we Americans like to “win” wars even if we don’t know what they’re about.) He, like every American President since FDR, has been a complete creature of the national security state, it’s assumptions, aims, and methods. He might not have believed in the heavy hand of the Pentagon, but he was right in there with the social scientist/cowboys like W.W. Rostow who, neocon-like, thought they could change the world with their ideas. The best and the brightest in their narrow ties, plus fortified hamlets and targeted assassinations, that was the ticket. Cf. his romance with Special Forces and counter-insurgency tactics, flipside of the Peace Corps.

In short, I don’t buy the film. I’m not sure why it’s even being sold except as a vanity project of the academic who’s the narrator and co-producer. The most interesting thing about it is seeing the vintage footage, especially the press conferences.

McPalin

Now that the "lipsticked wingnut" has been overshadowed by “it’s the casino economy, stupid,” I heard John McCain say, “We’re going to take care of the workers.” And I laughed all morning long...

He’s going to do it by filibustering minimum wage increases, make sure we have no universal health care, continue the non-enforcement of labor laws, further the busting of unions, and keep the nation’s money channeling upwards to the tiny top of the pyramid with his tax cuts. Just like he and his party have always done.

What a lying piece of shit.

Vox Populism

I don’t know if Sarah Palin is going to burn up like the proverbial pan flash or carry McBush to the White House, but I do know how the Democrats can challenge her splashy appeal. It’s called populism, only it’s not the reactionary, know-nothing, fundamentalist, cowboy kind Palin’s peddling. I also know that the Democrats are deathly afraid of populism -- what the Republicans like to call “class war” as they wage it so successful for their masters -- because the Democrats are just as in hock to a tiny masterly elite. Not the same people, of course, but the same class of people. Back when Andy Jackson was around, it was called the Money Power. Later the Slave Power. More than just the names change, of course, but the principal remains. When the strong weight of the state is captured by elite interests, the ruling oligarchies crush us. But when the strong weight of the state represents the great majority of us, we have a much more equitable economic system, and a much more equitable democratic one, as well.

The Democrats have the titans of the financial services industry, currently imploding the economy, and the tech business -- all swells who think they are broad-mined -- in their camp, while the Republicans have the old extractive industries, old money, and the giant shopkeepers. Biden, after all, is a long-time water-carrier for the usurious bankers who camp out in Delaware to take advantage of its harlot-like incorporation laws. Like New York’s Chuck Schumer, who represents the financial services industry so well, these tools give us scraps of social liberalism wrapped around predatory capitalism and call it “progressive.” And of course, Obama’s change rhetoric, so shameless poached by McBush, is not about fundamental change to the economic structure of the land. Until it is, the yahoos are going to run to Palin’s bogus cultural noise and eat the red meat of hate and fear, regardless of how detrimental it is to their own interests, (jobs, pocketbooks, mortgage payments, public sphere, and social/civic services).

Grand Guignol Old Party

The modern Republican Party is the bastard child of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater mellowed in his old age, and looks sage-like (as would a rock), in comparison to Bush II, but when it counted he was on the wrong side of history, standing firm against civil and voting rights for African Americans. He lost big in 1964, but the true believers, a crowd that used to be known as the “lunatic fringe” (redneck racists, know-nothings, Bible-thumping fundamentalists, McCarthyites, Birchers, etc.) vowed revenge, and ended up capturing the party from its liberal internationalist business grandees. Sort of capturing it, for of course the party is still the flagship of oligarchy and plutocracy, the old Money Power; culturally, however, it is the arm of white resentment and reaction. The white counter-revolution is profoundly ironic because it is aligned now with the very capitalist powers which immiserates it. Nixon brilliantly worked to realign the Neo-Confederacy from its long allegiance to the Democrats (because, in a nice transference, it was the Republicans who had ended slavery). Reagan triumphed with a self-styled “movement” of mostly ethnic and Catholic ex-working class, who swallowed the pap of god, guns, and guts as they were deindustrialized and down-sized by the masters they rushed to serve, and suburban bourgeois afraid of falling into the widening gap created by their bosses. An unending supply of enemies (commies, hippies, darkies, femnazis, queers, raghead terrorists, and, this year’s model, back for a return engagement, “illegals”) has always been available to focus the anger and rage.

But Republican power, which is essentially authoritarian and plutocratic, is obviously a minority taste. In addition to the very successful flimflam, it’s predicated on the suppression and disenfranchisement of voters. It’s little wonder their convention is a horror show: their platform is medieval; their candidate is desperate to masquerade as something other than the standard bearer of the disasters of laissez-faire oligarchy; their vice presidential candidate is essentially Dan Quayle in drag, red meat for the American Taliban who work tirelessly to put the plutocrats in command.

when will it end?

After violence and sex, it is athletic prowess, when combined with primitive nationalism, that is unbeatable as the winning ingredient for bread and circus spectacles. The lesson of the Genocide Games for China and GE/NBC and other sponsoring corporations is clear. Authoritarian capitalism is the future, finally putting the nail into the lie that private wealth accumulation by a state-controlling oligarchy is somehow democratic. Bush, Putin, Berlusconi and the other gangster bosses ruling the globe can rest easy. The global peasantry is easily manipulated by pretty-shiny gold baubles, canned dramas, steroidal wonders, and prepubescent mutants. The people of Tibet, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, not to mention the vast majority of Chinese? Well, fuck them, Michael Phelps* is swimming!

My favorite stories out of the “Games” so far, after the bogus fakery of the opening charade, is that there are officially sanctioned cheers for the audience, and that, while the state there lavishes billions on producing medal-winners in a system of conscripted child labor, they starve recreational facilities for most Chinese.

*It is instructive of our present moment that Phelps looks like a jarhead -- slang for a pupal Marine, shorn of his humanity to kill -- while Mark Spitz was a hippie in comparison.

Oligarchy Olympics

It’s only fitting the Torture President should attend the opening spectacle of the Genocide Olympics™. The Beijing “Games” promise to be an IOC-corrupted, drug-addled, hormone-twisted, gender-bent, corporate-sponsored orgy in celebration of the capitalist dictatorship’s coming out party, with little vanity-project athletes smiling for the cameras amid the deadly smog, wholesale repression, and ugliness of Han nationalism. All shoveled at us by the world’s leading companies.

Some coming out: China is successfully elbowing the US out of the way as the world’s greatest sponsor of state terror, leaving a trail of murder and destruction in Sudan, Burma, Zimbabwe, and Tibet, with Central Africa and other parts of Asia next up to the chopping block. China’s utter contempt for its own people, the vast majority of whom are being exploited by a tiny elite, nicely matches Bush II’s fathomless contempt for American democracy and the great majority of Americans. It’ll be a match made in hell. I hope he leaves his business card; come January, there will be much to be made in fixing lucrative connections between the oligarchies.

On Bush, and Helms

"His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had, for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society." E.L. Doctorow has the criminal's number.
*

I had thought Jesse Helms was long burning in hell, but it turns out the racist homophobic pig lived until the 4th of July. Well, he's being rended of his polluted fat in the fires now, isn't he? What a shit stain on the American flag, for half a century the pure cracker in service of his Bourbons (not the drink, the ruling white elite of the neo-Confederacy).