For all red-blooded Americans of a certain age, there are heroes of cinema which bring us back to our childhood, back to Nintendo, back to VHS, back to acne, back to basketball all day. Among the characters who trigger instant and intoxicating nostalgia in my generation are Indiana Jones, John J. Rambo, John McClane, and Rocky Balboa.
And props to Sylvester Stallone for creating and personifying two of these four amazing characters.
Really? This guy? Yes. This guy.
These four characters' sagas share something else: they all disappeared from the screen for over a decade and then came back when my generation was having children of their own. The actors didn't need the work, but they chose to resurrect their characters, surely acknowledging the possibility of diluting their previous glory.
Indiana Jones is one of the most remarkable characters in movie history, as is Han Solo, both played during the same period by Harrison Ford. Fans could be forgiven for assuming that the Indy saga concluded with The LAST Crusade. But no.
When Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 2008, 19 years had elapsed since the release of the Last Crusade. In other words, there were adults who saw the 4th Indiana Jones movie who had not been born when the 3rd Indiana Jones movie came out.
And it was awful. Really, really awful. There is a 5th installment in the works and, as a child of the 80's, I am positively thrilled by this. But I doubt it will improve the overall caliber of the saga, and I fear it may in fact only further degrade it.
John J. Rambo is a much more complex character than many people realize. The original Rambo trilogy, like the original Indiana Jones trilogy, followed a certain arc. Also like Indy, John J's character took 20 years off between their 3rd and 4th films.
2008's "Rambo" (just call it Rambo IV, honestly) was not nearly as bad as the 4th Indy installment, but it was just as pointless. People associate Rambo with violence, and not without reason, but in the first film. First Blood, Rambo killed one person (by accident). In the 4th installment, he kills hundreds. And he added nothing to his character's arc in the process.
John McClane had a 12 year hiatus between the 3rd and 4th installments of Die Hard. The 4th film was actually quite good in certain ways. But also, McClane went from a vulnerable, actual person to someone who literally drove a semi-trailer into a fighter jet. So.....yeah.
Overall, however, Die Hard 4 did not detract from the franchise. But then this happened...
This requires no explanation; it was as bad as it looks
So far, we've covered Indiana Jones, Rambo, and Die Hard. While I love these characters and will gladly and greedily consume any further movies with any of them, none of these sagas were made better by their additions following more than a decade of dormancy.
Now, for the exception. Rocky Balboa is the only one of these characters whose latest iterations have added to the character and to the story. The 6th and 7th installments of the Rocky saga are tremendous. In these movies, Rocky is.....old. Sick. Slowing down. Pondering mortality. You know, real life.
He's not driving trucks into jets, he's not surviving nuclear bombs by climbing into a fridge, he's not unloading automatic weapons. He's a person. It's real. It's devastating. And it's fantastic.
The 6th installment came out 16 years after the 5th.
The 7th installment came out 9 years after the 6th, and at least one more is in the works. He's not rushing it. He's not relying on special effects. He's following the actual moral arc of a character he created 40 years ago, and it is remarkable to behold.
There's such a thing as knowing when to quit. Luckily for us, Rocky knows when not to quit.
To invade, or to invite? If the reader has not read the first half of this post, you can do so below.
The United States has committed grievous sins against the Muslim, specifically Arab, nations over the past two decades. The only reason we need to consider inviting these people is because we've invaded these people.
The American government, media, and public have a disgusting relationship with this reality, bred through ignorance, evil, or an admixture of the two, which essentially denies our direct responsibility for military actions, whether overt or covert, which have led to the death of well over 1 million Muslims, the displacement and dispossession of millions more, and the undying hatred of tens of millions more.
In the first part of this post I attempted to illustrate a few (among many) examples of how invading Muslims leads to death, debt, and a surrendering of any pretense of moral virtue on our behalf. Put simply: we borrow money our grand-kids will have to pay back in order to kill people who didn't attack us, and then we deny that we did any such thing.
The other side of this amoral coin is inviting. Invading and inviting. We kill people who did not harm us, we destroy their societies, then we invite their wretched and starving and bitter neighbors into our country. And, just as we deny that we attacked them, we deny that they could possibly dislike us, or even have different values than us.
Muslim civilization is NOT the same as Western Civilization. I'm starting small here. Muslims from Muslim majority countries do NOT come from the same civilization as people from America and Europe do. To deny the difference between civilizations is as intellectually idiotic as denying the difference between Barbecue and Sushi.
Where most people start getting uncomfortable is when the question arises that asks if the differences between culture can be qualified. In other words, if two cultures are different, can we then say that one is better than the other?
The purpose of this post is not to answer that question, but to illustrate the danger in denying that differences even exist, even if we refuse to assign different moral values to the different things in question.
Here is what Western Civilization is based on in brief: rule of law, separation of church and state, limits on the power of the government, legal equality for all minorities. The West does not do these things perfectly, because the West is run by people and people are not perfect.
But Plato, one of the founders of Western thought, in the Platonic Ideals, tell us that we need to recognize that perfection is impossible while simultaneously recognizing that not trying to get just a little bit closer to perfection every day is to waste your life entirely.
The West is not perfect, but it has crawled slowly, painfully, bloodily, so bloodily, towards an ideal. The Muslim world is, by and large, not on that trajectory. There is no separation of religion and state in mainstream Islamic theology and politics.
Here we have police beating women for being dressed "immodestly". This was filmed, of course, in New York....or not.
The state of women in the Islamic world is miserable. The state of ethnic minorities in Muslim nations is deplorable. The state of Jews in the Muslim world is...well, there aren't any. But there are Muslims in Israel. The state of gays in the Muslim world is to be seconds from death at any moment. I could go on.
This does not mean that most Muslims are bad people. They simply come from a different culture with different values. The question at hand is: if we invite people from a very, very different culture into our country, will those people adopt our values, or will they act on the values from their home countries?
Tolerance is great, but tolerating in-tolerance is suicide, especially for minority groups. Let me be super-blunt: if you are gay, or female, or Jewish, or Christian, or atheist (these groups account for about 98% of the U.S. population), you would be in mortal danger in most Muslims nations if you tried to live the life you take for granted in the United State.
This question, and this tension, is as old as the republic itself. What types of people can the United States absorb and still be the United States? Earlier waves of immigrants and refugees were eyed with suspicion, apathy, or outright hatred.
But for most of this country's history, immigrants were from cultures and countries far, far more similar to the United States than 21st century migrants, refugees, and immigrants from the Muslim world.
And, and this is no small point, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Mexico were not coming from the very countries that the United States had been invading and destabilizing.
Vito Corleone came to Ellis Island fleeing Sicilian crime in Sicily, not American drone strikes in Sicily. There's a difference.
We can take the moral leap of welcoming radically different people into our society as an act of mercy and altruism. OR we can take a much smaller moral hop of STOP KILLING MUSLIMS AND DRIVING THEM OUT OF THEIR HOMES AND INTO OURS.
The American relationship with the Muslim World is at once cynical and naive, simultaneously culpable and ignorant, defined from every angle as an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge obvious truths about the immorality of invading peoples' home and the absurdity of inviting them into ours.
So, to invade, or to invite? In my opinion, we should do neither. As a statement of unfortunate fact, we are doing both. This is immoral and stupid. Were we immoral without also being stupid, we would pick one or the other. But, since our policy is both immoral and stupid, we find ourselves doing both.
First things first: what is the cost of invading Muslim nations?
The first Gulf War of 1991, fought to redeem and restore a disgusting, anti-Semitic, medieval family to the throne of an artificial nation created 30 years before as essentially a naval refueling station for the West, killed 150,000 people in 6 weeks. All for Kuwait.
Because what kind of world would it be without this guy?
The ruling family of Kuwait thanked us for our efforts by carrying out ethnic cleansing, expelling the tens of thousands of Palestinians living and working in their country. And we thanked ourselves by building what were meant to be permanent U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, the holiest land for Muslims.
Many Muslims were not impressed by the persecution of the Palestinians or the stationing of American soldiers in Arabia. One Muslim who wrote and spoke about this event extensively in the 1990's comes to mind....
What could go wrong?
After the 1991 war, the United States enforced sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children. Children. The U.S. did not dispute this fact; instead Bill Clinton's Secretary of State solemnly informed us:
Not big into that whole "conscience" thing, huh?
This is the woman who said that any woman who did not support Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 deserved a "special place in hell". Way to keep things in perspective, Masters of the Universe!
The 2003 invasion of Iraq led to the death, by decade's end, of one million Iraqis. But it was all for a good cause, right? We had to invade Iraq because...oh honestly, fuck it, I can't even pretend to make light of this anymore.
So we switched Presidents in 2009 and got a man who didn't believe in "stupid" wars. A man who was judicious by nature and who would never overthrow a government he found distasteful because of the sober realization that what replaces such governments is usually much more dangerous.
Ah yes, No Drama Obama would surely spare us any more of this nonsense, for practical reasons if not moral ones. Yeah, no.
"Hey, nice to meet you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go borrow some money from China and use it to destroy your country."
Libya was one of the safest, most prosperous Muslim nations with perhaps the highest degree of respect for and mobility of women. And now?
The above picture needs no caption; we all know the drill by now. Christians used to thrive in Libya. Now they are beheaded as the satanic thugs in black gaze across the Mediterranean towards Europe, licking their chops.
When America goes to war, most of our country treats it as a TV show. It is not. It is death. That's all war is. There's nothing heroic or romantic about it. It is the ripping apart of human beings, the evisceration of men, children, grandmothers, and everything else. It is 4 year old boys with their intestines spilling out of their stomach because a cluster bomb exploded too close to their house. It is the father watching his child die, unable to do anything but swear revenge.
When the United States goes to war, what we are doing is killing people. Thousands upon thousands of people, most of them entirely innocent. Even the "guilty" ones are usually "guilty" of nothing other than what most people would do in such situations: defending their homes from invaders.
We need to grow up as a nation. We need to understand the inherent immorality of war. We need to stop the narcissistic nonsense that tells that people will "welcome" us if we invade their homes. We need to develop some sort of consensus that civilized people are supposed to have almost without thinking about it: killing is wrong. It may occasionally be necessary, but it's always wrong. And it always has consequences.
American interventions in the Middle East have not only killed literally millions of people in my lifetime; they have also forced millions more out of their homes. Those broken and brutalized people are fleeing their homelands. Before we can assess where they should go, we need to be honest about why they are leaving.
President Kennedy in the rear seat of an open limousine, What Could Go Wrong?
The death of John Glenn makes perfect sense in 2016. There were few men like him left, men of a simpler time (which is not to say a better time) of clear-cut narratives of American greatness, the brand of greatness that had nothing to do with promising to build rape-proof walls across the desert.
John Glenn was not the first man in space (Yuri Gagarin) or the first man to orbit the earth (Gagarin again). Nor was he even the first American in space (Alan Shepard) or the second American in space (Gus Grissom). He was the first American to orbit the earth.
The enterprise which Kennedy set forth and which Glenn pioneered was an audacious human endeavor, and uniquely American. We promised to achieve something (landing on the moon) for which there was no existing technology, no mental framework, no consensus among experts that the thing was even theoretically possible (what if the lunar surface were covered by a layer of dust that would swallow up any landing craft?)
But the goal was set, and it was set very publicly, ensuring either outright triumph or total humiliation.
Why would someone strap themselves into a can with less legroom than a compact car and then strap that can on top of a missile and then fire that missile into the atmosphere? Because that's what it means to be human; you do it because you can conceive it.
If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that we would indeed reach the moon by 1969, they would be capable of believing that.
If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that Fidel Castro would live for another 54 years, they would not have been capable of believing that.
If you had told someone in 1962 after Glenn's flight that in 1972 America would abandon the moon and eventually stop even orbiting the earth, they would have been incredulous.
Annnnnnnd we're done here.
In the 1990's John Glenn returned to space on the now-defunct Space Shuttle. This flight is as fitting a symbol of the demise of the American space program as Glenn's first flight was a symbol of its ascension.
What was the point of that Space Shuttle mission? Or of any Space Shuttle mission? To fly around in circles in Low Earth Orbit. And that's cool, but...
Wait, didn't I already do this?
The Space Shuttle program flew well over 100 missions to nowhere. It surely made important scientific observations and breakthroughs. The launch and subsequent repair and improval of the Hubble Space Telescope was surely its most important accomplishment.
Where's that 5/8 wrench?
Why are we not spending more money on this???
But the uncomfortable and inconvenient question surrounding most Shuttle missions, including the two that killed all astronauts on board, was "why is this worth risking human life?". There was no clear answer to that question.
Just as America's wars during Glenn's life became harder to explain, justify, or identify an ultimate goal, the space program did the same.
When Glenn was young, there was consensus on certain things that has been lost. Some would argue that we are better off without that consensus, and perhaps we are. But there is also a clarity of purpose that has been lost. As Kennedy's contemporaries continue to shuffle off the mortal coil, we are left with that age-old question: is there really any such thing as the "good old days"?
The Reaper has been busy this year. Prince. David Bowie. Leonard Cohen. The Democratic Party. The Republican Party. The age-old belief that Presidents should not be pussy-grabbers. And now, Fidel Castro. The man who bedeviled 11 U.S. Presidents apparently could not escape old age as easily as he escaped CIA assassins.
Castro was a great man, but great does not mean good, and history is littered with examples of great promise in young leaders degenerating into narcissism, dictatorship, and decay. He was a man of a different time, a different world, the last leader of his generation. Many of his contemporaries (Kennedy, Che, Khrushchev) died a half-century ago. But Fidel endured. He was the Bob Dylan of politics, whereas Kennedy, Che, and Khrushchev were the Hendrix, the Cooke, the Lennon.
The question, of course, is what did he endure for? Castro was a revolutionary, but revolutionaries inevitably become conservatives if they live long enough, which most of them do not.
Fidel was a mass of contradictions. Freedom fighter. Tyrant. Great driver of physical and educational leaps forward for his people. Apocalyptic Egomaniac. This is a man who absolutely improved the health, education, and dignity of his people, but also a man who was prepared to consign them all to a nuclear holocaust.
If there were every any such thing as a good Communist, it was Fidel. But there isn't.
Because of Fidel's total devotion to his people (whether his people wanted that devotion or not), Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the U.S., a longer life expectancy, and a lower child mortality rate. This is remarkable. But was it necessary for him to hold jealously to absolute power for decade upon decade to achieve those very real advances?
And when he was finally forced by physical infirmity to at least publicly hand over power several years ago, was there really nobody on the island better suited for the job than his geriatric "younger" brother?
Finally, some new blood!
Every revolution has its Stalin and its Trotsky. The Stalin figure has a Machiavellian focus on preserving and strengthening the revolution in his own country. The Trotsky figure has an idealistic (but no less bloody) obsession with spreading the revolution worldwide. Fidel was Cuba's Stalin. Che was its Trotsky. Trotsky met his end via ice-pick, courtesy of Stalin. Che met his end via abandonment, courtesy of Fidel.
Fidel wasn't Stalin of course; he didn't murder his former brother-in-arms, but he made no effort to save him, either. Even 50 years ago, less than 10 years into the Revolution, it was clear that Fidel was about Fidel. He saw himself as indistinguishable from Cuba itself, which may sound selfless and romantic at first, but is shown to be incredibly selfish and dangerous over time.
One cannot assess Fidel, of course, without assessing the United States. Our Cold War Cuba policy, in large part, made Fidel what he was. Perhaps without our obsessive enmity towards him, he would have opened up Cuba earlier. But it is also true that Castro thrived on that enmity, and did not hesitate to label any Cuban critic of his dictatorship as a CIA stooge, a traitor to the fatherland.
While Castro has far, far, far less blood on his hands than any other Communist dictator (they call that "damning with faint praise"), he followed the worst instincts of Communism. It is a testament to his genuine popularity among his people that was able to hold on to power for so long and with such comparably little bloodshed.
Castro's impact on American history is monumental. Were it not for Castro, President Kennedy probably would not have been assassinated, as Lee Harvey Oswald was motivated in part by his delusional conviction that he was protecting the Cuban Revolution by murdering John Kennedy.
Turns out the CIA just gave him a really, really, really, really slow-acting poison
If Kennedy had lived, it is entirely possible that no American combat troops would have been sent to Vietnam...
He doesn't look like a world-wrecker, does he?
The 2000 presidential election came down to Florida, and one of the reasons Florida was so close was due to Cuban-Americans' anger at the Clinton administration for sending Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba after his mother essentially kidnapped him from his father in Cuba and died in the desperate flight to freedom aboard a rubber raft. No Fidel obsession, no George W. Bush.
What could go wrong?
Fidel Castro's ultimate legacy, of course, has yet to be written. He will truly be measured by how his people fare after him. Did he lay a foundation for Cuba to emerge as a free, prosperous, and independent nation? Or did he retard the ability of his country to take its place in the world by holding onto power for so long?
Unlike other dictators, it is clear to me that Fidel was motivated primarily by a love for his people. It is also clear, however, that across the decades that love may have become inseparable and indistinguishable from his love for himself.
For those of you who are distressed by the election of an authoritarian mouth-breather, or who are facing any other tribulation that seems to stand like an impenetrable wall in front of you, remember what Leonard said.
"There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That's how the light gets in. That's how the light gets in."
Where to begin? I have so many thoughts that rather than trying to order them coherently into a narrative, I'm just going to go Jackson Pollack with a few central themes in no particular order.
1. STOP CALLING EVERYONE WHO DISAGREED WITH YOU A RACIST. The outcome of this election does not prove that white people are racist. That is a hateful, slanderous and intellectually lazy response and I am unfortunately not surprised that the left is framing this event in those terms. Here is a fairly standard response from the left following the election:
I barely got any sleep last night. It wasn’t because the outcome of this
election made me realize how many morons populate this country, I
already knew that.
There are, of course, thousands of more examples of this attitude. And people like the author of the quote above, who are so smugly certain of their moral and intellectual superiority, are part of the reason this happened.
The left needs to stop acting like white people are some weird alien race to be studied but never fully understood. And by framing Trump's supporters as all white (false) and then using "white" as interchangeable with "racist" or "uneducated" or "angry", the left is guilty of the worst type of projection. People who are obsessed with calling millions of people racist are maybe, just maybe, projecting what is in their own hearts.
Working class whites weren't racist when they voted for Obama, right? But they magically became racist if they opposed Obamacare. Then in 2012 they became un-racist again to re-elect Obama. Now they're racist again because they voted for Trump.
The left treats working class white folks with such utter contempt that it is really shocking that they did not see the inevitable backlash. People tend to resent being called racist, sexist, and simple-minded. That should not surprise us.
Well over 90% of black folks voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. The left did not call them racist. In 2016, black turnout fell by millions, perhaps because there were no black folks on either ballot. The left did not call them racist. That would be stupid. Black folks have been voting for white folks their whole lives.
I say to the left: if you want to convince working class whites to vote for you, stop slandering them in the most vile terms. Stop nominating people who tell white folks that they "all have implicit bias". It's insulting, it's disgusting, and it helped get Trump elected, which is precisely what the left did NOT want.
2. THE MEDIA WERE WRONG, AND THAT MAY HAVE SUPPRESSED HILLARY VOTERS FROM TURNING OUT. Most establishment media outlets had the chances of a Clinton victory on the eve of the election at over 90%. Even without the benefit of hindsight, that was absurd.
The media saw what they wanted to see. They took Trump as a joke, gave him billions in free media for their own financial interest, all the while insisting he could not win and assuring people that Hillary's chances of losing were infitesimal. They were wrong. And in being so wrong, they may have convinced millions of Democrats that they had this election in the bag and that, therefore, one could be forgiven for not voting after a long day at work.
This helped get Trump elected, which is precisely what the media did NOT want.
3. HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE. This needs to stop happening. It didn't happen for the entire 20th century, but this is now the second time in the last five elections that we get a president who won fewer votes than his opponent. Not good. The electoral college is a vestigial tale that needs to be cut off.
The Republican candidate has won the popular vote once in the past seven elections, and then just barely (Bush in 2004) Yet here we are with our third Republican administration during that same period.
Imagine how different the world and our country would be if George W. Bush were not in a position to invade Iraq. Imagine how different the world and our country would be if Donald Trump were not elected.
4. TRUMP GOT 30% OF THE HISPANIC VOTE. For those who never step out of the leftist bubble, this is perhaps the most difficult thing to comprehend. How could any Hispanic vote for Trump? People are confused by this because the media has been telling them for 18 months that Trump hates Hispanics. But let's deconstruct that.
Trump's signature issue was his opposition to illegal immigration. Which, when considering that illegal immigration is illegal, would not have been all that controversial if Trump were not so devoid of empathy and moderation when explaining his position.
But here's what the leftists and the media did: they conflated illegal immigration with legal immigration (wildly dishonest). Then they conflated both of those terms with "Hispanic" (wildly inaccurate). So, to the media, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and Hispanics are all the same thing. Wrong, racist, and idiotic.
5. TRUMP GOT FEWER VOTES THAN MITT ROMNEY AND A LOWER PERCENTAGE OF THE WHITE VOTE THAN MITT ROMNEY. Yes, that's right. So how did Trump win while Romney lost even though Romney, read it again, got a higher percentage of the white vote than Trump? Because Democratic turn-out was far lower this year than in prior elections. And that's on the media for telling Democrats that the election was already won when obviously it wasn't. And it's on the Democrats for insisting on nominating a criminal.
6. OBAMA DIDN'T HELP. For the President to say that he "feared for the Republic" if Trump won was not a great move. Obama, of course, fancies himself the great guardian of the Republic. This from a man who doubled the national debt in 8 years, signed executive orders directing the executive branch to not enforce laws he didn't like, and signed assassination warrants for American citizens who had not been charged with a crime. For Obama to publicly state that a serious contender for his office might destroy the Republic displayed the same self-destructive bubble mentality that plagued the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media.
7. OBAMACARE IS A DISASTER. The most important story of the last weeks of the campaign was the massive premium increases due to Obamacare. While any personal story is by definition anecdotal, I can tell you that Obamacare has increased my premiums, increased my wife's premiums, and decreased the number of hours I can work, thereby decreasing my income and increasing my bills simultaneously. I don't like that. And it's not because the President, whom I admire greatly, is black, and it's not because I didn't go to college (3 post-secondary degrees).
8. WE NEED TO EMPATHIZE WITH EACH OTHER. As a white man with family roots in the Midwest, it pains and angers me to see people like me slandered and condescended to. For all the talk about Trump's lack of empathy (and an utter lack it indeed is) there needs to also be some talk about the lack of empathy for the working class. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump understood this. The "experts" did not.
9. WE'LL BE FINE. The sun will rise tomorrow. God will still be great. Your children will still fill you with indescribably joy, and this will still be the greatest country on Earth. Unplug and tune out for a few days. We all deserve it.
My musical library is entirely dominated by two demographics that would seem mutually exclusive to the uneducated. I generally prefer music written and recorded by white men born very poor no later than 1955 or black men born very poor no earlier than 1965.
One theme that my favorite musical artists explore regardless of their background is death, and specifically the concept of when one is Ready to Die.
For my generation, the term "Ready to Die" is instantly associated with the first album released by Biggie. Biggie today is regarded among rap elitists as the best rapper of all time. He released ONE album during his life. He recorded TWO albums during his life. His second release, "Life After Death", was released shortly after his murder in 1997. He was 24.
24. Take a moment to consider how many years ago you were 24 years of age. He died at 24, and was prophetic enough to openly doubt that he would live to see his work released.
To call Biggie the best rapper of all time is a bit like calling James Garfield the best president of all time based solely on the fact that both men were murdered before they could accomplish very much, leading their followers to wonder what might have been. Twenty years after his death, Biggie's music does not stand up when measured against what his still-living contemporaries have released in the intervening years.
He was 21 when he recorded his debut album. And he was, according to himself at least, "Ready to Die". But again, think back to your early 20's. Think about how smart and sexy and invincible you were. And now consider how much you have grown and evolved since then.
The idea of nationally-available music in America is not old. In fact, some of the first people to take advantage of that fact are still among us.
Rap is still a young enough art-form that there are still no "old" rappers. The Golden Age of rap began in 1992. The rappers who emerged from that era, if they are still alive, are still younger than President Obama was when he was first elected.
American forms of folk and rock music are older than rap, of course, but several of the pioneers from that era are still among us as well. And they are the first recording artists in our culture to face down death not as a twenty-something living out a self-destructive thug life fantasy, but as actual old people.
Johnny Cash spent his last years on the remarkable, and perfectly named, "American" recordings. As accomplished as Cash was by virtue of his previous work, the music recorded at the end of his life, with him knowing it was the end of his life, is perhaps his greatest contribution to American music.
"Hi, death. Don't make me do you like I did that man in Reno..."
Bob Dylan, being Bob Dylan, was 20 years ahead of everyone else by recording his Ready to Die album, Time Out Of Mind, in 1997. Two decades later, Dylan lives, having again reinvented American music when he's not busy meeting popes, presidents, and winning Nobel Prizes and not returning the Nobel Committee's phone calls.
Bobby was bigger than the Beatles when Barack was still in diapers
But the gold standard has been set by Leonard Cohen, who just released the third piece of a trilogy of Ready to Die music. It is astonishing in its serenity, fatalism, and grace. Like Cash and Dylan, Cohen could have died 30 years ago and still have been a first-ballot lock of the Hall of Fame.
Cohen's recent work (Old Ideas, Popular Problems, and You Want it Darker) are evidence that life is a gift that keeps on giving if we are humble enough to accept the natural rhythms of life and not define ourselves or our art by young men's trivial and short-sighted obsessions.
The final three weeks of this election cycle seem destined to be dominated by the wife of a sexual predator arguing that being a sexual predator disqualifies a person from being fit to be president, unless said sexual predator is her husband or a member of her political party. Because of course that's the most important issue at stake in our nation right now.
Character counts. But there are two issues that muddy the water when we try to apply that truth to politics. The first issue is that poor character in one person does not imply virtuous character in his or her political opponent. We are sometimes left with a choice between two people with poor character, and 2016 is decidedly one of those instances.
The second issue is that "character" in modern American media has become synonymous with "sexual behavior". A person's sexual behavior can indeed often be relevant to their overall character, but sexual behavior is far from being the most important component of a person's character in most cases.
Mr. Trump has huge character flaws, and it takes zero imagination to believe that those flaws probably have often expressed themselves via unwanted sexual advances. It is also relevant to his character because he was married during most of these alleged incidents.
But for the Democratic Party to collectively clutch their pearls and feign shock and outrage at Trump's comments and the allegations levied against him is disgusting. If there is such thing as morality, character, and virtue (and there is ) then that morality, character, virtue is only sincere if it is applied to all people equally.
If Democrats claim that sexual behavior is central to character and fitness to serve, then John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton were not fit to serve. And perhaps they were not. But they did. Some of them were bona fide sexual predators. Their affairs were legion, and not always "consensual" by our 21st century standards.
I think relatively highly of President Kennedy. I consider his American University Peace Speech and his Civil Rights Address, both delivered in the last months of his life, to be the two greatest speeches by an American leader in the post-war era.
But John F. Kennedy engaged in behavior that is so beyond repulsive that it literally defies belief. Kennedy was fortunate enough to live (and die) in an era when taking a teenager's virginity in your wife's bed was considered an "affair" and kept private.
Republican Presidents of the last 50 years stand in stark contrast. Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have never had any allegations of boorish, aggressive predation, or even adultery. According to Democrats' newfound evangelism, they must be the greatest presidents in American history.
We have, unfortunately, no shortage of men in modern American history who have behaved in ways that virtuous men would not, but that did not render them wholly evil or incompetent, and the only Democrat during that period that managed to keep his pants on, Jimmy Carter, is not remembered as being a very effective leader.
Nobody's perfect, but some of us are more imperfect than others. Human beings are complicated, and great sin and virtue can coexist within the same human soul. But implying that keeping your clothes on makes you a person of great character is lazy and dangerous.
Hillary can't argue that Trump's sexual rhetoric and behavior makes him unfit without delegitimizing her own husband. And we can't pretend that voting for the invasion of Iraq showed good character just because she was fully clothed when she did so.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." That quote is attributed to Mark Twain, who was perhaps the most American person to ever American, in the vein of Johnny Cash.
Moses is civilization's archetype for a leader. He is strong, patient, forgiving, but irreducibly human. He leads his people through all manner of danger and desperation, and is often not appreciated by the very souls he is saving. Sometimes, he is in fact mocked and disparaged.
But he leads. And when he is inches from his ultimate goal, the proverbial and literal Promised Land, he finds his fate. His fate is not only to die before realizing his final destination, but to be informed that, after his death, the people he led will falter and reject his memory and consign themselves to further misery.
Martin Luther King walked the same path. Some of his people thought him too confrontational. Some thought him not confrontational enough.
Moses is as good a vessel as any to carry the label of "founder of Western Civilization." In the Torah, he codified, through God, the right to reasonable self-defense (Exodus 22:2), the idea of an impartial "Supreme Court" (Deuteronomy 17:8-12), and the necessity for limits on executive power (Deuteronomy 17:14-20).
Martin Luther King took and embraced those concepts and laid bare the moral truth that those liberties and securities must apply to every citizen, channeling Moses, who constantly enjoined the Jews to treat the alien as they would treat themselves.
The night before Martin Luther King was assassinated, he spoke to his people and channeled his precursor, with an eerily prescient premonition that his fate would be the same as Moses'. He spoke of the promised land, and how he would not live to see it.
The ways in which Jews and African-Americans may have failed the visions of their leaders after the death of those leaders is too large an issue to tackle here, but the parallel sagas of Moses and Martin remind us of the glory of Western Civilizations and the fact that these two men represented the most persecuted minorities within the same. That's not a coincidence.
History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.
.He was not yet 40 years old. If that doesn't make your face tingle, you might want to go see a doctor.
As one of millions who are revolted by both candidates for president, I watched the first debate strictly for purposes of entertainment, as one would watch a demolition derby or a movie about the apocalypse. The problem, of course, is that if this were a demolition derby, we would not be safely ensconced in the bleachers but would instead be in the car.
By any objective standard, Hillary cleaned Donald's clock. She was more prepared, more measured, more self-assured, more informed, and more disciplined. But we already knew that. Hillary is the girl who stays up all night studying. Donald is the boy who copies off someone else and then assures us that he has "a very good brain" and knows all "the best words".
But the most telling dynamic was psychological rather than rhetorical. Hillary had a plan, she stuck to it, and it worked. Trump winged it, and he used his wings not to fly, but to swat at invisible insects. And in the course of doing so, he made an ass of himself (not to mix animal metaphors),
Every personal jab Mrs. Clinton sent his way was seized upon by Mr. Trump as a starving dog would seize upon a steak. He couldn't let anything go. He is clearly incapable of doing so. On the biggest stage of his life, Trump navel-gazed. And he did so, dare I say, bigly.
Trump spent so much time defending himself that he never raised his signature issue, illegal immigration. He never brought up his opponent's biggest weaknesses: Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, her entire public career, etc.
There was a question about cyber-security. How did Trump not immediately pounce upon that while debating a women who cyberly-unsecured our entire diplomatic policy?
There was a point where Mrs. Clinton implied that all Americans have "inherent bias". How did Trump not ask Mrs. Clinton whether she herself was "inherently biased" about the African-American debate moderator?
Because we have no good choice, it is clear that we need to settle for the more mature and disciplined individual. The first debate left absolutely no doubt at all who that is. These two people are deeply unappealing and corrupt in their own ways, but only one of them is capable of behaving like an adult who is cognizant of something larger than themselves.
It may be damning with faint praise, but Mrs. Clinton must win this election by default. Mr. Trump has played a valuable role and raised some important issues that establishment politicians would not, but he is so utterly unacceptable in terms of character and decorum that all of that virtue is swept away by his bottomless narssicism.
The good news is that whoever wins this election will probably due so with less than 50% of the popular vote. He or she will be largely despised by half of the country and will probably not be able to implement most of their plans. We're past due for a one-term president. Let's just get this over with and then press reset.
All that aside, if I lived in a state where it mattered, I would purge myself, hold my nose, vote for Mrs. Clinton, and then purge myself again. It is a sad truth that millions of people who vote for Mrs. Clinton next month will do so while suppressing a gag reflex, but it is, astonishingly, better than the alternative.
One of the morally revolting things about war (one of thousands) is that we define loss of life by how many people are killed on "our" side, while ignoring the reality that all of America's war in the last 100 years have resulted in far, far, far more "enemy" civilians being killed than American soldiers.
In addition to American soldiers and local civilians, enemy soldiers are also killed. Enemy soldiers can be seen as terrorists, as people who get what's coming to them, or as people who are defending their homes from an invader. For the purpose of this argument, I will put this issue aside and focus on civilians rather than tackle the more complicated issue of whether resisting invasion makes one a "terrorist".
Another revolting truth is that our "leaders" who set these bloodbaths in motion almost never make any reference to the death sown by their actions. Each individual American who dies in war is lionized as having made the "ultimate sacrifice", as having died for us, while the far larger number of innocent civilians killed are either ignored entirely or chalked up to "collateral damage".
So how utterly twisted is it that the only major American political figure to speak empathetically about these faceless dead, indeed to speak about them at all, is.......Donald Trump.
"Look, the war is a disaster. The war should not have been entered
into. To lose all of those thousands and thousands of people, on our
side and their side. I mean, you have Iraqi kids, not only our
soldiers, walking around with no legs, no arms, no faces. All for no
reason" 7-13-04
Aside from the unfortunate phrasing of people "walking around with no legs", this is an example of a fleetingly rare moral clarity. The man largely understood to be a self-absorbed blowhard, a heartless industrialist, a racist, sexist Islamophobe is the only person with the moral clarity and bravery to even mention the "Iraqi kids".
"Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the
people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mentions the other
side. All those Iraqi kids who've been blown to pieces. And it turned
out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this
for nothing."
8-13-14
These two quotes were uttered 10 years apart. Remember this when Hillary Clinton insists that Trump wasn't "really" against the war. And keep in mind that Hillary's change of heart about the war had nothing to do with heart or humanity. It was pure politics, as was her vote to unleash the dogs of hell in the first place.
It is exceedingly difficult to find virtue in Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, but Trump's unique willingness to acknowledge the humanity of the tens upon tens of thousands of young people who have been physically or psychologically destroyed by our actions stands out prominently amid the moral desert that nearly all of our politicians inhabit.
I am actually moved by this glimmer of humanity, but I am just as distraught that it is so rare. In terms of the most basic humanity, nearly all of our "leaders" are blind. How bizarre that Donald Trump, of all people, may in fact be the one-eyed man.
Of all the images, moving and still, from 9/11 that have been employed to captivate the horror of that day, this picture of Mohammad Atta is, for me, more evocative than any other. This man was the lead hijacker of the first plane to strike the first building on 9/11, and the leader, in fact, of the entire network of 19 nihilists that struck that day.
His very face has all the ingredient of that day: steel, ash, a total lack of pity. Death. He posed for this picture while getting a driver's license in Florida, and it is clear, as so many things are in retrospect, that he was already ready. Perhaps he was hoping that the DMV clerk would somehow end up on one of the planes.
There are so many aspects about what those people did on that day that could be written about that writers have a hard time picking just one. This was a massive conspiracy, spanning continents, with multiple rabbit holes of logistics, planning, funding, and operational support. There were so many targets, so many thousands of tons of steel and glass, so many thousands of innocent people sucked into the whirlwind of it.
9/11 is, to the writer, like an elephant to an ant; it can only be explored an inch at a time. Here are a few inches that have been on my mind since the 15th anniversary of the attacks.
Big picture: the War on Terrorism is an even bigger failure than the war on drugs. Terrorism has increased by 6000% (not a typo. six thousand percent) since 9/11. But most of that violence has occurred outside of the U.S., so we don't focus on it. But we have set the Middle East on fire. They had the gas; we brought the matches.
Other Thoughts:
Why is there no footage or photograph of the plane crashing into the Pentagon? The Pentagon has released a handful of individual frames from a surveillance camera, none of which clearly show a plane. We know there were several other surveillance cameras on nearby buildings, but those are all classified.
Why? If a plane crashed into the Pentagon, and there is video of it, how could it possibly threaten national security to show something that the government says already occurred? Mark my words, if video of the World Trade Center plane crashes could have been kept secret by the government, they would have.
Think about the psychology of an organization that will not release images of an event that that very same organization wants us to believe happened. The government creates conspiracy theories by its obsession on keeping things secret even if it insists that we accept the obvious truth of those things.
I assume a plane hit the Pentagon, but I know these two things: Firstly, the government claims to have, and refuses to release, objective evidence of that event in the form of video footage. Secondly, there is no independent video or photograph of an airplane approaching or impacting the Pentagon.
Washington DC, as opposed to New York, does not have modern skyscrapers. It is less dense and lower-lying than New York. Because of this, any aggressive, low-flying aircraft would be far more visible from much further away in DC than it would be in lower Manhattan.
And, like New York, Washington DC is full of people with money, people in media, and tourists. In other words, people with CAMERAS. And yet, there is no photograph or film, from any source, of an airliner flying fast and low along the Potomac River even though everyone in DC would have already known that hijacked airplanes were being flown into buildings representing American power.
The only footage that does exist is in the hands of the government, but they won't release it because it needs to be secret even though everyone "knows" what it shows, but we only know that because of an unshowable tape. It's exhausting.
Another thought: I think the most likely cover-up being orchestrated by the government is that some of the hijackers were working for our government and were, in fact, double agents sent by bin Laden to infiltrate our intelligence services.
Consider: the CIA would have been desperate from 1998 to 2001 to recruit agents that could infiltrate al Qaeda and pass us information on the next attack. These recruits would ideally be young Arab men. What it the CIA unwittingly recruited al Qaeda members to spy on al Qaeda?
What if some of those terrorists came to the US under CIA protection, claiming to be tracking the "real" terrorists while, in really, they were the real terrorists? And what if you were a CIA agent who, on that awful day, saw pictures of the hijackers, knowing that some of them were being supported and paid by your very own agency?
What would you do? You would bury that information. And you would tell yourself, not without reason, that if the truth ever came out....
9/11 will never end. I'm confident that most of the government's
account of what happened is true, but I am equally as confident that
some of it is not. We are all left to live in the chasm between those two truths.
Hillary Clinton got her start in Washington D.C. 40 years ago as a very junior member of the apparatus that drove Richard Nixon from the presidency for committing the worst of all political crimes: getting caught doing what your predecessors did without getting caught.
Hillary, on the other hand, did not get caught committing old and common political crimes; she got caught inventing her own, brand new political crimes. And not only will she not be driven from the presidency for her crimes; odds are that she will in fact be driven to the presidency in spite of them.
Hillary's email scandal is difficult to deconstruct for a few reasons; one is that the mainstream media is covering it, but not really explaining it. Another is that it involves computers which, even for people who have lived in a computerized world for years, can quickly descend into incomprehesible techno-babble.
Yet another reason is that this scandal doesn't involve sex. It is thanks in part to Hillary's husband the scandal and sex are often so synonymous that a scandal involving people with all their clothes on seems somehow not very scandalous at all, even if it is far more relevant to one's fitness to be president than one's private sexual behavior.
If Hillary had been sending pornography from her phone, she would have to drop out. But she was only sending national security secrets, so......whatever.
I will attempt here to explain this issue in a more comprehensible way, while acknowledging that I myself still do not, and never will, fully grasp all of its dimensions and implications. I will attempt to focus on a couple of big-picture concepts rather than to dissect all the technological and stautory minutiae.
When someone works at the level of Hillary Clinton in the federal government, their communications are public property. Almost none of these communications can be made public in the here and now and much of it never will due to national security concerns, but it is, in theory if not in practice, the public's information.
A brief aside: some things must be classified. The names of individuals in other nations who are risking their lives in the enterprise of passing us information should obviously not be made public. But in the national secuirty state we now inhabit, the government has a motive and a habit of classifying nearly everything it does.
That is a huge problem. We are paying for these actions, they are being done in our name, and we will reap the results, whether positive or negative. Much more of what our "leaders" do should be made public in a much more timely manner.
That very important caveat aside, all of Hillary Clinton's communications as Secretary of State were the property of the government and, eventually, hopefully, of the public at large. What they most decidedly were not was the personal property of Hillary Clinton.
When Clinton was sworn in, she was advised that personal email accounts cannot be linked to government devices. In other words, if Hillary had a gmail account, she was forbidden from accessing that acount from a government-issued phone or laptop.
This is because government-issued devices are used to conduct government business, much of which is secret. These devices, therefore, have all sorts of high-tech and high-cost protections against hacking. Allowing personal emails to flow into a government-issued computer would expose that computer to possible hacking via spam mail, viruses, etc.
So, Hillary was forbidden from getting her personal email on her government devices. So what did she do? She got her own devices, without all the protective bells and whistles, and used those personal devices for both personal and government communications.
Imagine if Hillary Clinton were the principal of an elementary school. She is informed by the powers-that-be that peanuts must never be allowed in the kitchens or cafeteria of her school because several of her students have life-threatening peanut allergies and the possibility of a mistake or a cross-contamination could literally be a life or death issue.
What would Hillary do in that situation? She would not bring peanuts into the school; she would bring the entire student body on a field trip to a peanut farm and then tell the mayor and the school board that she didn't break any rules.
Another way to look at this issue is to go old-school. Forget emails and servers and encryption software. Think about paper. Everyone understands paper. Think of the emails as paper documents.
The State Department is full of top-secret documents. The State Department is a very secure building and there is a rule, indeed a law, against any person taking any document out of the building for any reason.
Hillary decides, in this analogy (and maybe in real life, who knows?), to take top-secret paper documents home with her every night. When the State Department finds out and asks her to return those documents, Hillary says, "Sure, but I've mixed them all in with my bills, personal letters, poetry, and doodles. Give me a few weeks take out the personal, irrelevant stuff and then I'll give you all the government stuff back."
What does she do in those few weeks? She goes through all the government stuff, our property, and decides which of those stolen documents she will return. Whatever stolen documents make her look bad, she will destroy.
We know now that Hillary's staff took her personal devices, which were full of stolen government property, and literally smashed them with hammers. Presumably the vibe was something like this:
So, in summation: Hillary stole government property, decided which of that property to return, decided which of that property to destroy, and we have no way of knowing what property was either destroyed or pilfered by hostile foreign governments or terrorist organizations or drug cartels.
There's so much more to this, but what's been outlined here is enough to disqualify this woman from office. She will, in all likelihood, still win, and if she does I have no intellectual option other than to wish her well. But in either case, just like her husband, we know exactly what we will be getting.
