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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Barnaby's gRudge: Make America Hate Again.


Killer Klown Kommissariat


The explosive force of a radical mob is depicted in Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, as he, in one of his few historical novels, shows little sympathy for inchoate violence. In the aristocratic person of Lord George Gordon he gives us a charlatan who, using the emotions stirred up by religious bigotry, ignites the flames under a cauldron containing a seething brew of animosity, class hatred, xenophobia, and anti-papism.

The Gordon riots of 1780 were a Protestant uprising, and Dickens illustrates the irrationality of the mob, their willingness to have their fury unleashed against whomsoever their leaders deign deserving of it, no matter how innocent they may be, and the eventual punishment of the participants, whereas the instigators of the violence, Lord Gordon and his slimy accomplices, walk away unscathed.

The contrast between the smooth-talking, conciliatory Obama and the newly enthroned thuggishness of The Thump could not be more severe, the outcome he plans less transparent. There is no claim to the compassionate conservatism of his Republican predecessor, but only a promise to Make America Hate again, and to enshrine that intolerant, hooliganism in the seat of power. This isn't reactionary, as some have called it, because there has been no previous president that has flouted the rule of law in this manner. Like Duterte, the other famous unabashed basher currently astride the world stage, Thump flouts the very law that makes him the President in the first place, but, unlike Duterte, he's the leader of the world's soulless SuperPower, and an Empire cannot function across the boundaries of sovereign states without some simulacrum of standardization, which is what the rule of Law provides, no matter how hypocritically it may be wielded against the powerless while their oppressors sit on our collective faces farting and sneering at our resultant discomfiture.

Democracy and Full Spectrum Domination are not, after all, compatible philosophies.

It took the Bash Administration a full nine months and a city with its tallest towers lying in smoking ruins and a bombed out Pentagon to show the real measure of Bush's swaggering uselessness, but if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's unlikely it'll take The Thump anywhere near that amount of time to cause some part of the world or another to be reduced to a smoldering heap.

Using the specter of a resurrected Ghost of America Past as his rallying cry, Thump endeavors:

"To surround everything, however monstrous or ridiculous, with an air of mystery, to invest it with a secret charm, and power of attraction which to the crowd is irresistible, (he did, after all, cut his rabbit-like TV teeth on WWE). False priests, false prophets, false doctrines, false patriots, false prodigies of every kind, veiling their proceedings in mystery, have always addressed themselves at an immense advantage to the popular credulity, and have been, perhaps, more indebted to that resource in gaining and keeping for a time the upper hand over Truth and Common Sense, than to any half-dozen items in the whole catalog of imposture."

As in the novel, history has proven itself to be a repetitive and darkly mirrored refractory of time. Instead of staidly progressing, it tends instead to wash, rinse, repeat. Sometimes first as tragedy, then as farce, once as the Twilight of American Idols, next as Howdy Doody Philosophizes with a Hammer. But in either case, characters, names, events, all return, or are in danger of returning. An historical repetition where the present seems in danger of regressing to the past to repeat the suffering and pain of another era as it arrests and distorts time itself, exchanging the sloganeering of No Popery Here, to No Muslims Allowed, as the willful ignorance of establishing and enabling a dynasty via the usurpation of the hegemonic nuclear-backed power of a Democratic Nation by a small coterie of oligarchs dedicated to bending the might of a majority that far outnumbers them to do its bidding, putting their wealth, their safety, their very country at risk to carry out their own nefarious agenda.

This was a danger that Alexis DeToquevile warned about as early as 1838 in Democracy in America, a scant three years before Barnaby Rudge was published in the periodical, Master Humphrey's Clock. Hearkening back to the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 that debarred Roman Catholics from the throne, the Gordon Riots repeat the schism and inflame hatred against a foreign religion, a theme that echoed from the crusades as the current ban echos the GW invocation of that same theme, fleshly reinvigorated by its new standard bearer.

"What is more important in world history - a few stirred up German Nazis Moslems or the fall of communism? ... "

GW's father, (whose own father worked for the overthrow of communism in Europe by secretly funding the activities of the most rabid anti-communist on the continent: Adolf Hitler), the head of the CIA at the time the above quote was uttered, gave the answer to us all: better to have a coupla jets smashing their way into our cities than a thermo-nuclear attack. And now the Thump thinks he will ask the same question and receive a different answer; he won't, and neither will we.

The echoes resonate down through history, but no one is listening, they are too busy tweeting and texting, gaming and sexting  as the bombs fall on the hapless heads of Muslims throughout the Mideast, with the sanction, in fact instigation, of Jews and Muslims in the Middles East, with the US as their feckless patsy and Merchant of Death (If WE don't rake in billions in profits from the manufacture and sale of Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, someone else will).

All while the underlying energy equation necessitates the pouring of ever more money, even more than the arms industries, a vast sea of dollars flowing to propel a black tsunami of petroleum into the meta-machine of a modern American infernal combustion engine-driven Wehrmacht, as it drives us to our own destruction, while we hypnotically stare into a sideshow mirror that distorts reality such that dangers we see may appear larger than they are while dangers we don't loom dangerously out of our purposely-tunnel-visioned range.












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