A friend of mine is calling out his progressive friends for saying they’ll vote third party in the 2024 presidential election. Basically, his argument is this. We know Biden isn’t perfect. He leaves much to be desired, notably in obvious signs of his mental and physical decline. But we also know Trump is a monster. And, since Trump and Biden are currently running neck and neck, at least in the polls, your only real “choice” is to vote for Joe against the monster.
In sum, a vote for a third-party candidate of deep integrity and strong character like Cornel West is really a vote for Monster Trump.
A vote for Cornel West is a vote for Trump?
As I told my friend, telling people they’re making a big mistake by voting for a candidate like Cornel West is not the most effective way to win their hearts and minds. Telling them they’re throwing away their vote or that they’re really voting for Trump is hardly persuasive. In fact, it’s alienating and insulting.
If Joe Biden and the DNC want to win my vote, I want to see promises kept, progressive policies enacted, and corruption stymied and reversed. I want to see concrete results. I want changes in policy. I don’t want what Biden promised CEOs when he decided to run in 2020: that “nothing will fundamentally change.”
On so many issues, Biden has reneged on promises or otherwise failed to deliver for the working classes. He’s not a pro-union president. He hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage. He’s failed to deliver on student debt relief. There is no public optionfor health care. He’s approved oil and gas drilling in the most sensitive areas. Meanwhile, military budgets continue to soar as the Biden administration postures for a new Cold War with Russia and China. And I’m simply supposed to ignore this woeful record and vote for Joe because Trump is allegedly worse.
My friends tell me I expect too much from Biden and the Democrats. That they’re hamstrung by the Republicans. That Joe is doing the best he can. That I need to give Joe more chances. And so on.
But Joe Biden and the Democrats couldn’t even protect abortion rights. Barack Obama promised to codify Roe vs. Wade into law as his “top priority” but then abandoned his promise once he took office in 2009. Biden, of course, was his VP and has a long record of being critical of abortion rights. Again, however, we are told that Biden is the best hope for restoring rights that he’s never been keen on supporting, let alone protecting and extending.
If Biden loses in 2024, let’s be clear. It won’t be because some progressives voted third party. And it won’t be because of Putin or Russia or rigged voting machines or what-have-you. It will be because Biden simply couldn’t win enough votes in the right places. Because not enough voters believed in him. That’s not on people like me. That’s on Biden and the DNC.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Echoes JFK’s Peace Speech of June 1963
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running against the Democratic establishment’s position on the Russia-Ukraine War and for the presidential nomination of the party in 2024. He recently gave a peace speech in New Hampshire that echoed the sentiments of the peace speech given by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.
In New Hampshire, RFK Jr. speaks for the possibility of peace and against the MICC and its forever war
In his speech, RFK Jr. stated that Russia has legitimate security concerns, that NATO expansion to Russia’s border was a betrayal of promises made to leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, and that America’s military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) is enabling forever war rather than actively seeking an end to war. He was also careful to say he abhorred Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
I’ve already heard RFK Jr. being called a “Putin enabler,” if not a Putin puppet, for suggesting that Russian concerns about Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO are in any sense legitimate. Doesn’t he know, one reader asked, that Putin rejects Ukrainian identity as a country and a people? Doesn’t he know Russia is killing civilians in terror bombings? Why is he acting as an apologist for Putin’s many war crimes?
Obviously I can’t speak for RFK Jr., but I think his message is plain: a state of permanent war is causing deep harm to American democracy, what’s left of it, and any sustainable U.S. recovery must start with a rejection of war and massive military spending, including the more than $100 billion already devoted to what has become a proxy war in Ukraine. That war has greatly contributed to the rhetoric, and increasingly the reality, of a new Cold War with Russia (and China too), strengthening the MICC’s call for even vaster sums for wars and weapons in the cause of maintaining U.S. full-spectrum dominance around the globe.
Like his uncle, President Kennedy, RFK Jr. fears a world-ending nuclear cataclysm, an event that becomes more imaginable as the Russia-Ukraine War continues to escalate. Again, at no time did I hear RFK Jr. express support of the Russian invasion or its brutal methods; what he did express support for is diplomacy as a way of ending the bloodshed while reducing the risk of nuclear Armageddon.
Any reasonable diplomatic effort would have to recognize the legitimate security concerns of Russia, just as that same effort would have to recognize those of Ukraine as well.
Those who advocate for peace often face the charge of being puppets, enablers, or apologists for enemies who are usually presented as monstrous. All credit to RFK Jr. for departing from standard neocon rhetoric and practices and for extending an olive branch to Russia.
Arguing for more war is easy. It even wins salutes (and money) within today’s Democratic establishment. Striving for peace is far harder, and like his uncle, RFK Jr. has decided to take the harder path. More of us should join him.
Recently, Joe Biden went off script at a gun safety event in Connecticut, concluding his speech by saying, “God save the queen, man.” He also recently boasted of building a railroad from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, among other verbal slips.
JFK said we could put a man on the Moon, and we did. Biden says we can build a railroad from the Pacific across the Indian Ocean—a noble goal!
I’m not making fun of Joe Biden. I just want to restate what the consensus used to be: that being President of the United States is extremely demanding. It requires physical stamina and, even more importantly, mental acuity and clarity.
Biden is 80 years old. In the words of my dad, who lived to be 86, “It’s tough to grow old.” In the words of a blisteringly honest friend: “You know how they call them ‘the golden years’? Well, they suck.” Clearly, Biden is showing signs of his advanced age. Especially troubling is the apparent decline in his mental acuity. He occasionally looks confused and lost on stage. He tries his best to cover for this, even breaking into a hop or trot to try to show his vigor, but, honestly, he shouldn’t be running for president and another four-year term.
“Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” is a question that comes up during presidential elections. I can’t say I trust Joe Biden. Neither do I trust Donald Trump. (Trump’s personal problems are an entirely different story.)
The “choice” of Biden versus Trump is no choice at all. Both are untrustworthy. And if, yet again, those are America’s two leading candidates, we should all recognize how far mighty America has truly fallen.
At NBC News is a straightforward story, presented in a gushingly positive way, of the “campaign cash dash” of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It’s all about Biden and Harris “hitting the trail—and donors’ wallets”—for money. It’s presented as perfectly normal, almost as laudable, an admirable example of democracy at work in America. Biden and Harris need money—what better way to get it than to beg for it from big donors, who of course want nothing in return for their “contributions,” better known as bribes.
I realize I’m stating the obvious here. The U.S. political system is throughly corrupted. What amazes me is how it’s presented in the mainstream media not only as normal but as desirable, even commendable. Here I recall watching a documentary that explained that the first duty of a newly elected member of Congress is fundraising for the next election cycle. Very quickly, you realize the donors are largely running the show, buying access and bribing officials to make or change policy as the donors see fit.
Off they go, begging for money (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)
Again, this is hardly a shock; I suppose I just remain somewhat amazed how this is reported in almost gushing terms by outlets like NBC News.
A necessary part of the solution to restoring the republic is getting big money out of politics, which the Supreme Court made even more difficult to achieve with its Citizens United decision. Where corporations are citizens and money is speech, you necessarily have an oligarchy or a plutocracy. And that’s what America is.
Anyhow, here are a few excerpts from the NBC News article:
President Joe Biden is raising money again.
The commander in chief plans to accelerate his campaign cash dash after the White House paused overt political activity during debt-limit negotiations with Congress… Biden will be hitting the hustings — and donors’ wallets — harder over the next couple of weeks … The Biden re-election calendar has 20 fundraisers planned in the last half of June, most of which will be headlined by Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris …
The still-skeletal Biden campaign apparatus has a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC and all of the state parties that are allowed to tap donors for more than the $3,300 contribution limit that governs the president’s principal campaign committee.
On June 26, for example, top donors will be asked to pay $100,000 to sponsor the Harris-headlined DNC LGBTQ gala on Park Avenue in New York — a price that brings with it two “platinum” tables, passes to a VIP reception and an invitation to the photo line. A single seat at the dinner costs $1,500, and there are several giving thresholds between the top and bottom levels that are accompanied by various levels of access.
The ramp up is certain to haul in millions of dollars to support Biden and fellow Democrats, but it may not entirely put to bed the concerns of allies who worry that the debt-limit freeze on political events caused harm and that too much emphasis has been put on filling the DNC’s coffers … [O]ne longtime Democratic donor said he was “surprised” Biden has not put together a finance committee of heavyweight money-bundlers.
This donor pointed out that contributors can give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the DNC and its state affiliates while just $3,300 per donor per election — primary and general — can go to Biden under federal campaign finance limits. That is, big-dollar joint fundraising events benefiting the DNC and Biden’s campaign are orders of magnitude more lucrative for the party than the candidate.
As an aside, I’m not sure why Biden is identified as “the commander in chief.” There’s no military content to this article. “Beggar in chief” is far more accurate here. Also, I just love the way the mainstream media suggests this is like a sport, a “cash dash,” and to the victors go the spoils. Which, I suppose, is true.
It’s nice to know the DNC will profit greatly from those fundraising efforts. Small wonder the DNC still supports the Biden/Harris gravy train. Of course, there’s no suggestion in this NBC article that there’s anything wrong with this process. Indeed, Biden is being criticized for his laxness in not putting together “a finance committee of heavyweight money-bundlers.” C’mon, Joe. Show us the money!
Well, dear reader, it’s time for me to take my $100K to Park Avenue in New York. Look for me in the photo line with Kamala Harris.
All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?
For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)
Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep themover there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.
In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writingagainst the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.
But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.
Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billionin the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)
Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied“homeland.”
Lessons from History on Imperial Decline
I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.
And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.
As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.
As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.
There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.
History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.
Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.
For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.
That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.
Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.
Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.
Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion
Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?
Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.
Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.
The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclearones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.
History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.
What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?
As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.
Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence. (p. 432)
It’s hard to disagree with that, especially within imperial settings in countries dominated by rich and powerful interests. Kuang’s novel is set in the British Empire during the 1830s and 1840s, as Britain was ramping up its first opium war against China. Her quote readily applies to the U.S. empire today and its various global wars of dominance.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the so-called Capitol Insurrection on January 6th and the heavy-handed response to it, especially the long-term prison sentences being handed out. Too much attention is being paid to punishing Trump’s so-called coup supporters and not enough to how Washington, D.C., is increasingly fortifying itself against potential protests. Recall, for example, those Democrats who said they wanted to “defund” the police even as they voted for an expansion of the Capitol police force.
As my wife and I watched the January 6th “coup,” we both had the same thought: What if those protesters hadn’t been so misguided? What if they were truly protesting and “breaching” the Capitol for meaningful change? What if they had been advocating for universal health care, higher wages, an end to expensive and unnecessary wars? Would they ever had gained access to the Capitol? Would members of the Capitol police have moved the barricades, or posed for selfies, with the protesters? I highly doubt it.
America today has a rigged political system that is thoroughly captured by the moneyed interests. You don’t change that by speaking truth to power because the powerful already know the truth. Indeed, they create the truth. The golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules. And that’s what America means when it talks about a rules-based order. The wealthiest, most powerful, nations and people have the gold, want to keep and expand it, so they make the rules with that goal in mind.
How to effect meaningful change in a rigged system without violence is one of the huge questions of our age or any age. In her novel, Kuang suggests that powerful interests only respond to the demands of the less powerful when they are forced to “by acts of defiance” they can’t ignore. She may well be right.
The problem, of course, is that violence that drives change doesn’t always make things better. The French Revolution produced a Reign of Terror followed by the Napoleonic Wars. The Russian Revolution produced Lenin, Stalin, gulags, and ruthless five-year plans. Here I recall an Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote: “All revolutions unleash the most elemental barbarism.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Yet, if America’s so-called elites continue to close all legitimate avenues to meaningful change, they may be making elemental barbarism inevitable. And I’m not sure they care, in the sense they believe they will always come out on top, that they will, in a word, win, because the masses can always be manipulated or bullied into compliance.
Yesterday, President Joe Biden tripped and fell at the Air Force Academy after handing diplomas to roughly 900 graduating cadets. He was helped to his feet by an Air Force officer and two Secret Service agents.
There. That seems straightforward. Biden tripped and fell, apparently not seeing a small sandbag in his path that was being used to weigh down a teleprompter stand. No big deal. We all stumble, bump into things, trip, and fall.
Why didn’t the Secret Service neutralize the sandbag that tripped our president?
So I have no idea why the New York Times described it like this:
President Biden appeared to trip and fall to his knees after handing out diplomas to graduates at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
He “appeared to”? Why the hedging? He obviously tripped and fell. And he had some trouble getting back up. That’s OK. He’s 80 years old and has some arthritis. We shouldn’t be surprised that this happened, nor should we try to qualify it. “Appeared to” trip and fall—c’mon, man, as Biden might say.
What worries me much more about Biden is that he never holds press conferences and rarely speaks extemporaneously. Remember when presidents would hold televised press conferences and occasionally take challenging questions? These simply don’t happen anymore. Biden is kept isolated from the press, and when he does appear, the questions appear to be scripted, with Biden calling on reporters by name in pre-determined order.
Add to this the DNC’s policy that there will be no Democratic candidate debates in 2024, irrespective of how well rivals are polling, and it truly makes you wonder about Biden’s fitness for office. If he can’t handle a real unscripted press conference and can’t endure a 90-minute unscripted debate with rivals like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson, how can he possibly be well enough to serve as president, unless, of course, he’s merely a figurehead, pushed and shoved and propped up by those around him?
Even Hillary Clinton of all people has said that Biden’s age is a legitimate issue in the 2024 election. (Clinton said this, it seems, as a reminder to the DNC that she’s ready to run if Biden should stumble and fall in the primaries.) I don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, but so far the DNC is standing by their man, no matter how much he has to be propped up.
Personally, I don’t want Biden to run again for many reasons, but one is most certainly his age. He deserves to walk away with some dignity intact. Another four years as president for Biden would likely kill him; charges of ageism aside, the physical and mental demands of the presidency are simply beyond most people in their eighties. That’s no knock on Joe; it’s just reality.
Yesterday, Ron DeSantis announced his candidacy for President on Twitter; it didn’t go well due to “technical difficulties.” Something about his butchered announcement is telling. Yet what creeps me out about him isn’t his botched announcement with Elon Musk or even his record in Florida, which is bad enough, but rather his record in the U.S. military.
As a JAG (military lawyer), he seems to have facilitated torture at Gitmo (the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba) and assassinations by Special Forces teams in Iraq. He was also fond of posing like a combat officer in desert camo holding an assault rifle. I doubt DeSantis was ever truly in harm’s way (same with me, by the way, but I never posed like a commando), but he loves to strike a pose. He even made a campaign commercial based on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” in which DeSantis, of course, is the “Top Gun” of Florida.
Ron DeSantis, lawyer, ready to rock ‘n’ roll in Iraq
Meanwhile, speaking of image-making, according to the New York Times his wife Casey is cultivating a Jackie Kennedy-like image with her fashion choices (as a former TV news anchor, she knows the power of positive visuals). If image is everything, as those old camera commercials claimed, Ron DeSantis is burnishing his as a warrior-dad, which, I suppose, is better than the reality of a Harvard-trained power-hungry lawyer with no scruples.
There is something “off” about DeSantis, something inauthentic and dishonest, even more so than the typical politician. Call it a gut feeling.
But, moving past my “gut,” there’s the stunt DeSantis pulled in shipping immigrants seeking asylum in Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. People are just pawns in his political power game. Again, not that unusual for an ambitious pol, but that doesn’t mean I want this charlatan to have his finger on the nuclear button.
I see him as a proto-Greg Stillson (from Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone”). A dangerous man. Strange as it may sound, Donald Trump strikes me as more authentic and less dangerous than DeSantis. Which, by the way, is no endorsement of Trump.
Mobsters are known for breaking kneecaps to bend people to their will. Marketers break into heads with repetitive and manipulative advertising, images, and narratives. Mobsters of the mind, they are.
I thought of this after watching all those repetitive (and largely interchangeable) ads for “legal” prescription drugs. Rarely do they show the often serious conditions they allegedly treat. Instead it’s image after image of people enjoying life, whether at amusement parks, the beach, dancing, or what-have-you. It’s as if drug companies are selling happiness pills whose only side effect is experiencing the best day of your life. Meanwhile, as images spill into your head of eternal bliss, a narrator quietly intones about potential serious side effects, even possible death in the case of one drug I’ve seen advertised.
Excuse me while I pop a few pills and denounce Russia—or China
Drug ads are the worst. People wonder why Americans take so many illegal drugs and why we have so many drug addictions — well, just look at all the ads for legal drugs, and how they’re advertised as making people incandescently happy. It’s all about the messaging: the repetition of powerful feel-good imagery, with drugs as panaceas.
Speaking of repetition, something similar is true of political manipulation. To cite one example: Russia. Has there ever been a worse “drug” with more serious side effects than Russia? Russia keeps hacking our elections! Russia is led by war criminals! Russia is raping Ukraine! Over and over again, the mainstream media encourages us to hate Russia and Vladimir Putin. Is this truly all we need to know about Russia? As Sting sang, don’t the Russians love their children too? (Back in the 1980s, the media didn’t go easy on Sting for his alleged naïveté and pro-Russian sentiments.)
Whether it’s drug advertisers, the mainstream media, or the U.S. government for that matter, America is infested with various “ministries of truth” that are driven by a mobster-like mentality. They may not break your kneecaps, but they nevertheless find ways to break into your mind.
Now you’ll excuse me while I pop a few pills while denouncing Russia. And China too, perhaps?
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on “Catch-22” and Bureaucratic Madness
I wanted to share with you a conversation between Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on Joseph Heller’s classic satire, “Catch-22,” that focuses on the idea of loyalty oaths but that has much broader implications for our society today. Their entire conversation is well worth reading, but this passage is especially penetrating and important.
Profess your loyalty with a baseball cap for Armed Forces Day. $50 or less. Buy them for everyone in your family. You can’t be too patriotic — or too careful.
Matt Taibbi: That seems like a good place to segue into the story from this week.
On Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” in particular, “The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade.”
Walter Kirn: So we don’t end up being polite and going, no, you do it. No, you do it. It’s Chapter 11 of Catch-22 entitled “Captain Black.” Some people know it as the chapter called “The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade.” It tells a very simple story. There’s an officer on the air base where Catch-22 is set, and he’s been passed over for promotion. His name’s Captain Black, and he lost out when another officer was killed in battle, he thought he would succeed to his post, but he didn’t. Another guy, Major Major, got the job. So how is he going to take his revenge? How is he going to become important on the base? He comes up with the notion that he will start forcing all the troops and all the bombers and the crews of the different aircraft to take a “loyalty oath”, which he has to authorize before they can do anything.
And not just one loyalty oath, because they easily pass that test. They do it, but it’s two, three, four, until the point where the entire air base and its missions are paralyzed by the need to recite these oaths. If you want to get your plane off the ground, if you want to fuel your plane, if you want to eat lunch, you have to recite one of these oaths. And finally, the bureaucratic necessity of reciting oaths completely paralyzes the entire operation such that Heller says they were no longer able to even respond to emergencies. They were no longer able to respond to reality, because almost all they were doing was reciting these oaths over and over and over.
And it was assumed that if you had recited one oath and a minute had passed before you had recited the next one, that you might have become disloyal in the meantime. I guess what this all is a metaphor for is the notion that requiring loyalty of people is a bottomless request, which finally becomes an end in itself. Just as we saw at the hearing yesterday, let’s not get to the substance of what you’re alleging here. Let’s have you recite the oath first and did you recite it correctly and could you recite it again, and do you agree that it’s necessary? So by a Zeno’s arrow thing, you never get to the issue of anything because loyalty must always be the primary question and it is always doubted.
Matt Taibbi: Heller has this great line about the doctrine of “continual reaffirmation” that Captain Black originated. And the quote is,
A doctrine designed to trap all those men who had become disloyal since the last time they had signed a loyalty oath the day before.
Nobody has the authority to stop this thing. Even the colonel in the group, Colonel Korn, he’s complaining: “It’s that idiot Black off on a patriotism binge.”
But when they’re deciding what to do about it, he just says:
Well, this will probably run its course soon. I think the best thing now is to send Captain Black a letter of total support and hope he drops dead before he does too much damage.
In other words, even the people who have authority, once one of these things gets going, nobody wants to get in front of this buzz saw. And if they do, they get cut down.
Walter Kirn: You can’t stop it because as is the abiding theme of Catch-22, you can never get off the hook with a bureaucracy that wants everything. You can never pass the loyalty oath because the one you took was a minute ago, are you taking one now? The perfect loyalty oath, in other words from a bureaucratic point of view, is one that no one can ever pass. One that never ends.
The perfect accusation in a witch trial is one that you can never be innocent of. And I wrote, “The more absurd loyalty oath, and the more often it is required, the better.” Anyone can repeat a loyalty oath that’s true and it is offered only once, but only the truly submissive will repeat it over and over until it loses all meaning. Because finally, what bureaucracy wants of you is humiliation and submission. It doesn’t want an answer. It doesn’t want to give you a pass and say, “You are free to go now. You may enter, you may run your mission. You’ve got your credential.” It wants total power. And total power can only be had if you are never declared loyal.
Matt Taibbi: The only people who succeed in this system are complete sociopaths with no shame. I think that’s one of the great things about this chapter is the way he starts off, Heller — one of the great things about this book in general is his ability to make snap characterizations. I mean, it takes even very skilled authors a paragraph to capture the personality of a person, but he’s able to do it in a sentence or two over and over again.
With Captain Black at the very start of this chapter, he gets a phone call that the unit is going to have to attack Bologna, which is heavily guarded and is going to involve a tremendous number of casualties. There’s a scene:
Captain Black brightened immediately. Bologna, he exclaimed with delight. Well, I’ll be damned.” He broke into loud laughter, “Bologna?” He laughed again and shook his head in pleasant amazement. “Boy, I can’t wait to see those bastards’ faces when they find out they’re going to Bologna.”
And then he goes down again and keeps repeating this.
”That’s right, you bastards, Bologna.” He kept repeating to all the bombardier who inquired incredulously if they were really going to Bologna. “Ha, ha, ha! Eat your livers, you bastards.”
He’s a total sadist. The only thing that has any meaning in his life is that as you said, he was passed over for this promotion when somebody else got killed. The person who stepped in his place was Major Major, a hilarious character to whom all kinds of things happen. Among his distinctive qualities is that he looks like Henry Fonda. When the officers are talking about this, this is where the idea for the loyalty oath comes:
Captain Black asserted that Major Major really was Henry Fonda. And when they remarked it Major Major was somewhat odd. Captain Black announced that he was a communist.
“They’re taking over everything.” He would declare rebelliously. “Well, you fellows can stand around and let them if you want to, but I’m not going to. I’m doing something about it. From now on I’m going to make every son of a bitch who comes to my intelligence tent sign a loyalty oath.”
There’s a great line. “He had really hit on something.” That’s when it starts this whole description of how you have to sign an oath to go to the PX to buy anything, to get your hair cut, to get paid, to do anything. This idiotic, insipid character, who has no positive qualities and is a pure careerist, for whom even the death of other people is totally meaningless, he’s exactly the person who succeeds in this bureaucracy, because bureaucracies are designed to elevate such people.
Walter Kirn: This is why literature is a superior form of analysis for the human condition over politics. Politics has us believe that the content of our arguments matter, that the positions and ideas we’re arguing about matter, but literature suggests that rituals are rituals and human passions are human passions. And that sweep aside what people are talking about and what people are saying and focus on what they’re actually doing. And in this case, we have Black proclaiming Major Major a communist, and the suspicion of communism among the troops becomes the basis for the Great Loyalty Oath. But it could just as well be that he could have accused them of being MAGA or fascists, because loyalty oaths are the same no matter what the occasion for their administration. They are rituals of dominance and submission, they are ritualistic affirmations of the bureaucracy’s preeminence. [Emphasis added.]
We constantly are amazed by the fact that the same machinations that the anti-communist McCarthyite put into place in the fifties are now being used by the liberal party against the presumably patriotic side. In other words, we now have not communist-hunting but MAGA-hunting. And we think that something has changed because politics makes us think it’s all about the ideas. It’s not. It’s all about the whatand who sits above, and who sits below; who administers the oath and who has to take it. Who has the power to come up with an oath, and who is so unfortunate that they have to recite them?
What we’re seeing in American politics is a recapitulation in terms of structure and form of an old drama. But the words have changed, and the names for evil have swapped. And in some ways the D or the R on the desk, the Democrat or Republican plaque, has changed sides, but we’re seeing the same thing. What Heller’s showing in this novel is that bureaucracy itself serves its own interests over and above any particular problem that it’s there to solve.
These people are there to win a war. The great irony of Catch-22 is that this intense deadly war that’s going on in the background, is, actually in the background. What people are really concerned about are their promotions, whether they’ve filled out forms correctly, have they won the esteem of their superior? Have they triumphed over their inferior? And meanwhile, people are dying, thousands of people are being bombed and planes are going down. But that hardly matters when there are new stripes to be won for your uniform, or an extra lunch to be had at the commissary, or whatever. So the book’s continuing comedy is the inversion of values in which the institution is all important, and the purposes are forgotten. [Emphasis added]
END OF EXCERPT
OK, I’m back. I hope you enjoyed reading that passage. It helps to explain why the Pentagon/MICC continues to grow in power even as it’s lost every major war since World War II (ironically the historical setting for Heller’s brilliant satire).
Believe me, I’ve met my share of officers in the U.S. military who weren’t concerned with the mission or higher ideals like their oath to the Constitution. They were concerned about getting promoted and enlarging their own personal rice bowl (an image used often when I was on active duty).
How to stop a runaway bureaucracy that insists on your loyalty and obedience, repeated ad infinitum, is one of the great issues of this moment. With military propaganda in full swing this weekend (It’s Armed Forces Day!), you had best salute the troops smartly and show your loyalty, as baseball players are, by wearing special olive drab military-themed caps to celebrate “our nation’s finest.” Available for less that $50 each at MLB!
If you miss this weekend (Are you sure you’re a real American?), there’ll be themed caps for Memorial Day and July 4th. And if you’re not a baseball fan, the NFL will get you in the fall at all its “Salute to Service” celebrations.
Bracing Views 