22 VIII 2021: From Afghanistan to Trumpistan

It is difficult to get any real news about what’s actually happening in Afghanistan. The news outlets seem interested mainly in evaluating daily the popularity of our President at home, and of our country on the world stage.

But we are learning a few things: People are now acknowledging the fact that in Afghanistan, as in many other of our misadventures abroad, we’ve been backing the wrong team, i.e., we’ve been trying keep afloat a regime that was addicted to its own corruption and, predictably enough, lacked the support of citizens and soldiers alike. One has to wonder: HAVEN’T WE KNOWN THIS FOR DECADES?

We are also learning of the difficult in admitting imperiled Afghanis. Huge delays and “you can’t get there from here” situations have been created by the sabotage of the immigration apparatus during the Trump regime directed by that dirty little sneak Stephen Miller. Miller should be dropped in Afghanistan without papers, without money without a cell phone, and without the backing of right-wing xenophobes.

15 VIII 2021: Afghanistan, another failure to learn from the past

American arrogance and naivete have done it again. The exodus of Americans from Afghanistan is well under way, and those of us who viewed the exodus from Saigon are having a déjà vu experience. “Operation Iraqui Freedom” was an incalculable waste of wealth and lives, and now, I suppose we are watching the ill-conceived “War on Terror” end with a whimper. What were we doing in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires,” anyway? Couldn’t we have learned from 200 years of foreign-policy disasters in Afghanistan, from the British Empire’s series of catastrophes there, from the Soviet Empire’s experience that led to the fall of their Empire? And now we are seeing signs of the collapse of the American Empire.

And what can our foolish statesmen tell the veterans who were physically or mentally maimed there, what can they tell the families of those who were lost in Afghanistan, what could they conceivably say to our service men and women who died there? Yet again Rudyard Kipling’s epitaph for A Dead Statesman comes to mind:

I could not dig: I dared not rob;

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue

And I must face the men I slew.

What tale shall serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?

6 VIII 2021: Fools’ names and fools’ faces …

Patricia and Mark McCloskey could not rest in obscurity after their pardon, but have leapt back into the light by filing a lawsuit to recover their shootin’ irons and $872.50 they’ve paid in fines. Yes, St. Louis’ own Bonnie and Clyde are standing up for their “gun rights,” backed by the plenary indulgence they received from Gov. Parsons. If this does not get them the attention they feel they need, they can emulate another, more prominent Bonnie and Clyde, the motor-mouth twins, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

5 VIII 2021: Call them what they are!

1) It is reported in the local paper and now on the internet that Missouri’s bone-head governor has officially pardoned Patricia and Mark McCloskey. Good ol’ Parsons, he said he would do it and he’s done it.

The McCloskey case went through so many changes of course and zig-zags that I’m not sure of what they were convicted. But it is clear that prosecuting them, a wrong-headed bid for popularity by St. Louis’ naive prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, gave a prominence to disgraceful people and pointed up the inadequacy of our criminal code, namely that being stupid, self-aggrandizing, or otherwise anti-social is not a crime.

2) Ever more alarming information becomes known daily about the criminal Trump’s attempted coup d’état: his attempt to force the connivance of the Dept. of Justice, his confidence in co-conspirators among the Republicans in Congress, the instigation of insurrection by Trump and his collaborators, and the disinformation campaign now being conducted by these same collaborators. 

I think it’s time to stop calling these people “Trump loyalists,” “Trump supporters,” “Trump defenders,” etc., and name them for what they are: “pro-Trump fanatics,” “Trump addicts,” “criminal conspirators,” “anti-democratic revolutionaries,” “violent insurrectionists,” “betrayers of the Constitution,” and, yes, the good old “enemies of the people.”

28 VII 2021: Joe Isuzu again

The Jan 6th Committee has begun to gather evidence about the Jan 6th Insurrection, to pierce through all the confusion and industrial-strength obfuscation that suround it. Nancy Pelosi facilitated the Committee’s work by wisely excluding from the Committee the deceit-prone congressmen the Republican establishment had put forward And so, in the face of massive resistance, the work of the Committee has begun.

Republican response to the first hearing has been muted, obvious, or old-hat. Rep. Andrew Clyde is still marketing his invention of insurrection-tourism, and Sen. Ron Johnson goes on affirming his faith in the “peaceful protest” myth. However, the creativity of the Republicans in Congress has been given new life by Rep. Elise Stefanik who has announced that Nancy Pelosi is to blalme for the Insurrection. This is truly star-quality hutzpah that shows that Stefanik can surpass even Trump in the shameless creativity of her deceit. 

25 VI 2021: Crowd was loving of what?

Trump has described the crowd that was soon to attack the Capitol as “loving.” But we must ask “loving of what?” For I do not think that the epithet “loving” can be applied to this mob-to-be in any ordinary sense.

What’s evident in the increasingly available videos of the Insurrection is whole-hearted hooliganism. Yes, there may have been a few deluded patriots in the crowd, but the vast majority seem to have been hooligans with a temporary cause. As usual, they wanted some uproar, wanted some violence, wanted to show off before one another, wanted to overcome the frustration they endure as across-the-board misfits. So they loved the vandalism, loved to abuse police, loved menacing the members of Congress, loved glorying in their own ignorance, and especially loved the publicity.

They were little different from sports mobs around the world, whether the soccer mobs in Europe or the football and basketball mobs of many a college campus, mobs that are thought-repressing and conscience-numbing, mobs in which what would otherwise sink to the bottom rises to the top. However, sports mobs usually have an occasion for their violence: long-standing or momentary hostility to “the other side,” losing a game, or winning a game. These things may not be the absolute cause of the violence, but they provide the occasion for it.

In the case of the insurrectionist mob, all the preconditions were there in the people assembled: a lot of anger about whatever, an incapacity for independent thinking, a desperate craving to “belong.” So the insurrectionists were pre-disposed to what they were to do. But they needed a cause, an “occasion.” They needed someone to point them towards the target they were ready to attack, and our traitorous President was just the one to do the pointing. It was his peak so far as demagogue and wrecker of law and order. The “loving” mob may have loved Trump, but clearly Trump loved the mob.

22 VII 2021: Why should we endure them? Why should we pay them?

I have seen more than enough this week of Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and of Congressman Jim Jordan. They seem to have an urgent need for attention almost as great as the perennial boy D. Trump. They are lacking in self-control and so cannot comply with the demands of decency and even the rules of congressional procedure. 

I’m sorry that Jim Jordan is still a jock, sorry that Rand Paul was taught no manners, and sorry that no one at all likes or admires Ted Cruz. But they should have dealt with their problems before they entered public office, for now they’re turning the Congress into a poorly behaved therapy group. They are wasting the time of their colleagues and the money of the American people. Well, the sleaze tends to rise to the top, and though their gaucheries might be tolerable. But their immature posturing, obstructionism, and lack of anger control is more than we should have to endure or to pay for. 

28 VI 2021: Trump’s lost cause

Donald Trump persists in his claim that the election was stolen from him. His claim may become comic, for I think investigation into the Trump Organization will show that it has usually been Trump that did all the stealing. Trump’s big lie campaign will continue to be enfeebled and soon members of the Cult and lying politicians will be the only one’s keeping the Grand Old Pretense alive. So I’m wondering if we are going to see “Stop the steal” transformed into another “Lost Cause.” We’ll see statues of Trump erected in the courthouse squares of all the most backward counties. These will be paid for by a new women’s organization, The Daughters of the Chicanery. And racists, misogynists, homophobes, and well-to-do preachers will, in their cups, shed a tear for their lost cause.

18 VI 2021: Attacks on Chinese-Americans

I have been both horrified and puzzled by the steep upsurge in the verbal and physical assaults on Chinese Americans. Who would behave in this way, and why? I suppose the attacks are due to terrified stupidity and enabled malice, terrified stupidity, because fools in fear of COVID19 lash out at those whom the King of Fools has told them are responsible, enabled malice, because violence-prone, envious, resentful people are always quick to take advantage of any imagined license given them by persons in authority.

Let me end with Mark Twain’s observations on the Chinese and White-Chinese relations in his memoir Roughing It. He writes of the Chinese and the treatment they received in his time.

“They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it – they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as elsewhere in America.”

16 VI 2021: Trump and D.O.J.

So we’ve learned of the pressure Trump and his helpers applied to the Department of Justice to get it to play along with Trump’s Big Lie.

Did this come as a surprise to anyone at all? If we learn Al Capone has bribed a government official, that too is no news. These crimes are noteworthy, to be sure, but they are not news because they are only what we should expect.

We learn too that it was not only a matter of White House exerting pressure on the D.O.J., but there was also a Quisling at work in the D.O.J. I refer to Jeffrey Bossert Clark, an assistant Attorney General, who seems to have been ready to sabotage the D.O.J. to ingratiate himself with Trump. We should not simply blow off Mr. Clark with a “sleaze will be sleaze” shrug, but investigation is required into his activities at the D.O.J.