I live overseas and don't get out much anymore. Went to a trivia night at an Irish bar the other day, dragged there by my family, presumably in the hopes that I'd up their score with a tidbit or two of trivia they didn't know. I came through on two counts: I knew the answer was Jack the Ripper, when Whitechapel was cued, and knew that the six choir ranges included mezzo-soprano. It frightens me to think that there's a connection between the two things I knew.
Normally, I would have stayed at home reading or writing. In the mail the other day I received, some weeks after publication, the paper edition of the Ralph Nader startup, Capitol Hill Citizen. It's a throwback publication that smells nice, the ink and papyrus. I love it. Love feeling it in my hands. And the content reminds me of community news MassPIRG, and my days as a university undergrad in Boston, majoring in philosophy, specializing in existentialism, caught up in wondering why Mersault shot dead the Arab on the beach. Telling the priest, in the end, to bugger off, I understood, but why shoot the Palestinian? I didn't get it. I mean, he was wearing a T-shirt that read Je Suis Palestine. But I was unaware of Mersault's antisemitism. Dunno.
You live. You die. Lights on, Lights off. In between the two states a message crackles that is the message of your life. You shine or you can let The Man switch you on and off at will like some electro-puppet. Neurocellblock b*tch to some totalitarian algorithmic guard thug. Or some extremely ultra "feminist" holding a dogmatist at bay by a red white and blue leash, inches from your face. Stripping your thoughts naked and telling them to get in a pyramid of neurons. I mean, my daughter brought up Mersault at the trivia gathering, and said she 's of the ilk that sees him now as "autistic." That's a new take on existentialism, I thought, but I didn't say anything to her face.
Before I could get to the Capitol Hill Citizen from its postal sheath, I checked my email and there was a posting: "Nader on Briahna Joy Gray Podcast." Ralph was here to discuss the issues on the cover of the latest issue of CHC. I love hearing his voice. And I never dug, man, that so many lefties went turncoat back in 2000, blaming him for the ascension of GW Bush. F*ck them. Had Gore won his home state of Tennessee that election cycle he would have been president. Of course, we would have had to listen to him rave on about an inconvenient truth after 9/11. Coz that was going to happen. It was a military coup, he was poised to say. (I'm guessing.) Building 7: Giuliani said to his little nephew, Pull it, and his little nephew pulled Rudy's finger and he farted, and Building 7 came down in freefall. True Story.
But all kidding aside, the CHC had on its front page (albeit, technically below the fold), a story so f*cking appalling that I was ashamed to be an American, although technically I'm an expat, who really misses home. I mean a lot. Heaps. Help me. The story: In Congress, 52 Standing Ovations for Netanyahu. The article detailed Yahu's visit to Washington, DC, where so many swim in the swill of ill-begotten gains at the expense of the People they were voted in to serve and protect -- and fund schools, hospitals and road systems with tax dollars.
The article by Linda Pentz Gunter was a scathing rebuke of the Israeli prime minister's presence there. Gunter gets right to it in this plainspeak graph:
These are the times we live in now, when an ebullient crowd of elected officials can stand to cheer 52 times, according to Haaretz, during an hour-long speech delivered by a war criminal and purveyor of genocide.
Jesus, 52 standing ovulations. Damn, what if Hitler had been invited to ovate at Congress and everyone cheered each time his art school dropout mustache twirled and he goes, eins, zwei, drei, fear, foomf, nein, nein, nein nein nein, and the legislators had his babies right there on both sides of the aisle. Some Americans just loved the Nazis. Guttural for guttersnipes, my grandfather used to say when he got shitfaced. Would Charles Lindbergh have won, as Philip Roth imagined in The Plot Against America, and vut voold haf happened? Woold vee haf hat a nein nein nein / eleven?
And the piece was accompanied by a revealing photograph of American Jews protesting the presence of the Israeli fascist leader. That was above the fold. It is American Jews who have to take the brunt of Israel's -- Netanyahu's -- war criminality. They don't deserve the attention paid to them by American rightwing nutjobs, many of whom have felt the largesse of Israeli donations to their political causes. 52 ovations is real whoredom. Shame on Congress. These same f*ckers would have cheered Pontius Pilate as he washed his hands of that famous Jew, albeit 'self-loathing'.
Netanyahu actually opens up his speech this way:
Ladies and gentlemen, like December 7th, 1941 and September 11th, 2001, October 7th is a day that will forever live in infamy.
Another Pearl Harbor. Horrific as October 7th was, there is evidence that Israel (Netanyahu) intentionally ignored warnings from Americans about an impending disaster, according to Seymour Hersh., the little jew who wrote the bible on My Lai, and won a Puliter. Perhaps returning the favor, to our intentional ignoring of Israeli intel that made clear the imminence of 9/11.
Maybe ignoring warnings, knowing the consequences will result in ultra fascist reactionary force in play, is as close to an Inside Job as we'll ever be able to "prove." After all, the 9/11 Commission concluded that it was such miscommunication that led to the lack of action on known threats prior to 9/11. And they essentially blamed Cofer Black, then head of the CIA's director of the Counterterrorism Center, for a failure to communicate. Black went on to be an immensely important Ambassador at Large, and to establish the illegal black sites for rendition, and to lead the CIA's war in Afghanistan. 9 Eleven led to:
the federal government mov[ing] quickly to develop a security framework to protect our country from large-scale attacks directed from abroad, while enhancing federal, state, and local capabilities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from threats and disasters at home.
Read: Mission Accomplished for the crossing of the Abyss of No Return that Senator Frank Church warned us about in 1975. We are totally -- each of us -- under surveillance now. And no country is better at secret surveillance than Israel. 52 ovations? Take a bow:
Imagine putting your money down and having her (or him) give you a standing O after your oil fracking. As Gunter said, such are the times we live in.
