The Little Things

History doesn’t repeat itself.
But it does rhyme
--Mark Twain

 And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
--Circle Game, 
Joni Mitchell

Team by team, reporters baffled,
trumped, tethered, cropped
Look at that low plane, fine, then
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group 
--It's the End of the World as We Know It,
R.E.M.
______________________

Mr. Obama wasn't the funniest of Presidents, but he has a toothsome sense of the ironic.

Just a little rumination, on Inaugural Day 2017 (which you might not know about if you read the New York Times exclusively.)

Last September, the President feted 1968 Mexico City Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the White House. The athlete's Black Power salute in violation of the non-partisan International Olympic Committee charter was a shot heard round the world via television. It was also to be the seminal event of symbolic terrorism in the mid-20th century.

Prior to this event, terrorist's goals were more tactically-oriented. Violence before Mexico City was for violence's sake. After Mexico City, it grew increasingly symbolic and spectacular. Terrorist events became entertainment in the theatre and the society of the spectacle.

Smith's and Carlos's theatre inspired terrorist actions from that point forward. Not that the two Olympians killed anyone, themselves. Rather, they showed that massive attention could be garnered by enlisting the electronic media in the conspiracy to commit spectacle. Simply put: their action was a fountainhead of international terrorism.

The near result was the 1972 Summer Munich Olympics Massacre of Jewish athletes by Palestinian terrorist group Black September. Eleven Olympic team members were taken hostage and killed, with the (later revealed) complicity of members of the German police force.

Subsequent actions were also media sensations, often focusing on only one building, boat or other vehicle. They were framed for the camera, just as the Olympics winner's podium provided a frame and a set-up for the Smith-Carlos photo-grab.

The athletes were not standing in the grass, but elevated and arrested in motion, calling out for the perfect shot. (Catch me while you can in my static set up; I'd like to be on t..v. tonight.)

Historical examples abound, but the Lod Airport Massacre (1972), the Raid on Entebbe (1976), the Rome and Vienna airport incidents (1985) and the Achille Lauro hijacking (1985) are a few.

The Irish Republican Army's 1982 Hyde Park bombing which killed seven Blues and Royal's horses scored front pages above the fold internationally, but not for the 11 serviceman that were killed: it was for the horses (who held no passport). Murdered animals are always a gut punch, and this was a new and novel target.

TWA Flight 847 (1985) featured the body of a USN diver thrown onto the tarmac. But the iconic image of this hijacking -- a gun being held to a pilot's head, sticking out of the cockpit window -- was committed with an unloaded gun.

The hijacker stated he primarily wanted to be on television.

The 1968 Olympic protest spectacle differs little from ISIS instantaneous uploads of their violence in Iraq, France, Belgium or Australia. We are our own publicists in this day of the social media upload.

Both murderer, set designer and photog.

The drama and symbolism always trumps the action. In order not to become hackneyed, symbolic terrorist acts always require that each subsequent act has more shock power than its predecessor.

As our consumption grows ever more savvy, we demand increasingly outrageous spectacles to hold our gaze. It is perhaps not too simplistic to trace the origins of ISIS live Facebook feeds to the 1968 initial broadcasted transgression.

It took four years for terrorists to learn and operationalize the lesson, but a profusion of spectacular media events followed.

Operating from the principle of charity, it could be said that Mr. Obama acted from an intellectual scotoma, as the first visibly black President. Everyone from Henry Louis Gates to Rosa Parks had their moment in the sun during his presidency, in the callow effort to enforce a post-racial America.

But publicly honoring the Olympic "protest" lends credence to every subsequent video violation. Euroterror and Palestinian terror groups were informed by this first act of live defiance, and learned to coalesce and to harness the power of instantaneous international news coverage.

Smith and Carlos let the horse out of the barn. The West has been opposing the violence unleashed for the last 48 years. And we now commend them.

Just how stupid and clueless are we?

We guess it's good for giving the dispirited public something to fixate upon. We all like rehabilitation stories -- even when we must construct them for ourselves.

However, it would be wise to consider that one cannot in good faith be both for protests that germinate terror activities, and yet against terror activities. Or as the late George Carlin said, "Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."

What have the last 25+ years been about? Confronting the escalating threat of terrorist activity rising out of the Middle East.

Concomitant with and responsible for the terrorist's success is their ability to saturate the media. Ditto for the ability of the media to saturate our minds, as we grow ever closer to the much ballyhooed convergence day when our minds coalesce with our devices.

Some celebrate this "brain opera", but we must be ever-vigilant in monitoring the conductors. How to keep the mind in control is becoming an exponentially greater challenge daily. The peddlers of fake news -- an oxymoron if ever there was one -- do not want to help you.

Living in America today is a little like inhabiting an M. C. Escher drawing, or traveling a Mobius strip.  Perhaps, Hieronymous Bosch's Purgatory is the more analogous scenario.

We supposedly fight terrorism, while smiling and nodding at two men who blazed the trail for terrorists to exploit public media.

Where does it come from and where does it go?

Just an interesting little thought on this morning of the swearing in of a new President.

--by Jim and Lisa

Chinese Fire Drill

--The New Europeans 

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country
when it is behaving dishonorably
--Julian Barnes

Islam is a beautiful harmless happy daffodil 
--Earth (The Book),
Jon Stewart, et al. 

I don't wanna hear your talking, boy
Your words don't mean a thing 
--Wings, Little Mix
_________________________

Watching the news today is like watching a Chinese fire drill. Inscrutable Middle East / Arab / Muslim people lead each news hour. If it is not the bedlam in their own countries, than it is their effect upon the others. It is a contagion we are led to believe cannot be contained.

The intellectuals tell us, "refugees are the price we pay for a globalised economy in which commodities – but not people – are permitted to circulate freely", like it or lump it [ "The Non-Existence of Norway".]

When we make a foray into out own nation's news, it is to strike the alarum against Things That Cannot Be, like presidential front-runner Trump. In a democratic nation, Trump's facticity mortifies us. Yet his success is a bellwether for the condition of our electorate. 

In addition, he is not sui generis. We have had businessmen and an actor (a business of sorts) serve as President. In addition, wrestlers, comedians, and everyone in between have served in representative positions.

Rather than The Powers That Be scrambling to pull the plug on the farrago that is Trumpmania, why not look with fascination and concision at that very real phenomenon. No, sadly, that sort of truth-telling we cannot allow. 

We do not ask the right questions because we are too busy constructing the images that tell the story we want to tell.

A recent story-topper in the New York Times was masterful: "The New Europeans" re-constructed Grant Wood's iconic "American Gothic" for a world which is told it must absorb the illegal Arab immigrant (see above). ("Look -- they are just like you", the carefully constructed image tells you. "No worries".)

The clean-cut Middle East couple newly arrived in Bavaria could be in an American Outfitters advertisement, with the photo's appealing bright pinks and yellows. And, it's got kids -- kids in matching little construction boots! Future workmen -- what's not to like?

In addition to the variously imaged immigrants, we see the same news footage nightly regarding the latest Islamic State (IS) outrage, but we never see pictures of IS fighters who have been captured alive. Why?

Does the Iraqi Army, Iraqi militias or the Kurds have enemy prisoner of war (EPW) units? Do these forces abide by the Geneva Conventions (GC) when dealing with IS?

The immediate reply will be, "Well, IS doesn't abide by the GC's". While clearly a true statement, hopefully United States tax dollars do not finance IS. The Iraqis are a different matter since they were created in our image and likeness by our greenbacks.

You won't hear it on the news, but the real Rubik's Cube is a U.S. policy which supports allies who are not allies, and who do not share our values. Allies who practice ethnic cleansing and Genocide Light, something which is opposed to the 1988 Genocide Treaty signed by the U.S. 

What we are given instead are graphics, things we can scroll on our media feed while stopped at traffic lights, possibly even while driving, a little something to enhance that otherwise mundane experience.

We took our eyes off of the road some time ago.

--Jim and Lisa

Pretty Dead Things

--ISIS and Iraq, 
Arend Van Dam

The image is re-presentation,
which is to say ultimately resurrection, and, as we know,
the intelligible is reputed antipathetic to lived experience

*   *   *

 The type of consciousness the photograph involves
is indeed truly unprecedented,
since it establishes not a consciousness
of the being-there of the thing…
but an awareness of its having-been-there.
What we have is a new space-time category:
spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority,
the photograph being an illogical conjunction
between the here-now and the there-then. 
--Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes

  Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just 
--King Lear, Shakespeare  

Wars and elections are both too big and too small
to matter in the long run.
The daily work - that goes on, it adds up
 --Animal Dreams, 
Barbara Kingsolver
_______________________

ISIS is looking like a one-trick pony, with its latest journo beheading. But sometimes, one good move is all you need. The Afghan national game is Buzkashi, after all, in which a beheaded and be-hooved goat is dragged roughly around the field of play, so it seems playing with dead things can be fun.

The West continues its fascinated horror at these actions, committed even -- especially -- in the face of pathetic begging on behalf of the murdered and their families. Why pretend to care? When the rubber meets the road, the question for most is, "What of me and mine?" and IS is not threatening Kansas, after all.

This is reasonable, as we are neither giants nor martyrs. A martyr would leave his actual family in a lurch, in the name of pursuing the salvation of the universal Family -- the prerogative of very few.

In his book, War, Sebastian Junger mentions the chimpanzees who do not seek to aid their fellows in the face of a threat, but invariably run away from danger in order to save themselves. This self-preservation behavior comports with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' theory of the "Selfish Gene", that lives on to fight another day.

For those peoples not burdened by a martyrish savior, the concept of being one's brother's keeper may not have much relevance in the race for survival. But what about those people who do understand the concept of service and martyrdom?

In China recently, members of a forbidden proto-Christian sect bludgeoned a 38-year-old woman to death in a McDonald's restaurant for refusing to give them her contact information. The more remarkable thing, however, is that the murder occurred before the watching eyes of others in the establishment, who were too busy documenting the event on their smartphones to intervene. For those who uploaded their photos to the cloud, it must have been a stellar "capture".

Similarly, the murderous members of the Islamic State (IS) members are mastering the art of social networking, being sure to publicize their gory work on the various platforms, disseminating their handiwork in real time.

A recent NYT piece ("Losing Our Touch") asks if we have entered an age of “excarnation,” where we focus on the body in increasingly disembodied ways "For if incarnation is the image become flesh, excarnation is flesh become image. Incarnation invests flesh; excarnation divests it." And what if, through reliance on the intermediary of the transmitted image, we do lose our sense of touch? Does that equate with losing our compassion?

What is the effect of instantaneous documentation on our tolerance reaction? Will witnessing and documenting preempt the impulse to act?

Chimpanzees, smartphones and brutality ... do you see any nexus here?

Débauché

  
By the time a person hears the news,
it is not news at all, but opinion.
It becomes a message of some kind,
rather than fresh, straightforward news
--Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

 … Have we eaten on the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner?
--Macbeth 

As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering
conferred dignity on a person.
Now he had to admit that he had been wrong.
What conferred dignity on people was television 
--The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq

___________________

[What follows is a meditation on media; more military and politics back tomorrow -- ed.]

Two weekends ago I visited a friend who is a t.v. watcher, and over the course of that weekend I passed before the set for perhaps 30 minutes total, but those 30 minutes reminded me why I do not watch.

First came the superannuated momentous query on the news: "WHAT would turn an Elvis impersonator into a would-be killer?" The mind reels in contemplation of such a question. Before a cutaway to an ad, the voiceover suggested the next feature would be advice to survivors of the Boston bombing. We catch a glimpse of a woman staunchly dispensing heartfelt words from a rehab facility, presumably a victim of some other tragedy: "Don't never give up".  But -- is this news?

Earlier, the local news devoted 6 minutes of a 30-minute broadcast to -- the weather.  All that is needed in order to know whether to wear one's mac is the 5-day forecast, but instead they must dazzle with all the bells and whistles and Doppler Radar, the "forecaster" (how medieval!) giving his best guess as to how the winds will blow, with his usual 50/50 accuracy rate. [An intelligent friend once observed that he kept the Weather Channel on all day as background, and wasn't sure why it held such a fascination for him.]

Six minutes of weather patterns, while the world turns and events of import are never suggested. We are lucky to get six minutes of international news each night, hence why Lisa stopped watching t.v. news back in college.  She witnessed the "Tessification" of the media news with the advent of the dreaded "infotainment" industry.

But even before the degradation that ET ushered in, an absolutely disinterested posture seemed impossible for humans, especially when they've entered the realm of celebrity. When a trusted news reporter like Walter Cronkite grafts his opinion upon his reportage (as he did following his Vietnam visit when he declared that war to be unwinnable), the facts as presented are no longer trustworthy.

I largely stopped watching much television after Hill Street Blues ushered in the use of vertiginous shots to suggest a strained verisimilitude; cinema verite it was not. The static angles of film noir are tolerable but one feels like a seizure victim when the entire program is riddled by close ups and fade outs and a shaky hand; it's exhausting. (Needless to say, classics of the film canon, like "Blair Witch Project", are outre for me.)

Later, was a performance of Otis Redding tunes at the White House hosted by Queen Latifah.  Being a Redding fan, I stayed with this program the longest, hoping for some soulful and heartfelt renditions.  I entered to hear the underwhelming Justin Timberlake butcher a tune, straining himself beyond all credibililty, lacking an ounce of feeling. He was decked out in a too-tight suit trying to strike a cross between Sinatra (more at Michael Buble) and Daniel Craig's Bond, but he couldn't open the collar to correct effect lest his tats show. It was a truly painful performance.

There was one campy but spirited performance of "Knock on Wood by an older performer, followed by a dismal performance of Redding's anthematic "When a Man Loves a Woman" by a young man who did not appear to have ever loved a woman, who went falsetto when he failed to mine the pathos of the tune. This effort garnered him the requisite "oohs and ahhs," but in fact the performance was another dud. Latifah sang one and hit the notes, but did not inspire. Any day of the week in our town one may hear the angelic and inspired voices of simple church choir members doing a far more credible job of invoking feelings.

Nonetheless, the white people squirmed uneasily, smiled and clapped to some unfelt rhythm. But when Cyndi Lauper began a tune which she could clearly not honor, my hopes for hearing any more singers with feeling were quashed. Lauper's "True Colors" back in the '80's was masterful, but Redding is not her league. Who scheduled this lineup of abysmal failures?

Lastly, I caught a moment of the nighttime soap "The Good Wife", in which actual t.v. interviewer Charley Rose appeared in a cameo on the program doing his interview schtick. I know there is precedent for public personas making appearances on t.v. programs, but this was disappointing. This simulacrum might easily confuse a young person trying to discern fact from fiction.

Charley Rose was great early in his career on late night public t.v., when he provided a forum for people of note to explain their thinking. He was an informed and respectful host who largely took himself out of the equation, but about 20 years ago he was repackaged into the ubiquitous form of the interrupting, "gotcha" interviewer and was no longer unique. No longer what he was, this jump into pure fiction wasn't a tremendous jump for him.

My 30 minutes of t.v. time was a bridge too far.

Socialism Creep

 ~It's important to get with the majority, isn't it?
That's... oh, that's a big thing nowadays,
isn't it, Reverend? 
~That's all there is, is the majority.
The minority must have died on the cross
two thousand years ago 
--I Am the Night (The Twilight Zone)
__________________

This socialism creep is not that weird little neo-Bolshevik at the cafe.  Instead, it is the reality of modern America which most Americans fail to grasp. The bumper sticker "No Socialism for America" on a local merchant's vehicle got Ranger thinking on the topic.

• The U.S. tax code is Socialism in action. Property taxes are Socialism.  Redistributing the wealth to pay educational costs for (often) non-homeowning baby producers.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs medical system is socialistic (though it is lauded by most as being a paragon of efficiency.)

• Military service itself is pure socialism -- it is distributing the duty to those who cannot afford to avoid service.  If military service were democratic then citizens from all strata of our society would serve equally (which is not the case), and capital would provide neither an escape route from service, nor an incentive to enlist.  Since we have socialized the requirement, we provide socialized medicine for the veterans. 

• Social Security Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is Socialism.

• Pell Grants underwriting college education redistribute wealth -- isn't that socialism?  For that matter, public schools are also Socialist.

• State-run Lottos are Socialist, if not very fair. 

• State hospitals for the mentally infirm are Socialism, as are state-run "old soldiers homes"; our society would be much the poorer without these safety nets.

• National disaster relief is Socialism, as is the Centers for Disease Control. 

• Even organized religion is an exercise in Socialism: Jesus died for our sins in order to redistribute the assets of heaven, and not on a meretricious basis. 

Strangely, we champion capitalism and democracy when even our banking system is based in socialism.  The United States socialized the debt of the errant banks in 2008 and underwrote the results of their ineptitude, greed and resultant financial shortfalls with U.S. taxpayer funds.  The U.S. socialized the debt while ensuring the privatization of the profits from the governmental bailouts.

Isn't the concept of Federalism actually socialist in basis? Doesn't the Federal government redistribute the wealth of the richer states to the poorer?  Doesn't Alabama, Mississippi, etc. benefit from this socialism? 

If our citizens would stop to think for the time it takes to belch, maybe they would realize that socialism is the reality and the answer, rather than the problem. In addition, most of our major NATO allies are Socialist states; why are they allies if we are so opposed to their way of life?

When FOX news et. al. fashion socialism as the devil it keeps the plebes in line, keeps them feeling a faux solidarity against a chimerical enemy.  For example, the U.S. outspends twelve other industrial nations in healthcare, but our level of treatment is inferior.

Ours is a mangy Socialism: All of the calories, little of the nutrition.