Soo-wee Pig

My parents paid for my honors degree in International Politics (with Minors in German and Modern Middle Eastern History [Including Undergraduate Teaching Assistantship]; Undergraduate Thesis: The Geopolitics of East Prussia - Kaliningrad Oblast) so that I could become a diplomat.

Or, at least, that's what I thought I'd do with it. Then I learned something other than the shit I was fed in class. One teacher was a counterinsurgency expert in Vietnam. Stewart, I think his surname was. One of these dying dinosaurs, who kept repeating: 'Leadership. To Do'. Over and over, like it was profound.

I read Chomsky and it changed my life. Who could participate in this evil system of imperialism and genocide? The propaganda machine – the bullshit Wurlitzer – perpetrated a snow job on the American people. Good, honest people get the flag waved at them by well-credentialed mass murdering filth. They take advantage of the good feeling people have for their communities and transmute it into chauvenism.

Fred said that's what the French call nationalistic fervor. What was the German name for it? Something complicated and multisylabic? No, what the German called it in his time was 'German'. Well, not anymore, although you wouldn't know it by their leaders.

Ukraine must be German again. Make Ukraine Great Again! For the third time in 109 years. Or American, maybe?

Certainly Russia shouldn't have much influence there. It was only part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union for 300 odd years. Nope, that's our playground. Just like Mexico must become a satellite of China. Or maybe Russia? Yeah, right. It's all so stupid and doomed to fail, like everything else the bipartisan elite touches, that project over there will turn to shit.

They did it first in World War I: the leading lights of the liberal intelligenCIA. (Didn't even have the OSS back then, ok) The Creel Commission, headed up by the likes of Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. The liberal wing of capitalism, the refined urban elite, working on behalf of a segregationist Princeton man, Woodrow Wilson.

Lippmann was the leading liberal intellectual from 1920 to the Vietnam War Era. He wrote two influential books: Public Opinion (1920) and my personal favorite The Phantom Public (1922). I wrote about it here, back then in 2002, when the world was still new, at least to me.

The story of 'modernity' is told in stunning detail in the documentary The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis, which appeared nationwide in Great Britain on the BBC. Copies on eBay are through the roof. Freud to Bernays, or was it the other way around. Just another snow job. I saw it in San Francisco 20 some years ago. A 4 hour marathon at the Roxy in the Mission. It can be found here.

Probably everyone reading this has already seen it? If not, you owe it to yourself to understand the real existing world that was forged about a century ago in the image of the same elements that still run the world today. But not for long. They fuckin' blew it. In the infamous words of Thomas Friedman to Charlie Rose with respect to the people of Iraq, right back atcha, whom I was meant to join: Suck. On. This.

They are such miserable creatures, this American elite of theirs. The Big Club. Y'all know 'the big club', of that I'm pretty sure.

The institutions they've bled dry while claiming to 'reform' them. Give them over to private equity and kindred ghouls. Free computers for the brats. Charter Schools where children and parents become 'customers', not citizens. Let's hook 'em on The Magic Phone, where they can gamble. Where we can extract not just their money, but harvest their souls as well. The hate wells up. We are their slaves and they whip us up into a frenzy every once in a while because? So said an anonymous Dubya aparatchik.

'That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

Michael Ledeen, another one of these 'defense intellectuals', along with Wolfowitz and Perle – Team B in the 1970's who cooked the books to make East Germany have a GDP equivalent to the Nazi successor state (Reinhard Gehlen, anyone? Bueller. Bueller) – is said to have said:

'Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business'.

That's who owns you. Not nice Jewish boys, although they did and do the heavy lifting, the big thinking, for the Zionist Christian front men whom we get to chose from every two or four or six years. They aren't even really Zionists, that's a side issue, they're just Capitalist whores, front men for the destruction of the natural world.

Mark my words: Israel will get thrown overboard by these very same people the second it becomes too great a liability. And it has been that for a long time. Kissinger found Israel distasteful. So did Nixon, H.W. Bush, Republicans mostly.

Every president who had to deal with him hated Netanyahu. Well, what's to like? Sumbitch is from Philly. Golda Mair was from Milwaukee. Go home Yankee, they used to say all over the world. Similar slogans will emerge, with time, in that respect.

It's the Crusader States, all over again. Lasted nearly 200 years. It's the French in Algeria, all over again. That lasted 132 years. The way things are going, Israel as we know it – as a Herrnvolk democracy – won't sniff 100. Just had the 75th anniversary.

They're already leaving, the smart ones. The PMC is jumping ship. It will leave the fanatics there. The hard core. Like at Masada. Where are they now?

Maybe they'll do the Samson option? I doubt it, but that's their sub rosa doctrine, at least according to Seymour Hersh. Their God did genocide the world, except for Noah. Bad things come to those who engage in prolonged hubris.

Not just yet though. The people with fancy suits and ties, Ivy League educations, and a defense contract heavy portfolio, you know, the real cards at bicoastal dinner parties? Those people, the cosmopolitan elite featuring all the colors of the rainbow. You know, these assholes. They're so mediocre. They're failures. They're 'mid' to employ what is by now likely outdated youth parlance. They and their imperial dreams will turn to ashes in their mouths. Sackcloth and ashes.

The rage and the swearing has zilch to do with my personal life, which is impeccable, by the way. It's systems analysis. It's so boring. Typing away into the void. You do it anyway. To bear witness. Like this pretend guy, Rust Cohle, from Season 1 of True Detective, the finest long form short series of the 21st Century. He talks about 'pessimism'. I couldn't possibly say it better myself. A true Masterpiece combining 'The Yellow King' by Robert Chambers, Nietzsche, Shopenhauer and Southern Gothic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oX2xFo7JA4&rco=1

So, you just plow through this bullshit. It used to be a struggle. Now I dash it off without trying. Just automatic pilot. I'm looking forward to unwinding in a different way. Over there. In Europe, where it is similar but different, to here. It's not much better. It isn't much wiser, but at least it's older.

This is another apocryphal quote. I don't think it's real, but it's illustrative anyway. The claim was, back in the day, that World War I Ace cum morphine addict, Hermann Goering said it. Not true, but here it is.

'Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ... [V]oice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country'.

Hitler really did say this in Mein Kampf. Fact check, also fake, but he said similar things mocking the intelligence of ordinary people. 'How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think'. But they do think. I always learn important things in these dive bars.

Watched Patton at a bar and learned from an old codger that our best WW 2 general believed in reincarnation. He thought he was Robert E. Lee or Genghis Khan. Just like the current president is said to believe such things. That's why Patton was probably fragged. He was off his rocker at the end. Kennedy too?

Power is an aphrodesiac, Kissinger is said to have said. A real swinger back in the 70s. Fucked Wa-Wa Wa-Wa, aka Barbara Walters. Among others. Wilhelm Reich touches on these matters: why do humans keep making the same old mistakes again. Because the bad half of ordinary people wins out all too often. They say 'fuck it', go with the flow. The Situationist-inspired Anglo-French band Stereolab touches on this.

I hate to see your broken face
This world would give you anything
As long as you will want to
As long as you will want to
I hate your state of hopelessness
And that vain articulateness
Your loser type wreck want to be
Not a pretty sight really
In another world it'd be funny
I hate to see your broken face
A lazy life of fatal waste
Of fashionable cynicism
The poison they want you to drink
Oh no man that's too easy
Oh no man that's too easy
We weren't talking bout happiness
Apply your leading potential
To be useful to this planet
The world would give you anything
As long as you will want to
As long as you will want to
Ba da ba

This country used genocide and slavery to become a Wirtschaftswunder. Born on 3rd base and the gaslighting freaks in power still insist we hit a triple. Well, the Chinese have done it bigger, stronger and faster. They were going to do that anyhow. But we didn't need to piss it away. But we did. And now it's over. This AI bubble is going to burst one of these days and it will wreak havoc. What is to be done? Nothing.

Young people need to lead this counter-offensive. You see it everywhere. New York City comes to mind. Happening all across this country. The Internet has been a boon in some respects.

It's destroying the largest and richest mafia in the country at the moment. Mormonism. Young people are leaving in droves. It's doomed as a religion, but the leaders have hundreds of billions to play with. Whatever. Maybe we'll have a Renaissance? Who knows and who cares anymore?

Every generation's Cassandras warn that the sky is falling. Well, it's still up there, isn't it? God is in his house, up there in the great void. And this grain of sand on the beach of the universe keeps spinning round and round. So, let's laugh at our predicament. Why not enjoy art and really listen to it. It will teach you what you need to learn.

Y'all are middle aged. As am I. I thank my lucky stars to only have to live another couple decades. 10, 12 or 14 hour days most days. I get to be an amateur anthropologist with the rest of my life. Drive around, buy cool stuff, listen to music, take pictures, write some bullshit. And Drink. Or something else. None of this matters, so let's enjoy it while we can.