The post Starship Troopers and the Degeneration of Parody appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>May 17th saw the release of Starship Troopers: Extermination, a video game based on the 1997 Paul Verhoeven movie Starship Troopers. This may or not be a fun or well-told game, but there are some deeply sinister undertones to its existence. A silver lining is that the Starship Troopers franchise helps us understand how parody degenerates into promotion of the idea it satirizes.
Paul Verhoeven’s film is itself an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is sincere and unironic. It portrayed a future in which humanity, led by the militarist Terran Federation, is at war with bug-like aliens. In the Federation’s society, only veterans can vote or hold office, corporal punishment is common, and war is perpetual. It is more or less fascist. Heinlein portrays this positively.
Verhoeven, who grew up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, decided to use Heinlein’s basic plot but added a satirical layer to it: After brief opening credits, the story is told entirely BY the Federation as propaganda. Thus, the film is less a movie overtly criticizing fascism than a movie made by a fascist society about itself, with all the subtle horror that entails.
Upon first viewing, the plot is straightforward: Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) graduates high school and joins the Mobile Infantry, the Federation’s shock troopers. He and his fellow recruits fight the aliens and eventually participate in an operation that captures a member of their leadership caste, with the implication that the knowledge gained from this “brain bug” will help win the war. But that’s just the surface.
The careful viewer will discover grim details that shed light on the Federation’s monstrous society. An early, brilliant scene has Rico and two female love interests, Dizzy (Dina Meyer) and Carmen (Denise Richards) surreptitiously flirt while their teacher Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside) delivers a lecture. The camera focuses almost entirely on the teens, while Rasczak’s speech flies under the radar. He says:
This year we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.
Here, in the fascist imagination, military discipline is the antidote to democratic instability. Substitute “the social scientists” with “cultural Marxists” and striking parallels to modern reactionary thought emerge.
Other details are equally disturbing and sometimes comical: “The Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today,” gushes a veteran to Rico. The veteran is missing three appendages. The soldier Ace (Jake Busey) performs the Confederate anthem “Dixie” on the violin, implying the Federation is the moral equivalent of the Confederacy. The only hint of a civil society is a brief debate between two Federation scientists over whether the bugs can think. One, dressed in a ridiculous suit and bowtie, says that he finds “the idea of a bug that can think OFFENSIVE!” And when the Federation soldiers finally confront the bugs, the battle scenes are horrific, with dozens of human troopers killed for every bug slain. Most disturbing of all, echoing real-life Nazi tactics, some Federation soldiers are clearly children.
The fascist aesthetic is the main tip-off Verhoeven uses to show us that all is not well. The Mobile Infantry rifles are gigantic and cumbersome, some boasting hilariously large scopes. Federation military personnel dress like Nazis, all grey uniforms with black leather. Carl (Neil Patrick Harris), Johnny’s nerdy friend from high school, reemerges towards the end of the film as a military intelligence officer in a uniform identical to the Nazi SS. And like the Nazis, David Roth notes in a 2020 essay, the Federation is implied to be losing.
Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is brilliant. Critics that panned the film’s performances missed the point: Fascist art is bad. The scenes of idiotic teen drama mimic the similarly vapid German films of the Nazi period.
But because Starship Troopers was a success, and because of the incentives of capitalism, a franchise was inevitable. Multiple sequels, animated films, a pinball machine, and more were spawned. A story about perpetual war was incentivized by its success to replicate itself and eventually drop its satirical themes. Similar franchises include Rambo and Death Wish, the first entries of which portray good-hearted veterans forced into horrific situations. These franchise’s subsequent entries become bloodbaths obsessed with the spectacle of supposedly righteous violence.
And this brings us back to the video game Starship Troopers: Extermination. Its creator, Offworld Industries, describes the game as a cooperative first-person shooter “that puts you on the far-off front lines of an all-out battle against the Bugs! Squad up, grab your rifle, and do your part as an elite Deep Space Vanguard Trooper set to take back planets claimed by the Arachnid threat!”
The anti-fascist parodic message of the 1997 film seems entirely lost. When we are incentivized to make our parodies profitable, the social critique will ultimately be stifled.
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]]>The post “Secular Humanists with Jewish Last Names” appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>The title of this article is a recent quote from Steven Crowder, an immensely popular conservative YouTuber with almost six million subscribers. “He’s not wrong about everything,” Crowder quipped about Kanye West’s recent and obviously anti-Semitic remarks. “Is there a conversation to be had about secular humanists with Jewish last names exploiting people in Hollywood?”
Crowder went on to articulate that these “secular humanists with Jewish last names” aren’t evil “because they’re Jewish”. His distinction serves two purposes here. First, it allows a modicum of plausible deniability for anti-Semites and people foolish enough to believe “I hate Jews, but not because they are Jewish” is a legitimate opinion. Second, it allows the divorcing of Jews with non-reactionary views from the Jewish populace as a whole. It separates Jews that Crowder finds worthy–religious conservatives like Ben Shapiro, the late Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli far-right–with those he finds unworthy. The fact that Crowder was referring to wealthy Hollywood executives is irrelevant here, as he does not make a distinction between powerful Jews who aren’t religious and Jews who hold left-wing views. For Crowder, there is no water between Noam Chomsky and Harvey Weinstein. They’re both part of the same cabal.
The comment section of Crowder’s video rips the mask off this farce. It’s full of open anti-Semites. So too with “journalist” Tim Pool’s Kanye West interview, in which Pool tried to make a distinction between “the corporate press” treating Kanye unfairly vs. Jews as a monolithic bloc doing so. A large chunk of these comments consisted of Pool’s fans criticizing him for not identifying the “real problem”, i.e., Jews.
Crowder is noteworthy here because he straddles the gap between American conservatism–people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson–and overt fascists like Milo Yiannopolis and Nick Fuentes. That gap shrinks by the day. We may soon see mainstream Republicans running on a rhetorical platform similar to Crowder’s. Donald Trump’s admonishment of American Jews for “not caring about Israel” is probably a portent of an ever-more noxious Republican Party, one an inch from Nazi talking points on Jewish issues. The predominance of conservative discourse on “cultural Marxism” (The Nazis said “cultural Bolshevism”) means we’re already pretty close.
Where does this thinly-veiled prejudice come from? Consider Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on anti-Semitism in The Sublime Object of Ideology. In response to the overt anti-Semitism of Nazis and their ilk, Zizek writes, many will say that
‘The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.’ Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called ‘unconscious prejudices’ with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.’
Zizek is a difficult and provocative thinker, but my interpretation of this passage is that people like Crowder will find “the Jew” a convenient ideological fantasy to justify already-held beliefs. For Crowder, whose politics revolve around disgust at those he finds displeasing–black people and LGBT people in particular–”The Jew” serves as the source of the revulsion. This is to say, Crowder and company cannot admit that queer people have a legitimate right to their gender and sexual expression, or that black people have legitimate grievances with contemporary America. There must therefore be a nefarious source spreading these ideas among the populace. The source of the “repulsive ideology” is, conveniently, “secular humanists with Jewish last names”. By situating Jews as the master manipulators, Crowder legitimizes the prejudices he previously held and espoused.
We must remember that conservatives have set the bar impossibly high for what constitutes prejudice. Donald Trump, for instance, in justifying his dinner with Kanye West, denied Kanye’s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye did not, in that particular dinner, say anything anti-Semitic. Similarly, Steven Crowder denied Kanye’s anti-Semitism by saying that Kanye was “using a Howitzer”, but “doesn’t hate Jews.” For the modern conservative, to be prejudiced is to hold hatred for a group in one’s heart of hearts. As humanity has not yet developed telepathy, this is a standard that cannot be met. The potentially virtuous inner life of a Nazi does not prevent him from doing the things that Nazis do.
History does not look kindly on these conservative fence-sitters, those who refuse to oppose fascism. Paul Von Hindenburg is not viewed as an anti-fascist but rather as the man who invited the Nazis into government. Erwin Romell, who was perhaps not a Nazi in his political inner life, still served as the general of a fascist army. Aside from Claus Von Stauffenberg, the conservatives and monarchists who fought alongside the Nazis are remembered correctly as Nazis. Ditto with Steven Crowder.
To quote the novelist A.R. Moxon: “Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is ‘Nazi.’ Nobody cares about their motives anymore.”
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]]>The post RIP Michael Brooks appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Michael Brooks passed away yesterday. A journalist, comedian, podcaster, and socialist thinker, he was one of the most important young voices on the left. His family has listed the cause as a sudden medical condition.
More than just a partisan, he combined his “dirtbag left” aesthetic with segments on world history, Marxist philosophy, postcolonial thought, and more. Michael’s humor, kindness, and charismatic demeanor were disarming enough to introduce many people to important, globe-trotting ideas.
Michael was an uncompromising advocate for democracy and other socialist ideals across the world. This led him to a strong focus on the legally shaky imprisonment of President Lula of Brazil, which allowed for the triumph of the unhinged quasi-fascist Jair Bolsonero. Michael’s coverage of Brazil was more in-depth than most major outlets. While The Economist praised Bolsonaro as a dangerous populist, but one with good ideas on fiscal policy, Michael was uncompromising in his support for Brazilian democracy. Eventually, he was able to interview Lula after his release from prison.
He understood the allure of online right-wing thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Sam Harris to young white men. It was the recognition of the power of this cadre of “Intellectual Dark Web” denizens that led him to produce a short book, Against The Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right. In it, he argued against Peterson’s advocacy of a return to tradition and Rubin’s shallow libertarianism. They focused too much on insular internet arguments and eschewed real-life catastrophes like climate change, autocracy, and inequality. These issues, Michael wrote, were very real and could only be tackled by an international working-class movement for a humane socialist society.
It was this cosmopolitanism, this drawing from sources across the human experience, that made Michael so special. From Brazil to online discourse, from lectures on Cameroonian philosopher Achilla Mbembe to commenting on the latest NBA game, few modern thinkers had his breadth. “he was more intellectually curious than most socialists I’ve met,” said Bhaskar Sunkara in a tribute piece in Jacobin. “Michael was fascinated by the world and by the movements people built to change it.”
He combined this substantial knowledge base with a warmth and understanding of human flaws. Human beings contained multitudes, and therefore deserved forgiveness and understanding. What was needed, he said, was a mixture of “Machiavelli and spirituality” to tackle the problems of modernity. “He was hungry to cultivate a milieu of people who were both politically committed and loved life,” said Sunkara.
A few weeks ago, Michael joked that he had finished off his bucket list of famous people to interview: Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, President Lula, and more. I’m glad he got to meet his heroes before he passed. Now that he’s gone, I wish I had gotten the chance to meet one of mine.
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]]>The post George Floyd’s Death Proves There is No “New Right” appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>As police move in to destroy the Capitol Hill Occupation Protest, it’s worth reflecting on what conservatism is.
British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott likened his creed to a voyage at sea, in which the ship of state has “neither starting-place nor appointed destination…the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel,” he wrote in Rationalism in Politics. It’s an idea not without merit or appeal: The point of politics, it holds, is to keep things functional and well-governed, not to leap desperately towards a utopian society.
Unfortunately, Oakeshott’s metaphor is not what conservatism is.
In 2017’s inaugural address, President Trump said that “Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” Trump promised to reverse these trends, and bring the jobs back. The Republican Party, he promised, was now the party of the American worker.
That’s not what conservatism is, either. So, it’s no surprise that Trump’s administration acts like the Bush II clique on methamphetamine.
On May 25th, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis policeman, killed African-American local George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for close to nine minutes. Floyd’s crime had been to potentially use a counterfeit $20 bill. There are accusations that Floyd might have been drunk or high. None of this matters, of course; he’s dead.
That’s what conservatism is. The defense of the social order at all costs.
Interestingly, unlike past police killings, the president ostensibly disapproved of Floyd’s murder. He’s a “New Republican”, remember. But in practice, this meant nothing. When protests started, he immediately blamed the protestors for things getting out of hand, despite the violence being largely perpetrated by police. He even threatened to send in the US Army, a move that would blatantly violate posse comitatus.
In the early 2000s, conservatism–excuse me, neoconservatism–was mainly focused on implementing austerity and fostering the War on Terror abroad. After the election of Barack Obama, we saw right-wing discourse shift in a libertarian direction. Sales of Ayn Rand’s novels skyrocketed. One would think this would change policy; it did not. When Trump came to power, all pretense of small government was dropped by the man who said he would “bomb the s— out of ISIS.”
One can be forgiven for thinking that things haven’t changed much.
In the 1920s and 30s, when the ruling classes of Europe–the bourgeoisie, the militaries, the clergy–realized they couldn’t beat the Left at the ballot box, they installed fascists, the “New Right”, rather than lose a fraction of their power. In Italy, the king chose to give Mussolini the job after his March on Rome; in Germany, conservative president Paul Von Hindenburg decided to make Hitler chancellor after the Nazis won a plurality of the votes. In Spain, the military, disgusted at the reforms of the left-leaning Second Republic, decided to overthrow the government rather than participate in democratic politics. “LAW & ORDER”, as the president puts it, was more important to conservatives, and some right-wing liberals, than democracy.
This social order in America is of course tied to race. Black people must periodically be reminded of their lack of worth via state violence. These killings make a lot more sense if one views it that way.
This suppression must of course be accompanied by whitewashing in the press if the suppression is to be effective. American freedom of the press’s dark side is the egregious lies the capitalists have told via that same press: William Randolph Hearst’s lie about the USS Maine led directly to the Spanish-American War. During the Russian Revolution, American papers claimed that Bolsheviks were “nationalizing women” to be collectively raped by Red soldiers; it was a fabrication. When socialist novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in the 1930s, Hollywood studios, afraid of losing an iota of profit, hired actors to play Russian caricatures and filmed them saying they’d vote for Sinclair. They filmed hobos and claimed thousands of miscreants were swarming across the California border to get Sinclair’s nonexistent handouts.
The Right’s media infrastructure hasn’t changed, and in 2020 it can still be found lying about the threats to the system. Take the CHOP in Seattle, formerly known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone). Fox News reported a Monty Python reference joke as fact, claiming that a local leader of the protest had become a “Warlord”. In another instance, they posted edited images to portray CHOP as a chaotic hellscape. Actual first-hand reports describe CHOP as a refuge with water, masks, produce, and other necessities freely available for all. The streets and walls are decorated with gigantic, collective works of art, not the entrails of shopkeepers.
In the case of black America, our press is just as likely to fail in what it doesn’t report. Activists have pointed out during this latest round of anti-brutality protests that we only know of the police brutality we see, that we capture on phones. Consider Rahm Emmanuel’s cover-up of a police shooting. Consider the existence of secret police torture chambers in that same mayor’s city. Consider that a black man was found hanging from a tree in Los Angeles and the police declared it a suicide. There have been half a dozen of these hangings over the last few weeks.
Some viewers who saw HBO’s excellent Watchmen show thought that its depiction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots was part of the comic book franchise’s alternate history. That’s because the horrific event–in which hundreds of black Tulsans were killed by white irregulars, some even flying planes–was suppressed in textbooks for decades. The event was a suppression of a threat to the status quo — the so-called “Black Wall Street” — and the knowledge of such a brutal suppression had to be hidden.
These brutalities — war, racism, beatings, killings, secret police, and the subsequent cover-ups, lying, and suppression of history — are what it takes to keep Michael Oakeshott’s ship of state at an “even keel”. Therefore, draw no distinction between Trump, racist cops, and “honorable” conservatives like George W. Bush, recently rehabilitated by the liberal media. For their mission is to keep the empire and its institutions from changing, and that mission is the true nature of conservatism.
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]]>The post Beat The Press appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>The current dust-up between fellow Senators and Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is an ugly thing. It boils down to a private conversation at Sen. Warren’s apartment, where, supposedly, Sanders claimed that a woman could not win the 2020 election. I don’t know the truth of what was said. A misunderstanding is likely. The following piece is not intended as an attack on Elizabeth Warren or her candidacy; she remains my second choice. The real villain of this story is neither Sanders nor Warren, but CNN. And their malfeasance in regard to Sanders and the left as a whole is typical in the American press. I present several instances of this below.
A week after Sanders emerged as the Iowa frontrunner, CNN, an anti-labor network which helped give Trump billions in free publicity, decided to run an unverifiable story a month before the Iowa caucus. All four of the sources they cite are either Warren reporters or heard Sanders’ comment from Warren herself. I do not claim here to know who said what in that meeting from 2018, and I accuse neither senator of lying. But I do know CNN’s coverage of this scandal was among the worst mainstream journalism I have ever seen: At the debate, which CNN themselves moderated, this gem of an exchange occurred:
Moderator: In 2018, you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?
Sanders: Well as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it…In 2015 I deferred in fact to Senator Warren. There was a movement to draft Senator Warren to run for president. And you know what, I said, ‘stay back’. Senator Warren decided not to run and I did run afterwards. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes. How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become President of the United States?[…]
Moderator: Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here. You are saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election.
Sanders: That is correct.
Moderator: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you that a woman could not win the election? [audible laughter from the audience]
I suspect the laughter was an acknowledgement from the audience of the biased nature of the question. Understandable: It is truly incredible seeing CNN, one of the supposed pillars of American journalism adopting a line of questioning with the same amount of good faith as the phrase, “When did you stop beating your wife?”
A basic proposition: That corporations are self-interested firms that seek to maximize shareholder value. CNN is owned by telecoms giant Warner Media, formerly Time Warner, a regular on the Fortune 500. The Washington Post, as Sanders often points out, is owned by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos. It’s also worth noting that CNN hired a Republican operative with no journalism experience to lead its coverage of the 2020 race. With this ownership and these kind of people in charge of coverage, is it really conspiratorial to suggest that the billionaires’ pet news orgs would lean towards politicians and policies that benefit the wealthy?
It has become increasingly obvious to those of us on the left that the capitalist press will never, ever give the movement for a democratic, worker’s America a fair shake. Certainly, one could be forgiven for thinking CNN was openly taking sides and crossing their fingers for a Trump victory or that of a right-wing Democrat.
While the Warren/Sanders tiff represents the first foray of the Warren campaign into negative advertising against her socialist rival, her surrogates in the media have been at it for months. In October of 2019, a clip surfaced of an MSNBC segment, “The Contenders”, about the Democratic primary. Featuring a speech by Emily Tisch Sussman, Former VP of Campaigns for the Center For American Progress, it touched on Elizabeth Warren’s supposed superiority to Bernie Sanders:
I overheard someone say…basically at this point, if you are still supporting Sanders as opposed to Warren, it’s kind of showing your sexism, because she has more detailed plans and her plans have evolved. I thought it was an interesting point, and I think there may be something to it.
This audio is followed by nods and assents from Sussman’s two male cohosts. This assertion is so emblematic of the liberal press for multiple reasons: One, Sussman, at least in the clip, did not mention that her father is a billionaire, and therefore might have an ulterior motive for trashing his campaign. It’s also worth point out that Sussman’s former employer, the Center for American Progress, recently laid off the entire staff its news arm, ThinkProgress.com, and hired non-union staff. If this doesn’t necessarily serve as an indictment of Sussman herself, it certainly does indict CAP’s ostensibly progressive liberalism. Crush labor, then bloviate on air about the horrors of the Trump administration.
Of course, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention the Gray Lady of liberalism herself, The New York Times. On Sunday they came out in support of not one, but TWO candidates for Democratic nominee: Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. Here’s some choice bits from their so-reasonable-it’s-actually-insane reasoning:
What are we to make of this? For a long time I hesitated on calling out these news outlets, because when they aren’t free-associating, evidence-free, about the left, they do really good work. The New York Times remains a gold standard of American journalism when they decide to do their jobs. Other times they hire Sydney Ember, with only a background in investment banking and marketing, to be their point person on Bernie Sanders.
So how are we to trust mainstream sources when they are corporate-owned and their most popular pundits include such luminaries as Rachel Maddow? Her night-after-night coverage of the Mueller Report, Russiagate, and promises of Trump in prison amounted to nothing except a brief statement from the Justice Department that, yes, the president is legally invincible and cannot be changed with a crime. Cool! Watergate was for nothing! Maddow is also author of Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, which posits that oil empires helped bring about Putin and Trump. Fair enough. Extraction industries are dirty to the core and gave us such dynasties as the Bushes and the House of Saud. But it’s an oversimplification and one in which she makes some major oversights. Note that she points out the corruption surrounding Equatorial Guinea’s oil boom but, to my knowledge, does not acknowledge Obama’s friendly dinner party with its fascist president, Teodoro Obiang.
Or Joy-Ann Reid, who, rather than admit she made homophobic statements in the past, suggested that Russia had hacked her blog to make her look homophobic. I, for one, find it difficult to believe that Reid’s show was such a threat to the Russian state apparatus that it would bother with cyberattacks in retaliation.
It’s these brave women that liberals would have us side with against that horrible misogynist, Bernie Sanders.
I should note at this point that this is no apologia for Putin and company. I too oppose Russia’s government. I oppose Putin because his regime is an authoritarian quilt of state, corporate, and intelligence concerns that kills, tortures, and imprisons dissidents, suppresses the poor, supports terrorism, has no concern for climate change, and whose overarching agenda seems to be the maximization of the power of the corporate-state apparatus. Incidentally, these are the same reasons I oppose the United States government.
I would like to conclude by saluting Democracy Now, Jacobin, Means TV, The Intercept, and other left news sources that are building an alternative to the mainstream media. Because it’s become increasingly clear that liberal networks like MSNBC, newspapers like The New York Times, and think tanks like the Center for American Progress have failed to cover left alternatives to the current system responsibly. The have a nasty habit of teaming up with the “responsible” anti-Trump Republicans, and are largely hawkish on foreign policy. In short, these liberals are as much of a facet of the American imperialist establishment as Fox News, the CIA, or the Republican Party. They too must be defeated if we hope to build a better society.
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]]>The post Socialism and the Loop Trolley appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>I wrote most of this essay on the day (12/29/2019) of the last Loop Trolley ride. For those outside of St. Louis, the Delmar Loop is a famous cultural street, connecting University City with the City of St. Louis proper. Revitalized in the late twentieth century primarily by local entrepreneur Joe Edwards, it was voted one of ten “Great Streets in America” by the American Planning Association in 2007.
And the Trolley? Well, the Trolley is, or was…. not so Great. It cost over $50 million, of which around $30 million came from federal grants, $4 million came from City tax abatements, and $3 million from the County; its construction caused nightmarish traffic in the Loop, stagnating commerce in the area; and it didn’t really do anything, other than provide a shuttle from the Missouri History Museum to the Loop, which is kind of cool, I guess. The whole thing endured for about a year. Now it’s dead.
In a political ideologies class in my undergraduate degree, I read an essay that so stuck with me that the closing of the Loop Trolley provided an instant connection to it in my mind. Titled “Town Meetings & Workers’ Control: A Story For Socialists” and written by political theorist Michael Walzer in 1978, it is a parable about a man who builds a town, and echoes the present situation of St. Louis governance pretty strongly.
This fictional entrepreneurial fellow, J.J., who, “when the frontier was still somewhere east of the Great Plains…set out to make his fortune.” First, J.J. establishes a ferry at the bend of a river (not unlike St. Louis itself). Taking pioneers from one bank to the other earns him some wealth. He buys up some land in the area and, when settlers arrive, lends them the acres needed to build a church, a blacksmith, and the other necessities of an American frontier town. When Indians attack (a somewhat problematic use of language and example on Walzer’s part), J.J. orders the rifles and gear needed to fend them off. In this way he becomes the informal mayor. When he borrows money from a bank and builds the town hall, he formalizes this role. What was previously a functional economic arrangement becomes a formal political one.
J-town, as the settlement becomes known, prospers. J.J. is the default leader, though “the settlers were not surprised; neither was there any opposition. J.J. was still a gregarious man; he knew them all, talked to them all, always consulted with them about matters of common interest.” J.J. built the town; that he would own it made a sort of sense. Years pass.
Growth requires a degree of formalization, and an elderly J.J. is obliged to appoint other town officers. In an act of hubris, he makes his idiot son chief of police. It is at this point that the citizens stage an electoral revolt. Here’s the crux of the arguments: J.J. is appreciated by all for his leadership of the early town. But this role only entitles him to “honor and glory, but not to obedience.” The citizens are workers, after all. They were the ones who built and operated the business J.J. arranged, and more to the point, his poor governance impacts their lives. The revolt is successful, and the town moves from informal and lax capitalist dictatorship to formalized workers’ democracy. The moral of the parable, writes Walzer, is that “what touches all should be decided by all”. If it will impact you, you should have a say in it. This could be the thesis statement of the entire socialist movement.
Back to St. Louis, with apologies for the diversion. Joe Edwards is our own local J.J. He is widely recognized and positively acknowledged as the man who built the Loop via his ownership and/or support of fruitful businesses like Blueberry Hill. St. Louis Magazine even called him the “Duke of Delmar”. But not all of his ideas have been so brilliant. Edwards has long been a supporter of installing the trolley system in the Loop. Whether or not such a plan could have been viable, its real-world implementation was not, costing taxpayers millions and providing neither increased tourism nor much of a public good.
Joe isn’t alone in St. Louis-area publicly-funded foibles. Consider, for instance, the public opposition to a Major League Soccer stadium over the past few years, which would have involved tens of millions of dollars in public funds. When the proposal was defeated, the organizers began a plan to create a stadium without spending state and local treasure. And a more recent example, the proposed privatization of Lambert International Airport, was defeated by local groups like Don’t Sell Our Airport and the St. Louis Democratic Socialists of America chapter. One might point to these as examples of the system working: A public vote defeated the MLS stadium proposal, and public opposition defeated the airport privatization plan, led by multimillionaire Republican investor Rex Sinquefield, a man with all Joe Edwards’ defects and none of his virtues. But the system clearly didn’t stop the Loop Trolley, and we’re all poorer and worse off for it.
My opposition to these projects doesn’t come from the fiscal conservative’s impulse to save money in the public treasury. Rather, I use the leftist’s critique that instead of playgrounds and attractions for the professional managerial classes, the money should be spent on social services, the homeless, jobs programs, desperately-needed police reform, and greening the city. I think much of the electorate knows this. Imagine if their representatives on the Board of Alderman and the local Democratic Party weren’t mostly weak shills for property developers and investors. Better yet, imagine if the electorate could determine where the money went themselves. Imagine, in short, a community where what touches all is decided by all.
P.S. The Trolley broke down on its final ride in front of Joe Edwards’ Peacock Loop Diner. On a thematically-related note, when Edwards rolled out plans for the diner in 2013, he said he chose the name because “everybody likes [peacocks]—I don’t think anyone has a bad thing to say about a peacock.” Amazing.
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]]>The post Gillette Vs. Tucker Carlson – by Adam Levin appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Centrists are fond of quoting Yates’ line about how “the center cannot hold”, implying that left and right have both become unhinged. I’ve always had my doubts about this: David Adler’s 2018 piece in the New York Times indicates that centrists, not extremists, may have the most negative feelings about democracy. So, we should be aware of a troubling trend of realignment: Some liberals are increasingly taking up a pro-corporate line, while a faction of conservatives have been hinting at criticism of capitalism. The center is reforming, and it may not be good for freedom.
In reaction to the Sanders campaign of 2016 and the increasing popularity of organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, centrist liberals have been shoring up their defenses. Since the Clinton era, the Democratic Party has been increasingly reliant on white-collar professionals who may be progressive on social issues but are uncomfortable with “big government” and wealth redistribution. Note that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been exploring a presidential run. But CNBC names Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 campaign, as a “key player in Schultz’s growing team”. Meanwhile, a Democratic strategist expressed their contempt of Schultz to The Atlantic: “What’s his value proposition for America? Make America like a corporate chain?” It’s difficult to imagine Schultz as a progressive champion.
Which leads us to another thorny problem: The fantasy of “woke” capitalism and the liberal corporation. Parts of corporate America have woven social commentary into their advertisements, most famously Gillette’s controversial ad calling out toxic masculinity. The ad itself has provoked a familiar controversy, with Fox News’ Tammy Bruce calling for Americans to “stand up and stop this pathological frenzy to marginalize boys and men”, and any number of Twitter liberals congratulating Gillette on their progressive position. Some people bought Gillette product in order to destroy them.
I watched the ad and found its sentiment noble, though the marketing behind it is insanely cynical: capital largely does not care why you buy something, as long as you do. Gillette knew it could make money on this principle, and did so. If the prevailing winds of culture were blowing the other way, and Gillette could make money on promoting far-right ideas, I’m sure it would do so, and we’d be watching a razor commercial that promoted phrenology or anti-Semitism. In this context we are faced with the possibility of a future where our political choices are between corporations with competing – and largely superficial – ideologies.
Here’s another grim potential vision of things to come: While liberals rally to corporate America’s side for being “woke”, some conservatives are attempting to make the right a little less pro-capitalism. On January 2, Tucker Carlson gave a monologue on his program that broke from Republican orthodoxy in a variety of ways. “For generations,” he said, “Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars”. The ruling elite is composed of “mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule”. He’s right, of course, but for the wrong reasons. He, like European conservatives, finds capitalism to be useful only in so far as it promotes traditional values. When market forces run up against those values (see Gillette above), capitalism is to be fought, not supported. But this kind of right-wing populism is largely hollow, and dangerous in its own right.
And here’s where our two stories – That of Schultz and Gillette and that of Carlson – collide: I posit that when liberals teamed up with capital and essentially ceded the idea of widespread economic prosperity, they allowed the rise of a faux “anti-establishment” right that helped give us Donald Trump.
In twentieth-century Europe, this manifested in the rise of fascism, a right-wing futurist ideology that claimed to serve the nation, not corrupt, Jewish capitalism. In practice, of course, this was a hollow promise: Mussolini’s claim that his corporatist system benefited both capital and labor was false, as Italian wealth inequality increased during the 1920s and 30s; Franco’s Spain experimented with “vertical trade unions” that only helped employers. Perhaps this ultra-nationalism isn’t what Carlson has in mind with his brand of European social conservatism. But his hatred for immigrants and ethnic minorities combined with a (theoretical) opposition to economic inequality could spawn a new and odious reactionism.
Benjamin Barber’s hypothesized in Jihad vs. McWorld that the world community would be beset by the inequities of a cosmopolitan global capitalism (“McWorld”), and the reactionary nationalist/religious movements (“Jihad”) that would rise to challenge it. Barber doesn’t see either as healthy for democracy. We’re faced with a similar dilemma today: Right-leaning liberals could come into conflict with “social” conservatives, and neither would restore economic welfare or political freedom.
The only way out of this trap would be the coalescence of an international left along the lines articulated by Yanis Varoufakis. One can see beginnings of such a movement in the popularity aroused by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I hope a widespread democratic left does arise to fight capitalism and nationalism. Because if we leave the future up to the likes of Howard Schultz or Tucker Carlson, our prospects are bleak indeed.
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]]>The post The Superstructure Triumphant appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>One of the crucial trends in the 2016 election was the 80-plus percent of white evangelicals who voted for Trump. A likely explanation is Trump’s ostensibly pro-life position, but there’s more going on here. A particularly interesting article that came across my Facebook feed this morning suggests other reasons evangelicals might continue to support the far-right.
The piece is a Christian Post editorial from the Rev. Mark H Creech, entitled “Can a Christian Be a Democrat?”. Creech lists six reasons that the Republicans are more in line with Christianity than the Democrats, quoting from a tract by Wayne Grudem entitled Politics According to the Bible. They are as follows (I paraphrase and quote for brevity):
Before we tackle these principles, I’d like to note that my purpose here isn’t to prove that Creech is a hypocrite or politically and historically uneducated. I also don’t endeavor to prove that Democrats are better than Creech says; I’m a socialist, not a liberal, so I feel less obligated to defend liberals. The point, rather, is to illustrate how a certain type of Christian, generally older and white, reliably vote for hard-right candidates. I put it down to the superstructure.
In Marxist thought, the “base” refers to the physical forces and relations of production in society, i.e. how employers and employees interact and how people produce what they need to survive. The “superstructure” is cultural and political customs, power relations, institutions, and ultimately, the state itself. As Marx and Engels tell it, the superstructure is largely created to justify the base. In feudal society, the concept of divine right was created to justify serfdom. In capitalist societies, more complex mechanics are at work: racism, classical economics, and power dynamics help justify why our economy is normal or Panglossian. It’s a crude distinction but it works for our purposes here.
Creech and his ilk have given religious significance to every aspect of the superstructure, not just religion. When Creech talks about how “smaller government and allowing people to keep the fruits of their labor” is Godly, he only looks at the exact distribution of wealth in this exact moment. By this logic, progressive taxation and social programs are just stealing, which violates one of the Ten Commandments. But this assumes that the economic system is natural, the product of hard work and nothing else. It might surprise Creech to know that the entire world-system on which his economic beliefs rely is the result of five hundred years of outright slavery, the exploitation of poor farmers and workers, colonialism, and a century of American-led coups against regimes that might in any way disrupt the Western wealthy. Then again, Creech might see all of this as Godly, too: America had to enslave Africans and dominate Native Americans to bring them the light of Christ (though Christianity in Africa predates America’s very existence). He would probably also explain away the tens of millions of deaths from late European colonialism, roughly 1870 – 1970. But more likely Creech didn’t even think of the historical sources of wealth. With little emphasis on history, all he can do is to protest that redistributing the wealth squeezed from the workers of the world is anti-Christian. A certain passage about a camel passing through the eye of a needle comes to mind.
In this vein, capitalist consumption becomes holy, and its end result, the destruction of global ecosystems, is only an “assumption that development of the earth’s resources will cause damage to the environment.” Never mind that the UN and David Attenborough warn us that the collapse of civilization and its natural resources are now within sight. Never mind the politics of how we get our fossil fuels. God put them there for us to consume, so go nuts.
That’s how economics is folded into religion: It’s only natural, not the result of human endeavor and malfeasance, and is therefore correct and Godly. But it’s not just economics: everything else gets sucked into the superstructure, which to Creech is righteous because it is simply the way things are. Take military force, which is necessary because “evil is something innate, which requires strong military and police forces”. Evil exists and must be combated. Thus, every bit of interventionist foreign policy is justified, from the Indian Wars to the Middle East. For instance, radical Islam, especially ISIS, must be fought tooth and nail. However, the righteous Christian should definitely not think about America’s support for the source of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia, or the fact that Bin Laden himself was a US puppet in the Afghan rebellion against the USSR. Because if historical context is applied, the US foreign policy and intelligence apparatus never comes out looking Godly.
Domestically, it justifies police brutality. I’ve even seen a few Christians online who think Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games was anti-Christian because “God Bless America” is sometimes played too.
In this way worship of God becomes the adoration of every aspect of currently existing society: The military, the police, the intelligence community, the uniformity of suburban life, gender roles, and on and on. It’s all holy, even if Gospel refutes it or the Jewish tradition from which evangelicals claim to take inspiration outright contradicts it. It would be amusing, for instance, to see hard-right evangelicals try to explain how the Jubilee Year promotes capitalism.
But this isn’t a Christianity with theological depth. This is a Christianity of cliché and pablum. It’s telling that in the article, Creech mentions that he told an elderly parishioner that her “use of tobacco wasn’t consistent with a better Christian walk.” Smoking is bad, he says, but I suspect his concern has less to do with lung cancer than it does with the aesthetic of smoking. Gangsters smoke. So do hippies. Therefore, the upright Christian should refrain from smoking or talking to smokers. Jesus would never stoop to associating with lepers or prostitutes.
In the same way, Creech and company say, we should vote for the normal, the traditional, the comforting, and not the foreign, the weird, the rabble-rousers. A retreat into an imagined past by making American great again; Politics as aesthetic normalcy. In this final stage, religion degenerates into the enforcement of conventional wisdom, the deployment of clichés: “socialism doesn’t work”, “Don’t worry about money”, “America is the greatest country”, “God bless our troops”, “Obama is vaguely foreign and dangerous,” and, ultimately, “Good Christians vote Republican”.
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]]>The post American Horror Story: Cult Is A Political Nightmare appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Major spoilers for the titular season below!
American Horror Story: Cult (recently available on Netflix) doesn’t open with the edgy supernatural murders that usually accompany the anthology series’ prologues. The whole season is wholly bereft of magical elements. Rather, Cult starts with a familiar and emotional moment: Election Night 2016, when Trump’s victory sent millions reeling. Liberal characters grieve while a mysterious basement-dweller cheers on the president-elect. AHS has briefly touched on politics before, but this intro tells us that Cult is an explicitly political season. Despite good points here and there, however, executive producer Ryan Murphy and his crew deliver a largely cliché, half-baked take on the Trump era.
Cult’s premise bears some similarity to that of the first season (retroactively titled Murder House), in which a family living a comfortable suburban existence is assailed by vicious forces. But Cult lacks the haunted-house mysticism of Murder House. It instead focuses on a lesbian couple, the anxious Ally (Sarah Paulson) and the businesslike Ivy (Allison Pill), whose marriage is strained by the election and by Ally’s crippling phobias. Also, there’s a sinister cult of clown-mask murderers who keep offing the denizens of their small Michigan town. The cult is led by the aforementioned basement-dwelling mastermind Kai Anderson (Evan Peters). Kai spends most of the season secretly killing people and using the ensuing panic to fuel his political rise. He frequently ruminates on the nature of fear-driven politics, pretty clearly serving as a Trump stand-in.
The first few episodes set up some political stereotypes: Ally voted for Jill Stein, is concerned about trucks releasing mysterious chemicals in the neighborhood (another trick of Kai’s to stir up fear) and refuses to take anti-anxiety meds. Ivy is a diehard Hillary supporter furious with Ally for not voting for HRC. Kai’s sister Winter (Billie Lourd) is a millennial feminist with admirable anti-sexist views. Kai himself is superficially a Trumpian nationalist, but in private has no politics beyond manipulation of the fearful. Sally, a rival politician (Mare Winningham) says Kai is a “reactionary” and not a “real conservative”, though I’m skeptical such a distinction exists in the Trump era. Sally is a voice of reason telling people that statistically the crime wave fueling Kai’s rise doesn’t exist. He immediately has her murdered. Thus begins the seasons’ consistent theme that emotion, not material reality, matters in politics. More on that later.
The second act gets confusing, though more compelling: Virtually the whole neighborhood is revealed to be part of Kai’s cult/movement, from Ally and Ivy’s neighbors Harrison (Billy Eichner) and Meadow (Leslie Grossman), to local neo-Nazi cop Jack Samuels (Colton Haynes). Ivy is revealed to be a member, and Ally even joins briefly out of self-preservation. These twists are fun, but if they’re supposed to prove that people of all political stripes can fall victim to the politics of fear, they’re not terribly convincing.
After Kai fakes an assassination attempt on himself (something Joe Arpaio actually did, incidentally), his popularity soars and his movement becomes more explicitly fascist. A number of gun-toting white men join up, the female members of the cult are literally relegated to the kitchen, and everyone begins to call Kai “Divine Ruler”. One thing that Cult nails is the consequences of the transformation of fascism from a fringe doctrine to a mainstream ideology: Many of its early supporters are cast aside, and much of its political doctrine becomes secondary to the adoration–extremely homoerotic here–of the leader.
The season takes a baffling turn when it flashes back to Valerie Solanas’ 1968 attempt to kill Andy Warhol (also played by Evan Peters). Lena Dunham portrays Solanas, a mentally ill misandrist who founded SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men. In AHS lore, SCUM is responsible for the series of murders falsely attributed to the Zodiac Killer. Back in the present, Bebe Babbitt (Frances Conroy), Solanas’ aging, widowed girlfriend, teaches the doctrine of misandry to the disillusioned women of Kai’s cult. Her ideology is presented as equivalent to Kai’s. It’s here that Cult‘s political commentary breaks down into vague moralizing.
This is largely because Cult lacks any sort of realistic left-wing faction, or much of any leftist politics. The liberal characters hardly ever articulate any actual views, and when they do, they tend to be milquetoast. Ally voted for Jill Stein because she didn’t trust Hillary Clinton; Ivy says she joined the cult because “I hate this country, what it’s become.” Early on, Ally kills a Hispanic employee who she mistakenly thinks is breaking into her house. This is hardly ever mentioned again after it happens, and has no repercussions, which sort of trivializes the issue of racist violence. There’s also virtually no class politics in Cult, so what remains devolves into cultural signifiers. Cult isn’t actually about Ally’s or Kai’s politics but about the kind of people who hold their views.
Additionally, Cult‘s critique of liberals is rather cliché: They’re portrayed as too judgy, too mean. During a presidential debate, one of Winter’s friends hits Kai with vile insults about how his unsuccessful sex life is at the root of his politics. He responds by hitting back physically. Meadow, who lives across the street from Ally and Ivy, feels suffocated by the “feminist expectation of being a ‘boss bitch’”. This intimates a corporatized, pop-culture feminism that stifles the emancipatory potential of the ideology, a real concern. If the point is to demonstrate the sometimes-toxic nature of liberal rhetoric, then point taken. The overall implication, however, is that liberals are leading people into fascism by insulting them. But if you say mean women on Twitter caused you to join a reactionary nationalist movement, I posit that there were probably other factors too.
I also posit that liberalism is not too radical, but not radical enough. Many liberal #Resistance types aren’t actually serious about political change. They have articulated an anti-Trump position, but have little to say about right-wing foreign policy, deregulation, inequality, voting rights, climate change, and the like. Consider Robert DeNiro’s “Fuck Trump” comment at the Tonys: Cult’s writers would consider that line rude and alienating to Trump supporters. But the real problem is that “Fuck Trump” is not a political doctrine, and thus insufficient to improve things. In this context, American liberalism is more of an affectation, one unable to craft political solutions.
Regarding the extremism of Valerie Solanas: Solanas is a little-known figure, and her doctrine of man-hating doesn’t reflect much about modern-day America. Trump’s far-right politics have caused resistance in many forms, including the “#Resistance” that I personally find insufficient and sometimes even conservative, as well as the resurgent socialist movement. But there really are no SCUM-style gangs of man-murdering women in post-2016 America. The season actually ends with Ally, now a US Senator, revealed as a SCUM devotee after running on platitudes about strong, “nasty women”. Is this something that Ryan Murphy and company actually think could happen? Liberal women turning into murderous man-killing extremists? I will concede any number of flaws in modern left-wing movements, but there’s little evidence that misandry is a major one.
Of course, the above is an analysis of Cult‘s politics. The season itself isn’t too bad, but falls far short of required viewing. If you weren’t interested in the series or horror before, Cult probably won’t win you over. It’s got the usual over-the-top AHS blend of gore porn, genuine suspense, and occasionally interesting characters who act with extreme violence. It’s genuinely spooky at first, though once the identities of the clown/cult members are revealed, the season becomes more darkly comedic than actually scary. Kai in particular has some absolutely hilarious moments as he rises politically but deteriorates mentally: At one point he tells his followers the stories of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Heaven’s Gate founder Marshall Applewhite; In his telling they are all played by Evan Peters; Peters even appears as Jesus and Charles Manson in Kai’s warped imagination. Kai also directs a sex ritual using a hilariously saccharine R&B song.
Towards the end of the season, one of Kai’s followers asks if they are a cult or a political movement. Kai replies that “all politics is a personality cult”. That may sound smart to some in the Trumpian, post-fact moment, but it’s really not. Politics is not clashing personalities but the determination of who gets what, and how collective decision-making works. If discourse becomes more about personality than public welfare, we must bring politics back to reality by enacting policies that actually improve peoples’ lives. I believe our nascent socialist and pro-labor movements embody these policies. If only American Horror Story‘s creators had decided to focus on them instead.
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]]>The post I Know the Identity of the anonymous Op-Ed writer appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>The last editorial I wrote for Occasional Planet was on the dangers of a potential post-Trump “unity government”. Consisting of centrists and ostensibly anti-Trump conservatives, it would retain Trump’s agenda while arguing for it in a way more palatable to the general public. The events of the last couple weeks have convinced me more than ever that a unity government of centrists and conservatives is a distinct possibility. After all, the two factions seem to be on quite friendly terms.
First, there was the establishment fawning over now-deceased warmonger John McCain. A particularly odious article in The New Yorker claimed that his funeral was “The Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet”, including Paul Ryan and George W. Bush in the “resistance” to Donald Trump.
Then, of course, came the anonymous New York Times op-ed from a high ranking official in the Trump administration claiming to be a double agent of sorts, preventing the more idiotic ideas of the administration while forwarding its generally conservative course. Wild speculation in the media surrounding the identity of the “heroic” official has been the parlor game of the week. Fortunately, I am here to put an end to such speculation. I have obtained the biography of the person in question, a Citizen of great note. A brief sketch of his life follows:
The Citizen was born in postwar America to a wealthy, white family in the suburbs of a coastal metropolis. They belonged to the first generation of post-sixties reactionaries, who learned to combat the social-democratic reforms of the mid-century via racist dog whistles and intimations of communist dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, in 1980 the Citizen, then a college student, cast his first vote for Ronald Reagan, impressed with his commitment to national security and his rhetoric of American renewal.
He was rarely disappointed with the Reagan presidency; during Iran-Contra the Citizen felt the President showed somewhat unbecoming behavior, but fundamentally believed the administration did the right thing. He considered Oliver North a personal hero to this day. At a conference he had the honor of shaking his hand.
After college the Citizen found work with a conservative think tank with the motto “free minds, free markets, and free people.” The think tank was mainly concerned with preserving and expanding American interests abroad. For their annual speaker series in 1985 they invited Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; in 1986 it was Angolan pro-American terrorist Jonas Savimbi.
During the Bush I years the Citizen was a White House staffer, focusing on issues such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” George Bush, Sr. proved to be a bit of a disappointment for the Citizen: the tax hikes (despite the promise of “read my lips, no new taxes”) and Bush’s decision not to depose Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War were particular sticking points.
After the Democrats took the White House in 1992, the Citizen took a hiatus from politics and joined a venture capital firm that invested heavily in post-Soviet Russia. During the chaos in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the firm made a killing buying up privatized Russian state assets. The Citizen became friendly with the administration of Boris Yeltsin and subsequently that of Vladimir Putin.
In 2001 the Citizen returned to public life after 9/11; he was once again called upon to serve the country in the White House. During the Bush II presidency, the Citizen advocated expanded surveillance on domestic suspects, was a strong proponent of the Iraq War, and urged the president to consider a preemptive strike against Iran.
The Citizen was deeply suspicious of Barack Obama, considered him dangerous due to his association with foreign ideas. The Citizen felt Obama did not have the kind of upbringing and posture befitting an American president. Miraculously, however, despite the Citizen’s repeated criticisms of Obama in the right-wing press, Obama offered the Citizen a place on the National Security Council. The Citizen graciously accepted. He subsequently advised Obama to bomb Libya and invade Syria.
By 2016 the Citizen was a respected intellectual in the center as well as on the right. After exiting the Obama administration, the Citizen was invited on numerous talk shows as a guest, a noted “political expert”. He had his feathers ruffled by the candidacy of Donald Trump, but as a lifelong Republican, he held his nose and voted for him. He was a Cruz voter personally, but we all have to make compromises. After November of 2016 it quickly became clear that the victorious new Trump administration did not expect to win the election, and almost by default the Citizen was hired back as a White House insider.
It is unclear when the Citizen started to feel uncomfortable with the president. He did not seem bothered by ICE’s domestic crackdown, or the Trump administrations cozying up to Islamists in Saudi Arabia and Syria, or the revoking of passports of US nationals based largely on skin color. But one too many conversations with America’s most stable genius, and the Citizen decides enough is enough. He calls the New York Times and begins to type up a strongly-worded anonymous op-ed.
The above biography is obviously fictional, but the quote used above (apart from the Bush I snippet) are excerpts from the Citizen’s New York Times op-ed. I use them to indicate the kind of person who might have written the piece. I see no reason why such a person should be welcomed into the fold of respectable society.
The Citizen presumably knows that it is becoming taboo in elite Washington circles to be a diehard Trump supporter. It is my conjecture that the motive behind his article was not to castigate the president in good faith but to line up his next career move if the administration crashes. This kind of piece is catnip for centrists and moderate liberals who delight in seeing conservatives speaking out against Trump, however rare the spectacle.
Rehabilitation of war criminals and reactionary hacks isn’t without precedent. Take the Citizen’s hero, Oliver North, who in a just world would be mopping the floors of The Hague alongside the Citizen. Disgraced in the 80s for supporting right-wing terrorism and selling weapons to Iran, in the past few years he has run the talk-show circuit, recorded advertisements for Call of Duty (and, in one series entry, played a Cold War-era version of himself), and has now ascended to head the NRA.
The Citizen’s future is yet unwritten, but I have a prediction: When the Trump fiasco ends one way or another, or if the Trump administration becomes irreversibly unpopular, the Citizen will make himself public. First, he’ll appear on MSNBC, then Meet the Press, promoting a new book called “Honor: Four Decades of Service to The Republic”, or something to that effect. Liberals will eat it up.
Of course, by “defending the republic” the Citizen never meant the restoration of voting rights, the end of money in politics and gerrymandering, the shoring up of our civil rights. He meant something vastly more important to him: politeness. If the Citizen has his way, we will never have quality healthcare in this country, or an end to oligarchic governance, or a foreign policy that transcends brutish imperialism. But maybe the people of America will have a president who can speak in complete sentences. Nevermind the content of the sentences themselves.
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