The horsemen of the Apocalypse…

… are saddling up for the Mother of Abominations. Hillary is apparently assembling — predictably enough — a fine team of neocons, brinksmanshippers, laptop bombardiers, and miscellaneous National Security berserkers for a reign which seems certain to be drenched in blood.

People are talking about Admiral James Stavridis for Vice President. He’s perfect, really. A longtime veteran of the bipartisan War Party, he first achieved notoriety as a retainer of Donald Rumsfeld back in the Bush II days, and became NATO’s El Supremo under Obama, where he played a prominent role in the butchery of Libya. Presidents come and go, but the machine hums on. Lately he has distinguished himself by advocating quite openly for a US alliance with the various Syrian jihadis, to do an Iraq on Syria — a long-standing neocon project, of course. Mr Brass Hat is also, of course, a close pal of the Israelis and a charter member of the Anything For Bibi club.

They’re also talking about Michele Flournoy for Secretary of Defense. After serving in the State Department under Obie, she founded and became executive director of the Center for a New American Security, one of the numberless swarm of Washington NatSec “think tanks”, buzzing like cicadas on a hazy, windless August afternoon. I do not understand the political economy of these outfits: why so many? Particularly since they all say more or less the same thing? Who pays for them? Why? I can only suppose that they’re intended as rocks for Permanent Government vermin like Fluornoy to hide under when they’re out of office, and that hedgies and defense contractors pay for them in order to keep these reptiles well-disposed.

CNAS is very much par for the course, enjoying Madeleine Albright and Joe “Talks to God but doesn’t listen” Lieberman as tutelary deities. Not surprisingly, one of the axes they’re grinding most relentlessly is the nuke deal with Iran. A sample of gloom-and-doom prose, from the febrile pen of one Ilan Goldenburg, CNAS’ cop on the Iran beat and incidentally an honest-to-God Israeli himself:

Iran’s regional behavior remains highly problematic. Provocative ballistic missile launches and continuing support for President Assad, Hezbollah, and Iraqi Shia militias are clear signs that the United States and Iran still have conflicting interests in the Middle East that are unlikely to change anytime soon. And competition between pragmatists and hardliners inside Iran has only intensified since the signing of the JCPOA as President Rouhani and his allies try to leverage the nuclear agreement to gain more influence while opponents of the deal try to box him in.

So if you thought Obie was bad — just wait for Hillary. She’s the real thing, red in tooth and claw. She can’t wait to start blowing people up, and she’s got a legion of fanatic gunsels who can’t wait to feed her the ammo belt.

White privilege?

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Some of my friends — I mean real friends, not the Facebook variety — are rolling out the old ‘white privilege’ trope, after the most recent round of police murders.

(That’s the subjective genitive, not objective; I mean murders by police. I’m not losing any sleep over the fact that somebody occasionally shoots back. There are, after all, laws of Nature.)

Now I think this is a bogus concept — white privilege, I mean.

[Voice from offstage] : That’s because you’re white!

Well, maybe. But I also have better reasons than that.

Let’s start from facts that we can all agree on.

1) Nearly everybody in the world — except for that notorious 1% — has a pretty shitty time of it.

2) In particular, and speaking of home matters, cops shoot somewhere between 500 and 600 people a year in the US. In absolute terms, most of these dead people are former white people — though in the grave these distinctions vanish quickly. Importantly, however, in proportionate terms, a young black guy is on average a lot more likely to be shot than a young white guy. This is not an insignificant fact.

3) Therefore: Though most people have a pretty shitty time of it, some — and they are not difficult to identify — have an even shittier time of it than others.

This, in a nutshell, is the case for ‘privilege’ as a concept: most everybody has a shitty time, but some people’s times are shittier than others. For no good reason: they’re not lazier, they’re not less intelligent, they’re not less moral or conscientious.

Now my own inclination is to focus on the overall shittiness, and ask why we have to put up with it.

But the discourse of privilege focuses on the disparity — as if that were the problem, and the overall shittiness were unavoidable; it’s only a question of how we spread it around.

Well, in theory, the disparity could be fixed. We could encourage the cops, for example, to shoot more white people, so as reduce the disparity.

Or we could hold the number of shot white people constant, and try to bring the rate of shot black people down to the same level. That would also reduce the disparity, and would certainly be preferable to Plan A. Particularly from my white point of view. But it’s still a lot of dead people. Rather too many, I should say.

But really, who wants either of these outcomes?

This is why I think the discourse of privilege leads us down a rabbit hole. It presupposes that the quantum of misery is constant, and like a kind of perverse reverse Communism, seeks to ensure that everybody is equally miserable.

I have developed a tactic for responding to my friends who bring up the matter of white privilege. Since it’s usually in the context of police murders — again I mean, murders by cops, not of cops — I ask them, well, if you want to put an end to police shootings, why not disarm the police? Then they couldn’t shoot anybody, black or white.

So far I have not had a single response to this question, and I have asked it many times. It seems clear that my anti-privilege friends are still strongly in favor of state-sanctioned violence — as long as it’s levied with an even hand.

Cheerleading the uncontroversial

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I’ve been reflecting on the effusive tributes to the late (and by me, unlamented) Elie Wiesel. Of course it’s obvious enough why people like Madeleine Albright and Bibi Netanyahu and Abe Foxman and Hillary Clinton would have liked him, so we can set all that to one side, having assessed its value and consequence out to the fourth decimal place without even breaking a sweat.

What surprises me just a bit is the spontaneous wreath-laying by jes’-folks. Most of it, to be sure, is on Facebook, where the currency of feeling is seriously devalued, so maybe I’m breaking a butterfly upon the wheel here.

Of course — you know what’s coming — I Have A Theory.

My theory is that we enjoy fervor. We like being enthusiastic about things, and jumping on some jolly bandwagon, and rooting for the home team. And of course we enjoy the bracing, piney air of the moral high ground. But we mostly don’t like disagreement, and argument, and making other people mad: because we are nice people ourselves. (Well, not me, of course. But I mean normal people.)

So the solution is to get all fervent and dewy-eyed and shaky-voiced about matters on which no one disagrees: the Nazis were bad, child molesters are bad, and these characteristically American shoot-em-up amuckniks are really, really bad. Click ‘like’ if you agree.

Best of both worlds, right? We can wave the banners and chant the slogans and march through the streets, with a police permit in due form, and nobody will get in our face.

The Henry Ford of the Holocaust Industry

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So that awful old humbug, Elie Wiesel, has at last gone to his long account. Old-time readers here will know that I am superstitious about death and don’t like to say I’m glad that anybody died, no matter who. I can stop at the brink even with old Elie, but only just. What an insufferable Uriah Heep he was. There was never even anything remotely likable about him. That mantle of high seriousness in which he muffled himself never, so far as I am aware, slipped by so much as a micron, even for a microsecond.

Naturally he was the mass murderer’s favorite Voice Of Conscience. So far I note that Bibi Netanyahu, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Abe Foxman — I find that Wiesel once received, no kidding, the Jabotinsky Award from Foxman’s ADL — Madeleine Albright, Ron Lauder, and assorted celebrities and other white trash, like George Clooney and Bill Gates, have weighed in with effusive praise. Of course he was also a Nobel Peace Prize recipient — always a very bad sign — along with Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Menachem Begin, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama, the last-named having been given the award simply for having been elected President.

Speaking of Kissinger, I haven’t yet heard what he has had to say about the late smarmster, but I can wait. Ditto for Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban. Somebody wake me when it’s over.

One thing I discovered, amid the saponaceous deluge of posthumous praise, and hadn’t previously known, was that the old hypocrite was an ardent advocate of Clinton I’s balkan War. Can’t say I’m surprised.

It’s a kind of fun parlor game imagining how, if one were Rhadamanthus, one would deal with people like this on the Other Side. The trick is to let the punishment fit the crime, without being too sadistic. Away with the Dantesque boiling pitch; let’s be more subtle. I think my sentence for Wiesel would be to lock him up in a seminar room with the late, and also unlamented, Saul Bellow, and let them bore each other for a millennium or so.