The knives were out for Iran again this week … not that that’s all that different from other weeks in America. Trump dropped an open threat on Twitter, his preferred channel for delivering such messaging. I know he’s never read it, but his little all-cap tweet is a blatant violation of Article 2 (principle 4) of the U.N. Charter, which, ratified by the U.S., is the supreme law of the land:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Of course, this principle gets violated all the time without consequence, particularly by our own leaders and those of our allied nations. Not sure how, exactly, this prohibition made its way into this document back in the day when the United States was the sole remaining power and the first-ever superpower in world history. We had an enormous hand in erecting this international order, putting ourselves at the very top of the global power structure in as much as we were the only nation to have emerged from the ravages of World War II stronger than before. Why would we include this principle only to violate it consistently for the next seventy years?
My point, I guess, is that this reckless sabre rattling is nothing new. What’s new is the fool in command. Trump is offensive in every manner you can name. I think he particularly grates on me because I’ve always hated reality television, and that more than anything else defines his public persona. After decades of avoiding reality shows like the plague, my fellow Americans elected a reality star president of the United States, and he is now doing his level best to turn our very reality into reality television. Now we not only have to watch the lousy show every day – we are bit players in the freaking show! From my perspective, it’s like drinking a pint of urine the moment you get out of bed in the morning. Pleasant.
What’s worse than that, though, is the empire crap. Posers like Pompeo and Bolton will use Trump to get their beloved war with Iran. That – and not so much the reality show BS – is what we need to concentrate our energy on.
luv u,
jp
It’s an exhausting undertaking, particularly when you are as work-averse as I am. Still, I’ve made pretty good progress. I’ve gotten most of them transferred to digital, and now I’m pruning around the edges, looking for songs that I know exist but haven’t located on tape as of yet. I’m also trying to fit all of Matt’s Christmas song collections into appropriate buckets — he did about eleven of them, starting with a handful of songs in 1985 up through 1995. They represent a subset of his total output, but even so, it amounts to about 60 – 70 songs. I’m curating them so that at some point interested parties can listen to each year’s collection in its original sequence.
That said, the coverage of this series of incidents has been so over the top it’s almost dizzying. Mainstream center-left commentary has portrayed this performance as evidence of treason, selling out the country, proof that Donald Trump is a mere puppet of the nefarious Vladimir Putin. It’s a circumstance in which everyone from war hawks like John McCain to drone apologist John Brennan to Rachel Maddow is in full agreement: Trump should have been tougher on the Russians. He should have never held this summit. Our country was “attacked” by Russia. Their interference in our election was “an attack on American Democracy” of a magnitude similar to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. How many died in the battle of Election 2016? Ask these folks.