"I'm worth less than a laptop"
Happy Memorial Day.
Before politicians were laying wreaths at cemeteries yesterday, Goldman Sachs was using the holiday month to welcome defense industry executives to a conference of bankers at their corporate headquarters in Manhattan. Eric DeMarco, the head of Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, addressed the gathering on the topic of the rising threat of war with Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. He told investors that these conflicts could be great for their business and his, that Kratos was "very well-aligned" to handle a U.S. return to nation-state warfare.
While politicians bowed their heads in prayer and meditation before television and newspaper cameras, the Department of Justice moved to the next step of extradition and prosecution on the 17 indictments filed last week against Julian Assange. Among Assange’s alleged crimes is publishing classified information about the U.S. military killing of unarmed civilians and journalists.
While politicians were praising the ultimate sacrifice of men and women in uniform, members of the House and Senate soaked in the success of the major defense spending bill they approved last week that raises spending on that budget item for the second time in two years, now to
$750 billion for 2019. Last year, the same two bodies pushed through a military budget that was at $716 billion, almost $80 billion more than the amount the Commander-in-Chief requested. The 750 billion dollars are the most seen for the military since 2009, when 180,000 troops were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate bill provides $10 billion specifically for 94 F-35 Fighters, 16 more than what the Pentagon requested.
While politicians issued media releases about the sanctity of the holiday, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, with a collection of B-52 fighter jets, remained in their position in the Persian Gulf in the waters off Iran. Pentagon sources announced threatening but unspecified threats from the Iranians, and reports have up to 120,000 American troops potentially being mobilized for a war crime assault against Iran that would be eerily reminiscent of the Gulf of Tonkin incident at North Vietnam 55 years ago this summer.
When the United States Army’s Twitter team asked the question online late last week: “How has serving impacted you?” they received some answers that were certainly unintended. Jeffrey Scott @Jscott916 tweeted back,
“I am a Navy vet. I was a happy person before I served, now I am broke apart, cant even work a full 30 days due to anxiety and depression. I am in constant pain everyday. And I think about killing myself daily.” Karen @educatorsresist wrote,
“I lost my virginity by being raped in front of my peers at 19. Got married to a nice guy who was part of my unit. He was in the invasion of Iraq. Came home a changed man who beat the shit out of me. He’s convinced y’all are stalking him and he’s homeless so great job there!” Schmoz @IvoryGazelle wrote,
“Depression, anxiety, still can’t deal with loud noises. I was assaulted by one of my superiors. When I reported him, with witnesses to corroborate my story, nothing happened to him. Nothing. A year later, he stole a laptop and got demoted. I’m worth less than a laptop.” And KrissyK @krissyk262 wrote,
“My sweet friend David can’t answer you. He committed suicide a few years ago after a couple tours in Afghanistan.”
Happy Memorial Day
The 9/11 comedian
Howard Stern’s book of interview transcripts is out-- and I’m devouring it. The self-annointed "king of all media" truly
is the greatest interviewer we have, in my estimation, and this one culls from his best and presents only the highlights from those best. So just imagine how provocative and engaging it is to sit down with these 550 pages.
One of the most interesting interviews he’s ever conducted on either terrestrial or satellite radio is one that speaks to the act of interviewing itself. Steve Rannazzisi is a stand-up comic and the star for several years of FX’s
The League. As that series was winding down in 2015, it was revealed in the New York Times that Rannazzisi had not been-- as he had claimed for many years-- inside one of the Twin Towers when the first plane hit on 9/11. The fact that he had lied about it was confusing to many, including me. The presumption that people have is that the then-very-unknown comic created the story as a way to boost his career. Before Pete Davidson (of
SNL Fame, whose father died in the disaster) became the unofficial 9/11 comedian, Rannazzisi was kind of the guy. And though the two quickly came to forgiveness and understanding, Davidson joined many others initially in 2015 in condemning Rannazzisi for his offense.
Since I’m not easily offended by such crimes against humanity, I find myself pondering mostly the why. I gave an interview last year-- to my friend, Jamie Marchiori. It was in respect to this blog. It was a maiden voyage for him in podcasting, an uncertainty for both of us about what was beginning, but I still felt a terrific pressure to be entertaining as a guest. During the recorded chat, I attempted a few dumb and pointless jokes, which he mostly and mercifully sliced out. It was promotion for me, I felt. I wanted to justify being interviewed to begin with, just as Rannazzisi would have wanted to do when he first told the lie publicly to Marc Maron on the
WTF podcast in 2009, shortly after scoring his big break on
The League. (However, he had been telling comedy colleagues the story going back to 2001.) I wanted to build a persona in my brief little chat. I very consciously attempted it. My pal didn’t yet have any episodes for me to listen to as an outline so I imagined he was Gilbert Gottfried on the Amazing Colossal Podcast, and I was someone he would want to invite back.
We all constantly do this, I believe. Most of us likely come right up even to the edge of what Rannazzisi did. Self-deception is everything in this life. The truly big difference between him and most of the rest of us is that his lie could be easily fed into the grinder of manufactured public outrage. It allowed sharpened observers to promote their own patriotism by harshly judging his offense and cudgeling the rest of us once more with that well-worn sword.
God knows his
unique crime was not using the tragedy of 9/11 to his own personal benefit. An entire government department-- Homeland Security-- was invented for the purpose of letting private business steal from the national treasury. Hundreds of politicians built themselves up by sewing the fear of foreigners into the fabric of the nation. We went to war with a handful of uninvolved countries over the day’s events. Police departments and officers’ unions, in New York and beyond, continue to tap into your memory of the tragedy in an attempt to disguise their crimes in other areas. Airlines fought tooth and nail for years against regulations to install security doors on cockpits, but quickly asked for federal dollars to do it in the wake of the thousands of lives being lost in 2001. I consider each of those acts to be much more shameless than Rannazzisi’s.
Many of his loudest detractors were probably doing so exactly to promote themselves and/or their pet causes, not unlike he had done. It’s a cottage industry. And not to point at Davidson, but even he likely got a tiny bump by piling on in that particular moment that his colleague was outed. Comedians are ball-busters. They make their living as society’s truth-tellers, and Pete’s arc becomes even more authentic when another one flames out by comparison, and he pushed a couple snarky tweets out before coming around to forgiveness.
I’m sure we can all appreciate how a small lie is capable of growing. Tangled webs and all that. And I don’t doubt that, as a New Yorker, Rannazzisi felt deeply connected to the story from its inception-- a very scary story. I was quite scared at the time of 9/11 myself, and I remember being pushed towards it even more so by people around these faraway parts seemingly even more scared than I was. And we were more than a thousand miles away from the smoke. From the gun, the news media throughout the land was telling us how important this event was-- but also, don’t forget, how important
we were to be living through it. Our confusion and narcissism led us to believe we were targets in Iowa at the time as well, even though the hindsight of history has made that idea seem quite foolish.
Really? They’re coming for our fertilizer? (That’s where Homeland Security came in.) Natural narcissism was mixed with great fear, a little of it justified, much of it, honestly, irrational.
Recorded interviews by celebrities invite so much lying. The entire idea of the interview, typically, is to build the interviewee’s brand. There’s no way that every celebrity in Hollywood was a nerd in high school, yet their individual claims lead us to believe that almost every one of them was. They want people to like them. Steve Rannazzisi wanted people to like him. Then he went on the Howard Stern show to apologize because, he said, Howard and his show “personified New York.” (Aside again: great show, great book.) Steve is a gifted comedian and actor, and based on that, wouldn’t necessarily need to have lied to aid his way along, but he must also know that his business-- entertainment-- is an insatiable one, and not a reasonable one. It makes unfair expectations upon its practitioners, and 100% truthfulness would certainly be one of those.
Read all about it
Furnishing the war
It's an historically-recognized ignominy that in 1898 major American newspapers fanned the flames of war with Spain over Cuba. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer put their competing scandal sheet empires to the purpose of inventing offenses by the Spanish on the Caribbean island. There’s no evidence to support this following particular anecdote-- later popularized by the film
Citizen Kane, but the story goes that a bored artist on Hearst’s rolls asked to be returned home from Cuba in 1897, with the missive “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.” The mogul reportedly denied the man’s request-- as well as his general assessment of the Cuban political situation-- with the volley, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”
The inventions to come included false claims related to Spanish atrocities, in particular the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine. The war made a hero of Theodore Roosevelt, a wave he rode all the way to the U.S. presidency, and it marked the beginning of the U.S. naval fleet as a global power. Print journalism, in its infancy at the time, was not marked by any distinct ethics or standards. Sensation sold papers-- and in cooperation with the power shakers of Washington, sold policy to boot. A later inquiry, far off into the future in 1974, determined that the explosion that sunk the Maine stemmed from an accident on board, not an enemy attack at all, but “Remember the Maine” was a battle cry in print that served to pump up the edgy conflict into full-blown war at the time.
It still occurs that the U.S. government uses tentacles of the dominant media as asset in achieving its aims. At the turn of the 20th century, it was Cuba we wanted. In 2019, it’s Venezuelan oil for the possession and greed of multi-national energy companies. The Nation has published that the U.S. government staged a fraudulent coup d’etat of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in recent days, in hopes that the media reports would encourage Venezuelans to attempt a coup for real, and would also soften-- among Americans-- the hypothetical of U.S. military intervention. Both CNN and the New York Times, ever credulous, took the bait and offered exhaustive coverage of the manufactured incident.
On April 30th, a CNN reporter went on the air and reported that the CIA’s man in Caracas, and the Trump administration’s choice for Venezuelan president, Juan Guaido, was addressing “thousands of supporters” at a military airfield, when in actually he was addressing nobody at all in the staged video, and was not located on occupied military property, but along a highway. The “thousands” of purported military personnel ready to join the coup is now thought to have numbered as few as 30 soldiers.
Shoddy, lazy journalism with little to no standards being applied, along with a plethora of mistakes-- or concerted propaganda funneled through the corporate press from a U.S. intelligence state that has targeted Venezuela’s democratically-elected Socialist government at least as far back as a failed 2002 coup attempt against then-president Hugo Chavez? That’s the question left to be answered.
Here’s the published account from The Nation.
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The Worst Democrat
It’s bad enough that New Jersey congressman Josh Gottheimer is on the take from Israel and Saudi Arabia. He also chides progressive revolutionaries in Congress as the “Herbal Tea Party,” and
talks down to colleagues in private meetings where he meets them with binders outlining things they may or may not have ever said publicly. And what we all need to understand about this two-party system that AOC, Tlaib, and Omar are trying to infiltrate is that it would leave corporate Democrats with nowhere to go. Joe Lieberman was forced to become an independent-- which is something the centrists believe only “radicals” should be forced to do. Gottheimer has made his political career lying to-- but relying upon the support of-- self-identified Democrats and so he’s not about to split with the new progressives (that will be soon taking over) and join the Republicans. That’s a branding problem for a former Bill Clinton speechwriter even though that’s the party with which he aligns and to which he
should belong. He truly could not be a more of a damaging figure to the future of the Democratic Party and to the cause of progressivism if he were a paid operative of the right, which, I guess, he technically is. The tent’s not large enough for the bank crooks and war profiteers like him and also the people’s advocates. We’ll come to watch it implode.
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Open minds
Madeleine Pape held bitterness for years over losing to Caster Semenya in track competition at the World Championships in Berlin in 2009. This month, in the Guardian, she
issues a mea culpa over her initial feelings of dispossession. She writes…
Quite unexpectedly, I found myself taking a class where I was made to revisit what had unfolded at those championships. For the first time, I encountered the vast literature written by advocates of women’s sport who oppose the exclusion of women athletes with naturally high testosterone for both scientific and ethical reasons: scientifically, because biological sex and athletic ability are both far too complex for scientists to reduce to measures of testosterone, and ethically, because these regulatory efforts have always been characterised by considerable harm to the women athletes singled out for testing. While I was initially confronted and confused by this discovery, I eventually began to question the convictions about fairness and sex difference that I had long held as an athlete.
Critically, during this time I also befriended some women with high testosterone. Enter another complicating factor: scientific and ethical concerns aside, was I willing to recognise my friends as women outside of sport yet deny them the right to compete alongside me on the track? The short answer, I realised, was no. The issue had shifted from one I could keep at a distance and discuss in the abstract to one that implicated the lives of people I actually knew and cared about.
