Lightning Rod
Good for Dennis Rodman! He has invited a shitstorm upon himself by visiting North Korea as part of a basketball-related (unofficial) humanitarian trip. He doubled down while he was there by calling the ruling family of Kims there “awesome” and “great leaders.”The former NBA’er is off most of the public radars at this point in his life, but the security state and its cultural class will flock back to him briefly now just for the purpose of hammering him. He'll be called silly and unimportant because what he's doing threatens the principles of permanent war. His opening four words to Kim this week, "I come in peace," still carry with them the baggage of revolution. He'll get the non-political, celebrity version of the Ralph Nader/Noam Chomsky treatment. I’ve already seen Rodman referred to in print this week as ignorant, brainwashed, an attention whore, a desperate former celebrity, and that’s just from one article in New York Magazine. Notice how this "neutral report from CNN makes snide, pointless reference to the fact that Rodman's basketball nickname is "Worm." Notice also how South Korean and U.S. military exercises in the region are referred to in the story as "routine," while North Korea's nuclear program is presented as menacing.
Rodman, always at the rhythm of his own internal drum, is actually showing here that he understands the true definition of diplomacy. Kim Jong-un is fresh to power in North Korea. He's certainly the son and grandson of a pair of tyrants, and a young tyrant himself. But tyrants lead many of the nations on Earth (including this one if we're applying the title fairly). Most of these global tyrants are our allies, or at the very least, open to conversations with the United States. American diplomats travel to Saudi Arabia, to Russia, to China, to Chile, and to Israel, but North Korea, for geopolitical reasons dating back to the Cold War, remains in that special category of our greatest enemies. They are cut off from diplomatic niceties, they are the unpredictable, most dangerous of threats. Like the Hun and his band before them, and the Bolsheviks, and the fascists, and the communists, and the Islamic terrorists.
Most nations can drift on and off our radar as enemies. We publicly approve of some their actions, and renounce others. But these top echelon security threats are always needed to justify the size and scope of the military-industrial, corporate-intelligence state. They allow us to keep our populace sufficiently fearful, to justify extrajudicial aggression, to dismiss pacifists as weak, to question the patriotism of our dissenters and exploit them with violence, to demand always-greater government secrecy, to abate public opinion generally, and to move more money- through the expunging of public services, regressive taxation, and open government bribery-- from the hands of the poor into the pockets of the rich.
Is a retired, forty-something, former rebounding machine highly-visible enough anymore to threaten the efficacy of this well-oiled machine? Probably not. But better safe than sorry.
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It turns out that the boardroom vermin at a dozen tobacco companies have been ordering their cigarettes to be filled with cat litter, and in so doing, also avoid paying better than a billion dollars in taxes. You know I’m starting to think that maybe cigarette smoking isn't so good for you.
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The ultimate shaming moment for both the New York Times and Washington Post was the moment that they each received the whistle blowing “Collateral Murder” military video and the millions of accompanying, implicating documents from Bradley Manning in 2010, and then failed to act upon them. Of course we know that the Post and their “embedded” reporter, David Finkel, had already seen the video. This article describes the timeline and details of Manning approaching the two newspapers. As a bonus, it also provides the text for part of Manning’s impassioned, persuasive court testimony on Thursday. I fear that the justice system's ultimate shaming moment is about to arrive.
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Remember the excitement 18 years ago when Robert De Niro and Al Pacino finally appeared together on screen. It was in Michael Mann’s crime picture Heat. The two celluloid standouts had never worked opposite each other before, the closest being when they appeared in alternating time periods of The Godfather Part II. The wait was well worth it, the electricity palpable in Heat between the two leads.
That’s the same excitement I feel every time I watch Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins on screen together in Justified.
posted by CM @ 11:15 AM
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