Tag Archives: 9/11

Political Rants

Clueless Rudy.

Impeachment is now officially under way. That’s not what I’ll write about today, however, because you are most likely hearing about that absolutely everywhere else, and I have little or nothing to add to what’s being said elsewhere. Today I’ll opine on the career and slime trail of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose evident losing battle with dementia is being televised nightly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask, what happened to Rudy? The answer is simple: nothing. Like Trump, he’s just as nasty as he ever was, only older and more scrambled.

Because of the nature and the timing of the 9/11 attacks, many people remember Giuliani fondly as “America’s Mayor”, I think mostly because he didn’t run up the street screaming when the towers fell. What he was then, of course, was a failed mayor at the end of his term, a man with the blood of many people of color on his hands, and an immensely corruptible individual whom Jimmy Breslin once famously described as a small man in search of a balcony. Well … he found that balcony, and then some. Anyone who remembers Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and Abner Louima knows something about what policing was like in NY City under America’s mayor. His personal abuses were legendary. At one point during his tenure, I remember a random cab driver (unofficial one; the 90s equivalent of an Uber driver) complaining about how Giuliani’s lover’s kids would run wild in the driver’s apartment building, bragging that they had mayoral protection. But I digress …

Why pick this photo? Because he effing deserves it.

After achieving hero status in the wake of 9/11 (despite his placement of the emergency command center up a few precarious floors in the World Trade Center after the 1993 attack and his sweetheart contract with Motorola for emergency communications that failed on the fateful day), Giuliani went out into the world, proffering his supposed expertise in security and anti-terrorism, helping police agencies, despotic governments, and corporations keep the rabble in line … for a steep consulting price. I suspect he thinks of Trump as just another despot who needs his services, and he would be right. Now, in his dotage, Giuliani may make a lot less sense, but he is still treated with some deference in foreign capitals, and more so thanks to his close association with the president of the United States.

Let’s be clear: in 2016, Giuliani openly bragged just days before the election about the New York office of the FBI having the goods on Hillary Clinton. A short time later, the story broke about Anthony Weiner’s laptop and the revival of the email probe, effectively torpedoing any chance of a Clinton victory. He and Trump relied on this tactic to get candidate Trump over the electoral finish line. It worked then, and it may work again without some real effort on the other side.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Fear itself (again).

These grim days remind me a bit of the far worse days of late 2001, when our nation was reeling from the 9/11 terror attacks and the world seemed to be falling in on itself. (It happened that my family life was imploding at the same time, but that’s another story.) I guess what reminds me most of that time is the visceral fear evident not only in mass media culture but in everyday life. People are scared, very scared about some relatively minor threats, while at the same time seemingly unconcerned about the real dangers facing us.

Year 2 of the Romney foreign policyThis is a cultivated disconnect, certainly no accident. Every day, the news media hammer away at the threat of Ebola, of ISIS, of Russia, and to a lesser extent North Korea and Iran. In the case of the former, we’re reaching a near hysteria about a virus that has affected only a handful of Americans, and only three cases in the U.S. The public has been worked up into such a lather that politicians are falling over themselves to try to benefit from it, take advantage of it, channel it in some way that is useful to them. One only wishes we could evoke this sort of reaction on actual threats, like our disastrous automotive transportation system that kills over 30,000 of us a year.

I only raise that particular example because it’s the 24th anniversary of my brother’s death behind the wheel of a crappy, very common unsafe-at-any-speed vehicle. There are far greater threats, though – those of climate change and of nuclear war, for instance. The former we cannot bring ourselves to seriously address; the latter we have discounted and essentially forgotten, unless our attention is turned to an official enemy, like Iran or North Korea. If our news media were reporting on these issues the way they report on a hemorrhagic African virus that’s not half as contagious as the flu, we might ultimately feel motivated to do something about them. So far, no potato.

We are probably the most fearful people ever to run an empire. It’s something we need to overcome, so that we can arrive at the kind of clarity we need to see what actually confronts us.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Permanent rule.

I’ve heard a lot of commentary in recent days about the state of affairs in Egypt, in Russia – about the primacy of the military and the intelligence services in the political life of those countries. Not as much about our own permanent government. I’m talking about the national security regime that persists independently, it seems, of what administration occupies the White House or runs the Congress. It’s a little hard to pass judgment on others when we ourselves have accommodated to something less than democratic rule.

It’s not that this is totally new. We had the Vietnam war, for instance, through Democratic and Republican presidencies, fought with comparable levels of savagery. The latest cycle, which started on September 11 2001, just nine months into the new century, seems much more pervasive, opened ended, and unquenchable. We invaded Afghanistan and still haven’t left. We’ve expanded our expionage and “homeland” security apparatus to encompass literally thousands of federal and contract installations, employing millions of people. We are spied upon in a way that makes the cold war East German state seem amateurish by comparison.

Is this the problem? Really?Even something as seemingly simple as closing Guantanamo. It would have enormous symbolic value, of course. But even though the president professes to want it closed, it remains open. Why? Why haven’t those cleared for release been released? Why haven’t the ones determined innocent / not a threat been moved to some residential setting that isn’t a prison cell? It’s almost as if that policy level is beyond the reach of democratically elected officials. We seem frozen in place since 9/11, unable to adjust our course, unable to accomplish practically anything aside from blowing things up, assassinating people, and spying on their ass. Hunger striking inmates are force fed, even though the president – a constiitutional lawyer – knows that that is abusive and wrong. Can’t change it.

We have to take power back from this permanent government, even if it means standing in the street and facing it down.

luv u,

jp