fearmongering

European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro are racist accidents of History, or of the “free world”. It’s just the opposite. Under the advertising varnish of capitalist globalization, the deep History of our world has never disappeared, it has even come back to the surface, even stronger.

Demonstrators on Wednesday, June 3, 2020 in downtown Los Angeles (AP Photo:  Ringo H.W. Chiu)

I am not trying to be cute and play with words.  That title is meant to convey what it says, so let me explain.

Do you know who coined the curse, “conspiracy theory” or accusation, “you are conspiracy theorist!”?  It was nobody less than the CIA in the 1950s, to silence those who saw through the lie of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This was a complete lie by US war strategists to install fear in the population in general and in Europeans in particular and to boost the American Military Industrial complex and presenting a constant threat to the communist Soviet Union.

The corporate media and corporate politicians are paralyzed with indecision.  Which fake myth do we adhere to?  “Black people burning down their own neighborhoods” or “outside agitators”?  What if it’s both, and more…?

Well, it looks like the Resistance’s long-anticipated “Second Civil War” has finally begun … more or less exactly on cue. Rioting has broken out across the nation. People are looting and burning stores and attacking each other in the streets. Robocops are beating, tear-gassing, and shooting people with non-lethal projectiles. State National Guards have been deployed, curfews imposed, “emergencies” declared. Secret Servicemen are fighting back angry hordes attempting to storm the White House.

Since Hunter Thompson isn’t here to continue along the Gonzo journalistic path of fear and loathing, I’ll just have to do the job.  I’m quite certain he would do so if he hadn’t left us so abruptly.  And unless I’m crazy, there’s never before been a situation quite this frightening and loathsome.  My lady left me a couple days ago.  Turned away from the embrace of a man who refuses to wear a mask as protection from the dreaded Carumba Virus.  And now I’m alone.  Sheltering in place in the foothills of The Tucson Range.  Our relationship trashed by the good advice of her pastor, the sacred l

It is not only about physically surviving the pandemic. People miss people, and places, sometimes desperately. And they die when separated.
We are bombarded by briefings and numbers. We are scared into submission by horrifying medical stories, by shocking images, and then, simultaneously, by predictions of economic and social downfall. Day and night, day and night.
But somehow, so often during this so-called coronavirus emergency, we tend to forget that people are people, not numbers, and that bare survival is far from everything.
*****

Asset Deals: John Paul II and his successor ex-Hitler Youth and Roman Grand Inquisitor Joseph Ratzingen, Benedict XVI1

My columns haven’t been very funny recently. This one isn’t going to be any funnier. Sorry. Fascism makes me cranky.
I don’t mean the kind of fascism the corporate media and the fake Resistance have been desperately hyping for the last four years. God help me, but I’m not terribly worried about a few hundred white-supremacist morons marching around with tiki torches hollering Nazi slogans at each other, or Jewish-Mexican-American law clerks flashing “OK” signs on TV, or smirking schoolkids in MAGA hats.