America is a Cabaret, Old Chum

Vhere are Your Troubles Now?

Ladies und gentlemen, willkommen to the Kit Kat Klub in beautiful Los Angeles, California where even za hood has palm trees! As you know, three weeks ago it was windy for two straight days and last week it was overcast and sprinkled briefly but we've talked it out, we've recovered and we're ready to party again! Don't let the sports on the giant plasma screens or the live dancers distract you from this book review. Stop texting for a moment and let me pour you a Tony Montana, a line of Whole Fools gluten-free, organic, totally vegan, absolutely fair-traded Bolivian marching powder. Vhere are your troubles now?

The Honey Obadger

He Don't Give a Shit

This is a brief description of the American honey obadger, sometimes confused with the African honey badger of this famous youtube video. 

See the American honey obadger running around the Middle East. Oh, my God, he looks lost, he doesn't seem to belong there… What's he doing now… Oh, oh, look at him, he's taking his paw and drawing a "red line" on Syria -- he's bringing the Middle East and maybe whole world to the brink of war -- he don't care. But now he says, "Oops, never mind." Honey obadger don't give a shit. 

Honey obadger weeps barackodile tears for dead Syrian children while Afghani children dangle bloody and disfigured from his mouth. Honey obadger rips the faces off Pakistani children for breakfast and accepts Nobel Peace Prize for lunch. Honey obadger don't give a shit. Honey obadger's a real bad ass from 20,000 feet above and 10,000 miles away. Honey obadger can even run backwards, especially from Russian bear. Honey obadger don't care, he don't give a shit.

Honey obadger goes crazy in prime time with the whole world watching -- he agonizes and feels the pain of people who died in World War I while he obliterates Yemeni children in the present. Honey obadger cynical and psychopathic as hell, he don't give a shit. Honey obadger tells American people: don't worry about retaliation for wrecking Syria, everybody hates us anyway. Keep hatred alive! Keep hatred alive! He learned that at Harvard. Honey obadger tells the world he can kill anyone, anywhere, anytime but says democracy is strengthened by letting Congress agree with him about murdering innocent people who never attacked America -- honey obadger loves himself some US Constitution. 

Honey obadger listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most hypocritical and insufferable of all animals in the political kingdom. Honey obadger has a silver tongue, really big ears for hearing everything said everywhere in the world, lives (politically) almost exclusively on killing Muslims and blends in well with whatever people want to believe they're seeing. Often called the Rorschach obadger, he's both the two faces and the empty vessel. But honey obadger don't care, he really doesn't give a shit. 

Oh, my God, Israel's screaming at the honey obadger: "Yeah, you do all the work, you kill all our enemies for us while we sit back collecting your money and creating new enemies for you to fight. Thanks for Iraq, stupid. Thanks for Libya, stupid. Don't let us down on Syria, stupid." Oh, my God, look at the honey obadger have his badgerhood taken from him on a regular basis by Israeli politicians -- but he don't care, he don't give a shit. He knows the Syrian government gassed its own people because Israel told him so. Honey obadger not really black, not really white, decided he's more comfortable just being a Zionist. Honey obadger prides himself on "exceptionalism."

In Syria, honey obadger kills side by side with cannibals -- oh, that's soooo disgusting -- and people who behead Christians and "moderates" who post illustrations on their Facebook page showing jihadi dreams of burning down the US Capitol. He just takes whatever and shacks up with whoever he wants, he's one nasty ass honey obadger. He don't give a shit, he don't care. He's got neo-con work to do: he must destroy Hezbollah for Israel but he can't do that till he wrecks Syria first and then on to Iran. The obadgers and the obushes change but the inexorable plan remains (wrecking Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Somalia and Iran.) Honey obadger don't care, he don't give a shit. Oh, what a crazy fuck, nothing can stop the honey obadger.

The American honey obadger: one of the freakiest creatures produced by late monopoly capitalism.

published 9/13/2013 at counterpunch.org

I Am the Rhombus Goo Goo G'joob

Roller Coaster Wars

I made a present for you today. I built you a roller coaster and we're going on the very first ride. You can thank me later.

Because I've always found the "dark rides," the haunted house rides, neither scary nor fun nor innovative, I thought I'd remedy this with your custom coaster. Your coaster is called the Inferno in tribute to the defunct Dante's Inferno at Brooklyn's Coney Island. 

Because I'm like the Pentagon, I have an unlimited amount of money to make you the greatest coaster in the world, one with all the bells and whistles and none of the whistle blowers. I am the Rhombus goo goo g'joob. I located your coaster back in the motherland (Ohio) on America's Roller Coast: Cedar Point in Sandusky, right along Lake Erie. Your coaster is made of wood, the lift hill is 1,000 feet tall and the first drop is 1,500 feet so it goes deep into the earth to give us that going-to-hell feeling. And no sissy ratcheting lap bars which keep us immobile -- we have fuck-the-insurance-companies fixed lap bars so we can get popped up out our seats a lot -- "air time" in the vernacular. At various points we’ll be standing and feel like we're flying. But remember: it's a dark ride, it's all enclosed, though there are strobe lights, black lights, flames and illuminations. Your coaster meets the qualifications of a Coaster Classic by the American Coaster Enthusiasts.

I want you to take note of how uncluttered the entrance is to your coaster, how few rules and regulations are posted. Imagine had your coaster been placed at King’s Island in Cincinnati where every single commonsense safety measure has to be spelled out for the genetic misfires coming across the river from Newport, Kentucky. There, right next to the height requirement sign, you might get admonitions like this: “All firearms must be secured while ride is in motion. King’s Island is not responsible for any items lost or stolen or heads blown off, any heart attacks, back injuries or pregnancies that occur while riding. Shooting people, including black people, is strictly prohibited and may be cause for removal from the park.”

Great company though you are, it wouldn’t be as much fun if it was just you and me so I packed this coaster with some wild and crazy guys and gals: Dave, Julie, Taylor, Lisa, Mark, Joan, Sam, Mary, Mike, Dina, Tory, Linda, Rox, Raheim, Anteneh, Jeffrey and Josh. I also convinced Arthur Silber, Sam Greenlee and Linh Dinh to ride plus the 2016 Glen Party presidential ticket: presidential nominee Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report and vice-presidential candidate Glenn Greenwald. The Glens, replacing the Greens who never really caught fire, were originally going to flip a coin to see which Glen/n would get the top slot but I successfully made the case that it was about goddam time for America to have its first black president. Like the Lizard King, the Rhombus can do anything: I can bring back the dead, so I gave the sacred back seat to Alex Cockburn and Joe Bageant. And because he’s already been gone way too long I brought back Hugo Chavez and to give him someone to screamemente with I also brought back Che Guevara. These haunted house rides are usually “ghost trains” in name only -- to do the supernatural right, it always takes us agnostics and atheists.

The outside entrance of your Inferno is a replica of the United States Capitol. As we clickety-clack up the lift hill we have plenty of time to appreciate just how high up we are. Feel the breeze, the ebb and and flow of the wood as it "breathes." Boy, some of those nails need pounded in a little more. A bright sunshiny day. You would never know what horrors await in the Inferno. Look at the fleas and ticks: Avalanches, Sierras, Tundras, Yukons, Sequoias. We're in the first car because, like the late great Screechin' Eagle at Americana, this is a front car ride, this is where the best air time will be.

Now we're at the summit. We're about to bust through the Capitol's saloon/whorehouse swinging doors (your coaster has a bit of a Wild West motif) and peer into the darkness. Hands up, comrade! The only thing I'm going to rob you of is your fear. 

What? You want to hang on? You won't put your hands up? I have to explain the facts of life to you, right now, just before unwrapping your present? I made you this great baba ganoush of a coaster and you're not going to try it? Jesus Christ...We ride with our hands up because we are participating in a work of art, a coaster is a living sculpture where the number, distribution and weight of fellow passengers and the weather can effect what kind of ride we'll have, we're like in that Robin Williams movie, a kind of What Heaves May Come, we're letting ourselves go so that we may experience the line, the design, the mind, the freedom that some creator chose to have -- if you hold on and brace yourself, you're working against it -- you'll never know what you could be experiencing or what the holy designer had in mind. Convinced? Good.

Is it going to be fast? Damn straight. I hired dozens of former Blackwater mercenaries at $120,000 per season to grease the tracks early every morning to make sure we have a fast ride. I know that sounds like a lot of money but I am the Rhombus. They get to do that fun shit they used to do -- like rappelling -- and they don't have to worry about getting strung up under the coaster supports or dragged down Route 250 here in beautiful Sandusky, hearing the world anthem: "Death to America! Death to America!" 

Start whooping, comrade! Here we go! Whee! Hey, look back real quick there's something I want to show you. The saloon doors are still letting in enough light so that you can see this: I made the angle of descent 85 degrees so it gives us the illusion that the whole back of the train is going to fall over on those of us in the front part! See it? So cool! OK, face forward, the scary monsters are coming.

Whee! Alriiiiight! Oh yeah! Plunging into the darkness, where will it stop…? We're going to go through a couple of enormous camel backs at the bottom of which, on either side of us, I made long halls of mirrors except that they're really forests of mirrored spires and funhouse glass but what you'll notice is that they function really well as cages. This is special material paid for by the taxpayers and developed by the Rhombus. I’m going to give it away to my cronies at Kennywood, Knoebels and Holiday World so they can make a bundle – these fantabulous parks deserve a bundle -- but that’s down the road. The exhibits are going to come fast and furious and will look quite ghastly and distorted. 

OK, look right: There's John Kerry, the man who shot both peasants and pheasants in the back and could never make up his mind whether he was a war hero or war criminal. He lost a presidential election to one of the stupidest and most hated figures in American political history -- WTF. Salute him, comrade, all several dozen of him, it doesn't matter if we can't tell which one is the real one, he's reporting for duty in there somewhere and he was against droopy faces before he was for them! See how bloody Kerry’s exhibit is: it represents the Iraq War that he supported and every Arab that Israel has ever killed that Kerry has always justified. But it's all fake blood! It's ketchup! Heinz ketchup! Kerry could no more be in your funhouse than he could be in the United States Senate without wife Teresa Heinz’s money. In fact, in exchange for some signage, she donated all of the ketchup for your Inferno and that’s a lot of ketchup. Because all of your exhibits hungered for blood and because Ronald Reagan said ketchup was, after all, a vegetable, ketchup is all that we're feeding them.   

Quick, look left: there's former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She's not nearly as scary as usual because she's still not up to speed from her recent stroke. Anyone who saw her crazed face over the past four years, screaming for Iranian blood, knew that her head could pop at any moment and it finally did. Of course, Bill's with her. 

“Did you know that Bill Clinton's a vegan?" say my excited animal lovin' friends. To which I reply, "Did you know that his ending of welfare as we know it gave us a homeless population like we've never seen it? Did you know that his 'humanitarian' bombing of Kosovo set the model for Libya? Did you know that his deregulation of the financial industry paved the way for the greatest transference of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class in the nation's history, that the 'good times' of his entire bubbalicious presidency were a mirage for the working class? Did you know that he was chosen by the ruling class to gut the working class with NAFTA because a Republican president never could have pulled it off? Did you know that NAFTA made it possible for Clinton's buddies at Archer Daniels Midland to dump cheap subsidized grain on Mexico and drive thousands of peasant farmers off the land and across the US southern border? Did you know that Clinton, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Tyson Foods, let slaughterhouses regulate themselves so they sped up slaughter lines, resulting in epidemic levels of salmonella in meat and millions of animals killed while fully conscious, all of which is still going on today? But now he's a vegan, praise Jesus! Did you know that he well represents America: individual 'salvation' for the privileged who have destroyed many parts of the world wholesale and then are lauded as role models. Didja know?"  

Well, it’s a starry night here in your coaster. See all the twinkling lights and glowing planets? We're coming up to the second hill. This thing is really rumbling. Hear that? Stand up and get down, comrade, they're playing our song: “Roller coaster of Love -- say what …" It's the Ohio Players' "Love Rollercoaster," vintage Dayton street funk, as sung by the recently deceased Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner. “Roller coaster of Love – say what…”

Now we’re in the galaxy of the giant plasma screens: There's one of America's greatest artists, John Miller, the god of wood, the 1920s coaster sculptor virtuoso who gave us the “safety ratchet” that makes the clickety-clack sound and makes sure a coaster won't roll back down the lift hill if the chain breaks. He also invented the "unstop" wheel under the coaster track to keep the trains from flying off. Nobody's perfect! And here's some of Miller's masterworks: the aforementioned Screechin' Eagle where I and a friend had 30 rides on its last operating day before being demolished. There's the Coney Island Thunderbolt which survived four fires but couldn't survive a heathen nation that doesn't appreciate great art. This was the coaster that Woody Allen's fictional family lived under in the movie Annie Hall but it was the real life house where coaster owners Mary Timpano and Fred Moran lived for forty years. On the sad day of the wrecking ball, Timpano regaled reporters with stories of finding false teeth in her yard and other objects dislodged from riders and the rattling of her living room with every ride. There's the dead and gone Geauga Lake Big Dipper -- air time central, comrade -- and Kennywood's still existing, still thrilling Racer, Thunderbolt and Jack Rabbit, and there's Elvis' favorite coaster, the Zippin Pippin, the site of many peanut butter, ‘nanner and Seconal sandwiches and midnight rides with the King. And John Miller gave us all of those things…

And there's Ron Toomer, the man of steel, who designed Cedar Point's perfect cloud-dwelling Magnum XL-200 with the best turnaround in all of coasterdom – the famed pretzel loop -- and there’s Ron’s dearly departed, beloved and vicious Drachen Fire and there’s one of America's greatest sculptures, the Loch Ness Monster at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg. Yes, John Miller and Ron Toomer did more for America than any painters or conventional sculptors ever did, they put us in the center of their art and let us feel it, not just visually or mentally or spiritually but physically. I bow down, guys -- one day we’ll get that rot out of the Guggenheim and MOMA and get some flying turns and trick track in there. 

“Priest! Priest!”

Hear that? Somebody’s calling for a priest -- things must really be dire down here at the bottom of the second hill and hall of mirrors…Whoa, look who it is – it’s the Pillsbury drone boy, Harold Hongju (pronounced “hung you”, as in “hung you in a stress position”) Koh, the liberal lawyer darling who waxed indignant about torture and war crimes when Bush committed them but waned when Obama became the perp-in-chief. With ethics as pliable as his doughy face, Koh's the man who set up Obama's legal justifications for violating other nation's sovereignty and drone murdering people without charge or trial, far from combat zones and including American citizens. One of his most Orwellian statements was saying that bombing the hell out of Libya didn't constitute "hostilities" because there were no American boots on the ground. Using his Harvard-educated logic we could say that Russia hitting America with ICBMs during the Cold War or al-Qaeda leveling the Twin Towers on 9/11 wouldn’t/didn't constitute "hostilities" because there were no Russian or al-Qaeda boots on the ground in America. Right wing fascists are entirely superfluous in America -- all of their work is done by “liberal” professors, lawyers and politicians. I put this freak down here for the rest of his days but that's not why he's calling for a priest. Look on my side of the track: 

It's John Brennan. Professor Koh once referred to death squad leader (i.e., CIA director) Brennan as being like Obama's "priest" when he would sit down on Star Chamber Tuesdays and help Obama decide who they were going to murder next. One of the scary terrorists on their kill list was a 17-year-old Yemeni girl. That's right: a Yemeni teenager can cause the hilarious insecure reactionary cowardly fearful obedient gone baby gone nation of America to throw away hundreds of years of civilizing legal precedents in a heartbeat. In 2008 Brennan’s views on torture were considered too atrocious for him to head the CIA but when cretins like Obama and Koh moved all debate about “terrorism” and civil liberties further to the right, Brennan became a-okay. During his confirmation hearing, Brennan refused to answer Sen. Carl Levin's question of whether water boarding is torture. "I'm not a lawyer," said the 17-year-old-Yemeni-girl-whipped Brennan. Brennan said drone strikes on civilians were "rare instances" but here's a list of children, their names and ages, killed by American drones in Pakistan and Yemen. Maybe Brennan is a kind of priest -- a pedocide priest!

Our turnaround is an upward spiraling helix and the theme is Saturn and its rings with the body of the planet being Neocon Monkey Island. As we ride the rings we see the neocons are surrounded by walls, razor wire and electrified fencing to make them feel like they're in their true home, Israel. (Your coaster has a bit of a rampaging mass murdering bloodthirsty worthless fucking Satanic bastard motif.) Look at them popping up out of their holes: Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condoleeza Rice, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, George W. Bush and others. See them "securing the realm" by playing in their own shit? Where else can you see such a collection of enemies of humanity, promoters of constant war and destroyers of civil liberties? Look at them swing on the monkey bars -- kinda looks like an al-Qaeda training camp which is appropriate since they've used religious fanatics to wreck secular governments the world over and always created more "terrorists" than they've ever killed. I warned you there were horrors in your Inferno.

This next element is called a triple-down head-chopper. It's going to look like we're going to get decapitated by these cross beams but it's an illusion because just before we hit them I've dropped the track down severely so we just miss them. One, two, woo hoo, and look at the third one: it's Henry Kissinger hung upside down like a bat. This is where all future American presidents will have to make their post-inauguration pilgrimage to ask his wise counsel about how to get away with any contemplated genocides -- the big picture stuff. See his forehead, that's where riders will slap their chewing gum if they stand up and they're really fast. Fuck the insurance companies! Why Kissinger? Because I think Kissinger is immortal -- an immortal dumpy vampire, probably known back in his Transylvanian days as Schlub the Impaler. He was old when I was kid and he was killing Vietnamese and Cambodians, he was old when he was killing Chileans and he was old when he was killing the Timorese. But he never fucking dies. And he always looks about the same. A bona fide monster for your haunted ride.

This next section is special. Look right: I did away with the mirrored spires for this exhibit and made a terrarium with bullet proof glass. I put… wait a minute… oh, no… I tried to make this really cool for you: I put Antonin Scalia and Dick Cheney in there. After being pestered by the ACLU, I gave these two primates some enrichment, I gave them two AK 47s, two Glocks and a thousand rounds of ammunition. But all I see is a pair of shoes and a black robe and Cheney lying next to his water bowl. Dammit, comrade, Cheney ate Scalia! And then he had a heart attack and died! That guy would do anything to get out of going vegan! Didn't he know that Scalia was probably poisonous! All we can do is use this as a learning experience: just because two species are very similar it doesn't mean they’ll get along in close quarters. What a drag!

Look left (ha ha): there's Barack Obama: no smoke, no mirrors, not funny, just the man who said he greatly admired Ronald Reagan and chose as his Senate mentor the neocon Joe Lieberman whose horrendous objectionable (back then, two years ago) totalitarian dreams he made real. There's his "historic" Cairo speech which he may as well have begun by saying, "Shalom, assholes!" There's his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech where, while attacking a half dozen different countries, he made a defense of war and dissed Martin Luther King -- because Obama's in the business of repudiating the 1960s (e.g., the Vietnam War Commemoration Project), black militancy and dissent of every kind. There he is debating Hillary Clinton during his first presidential campaign where he said he intended, if elected, to chase Afghan peasants into Pakistan, thus destabilizing and warring on Pakistan -- the equivalent of Nixon telling the American people he was going to bomb Cambodia instead of doing it in secret. There's Obama at his ruling class coming out party, telling David Brooks that Social Security should be on the chopping block. Hear the haunted echoes and hollow sounds of his supporters who either defended him to the end or, perhaps, lamented his broken promises and lies -- hey, Obombazombies, you should have been afraid when he told you what he "really thinks," what he "really believes" in. It was all there in the open. 

There's Obama, always breaking new ground for the ruling class, doubling the million dollar bounty on 65-year-old Assata Shakur, setting her up for a drone strike in Cuba and her supporters for charges of "providing material support" for terrorism. And there's more prizes in this Crackerjack box: Obama sabotages any normalization with Cuba and, diobamacally, implies an equivalence between an escaped political prisoner like Shakur and the mass murdering former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles who's walking around free in Miami and whose bombings killed over 70 innocent people including the entire Cuban fencing team. Obastard had to reach back 40 years to provide bumfuck America with a new "terrorist" villain of the month. The FBI billboards of Shakur are, in reality, Big Brother intimidation for the American working class. They're for our "benefit." I smell sulphur, comrade. 

As we head back to the station I want to kick around some ideas with you. That's the end of the exhibits -- there's plenty of room to add more. The ride back features severely banked turns and very low-to-the-ground rabbit hops taken at speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour. A kind of Mighty Canadian Minebuster on steroids.

Oops, holy shit, let me put you out, comrade. It slipped my mind, but I made the track dip down into Lake Erie and, a few times each day -- totally at random and for old times' sake -- I set the lake on fire for a few seconds. I guess we're a little singed. Many parks brag about their water rides but I thought you should be the first to have a fire ride. It is the Inferno, you know? That's why I made the cues so long for the front seat -- people are gonna be lined up for hours waiting to experience what we just experienced. You laugh, but wait and see. 

Your coaster is actually a prototype for my dream of adding a little something to the Chicago skyline and transportation system. We'd take elevators up to the top of the Hancock building, walk out of the open air observatory onto a platform and get into the coaster cars. The track would snake around the building a couple times before entering a seeming death spiral cork screw and at the last moment it would break loose into some camel backs above Michigan Avenue, fly down to Grant Park, turn around over Lake Superior, hug Lake Shore Drive, then roar back to the River North and end up at Reza's on Ontario where, for a quarter, Reza patrons could pelt us with the best falafel balls in America -- one of those win-win situations we read about but seldom experience. Let other parks have water cannons on the ground to blast riders above -- we can do better. To the city of Big Shoulders, I will bring a present from Philly, city of Broad Asses.

So here's what I'm thinking (and don't touch the lap bar -- it's God's will that we slam into each other): you've heard of roller coaster wars between Cedar Point and Six Flags Magic Mountain in California, both of them competing to build taller, longer, faster, more innovative coasters. Well, I propose mothballing the Pentagon and turning that trillion dollar a year budget over to putting coasters and amusement parks all over America. You might say: "How can you spend tax dollars on roller coasters when there are so many crying social needs going unmet? Most people don't even like roller coasters and wouldn't get anything out of it."

My answer: You and me and the rest of America don't care anything about crying social needs -- if we did we'd be rioting and burning this country down. We care about being amused. The working class isn't outraged or getting anything out of the $15 billion we spend every month in Afghanistan even as the ruling class whacks Social Security. And all we get for that $15 billion a month is 1.5 billion Muslims hating our guts. So don't tell me America will miss this money if we spend it on coasters. 

You see, I'm envisioning bringing back the dead, the masterworks: the Idora Park Wildcat, the Crystal Beach Cyclone, the Coney Island Thunderbolt, the Geauga Lake Villain and Big Dipper and, by God, the Americana Screechin' Eagle. I'm proposing to give teenagers 75K a year with full benefits and a pension for guessing peoples' ages and weights when they enter the amusement park -- that's better than paying them a few years later to gun down Afghan children. We've got the money, the money is always there, just like the $15 trillion handed over to Wall Street -- it's just a question of if the working class wants to take it and put it into the economy -- or not. The money is there for bombs and drones and killing and torture and surveillance and spying on Americans. The money is there for holding the working class down -- I'm trying to give the working class some air time for crissakes! 

Well, whaddya think? That's it, we're back out in the sunshine again. It's a beautiful day here in America. It's good having the monsters contained in the Inferno. Hey, let's ride one more time and then we'll go. Just one more, come on… At some point we have to go back in there anyway and part out Cheney -- his pacemaker must be worth something on eBay. I can't make any promises about the flames from Lake Erie, though -- that could happen again. Are you game? Awesome. I told you there was nothing to be afraid of!  

published 5/10/2013 at counterpunch.org

I Think I Hear My Can Opening

The Desolationists

You've heard of the "isolationist" right but I want to tell you about the "desolationist" left. 

The desolationists rose up recently, decrying Obama's "gaffe" of calling California Attorney General Kamala Harris "by far the best-looking attorney general in the country." ("Gaffe" means someone in power absentmindedly telling the truth, like Chuck Hagel saying that a United States Senator's first job is to represent America, not Israel. OK, maybe this was more of a misunderstanding on Hagel's part than a true gaffe but he did say it.) 

The desolationists wrote many columns analyzing Obama's Kamala Harris comment in the same week that they failed to notice the two Afghan children he killed and seven adult civilians he wounded the preceding Saturday, the four Afghan policemen and two civilians he killed on Thursday and the eleven Afghan children and one woman that he killed the following Saturday -- over six times as many people as were killed at the Boston Marathon. It was a banner week for the pedocider-in-chief. Years ago, Iran's Ahmadinejad was mis-translated as saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map" but Barack Obama actually does wipe completely innocent people off the map -- every week -- and he doesn’t shed a tear about them. But desolationists will imagine that Ahmadinejad does more damage to the world than Barack Obama. 

Cornered about Obama’s awful positions and record, desolationists say they had to vote for him because he will, at least, preserve Roe v. Wade, ignoring the ample evidence that access to safe and legal abortion (and even contraception) has done nothing but constrict during his rule. A couple weeks ago a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan rebuked Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for preventing women under 17 from having access to emergency contraception. The judge called Sebelius/Obama's actions "politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent." Still, desolationists feel better that Obama isn't some anti-science Republican yahoo. After all, Romney and Bush and Cheney and Tamerlane and Genghis Khan were all worse. (Obama campaign song in election contest against Tamerlane: “Ain’t No Mountain of Skulls High Enough!”) 

Desolationists are content to fight over God, guns and gays, arenas where they can shoot right wing crazies in a barrel while ignoring bi-partisan systemic evil. Desolationists have no class consciousness and no international solidarity, especially with people of color. In the end, they seldom get what they want. Hence, their state of complete emptiness and/or destruction. Desolationists believe that America's non-stop bombing of other nations is either no issue at all or just one among many and probably not nearly as important as being pro-choice or supporting gun control or marriage equality. If you tell a desolationist that constant war means a police state at home they think you're alarmist because desolationists prize order above nearly everything, generally aren't Muslim, definitely aren't radical and never have their innocuous verbalizations interfered with by the state. Desolationists love identity politics, they believe symbols are victories and progress looks like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Wall Street shill Eric Holder and the supreme twofer, the African American mad humanitarian bomber Susan Rice. Desolationists are greatly troubled when oppressed people use violence to defend and advance their interests against the capitalist class and its agents.  

Desolationists believe it's a big achievement that gay people have the same opportunity as straight people to slaughter innocent brown people on behalf of the American empire. Same way with "feminist" desolationists who celebrate women in combat roles in the military. One day these "feminists" will look back puzzled that the American government skipped right over Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, where women were segregated as sex slaves and breeding machines, and went directly to making America's women war slaves while most of the menfolk will kick back on the home front drinking beer and watching sports. You go, girls! If we knew how to bake cookies, we‘d send them to you in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, wherever you‘re defending America’s values of aggressive war, resource theft, bolstering corrupt dictators and liquidating land reformers, union organizers and popular liberation movements. Capitalism will pervert everything eventually, including feminism. In fact, desolationists believe the delusion that feminism is stronger than capitalism.

If you want to see desolationists up close and despicable check out the Alliance of Women Film Journalists who presented actress Jessica Chastain with the award for "Humanitarian Activism -- Female Icon Award" for her character of "Maya," the CIA torturer and killer in the movie Zero Dark Thirty. No, really, this isn't an Onion-like satire. The award is "presented to an actress for the portrayal of the most positive female role model… a woman who is heroic, accomplished, persistent, demands her rights and/or the rights of others." You know, the rights of others to be kidnapped and tortured to death as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles, the right of a woman to assimilate, emulate and validate the absolute worst qualities of a white male racist -- and undoubtedly sexist -- goon for capitalism. The AWFJ also gave awards to Zero Dark Thirty for best film, best director, best original screenplay, best actress, best editing and best woman director. One of the rare AWFJ awards that didn't go to trashing Arabs went to trashing Persians -- Argo won for best adapted screenplay. The only way you award Zero Dark Thirty so thoroughly is if you hate Muslims or see them as, say, three/fifths of a human being. For a deeper look at Zero Dark Thirty, Abu Ghraib and how "feminism" is used in service of the American empire, check out Matt Cornell's excellent The Torturer as Feminist. 

Why should the CIA spend its hard-earned drug money on front groups when organizations like the AWFJ do the heavy propaganda lifting? Is it too paranoid to imagine that one day all nominees for the best picture Oscar will be CIA productions, either covertly or overtly? This would just be an extension of the FBI orchestrating most of the recent “terror plots” or infiltrating leftist groups in the early 1970s to such an extent that FBI agents eventually rose to "leadership" positions in these groups and then disbanded them. Freedom, democracy, “choices” (shot or hung), everything in America is a mirage. Nothing matters because nothing is real. The past is wiped clean every day. It’s a cardboard cut out country and the only thing behind the official apparitions is money.

And there's the desolationists, saying for months that they'll "hold Obama's feet to the fire" about resisting Republican cuts to Social Security when it's Obama himself who first put these cuts on the table and now has put them into his budget, the first Democratic president to ever do so. Obama says he wants to put your grandma on Friskies so that someday, maybe, your children can have Fancy Feast. I think I hear my can opening right now, nine years into the future. That will be the desolationists' war cry: Please, Barack, take Friskies off the table! With blacks standing down indefinitely, the working class doesn't have the requisite rage to stop Obama from taking the first swings of the wrecking ball to Social Security. (“Wrecking ball” – where have I heard those words? Oh yeah, thanks, Bruce Springsteen, for campaigning for this Wall Street stooge -- you're gonna have a whole fuckload of newly impoverished Americans to wail about while racking up kudos from the cock-and-bull rock and roll press. Talk about desolationists!) 

Workers are probably going to go gentle into that chained CPI night and die anonymous overlooked deaths of a thousand cuts. By then, Barack Obama will be long gone with a multi-million dollar book deal and speaking engagements, a foundation and, who knows, maybe he'll devote his later years to cramming South Africa-like bantustans down the throats of Palestinians or being a globe-trotting grand bargainer for American capital in Africa with a pen in one hand and an AFRICOM drone joystick in the other. Who the ruling class gonna call? Oballbuster, that's who.

published 4/19/2013 at counterpunch.org

Forty Years of Rabbit Food

How I Learned to Start Worrying and Care About the World

Forty years ago today, March 1, 1973 I became a vegetarian. I was 16. There was no glorious last supper before my truce-ifixion with non-human beings – my farewell to flesh was a leftover bologna sandwich.

I had been thinking about becoming a vegetarian for awhile and decided that I would tie it in with the March 1-7 nationwide boycott of meat because of high prices. In the radical whirlwind of the early 1970s it wasn’t unthinkable for meat eaters to join collectively, deny themselves gustatory pleasure for a week and try to effect change. (Roe v. Wade had just overturned state abortion laws and the American Indian Movement was occupying Wounded Knee. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon appeared and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In exited. That May Day 1.6 million British workers engaged in a one day strike against government austerity measures. Think we’ll get that many on the street against Obama’s upcoming austerity measures? I bet the NAACP will lead the protest! I'm starting a competing NAACP myself -- the National Association for the Advancement of CounterPunchers. You can join here.) Today, Americans accept living like peasants because we are allowed to eat like kings, feasting on rich animal-based foods 21 times or more a week – and we’ve got the obesity, heart disease, diabetes and health bills to prove it.

Because of my mother, animals were seen as fascinating and being able to help them was a blessing. Despite that, we weren’t vegetarians and the “issue” of eating animals never came up. (Mom was even a vegetarian for awhile in her teens and her father was a longtime vegetarian in the 1940s and 1950s. He died when I was very young and I only have one memory of his presence: When I was three -- and probably in a sugar cookie-fueled frenzy -- he let me wrap and tie up every object in the living room and dining room with balls of string, every chair and table leg, the bookshelves, the couch, the banister post leading up the stairs, one giant crazy web that took hours to make. When my mother came home from work she wondered what the hell was going on because it was impossible to walk. She told me later -- I didn’t remember -- that he said, ”It’s OK, he’s using his creativity.”) At one point as a child, I thought hamburgers were laid like eggs or meat was shit that somebody doctored up for human consumption. My mother tried to get me to eat a variety of foods but if I didn't like something I'd wait till she left the kitchen and then throw it in the trash, later telling her how great it was. Sometimes I'd outsmart myself and she'd give me more and then I'd have to dump it twice or, worse, eat it -- I especially hated these "draws." The thing that I threw away the fastest was pork chops. Being a culinary artist came very natural for me: when I was trusted enough to use the oven I'd throw a few hot dogs under the broiler till they ripped open and turned black on the outside. Then I'd toast the buns, slather them with peanut butter, add the ripped black hot dogs and feast away -- what the yum!  

I was the only vegetarian I knew. I think I lived on peanut butter sandwiches, canned peas and Kraft macaroni and cheese for the next five years. I didn't know a damned thing about health (who does at invincible 16?) Somebody could have told me I was gonna die but it didn't matter -- I wasn't participating in meat eating anymore. So, it's five years later and I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian, happily ensconced in the land of milk and honey, thinking my ethical work is done here...I'm working the night shift at a hospital, I'm 21 now, I'm sitting in the kitchen on my lunch break and I'm powering down those single serving (huh?) hospital ice creams, I've got a giant mess of them on the table, all vanilla… Flashback: God how I loved vanilla ice cream, I'd dump a half gallon of vanilla ice cream in the biggest bowl we had in the house, a bowl that I didn't know why we had because it was only ever used for my vanilla ice cream epics and I'd decorate that white monolith with as many Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies as it took to eat both of them in sweet harmony, I was the cookie jeweler breaking them up in halves and quarters and eighths with my spoon and it always, perfectly evenly Edenly, took the entire bag and that was my idea of an after school snack... But back to the hospital: I'm reading Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation, where he talks about egg production and veal calves and the dairy industry, and I looked at that collection of  empty ice cream cups and said to them: "Well, that it's for you." Except for being unintentionally snookered by servers at restaurants two times about dairy and once about chicken fat in rice, I haven't had an animal product since Nov. 15, 1978 and it's the best decision I ever made. Looking back on my excesses I'm reminded of Dr. John McDougall's contention that moderation is bullshit and doesn't work because humans are risk-taking creatures prone to excess and that, instead, our junkiedom should be embraced in the healthiest ways possible, whether it's eating mountainous plates of brown rice, baked potatoes and vegetables or finding physical activities that we can be crazy about for our entire lives.

So what motivated me to take the plunge into vegetarianism? My mother created the right ethical conditions but it actually took the boom-boom gang to push me over the edge. The Hindus say that you teach Aries Rising children about gravity by letting them jump off the roof and that's what had to happen to me. I had to be confronted and challenged and I had to feel it. As I was growing up I used to get into arguments with adult hunters, telling them how wrong and cruel they were and one of these guys had the presence of mind to tell me I was a hypocrite because I was eating animals, that I was paying someone down at the slaughterhouse to do the dirty work for me, but it was me killing them just the same. Even though I didn't know anything about health and nutrition I immediately offered a bullshit defense about how hunting and meat eating were different and how we humans had to eat meat. To not change, to stave off the unwelcome prospect of having to change, to not face my hypocrisy, I was an instant Clarence Darrow. But the truth of what he said hit me strong, my internal compass was broken but it didn't stop -- it was spinning wildly: Holy fucking shit, I'm in spiritual trouble here even though I don't believe in God. Here I was: a happy well-adjusted traitor to the human race but it turns out I've been doing wrong! And doing wrong to my holy of holies...The hunter made the salient point that I was just as low down and fucking worthless as he was! And he was content with it! He was happy about it! I was the one in crisis! After that, I shut my little big mouth for awhile and regrouped. At 16 I told my mother what I was doing and she was totally supportive. It was one more way that I was like my left wing piano-playing grandfather and she wished, as I, that he and I could have known each other. Within a few years, tiny expensive guerrilla pints of Vanilla Almond Bark Tofutti, sent from the Big Bad Apple, would infiltrate sleepy Springfield, Ohio and the resistance was secure. My mother followed me into vegetarianism and was a vegan for the last 20 years of her life.

Some ninnies think hunters should get some points for killing their own "food," that it's "less hypocritical." Wrong. We don't need more people who kill sentient beings. We don't need destroyers, we need creators and healers. Give me your ethically tired, your hypocrites, your huddled weak-asses, your spiritually lazy who claim they are too sensitive and can't bear to see the photos and films of the cruelty that they pay for and cause -- give me these people because they're actually much easier to reach and turn around than the ones who routinely get their hands bloody and inure themselves to violence and injustice, especially if money is involved. America is one giant monster-making machine, from school dissection to teaching kids to hunt, from spanking and bullying to 4-H where the tears of each bawling Judas are quickly dried up, dammed and hardened by filthy lucre, the child's first experience of selling out their "friends" to be murdered, the alienation moment, their first betrayal of the first working class (non-humans) and what it "feels" like to grab a rung in the capitalist hierarchy. 4-H needs replaced by a new program of 4-Rs: rescue, rehabilitation, relocation and refuge. 

Anyway…Thanks, hunters. Thanks to you confronting me about my hypocrisy, you set in motion the most worthwhile learning adventure in my life. From that gut reaction of me hating what you do and seeing that I was too close to you, I changed, and I learned to eat differently. Once vegan, I plunged into Middle Eastern, North African, Indian and Vietnamese cuisines. I eventually learned to cook, I learned how most of our agriculture isn't for humans but for fattening up poor creatures who are Satanically brought into the world to suffer and be brutalized and terrorized and then hideously killed all for the sake of the crown of creation's taste buds. Tell me how special and noble you are, again, O speciesist bigots! Tell me how you deserve life everlasting! Tell me how you ever showed elementary compassion for innocent creatures by refraining from eating them! Tell me how atrocities done to your pleading selves are not atrocities when done to the animal nations! I learned about deforestation, desertification, overgrazing, the welfare-rancher bums and their genocidal wars on wildlife. I read great books like Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis and learned how improvements in hygiene, nutrition and sanitation in the early part of the 20th century were more important to human health than all the treatments and "cures" ever concocted in labs. I learned that there were mini-Marxes walking among us in the fields of philosophy and nutrition, thinkers whose main points have never been refuted like Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights and the health writings of Dr. John McDougall. I wondered and looked at what the world's religions had to say about animals when, previously, I didn't give a damn about what they said about anything. I was voracious and indefatigable because that's what the animals required to be their defender -- their tormenters needed to be beat back everywhere: politically, intellectually, socially, culturally. I learned about the Dr. Frankensteins of the forests and fields, the "game managers" who manipulate wildlife habitat to produce ever greater numbers of animals to be shot by hunters and the other Dr. Frankensteins in the labs, performing superstitious rites in order to have "confidence" about releasing lucrative and usually harmful potions onto the world. You hunters turned a kid who hated being called on in class into a debater, a campaigner, a picketer, an organizer, a legislation testifier, a cruelty documenter, a hunt saboteur and a consultant to cities, colleges and commercial real estate owners about how to pigeon-proof buildings (yeah, you never know where things will lead.) Way to go, guys! I didn't get a chance to thank you back in the 70s, so I'm doing it now.

Today's veggie birthday missive will fly away on the wings of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being which came out in 1984, the feverish heyday of the animal lib movement. Or maybe it will be like a bird shitting on your head. The movie version of this astoundingly original and beautiful book didn't have the guts to include how the death of a dog affects the main characters' lives or Kundera's powerful meditation on non-human beings in general. But a spoilsportsman like me is never gonna let you forget it: 

"There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."

published 3/1/2013 at counterpunch.org

The Great White Camel

Zero Down and Dirty

Probably many people have read the informed and thoughtful commentary on the movie Zero Dark Thirty by Glenn Greenwald or Jane Mayer or Karen Greenberg. 

But what you’re really wondering is: what does a scalawag, what does a completely unrepentant flame thrower and certified America-hater think about Zero Dark Thirty? Come, sit by me.

Zero Dark Thirty, like director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (which I reviewed and contrasted with Avatar here), is about the trials and tribulations of American occupiers, torturers, death squads and empire builders -- no Muslims need apply for any humanity, although they’re allowed to scream a lot and blow up shit. (In real life they scream a lot, too, because some party unknown to Bigelow keeps dropping bombs on them, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.) 

First off, I think the critics of this movie are lost in minutia. They mistakenly credit Americans with a humanity which they don’t possess and assume that Americans will be unduly influenced by the movie’s depiction of torture when, in fact, more Americans support torture than are against it, according to this 2012 poll. More Americans support torture now than in 2007. Americans are a lost cause. Instead, let’s see the waterboard pitcher as half full and celebrate how the rest of the world might see this movie.  

Two things stuck out for me about the movie, one at the very beginning and the other at the end. Watching the CIA torturers at work, waterboarding, beating, hanging a guy in stress positions, depriving him of sleep, confining him in a little box, the sexual humiliation, the blinding light and blaring music -- all of it called to mind George Bernard Shaw’s observation on animal experimentation: that a race of people who would use something as barbarous as animal experiments to “save” themselves would be a race of people not worth saving. No matter what the CIA, director Kathryn Bigelow (don’t overlook that comma!) and screenwriter Mark Boal intended, that’s the real message (subliminal only if you’re an American) of Zero Dark Thirty: America isn’t worth saving. Creative artists don’t always know the forces and influences that they’re working under or the ultimate import and meaning of what they’re creating. History, someday even written by the working class, will judge the meaning of this film. 

The definition of torture is “the infliction of pain to elicit information.” That’s why I’ve never had a problem calling animal experimenters torturers. Torture isn’t in the mind or the intent of the torturer, it’s what they do. They cause pain to get information. So the torturers in Zero Dark Thirty can go from being brutal to joking around in mere seconds. They aren’t foaming-at-the-mouth sadists 24/7 -- they’re the war criminals standing behind us in the grocery line. It’s Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

If the experiments/torture didn’t actually start out this way, in the end it always becomes about the sick fuck craziness of the torturers/experimenters themselves, their desire to be obeyed and take absolute power and control over a helpless being’s life, not the search for truth or “cures” or “protecting the American people.” (It’s perfect symmetry that the “learned helplessness” experiments of University of Pennsylvania dog shocker Dr. Martin Seligman formed the “intellectual” basis of the Bush torture program.) Zero Dark Thirty shows American torturers in action, which is good. In fact, I think it would be dishonest of Bigelow and Boal to toss in the one or two FBI agents who objected to the systematic torture of one of hundreds (thousands?) of people and the torture trail that went all the way up to Yoo, Bybee, Addington, Cheney and Rumsfeld for their recommendations on torture techniques. This fucking movie should go down hard in the craw of the world -- there was never any humanity or conscience or enough “good Americans” involved to even be worth noting. I don’t recall those FBI agents making any arrests of the torturers or raising hell in the press at the time they witnessed the torture. 

(An aside on waterboarding: as awful as waterboarding is in the movie, I think this written description -- by a man who waterboarded himself -- conveys the suffering better. In media interviews, director Bigelow never calls waterboarding torture -- she always calls it “enhanced interrogation.” People who don’t call waterboarding torture are either: 1) misinformed 2) diabolical servants of the American empire or 3) the New York Times. Waterboarding has been known as torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition and the Reagan Justice Department recognized it as such when it prosecuted Texas sheriff James Parker and three deputies for doing it to prisoners to obtain confessions back in 1983.)    

The other thing that struck me about Zero Dark Thirty was no face to face confrontation with Osama bin Laden when the Navy SEALs are blowing up doors to his compound and proceeding up the different levels to his bedroom. Once there, everything gets even murkier, despite the night vision goggles worn by the SEALs. We don’t see the shot that fells bin Laden -- we see him after he’s shot and laying on the floor as a SEAL pushes away two of his wives and then another SEAL pumps his supine body with a couple more bullets. 

In a movie where plenty of dramatic license is taken, why no face to face confrontation with the great terrorist mastermind, with the Navy SEAL gunslinger at high midnight delivering vengeance for the smoking ashes of the twin towers? Why no look into bin Laden’s face as he realizes he is about to die in the “belly of an eagle” (America) as he said he probably would? Why no cathartic righteous justice? It doesn’t matter that maybe in “real life” it really was dark and difficult to see and that the one-to-one look in bin Laden’s eyes didn’t happen. These filmmakers don’t give a damn about “real life” and context when it comes to vilifying Muslims. Without fail, they care about drama and maximum emotional impact, from the real life September 11 911 callers which lead directly to the waterboarding to the CIA agent who bakes a cake for the man she thinks has been turned into an informant only to have him detonate a suicide vest and kill her and several other agents. This movie is all about drama but only within the confines of CIA propaganda.   

The filmmakers would no doubt consider showing bin Laden’s face to be “glorifying” him. If bin Laden was shown to be afraid, he might draw some sympathy as an unarmed man executed in his bedroom by a death squad. If he was defiant, this might rev up his followers. If he was calmly waiting and accepting of his imminent death, this might show bravery. (A Pakistani commission investigating the raid said bin Laden “advised his family members to pray during the raid.” This would go along with why he didn’t take the rifle from off the wall and defend himself.) So there must not be anything recognizably human about him. Code-named “Geronimo” by the American government, bin Laden must die like every indigenous person at the hands of cowboys and soldiers in American movies: just fall down dead like a cardboard cutout, incapable of expression, meaning or emotion. Only the White Man’s struggles are of any interest. Paradoxically, bin Laden remains a boogeyman who still holds so much power that even his death in a movie can’t be shown. Moby bin Laden’s dead and America, through Ahab Bigelow, is still afraid of him, a kind of Great White Camel, an obsession, a fiend, now buried in the sea, who played a very useful role for American warmongers, from terror alerts always sounded near key political and legislative moments to being the supposed inspiration for every zealot with a Kalashnikov that America must spend a fortune exterminating -- not a mere criminal who could have been easily been captured alive and tried in court.

America’s pursuit of the Great White Camel told us much more about ourselves than it did about him: we killed over one million Iraqis and wrecked their country which is still going on to this day, every day. We’ve now killed more Afghan civilians than Americans were killed on 9/11, and our drone strikes in Pakistan are making it a close second. The pursuit of the Great White Camel let the world see through a mirage: America isn’t a model to be emulated, it’s not a soaring eagle but a Chicken Little who scares easily and rushed to throw away every civil liberty and legal protection it had via the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act and the National Defense Authorization Act. A deluded cowardly and bullying country that will mainly fight you from 10,000 miles away and 20,000 feet above. A country whose dumb ass personality-cult liberals believe it’s a big improvement going from Bush capturing and torturing alleged “terrorists” to Barackus Obombus Caesar who captures no one and simply kills whoever he wants wherever he wants whenever he wants. It’s no coincidence that the CIA works with an Oscar-winning director on a film depicting torture now that its preferred modus operandi is extrajudicial assassination.  

So why is this movie good for the world? Because it shows the ugly beast of America out of control, it comes to you bloody and crazed, so detached from reality that it believes its vices are virtues. It congratulates itself on its military prowess while the rest of the world sees sadistic torture, innocent people killed, nations’ sovereignty violated with impunity, international law and the Geneva Conventions jettisoned, lumbering death squads coming in the night from thousands of miles away to wreck your world, terrifying women and children and sometimes killing them. This movie’s message is: America makes the whole world insecure -- therefore: arm yourselves to the teeth, preferably with nuclear weapons.  

Zero Dark Thirty shows America swaggering and bragging, torturing and killing and proud of it. Americans love this shit because they have no empathy -- they never imagine themselves on the receiving end of it. And they’re so damnably stupid and easy to manipulate that even when they are on the receiving end of it, as on 9/11, they don’t learn anything from it. Forget about any self-reflection as to why so many people in the world hate America. It was so easy for the ruling class to channel Americans’  bigotry onto Muslims and deflect away the normal healthy reaction of what should have been tremendous anger at the US government for not preventing 9/11 after all the trillions of dollars spent on “defense” and “security” and all the warnings from various other nations’ intelligence agencies. (Ralph Nader suggested four decades ago that cockpit doors on planes should be strengthened and locked. But what does he know compared to “bottom line” airline executives -- he only gave us seat belts.) Three thousand people dead, a nation shellshocked and yet no one in our vast political/intelligence/military/surveillance state lost a day’s pay or got a reprimand. No one on top pays for anything in America whether it’s torture, financial fraud, illegal eavesdropping or negligent homicide. Zero Dark Thirty shows the incredible resources available to kill and destroy while Americans live in cardboard boxes in New York City and tents next to off-ramps in San Diego. A country whose infrastructure is so dilapidated that it’s not even safe for people to live under its bridges. A moral and social wasteland where more of its “true believers,” its trumpeted soldiers, kill themselves each year than are killed by its enemies. A country so fucked up, from its rotting Obama drone-head on down, that an increasing number of alienated citizens make their final statement the mass killing of total strangers, especially children. One great day it will be unanimous: three hundred million Americans will hate America.     

Now wasn’t this a better movie review than some reverent cinephile talking about camera angles and lighting and references to other movies that weren’t worth seeing in the first place? The only way that I could be wrong about all of this, and the S & M America-lovers could have the last laugh, is if the goal of the American government, through propaganda vehicles like Zero Dark Thirty, is to cause as much hatred and blowback to America as possible in order to justify ever more “defense” and “security” spending, as if the whole reason for the being of America was the wildly successful business of plunder and murder. I flame. You decide. Have it your way at Vegan King.

published 1/25/2013 at counterpunch.org