#anti pt barnum

[beetlegoose01]

if you're a fan of the greatest showman in 2024, please just unfollow me rn

[captainjonnitkessler]

George Hull was an atheist in the 1860s, and he was pretty pissed off at biblical literalists. In particular, he was pissed off about the gullibility of those who insisted that giants had once roamed the earth, simply because it said so in the Bible.

Hull, a big fan of science and the still-new theory of evolution, decided to do what any rational, science-minded man would do: He spent today's equivalent of $60,000 buying a bunch of stone from Iowa, sending it to Chicago to have it fashioned into a giant statue of a man in absolute secrecy, shipping it to his cousin's farm in New York, burying it there in the dead of night, waiting a year, and then having his cousin hire two men to dig a well in that spot so they could "discover" the giant. Obviously.

He and his cousin set up a tent and charged people for admission to see the "Cardiff Giant" and made absolute bank from the hundreds of people per day that flocked to it. Experts insisted it was a hoax, but many people were convinced it was proof of the Bible's inerrancy. Eventually Hull sold his part-interest to David Hannum for today's equivalent of over $500,000. PT Barnum, the infamous showman and ringmaster, then tried to buy it and when Hannum refused to sell, he made his own copy. He declared his to be the original and Hannum's version the fake, potentially leading Hannum to coin the famous phrase "there's a sucker born every minute". He also sued Barnum, but according to Wikipedia "the judge told him to get his giant to swear on his own genuineness in court if he wanted a favorable injunction".

Eventually Hull proudly confessed to the hoax, putting an end once and for all to the debates about either giants' genuineness. Hull claimed that his intent had been to reveal the gullibility of Christians and to refute anti-science religious fundamentalism.

Then he moved to Colorado and did the exact same thing again, except this time he added a tail and called it the "missing link" between humans and apes.

(Big shoutout to the podcast The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong, where I first heard about the Cardiff Giant. If you like weird stories from history you need to check out this podcast it is SO fucking good)

[spock-smokes-weed]

I can’t believe Hollywood made a musical about a historically corrupt asshole who abused animals and y’all just let them

[sepialunaris]

I would gladly trust my life on a monsterfucker than someone that watches the Joker more than 5 times

[spiritualdirections]

Diversity training doesn’t seem to help reduce prejudice, but corporations pay for it anyway in order to be seen to be doing something about racism. Some people have compared diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo to PT Barnum, for her ability to get rich selling gullible corporations ineffective solutions to their perceived problems. 

DiAngelo vaulted to superstardom upon the 2018 publication of her book, White Fragility, which argues that all whites are racist and any rejection of that fact is only further evidence of it. To address racism, DiAngelo argues, requires the sort of anti-bias instruction she is selling.

The nationwide racial outcry that has followed the killing of George Floyd has supercharged the Diversity and Inclusion industry, and DiAngelo may be its greatest success story. While she has likely made over $2 million from her book, the speaking circuit is where she is cleaning up. One of the speakers bureaus that represents her told the Free Beacon that a 60-90 minute keynote would run $30,000, a two-hour workshop $35,000, and a half-day event $40,000.Even before the George Floyd protests reinvigorated demand for so-called anti-racist instruction, the New Yorker had dubbed DiAngelo "the country’s most visible expert in anti-bias training." But the eye-popping numbers underscore how she has turned her academic theories about white racism into a multimillion-dollar empire of anti-imperialism. She owns three homes and is an international jetsetter.

...By the time DiAngelo landed an associate professorship at Westfield State University, outside of Springfield, Mass., she was entrenched in anti-bias training... She may have seen opportunity in a growing industry. The Diversity and Inclusion business was thought to be worth $8 billion as of 2003; by 2005, 65 percent of big companies offered diversity training.

Demand has risen since, and she has reaped the benefits. Public records indicate she owns three homes, all bought before White Fragility was published: a four-bedroom bungalow and half of a duplex in Seattle (her daughter, nearing 40, occupies the latter), and a cabin in rural Washington, where DiAngelo and husband Jason Toews relax with friends who, at least on Toews's Instagram, appear to be exclusively white.

Tax assessments put DiAngelo's cumulative housing wealth at roughly $1.6 million...

In the past three years, DiAngelo and Toews, who as of last September served as DiAngelo’s administrative assistant, have backpacked through Thailand, visited Romania, and toured South Africa.

DiAngelo’s wealth is jarring in part because of her criticisms of white privilege. It is also surprising given that available evidence suggests the anti-bias training she peddles does not work.

A review of nearly 1,000 studies of anti-bias tools found little evidence that they have any impact. In fact, recent studies suggest anti-bias training's primary effect may be to encourage discrimination: Firms with diversity training end up with fewer minorities in management, and field research finds that training both reinforces stereotypes and increases animosity against minority groups.

But DiAngelo’s concept of "white fragility" offers an answer to that academic evidence: The negative responses whites express when told they’re racist are simply evidence that they lack "racial stamina"—and indicate that more $40,000 anti-bias sessions are necessary.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

To do in NYC: Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir present Earth Riot

We've been writing about Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping for nearly 20 years, tracing his remarkable spectacles of anti-consumerism around the world.

New Yorkers can see Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir ("an ecstatic group of 35 activists who sing harmoniously while trespassing inside corporations") in a performance called "Earth Riot" at Joe's Pub that runs Nov 24-Dec 22.

The 40 activists-who-sing, The Stop Shopping Choir, return from risking arrest to take the stage for their annual run at Joe's Pub. The "church" comes back each holiday season with songs created from improvisations in climate-killing banks, pipelines, immigration prisons, and churches hiding sanctuary families.

"The Church of Stop Shopping takes on the trinity of consumerism, corporate greed and environmental destruction. Reverend Billy's antics remain difficult to categorize—part Brecht, part PT Barnum..." – Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/28/earth-riot.html

[muddypolitics]

I am amazed at the level of trust supporters have in trump

he has flip-flopped on almost every issue he campaigned on - he has no policy, no point of view that can't change the next day if he sees something on fox "news"

and then the supporters find a way to move to the new stance with him - and unquestioningly and vocally support his new approach without question.

remember when he ran on an isolationist, non-interventionist platform?!?! Now we are taking unprecedented and unrestrained military action without oversight from elected officials, because apparently, trump likes war? At least until he sees an anti-war ad or something that makes him change his mind.

I knew PT Barnum was right...but are you farking kidding me?!?!

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

The Greatest Showman was an enjoyable movie but the real life PT Barnum was exploitative scum. Joice Heth was a blind and paralyzed enslaved black woman who was exhibited by PT Barnum with the false claim that she was the 161-year-old nursing "mammy" of George Washington. He later displayed her cut up body after her death to audiences for 50 cents.

Ugh wtf! That’s horrible!  

mod m

[neptunecreek]

"Don't Believe Proven Liars": The Absolute Minimum Standard of Prudence in Merger Scrutiny

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." -President George W Bush

Anti-monopoly enforcement has seen a significant shift since the 1970s. Where the Department of Justice once routinely brought suits against anticompetitive mergers, today, that's extremely rare, even between giant companies in highly concentrated industries. (The strongest remedy against a monopolist—breaking them up altogether—is a relic of the past). Regulators used to go to court to block mergers to prevent companies from growing so large that they could abuse their market power. In place of blocking mergers, today's competition regulators like to add terms and conditions to them, exacting promises from companies to behave themselves after the merger is complete. This safeguard continues to enjoy popularity with competition regulators, despite the fact that companies routinely break their public promises to safeguard users’ privacy and rarely face consequences for doing so. (These two facts may be related!) When they do get sanctioned, the punishment almost never exceeds the profits from the broken promise. "A fine is a price." Today, we'd like to propose a modest, incremental improvement to this underpowered deterrent:

If a company breaks its promise, and then it makes the same promise when seeking approval for a merger, we should not believe it.

Read on for three significant broken promises we'd be fools to believe again.

"There's a sucker born every minute" -Traditional (often misattributed to PT Barnum)

Amazon promised not to use data from the sellers on its platform to launch competing products. It lied. In the summer of 2019, Amazon's General Counsel Nate Sutton made the company's position crystal clear when he told Congress, "We don't use individual seller data directly to compete." In April, the Wall Street Journal spoke to 20 former Amazon employees who said they did exactly this, confirming the suspicions of Amazon sellers, who'd been told that it was just a coincidence that the world's largest online retailer kept cloning the most successful products on its platform.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results." -Rita Mae Brown (often misattributed to Albert Einstein)

In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19b, and promised users that it wouldn't harvest their data and mix it with the surveillance troves it got from Facebook and Instagram. It lied. Years later, Facebook mixes data from all of its properties, mining it for data that ultimately helps advertisers, political campaigns and fraudsters find prospects for whatever they're peddling. Today, Facebook is in the process of acquiring Giphy, and while Giphy currently doesn’t track users when they embed GIFs in messages, Facebook could start doing that anytime.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action." -Ian Fleming

In 2007, Google bought DoubleClick, a web advertising network. It promised not to merge advertising data with Google user profiles. It lied. Like most Big Tech companies, much of Google's growth comes from buying smaller companies. Because Google's primary revenue source is targeted advertising, these mergers inevitably raise questions about data-mining. As Google’s role in online advertising is under scrutiny, antitrust enforcers must not accept a new “We mean it, this time. Seriously, guys” promise to protect user data. It would be easy to argue that promises made in a formal settlement with antitrust enforcers will carry more weight than mere public statements about what a company will do. But those public promises can keep customers unaware, and enforcers away, as the company extends its dominance. Those promises have to mean something. Hiding privacy abuses behind false promises “ ">effectively raises rivals’ costs, as they try to compete against what appears to be high quality, but is, in truth, low quality.” That could raise antitrust liability. An overhaul to competition enforcement is long past due, but while that's happening, can we take the absolute smallest step toward prudent regulation and stop believing liars when they tell the same lies?

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/3gh3M3v

[keywestlou]

MORNING STEW #6

A number of significant topics today beginning with my yesterday and then into the world. I generally share the topics in some sort of order. On a day like this it would add an hour to the blog. No time today. I have been at it 2.5 hours gathering the information. Started at 6:30. Need to be done by 11.

So I present you with a Morning Stew. Number 6.

Cath scan time yesterday in the hospital. My appointment was for 1. Did not get taken till 2:30. Thought they were taking another look at my aortic stenosis. Nurse told me order sheet indicated aortic aneurysm. Bothered me. I have known for several years about the aneurysm. Do not think about it. Now it is back in my thought process.

Had to fast for the Cath scan. Was hungry following the test. Back to Harpoon Harry’s. Wednesday is Thanksgiving turkey day. I enjoyed a complete turkey meal.

When last in friday, I forgot to tip the waitress. Embarrassing. First thing I did when I arrived yesterday was to find her and give her a $5 bill. She was grateful, but said she actually did not remember me nor that I failed to tip her.

Whatever, I have made a friend for life.

The waitress actually waiting on me was Allana. European born, she has been in the U.S. 30 years. Twenty seven in Aspen. The last 3 in Key West. Knows how to pick her spots to live!

The time sitting around the hospital waiting for the Cath scan gave me time to finish Becoming Michelle Obama. I enjoyed reading it. Recommend you read it.

Nothing fantastic about the book. It is merely the step by step progression of Michelle’s life from her birth in South Chicago to retirement now following the White House. A modest work. Personal. Like Barrack still leaves his dirty socks on the floor.

Today, a haircut at noon with Lori. Lunch. The Farmers Market at Bayview Park for a special bread and tomatoes that are softer than the rocks available at Publix.

I am looking forward to this evening. Dinner at the home of Larry and Cindy. A couple I have visited with 2 years in a row at the Chart Room. They are from Ontario, Canada. Have a second home on the golf course.

Cindy is cooking.

I have a special affinity to Cindy. She is a loyal blog follower.

I will not be appearing with Laurie Thibault this afternoon on her radio show. Traffic is so heavy this time of year that I would be late for dinner. Tune in however. Laurie needs no help. A born natural for radio. Station 107.5 FM, WGAY FM.

Sex and the Catholic Church. Back in the limelight. Today the beginning of a conference of Bishops. A Sex Abuse Prevention Summit at the Vatican. Pope Francis presiding.

The problem an open wound.

The issues will center around gay priests, secret rules, and the abuse of nuns.

A dynamite conference in the making!

Trump has nominated Jeffrey Rosen to be Deputy Attorney General. He will be the #2 person in the Justice Department.

His only connection to the law is that he is a Harvard law grad. Never worked in criminal prosecution. No police background of any kind.

Why? Of what value will he be? I fear another Trump step in trying to destroy the Department of Justice.

Tired last night. Watched Syracuse/Louisville at 7 from home. Syracuse won decisively 69-49.

A great game!

Next #1 Duke on saturday at the Carrier Dome. Syracuse beat Duke 2 weeks ago on Duke’s home court. Duke was #1 at the time, also.

There is a gluttony overtaking college sports.

I watched part of the Duke/North Carolina game following the Syracuse one. Obama was there. No seats available. A huge sell out.

Certain seats were going for $2,600 each. Super Bowl prices. It was announced that 4 seats at the Syracuse/Duke game saturday will be selling for $3,500 each.

College ball? Professional ball?

There is a drive underway to pay college athletes. In addition to free tuition, room and board. The argument is they are making their schools rich.

The day is coming. Very soon. I don’t like it. Something wrong with paying college athletes especially after they are getting a free ride to a college education.

Iran recently publicly hung a 31 year old man for being gay. Seventy one countries have criminalized homosexuality. Eight of them call for the death penalty.

In Iran, gays as young as 9 can be put to death. And they are.

Lesbians included.

Now comes Donald Trump to lead the battle to end the criminalization of homosexuality across the globe. Announced yesterday. He says he will launch a campaign and lead the cause.

Something irregular here. Trump goes out of his way in the U.S. to do whatever he can to hurt the gay community. He is anti LGBT. His most recent action to prevent transgenders from being in the military.

Hypocrisy? You better believe it.

I can remember John L. Lewis. He was a big man in union work in the 1930’s through 1950’s. A huge man with bushy eyebrows.He was CEO of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and President of the United Mine Workers.

An autocrat in his work. Tough guy similar to Trump. A liar, also. He was described during his time as the most experienced truth-twisting wind bag ever produced in the U.S.

Possessed brass testicles. He called a coal strike during World War II.

I mention Lewis today because on this day in 1940 he was a guest at the Casa Marina.

Cemetery stroll sunday. The Key West Cemetery. The history of our island carved into the stones. Always a crowd. Reservations required. Three starting times 9:30 to 10:10. A $20 donation requested.

I love the cemetery. One of the best stones reads: “I Told You I Was Sick.”

Washington Post columnist Reuben Navarrette in a recent article wrote about Trump, El Paso, and his lies.

Trump was in El Paso this past week pushing the border wall/barrier, whatever it is called. He claimed El Paso had one of the highest crime rates in the U.S. till a wall was built on their border. The problem is El Paso was never a high crime city. Before, during or after the wall was built.

Typical Trump exaggeration, lie.

Navarrette wrote  that Trump “…..since his days selling real estate in Manhattan, has never let the truth interfere with a good pitch. The PT Barnum of Fifth Avenue used to attempt to convince people that the Trump Tower had ten more floors than it really did.”

He continued, “Trump doesn’t just sell steak, or the sizzle. He can get by with just selling you the thought of a steak. That’s a gift folks.”

It’s the nature of the beast, folks!

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Paul Hasan has been arrested. A white supremacist interested in terrorist attacks. Leading them himself. Against the U.S. government.

His intent to kill members of Congress and the media. As part of a purpose to create a white homeland. Among those designated for elimination were Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Scarborough, and John Podesta.

In a draft of an e-mail authorities recovered, Hasan wrote: “Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch.”

The U.S. worries about terrorism coming at us from the Middle East. We fail to have any significant concern with the terrorism on our shores lying in silence ready to attack. Our efforts must be directed at them also.

I end with Karl Marx. Author of the Communist Manifesto. Written in collaboration with Frederich Engels. Published this day in 1848.

The Manifesto was slow to take hold. However by 1950, half the world’s population lived under Communism.

Marx’s closing words in the Manifest set forth marching orders for those to become his followers: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite.”

Enjoy your day!

  MORNING STEW #6 was originally published on Key West Lou

[blue-official-blog]

Fuck Facebook! They think they're a diamond Ned Flanders with their bullshit standards. If people would quit using Facebook we could get rid of these anti-constitutional, 1st amendment hating, fascist, Communist pigs. That little bitch Zuckerberg just wanted some pussy; now he's fucked up the internet and American social habits. People should be appreciated for their merits and contributions to the world not how cute they are or what stupid ass memes they post. Facebook is the new cancer destroying society and all the sheep just abide by their puppet master. I refuse to conform to the witless fucktards who have ruined America. Andy Warhol said, "In the future, everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame." Fuck fame! I want money!!! But I have to be popular in order to get people's attention. PT Barnum said it best, "A sucker's born every minute!" #facebook #instagram #1stamendment #firstamendment #freedom #constitution #america #trump #obama #beto #lies #warhol #andywarhol #fame #immigration #border #igers #twitter #socialmediamarketing #sellout #society #fsociety #truth #trend #trending #conform #communism #fascism #ptbarnum #loser https://www.instagram.com/p/BqsziGLBe8J/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1givqa53z2xr9

[ara-la]

Post Election Post Mortem 2018

Post Election Post Mortem

by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)

    In the recent so-called “mid-term” elections, roughly halfway through the four-year term of proto-fascist Donald Trump, the US political system demonstrated simultaneously its irrelevance to the fundamental issues, crises and contradictions of US society and economy, and at the same time its capacity to function as a mechanism for absorbing, containing and recuperating the frustrations and dissidence of the population in the face of those contradictions and crises. Millions were drawn into voting, and getting out the vote, as a “blue wave” crashed on the shoals on institutionalized and internalized white supremacy.

     The election exposed the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the US federal state, perhaps even to a greater degree than the two recent presidential elections “won” by the candidate with fewer votes (“Dubya” Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016). The undemocratic nature of the presidential Electoral College is simply a manifestation of the undemocratic nature of the US Senate (as well as the generally winner-take-all, single-member gerrymandered Congressional districts). Two Democratic woman US Senators were punished with defeat for re-election for opposing Brett Kavanagh, Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court. Black gubernatorial candidates in MD, GA and FL were all unsuccessful. A Black US Senate candidate in Mississippi has forced a run-off but will doubtless lose once white reactionaries are no longer splitting their vote. To paraphrase PT Barnum, nobody ever went broke overestimating the reactionary majority of white US voters. Trump quite successfully motivated his base of voters in so-called “red” states with blatant racist and misogynist fear-mongering. Efforts to supposedly deal with the social media amplification of racist, misogynist, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-Semitic memes somehow became a mechanism for corporate censorship of left-wing platforms.

GOP flipped Dem Senators in ND, MO, IN and FL; Dems flipped NV.

    Disregarding for a moment the fact that the Democratic Party is for the most part no less pro-Empire than the Republicans, the number of votes won by Democrats in US Senate races far exceeded those won by the GOP candidates, yet the Republicans picked up additional Senate seats, because Senate seats are not apportioned according to population. Republicans generally win seats in sparsely-populated, predominantly-white states (or by narrow margins through voter suppression in more diverse and populous states), giving them a lock on the Senate (and thus increasing their control over the equally undemocratic judiciary).

    The House of Representatives, in which all seats are up, and where districts are roughly comparable in population, showed a more accurate reflection of the support base of the two capitalist parties, but all the legislative races reflected the more fundamental problem. Despite the presence of a few “democratic socialist” candidates, the Congressional and Senatorial elections and discourse never addressed fundamental and vital concerns.

    There was no significant national discussion or debate about the national prisoner strike and the crisis of racialized mass incarceration; no platform addressing global warming and climate justice issues as reflected by devastation in Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida and the Carolinas or forest fires across CA and the West. No candidate or party spoke out against US troops in Afghanistan, military operations and bases in Africa, backing for genocide in Yemen, or the intent to launch a new nuclear weapons race and to militarize space. Bernie Sanders did come to L.A. and speak out against racist police murders with impunity, but despite years of unrest and agitation by local communities, Black Lives Matter and its allies, police abuse did not become a pressing issue within the election campaigns or corporate media coverage of the “mid-terms”.

White militia groups heading to border in wake of Trump military mobilization.

     The increasing evidence of the threat posed by white racial nationalists and their misogynist “incel” fellow travelers drew out little more than pious calls for “civility” in our political disputes and crocodile tears for the 11 elderly and disabled Jews massacred in Pittsburgh, occasionally supplemented by acknowledgment of two Black people shot dead in South Carolina by a white racist gunman who couldn’t get into a Black church.

     The elections serve therefore merely as a cathartic spectacle that allows people to feel the system is theirs to command through the power of the ballot box. The notion that Constitutional norms will allow a partisan “check and balance” on the autocratic impulses of Trump through divided power in DC lulls people into believing they have effectively “resisted” by casting their votes. The last time Democrats flipped the House in midterms, during Dubya Bush’s second term, they swiftly abandoned any of their alleged opposition to tyrannical measures like the USA PATRIOT Act. This time around, they did not go into the election with any program beyond defending “Obamacare” and Social Security, while the ‘left’ wing of the party talks mainly about Medicare for All and debt  relief for college students (neither of which is a remote legislative possibility).

Just as in 2006, don’t expect the Dems taking of the House of Representatives  to counter war crimes or fascism.

    Comparing the massive white voter rejection of the Obama presidency in his first mid-term -- 6 lost Senate seats, including the majority, and over 60 House seats -- with the majority white embrace of the blatantly racist, misogynist and narcissistic Trump -- a net gain of Senate seats, and many fewer ‘flipped’ in Congress -- gives us an accurate picture of the death grip white supremacy and identification with empire holds on mass consciousness in the US. There were, however, two significant blows to institutionalized white supremacy -- the restoration of voting rights to 1.4 million+ formerly incarcerated people who served their felony time in Florida, and the abolition of criminal convictions by a less-than-unanimous verdict in Louisiana, which had been designed circumvent being required to allow Black people to serve on juries. But like the two Muslim and two native women elected to Congress, this does not belie the fundamental racism and sexism of the system.

     In California, voters rejected Prop. 10, which would’ve allowed municipalities to develop rent control programs, by nearly a 2-1 margin after a massive fear mongering campaign. The billionaires backing charter schools bought the superintendent of public instruction office for their favored candidate on his second attempt. In Los Angeles, Measure B to authorize a public bank was crushed. The House seats in OC that the Dems thought they could flip appeared as we went to press to be staying in the GOP column except for Dana Rohrabacher, who appears to have lost to a former Republican running on the Democratic line. Indicted SD GOP Rep. Hunter was re-elected.

Lost his seat, but got his wish -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions is out in wake of mid-term election.

    The locus of peoples’ power cannot be such legislative bodies. We need a clear-eyed recognition of the need to develop countervailing power at the grassroots and in the streets, through self-determined community action and real “resistance.” Rent strikes, labor militance, intercommunal solidarity, Copwatching, sanctuary networks, mutual aid centers like in Puerto Rico, overcoming opioids, combating white supremacy with the weapons of self-criticism and self-defense, upholding indigenous sovereignty, building urban-rural alliances against pipelines and fracking and for food sovereignty, turning anti-elitist despair and frustration into generative solidarity will bear greater fruit. We must build our capacity to meet human needs, defend human rights, and protect the planet  through our own power as working and oppressed people.

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

Does Anyone Hate Donald Trump More Than Donald Trump? An Interview With David Shields

Cataloged in Psychology

Does Anyone Hate Donald Trump More Than Donald Trump? An Interview With David Shields

David Shields Updated September 22, 2018

In his new book,  New York Times bestselling author David Shields deconstructs the idiot-savant-autocrat at 1600 Pennsylvania, his fan-fiction base, and the emotional needs/moral failures of the city, country, and world that created him.

 is at once a psychological investigation of Trump, a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, a satirical compilation of the collected wit and wisdom of Donald Trump, and above all a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse—a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and sustains Trump. The book is organized into six chapters and 60 subsections and gets increasingly harrowing in its focus, moving from childhood to sex to media to virtue-signaling to chaos theory to “apocalypse always.” The book’s central thesis is that we have met the enemy and he is us.

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A conversation with David Shields

David sits down with Leah Paulos to discuss his new book, , a psychological inquiry into Trump’s brokenness, a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, and a satirical compilation of the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump. Above all, it functions as a dagger into the rhetoric of American political discourse—a dissection of the politesse that gave rise to and that now sustains Trump.

Leah: There are a lot of Americans, including this interviewer, who despise Trump with every cell in their bodies. Why is the book called NOBODY HATES TRUMP MORE THAN TRUMP: AN INTERVENTION, and do you think it’s true?

David: Yes, of course Trump loathes himself. No human being on the planet is less capable of joy or even fulfillment. This is a key connection between himself and his voters. He’s as unhappy as they are, or he’s very good at pretending he is—it’s very difficult to tell, which gives his hyper-performativity its immense frisson. 

Leah: But close to 90% of Republicans voted for Trump. Trump voters were Bush and Reagan voters, and they were Goldwater voters. Are you saying they are all deeply unhappy people and always have been?

David: The key people are the five million people who voted for Obama and who voted for Trump. They are who matter. They are low-income, low-information, disenfranchised, blue-collar voters. They are furious at the varieties of ways in which the world has left them behind. Obama offered them hope. Trump offered them rage. HRC offered them precisely nothing.

Leah: Books about Trump are a dime a dozen these days, and everyone is drowning in tweets and hot takes. What is different about this book?

David: It’s not everybody else’s Trump-bashing book. It offers a tragic take on human nature—Trump’s destructiveness and self-destructiveness echoing with an existentially lost populace. It has leaked off-air Fox News conversations. It’s about a very scary American strain of death wish. It offers a new reading of his psychology and childhood to suggest origins of his anhedonia.It shows the many subcultures which gave rise to him and which now sustain him. It raises the real question whether he’s a genius quasi-punk anti-hero or a near-Asperger’s idiot or neither or both. It’s about the emotional weather of living under Cloud Trump. It’s a manual for beating bullies.

Leah: There’s always been loads of money, charismatic celebrities, and bigoted flamethrowers in American politics, but a person like Trump becoming President never seemed possible until it happened. Or did it?

David: Oh, please. Sonny Bono. Ronald Reagan. Shirley Temple. Jesse Ventura. Jerry Springer. George Murphy. Fred Thompson. Cynthia Nixon. Clint Eastwood. Clay Aiken. Al Franken. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Caligula.

Leah: When did you realize America was screwed up enough to elect Trump? 

David: When, at age 7, I realized being bad was more fun than being good (a more perfect foil than HRC would be impossible to imagine).

Leah: How many of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump did so because he’s a big, sick joke?

David: A huge number of things we love are big, sick jokes (from WWE to horror movies to the NFL). The method to Trump’s madness is that, in a shame culture, he’s shameless; this gives him enormous appeal and leverage to people who are resentful (as Louis Theroux has pointed out).

Leah: Trump is a needy, unloved, extraordinarily damaged, outer-borough millionaire with a genius for low-brow marketing. In a culture steeped in celebrity worship and with a mass media allergic to serious issues, was the marriage between Trump and his scared, aging, white base inevitable?

David: “Outer-borough” is a tell that you hold yourself above Trump, but the key to iconic celebs (e.g, Jesus, Napoleon, Elvis, Madonna) is that they embody the culture’s contradictions. Trump is a “winner” who acts like a “loser.” He’s a millionaire “schlub.” This allows him to play both ends against the middle. This is mad brilliance or luck or both.  Trump is karmic payback for an America lost to simulacra for at least twenty years; as Andrew O’Hehir says, “Our culture is obsessed with ‘real’ events because we experience hardly any.” Trump pretends to be “real.” It’s black magic.

Leah: What particular talents does Trump have that tap into the American psyche?

David: What such talents does he not have? He has swallowed America whole.

Leah: In this entire disgraceful, scary, embarrassing saga, who is the person you hate the most?

David: Exactly the wrong question. G.K. Chesterton, asked what’s wrong with the world, said, “I am.” If you can’t find in yourself what’s scary about Trump, you have zero chance of figuring him out and/or counteracting him. 

Leah: I fully understand that within myself I can find what is scary about Trump. The spectacle is impossible to turn away from; we’ve all been rubbernecking for 3 years now. In the debates, I laughed at “low-energy Jeb” and “Lil’ Marco,” while simultaneously knowing the whole thing was gross. But I think your answer absolves Trump and his administration of their cruelty. They took babies from their mothers at the border. They won’t stop until poor people don’t have health care. It’s not just PT Barnum giving people a good show. So, let me ask again: whom do you hate the most?

David: The book is the book and my life is my life. In my actual life, I work to bring an end to the oligarchy. Along with everyone else, I yell at the TV and radio and web. In the book, though, I strive to understand the phenomenon. And to understand all is most definitely not to pardon all. That being said, whom do I hate the most? To my surprise, the person who comes to mind is Comey.

Leah: In the book, you mention Will Blythe’s TO HATE LIKE THIS IS TO BE HAPPY FOREVER, a book about the Duke / UNC basketball rivalry. Does Trump vs. liberals feel like a sports event to you? On some level, is checking Twitter every morning and getting outraged fun? If it is, is that white privilege?

David: Love the title but have never read the book. To not view Trump as both deadly serious and a “funny” game-player is to miss the entire point. Of course it’s sport; that’s a huge part of the shtick. “Bread and circuses” means there are circuses. Overreliance on the term “white privilege”: another reason Trump will be re-elected. 

Leah: Is Trump your perfect foil? What about him as subject matter makes him so conducive to your writing style and thought process?

David: ADD. OCD. Logorrhea. Graphomania. Ressentiment. Weariness/wariness re virtue-signaling. Originary woundedness. Vanity. Narcissism. Avariciousness. Lust. All the usual human vices and sins. 

Leah: Should America still be a country? How can you stay in a marriage with 63 million people that voted for a monster? 

David: These are the very questions that got Trump elected and that threaten to get him re-elected. The moment you call Trump a monster, you’ve stopped trying to understand him and the conditions that gave rise to him and why he resonates with so many people. There’s nothing remotely useful about this sort of moral self-congratulation. 

Leah: How do you hope this ends?

David: I’m not in the hope business. I’m in the tragic-news-about-the-human-condition-business. We are a fallen, doomed species. People want apocalypse always. Trump promises to deliver the end or a glimmer of the end.

About David Shields

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-two books, including  (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), Bestseller, (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), ( Editors’ Choice). The film adaptation of  was released by First Pond Entertainment in 2017.  is forthcoming in 2019. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in the , , , , , , , and . His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

You can follow David Shields on Instagram and Twitter and buy his latest book here.

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Expert: Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions  Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. — Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello It’s more than disconcerting to hear the blathering now, September 2018, about Jeff Bezos. About Amazon dot com as richest company ever. To hear the fawning love of the rich guy, now, when we were predicting a slave master killing publishing, killing independence; news reports and tribute after tribute for this full-fledged Midas of tax cheating, our homegrown monopolist of the highest order, anti-American who gives a shit about main street America, a misanthropic fake news purveyor, a full-bore felonious PT Barnum and smoke and mirrors double shuffle guy who thinks of his tens upon tens of thousands of warehouse workers as spindles, interchangeable parts, and to hell with their precarity, their one nose-bleed from homelessness. This is a time of same sides of the coin of the realm: the conservative and the liberal, the War-Mongering Democratic Party drooling at the McCain fiasco and the Sycophantic Zio-Christo Republicans confused about who is going to own what while scampering away like rats into the alleys as the headlights of their narcissist-in-chief blowtorches the world. The most important characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are grandiosity, seeking excessive admiration, and a lack of empathy. These identifying features can result in a negative impact on an individual’s interpersonal affairs and life general. In most cases, on the exterior, these patients act with an air of right and control, dismissing others, and frequently showcasing condescending or denigrating attitudes. Nevertheless, internally, these patients battle with strong feelings of low self esteem issues and inadequacy. Even though the typical NPD patient may achieve great achievements, ultimately their functioning in society can be affected as these characteristics interfere with both personal and professional relationships. A large part of this is as result of the NPD patient being incapable of receiving disapproval or rebuff of any kind, in addition to the fact that the NPD patient typically exhibits lack of empathy and overall disrespect for others.** ** Note that NPD runs through the DNA of these ministers like Jimmy Swaggart or Billy-Franklin Graham, through the family RNA of so-called royalty of the world, in the brain chemistry of the likes of a Henry Kissinger or Adolph Hitler, in the hypothalamus of fruit-salad bedecked generals and in the frontal cortex of all great and not-so-great thespians, from politicos to actors. Moreover, this Bezos, our great Albuquerque-born plumbing showroom huckster peddling absolutely all the stuff we do not need piled up in his fulfillment centers, represents those two sides of the same coin: powerful, libertarian, ruthless and spirit-less, driven to conquer/distribute/hawk all the stuff in any sort of catalog that exists out there to fulfill the needs and mostly not so necessary junk of obsolescence and consumer addiction. A cold anti-philanthropy multi-billionaire, whose net worth of $160.7 billion is headline news now as the TV clowns present the Top Five, Top Ten/Twenty diligently, Bezos is the top of the dung heap according to another rag with all the news unfit (for humanity) to print . . . . . . Who is the richest person in the world? While Forbes updates their list of the world’s billionaires in real time as markets fluctuate, the magazine also releases a more static list each year. The total net worth of these money-makers when the 2018 list was released in March was $7.67 trillion. Click through to see 2018’s top 20 richest billionaires on the planet. With his company — which epitomizes the heights of death star techie logic, next gen robotics, drones, massive crisscrossing of products through a digital satellite-fed network of Prime Time orders — Bezos has continually kicked out with the help of Seattle PD we protesters with one share of his shit stock at shareholder meetings protesting his sadism around refusing to air condition fulfillment centers while instead putting rent-an-ambulances outside the doors! Oh, this economic disruptor of small and large businesses, all part of that gift of unfettered homicidal capitalism a la retail conglomeration, is reviled, hated, but will be the big section in those econ books from many years to come. Bernie Sanders wants a special tax on this white shark-eyed Jeff Bezos? Funny follies of the political kind. Imagine, justifying all the tax evasion and felonies of the billionaires and millionaires and banks and hedge funders and the rest of the elites — that’s the cool truth of our state of misrepresentation in Washington. Never political cries of “tax them all for their externalities — all the damage capital and capitalists have done to the world.”  Major and minor municipalities and entire states fall over themselves with money dripping tongues out of their mouths while courting this company with so many freebies in the billions to get another load of office buildings or fulfillment centers or even another headquarters/campus or pod of fulfillment centers. At any cost. Walmartization of the world, or was it McDonaldization first, or Fordization, but now Amazonization of the culture outstrips anything up to this point in this country’s lunacy. You can get anything anytime anywhere for anyone from this five and dime on steroids. Or, The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon: A $600 million computing cloud built by an outside company is a “radical departure” for the risk-averse intelligence community Just in Time Employment, 11th Hour appointments, Permanent Temp, a Precarity defined as the New Almost Slavery Gig gigs — Coulda Been HuffPost Slave Yet, on Democracy Now, again, in September 2018, we are led to believe we now have to be aghast about those fulfillment centers and those Americans being worked to the bone, worked down to the shredded screws in their hip replacement hardware, worked to confusion and exhaustion and then discarded for not working hard enough for this Master Blaster of the Retail Monopoly. Juan Gonzalez of DN tells us about these “cutting edge” stories from his Rutgers University Department of Journalism and Media Studies students working on this “breaking news,” while Juan laughs and smirks at the reality of “us” (not me) ordering everything on Amazon. Here, the DN reports: As Amazon Hits $1 Trillion in Value, Its Warehouse Workers Denounce “Slavery” Conditions Exposed: Undercover Reporter at Amazon Warehouse Found Abusive Conditions & No Bathroom Breaks Ahh, but we over at DV have been printing these stories for more than six years: * Punditry of Shit-Hole Thinking  * On-line Dildo Salesman Bezos is the News Fit to Print * Amazon.com Don’t Need No Stinking Climate Change Badge, No Stinking Corporate Transparency Crap * Books, Bountiful Ethics, Brave Buyers Nichole Gracely / May 21st, 2012 Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (LV) is a distribution hub, and many fellow Amazon associates and Integrity Staffing Solutions temps had previously worked in other local warehouses. I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces. At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign. Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could house a small city. Physical strength is not a necessary qualification to perform any of their warehouse job functions, and management is ostensibly concerned with worker safety. Just about anyone could staff Amazon’s FC, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to train workers to perform any specific job function. It’s safe to say that anyone laboring in an Amazon FC has fallen into hard times, and many of my former coworkers’ resumes featured distinguished past titles, impressive demonstrations of manual skill and ability, and/or lofty educational attainment. Many never thought they’d wind up in a warehouse and so, yes, this was all foreign for many. Other workers who staffed other warehouses in the past didn’t know what to make of the place because there is something different about Amazon, something alien. “Chairman” Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company. “Chairman” Bezos has zero tolerance for union activity and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed. After two years on the job an Amazon FC associate is entitled to eight shares of stock. If Amazon is trading at, say, $250 a share, that’s $2,000. Ownership? $250 per share is a generous projection. Seasoned investors are baffled by AMZN’s current overvaluation because of its unhealthy 188:1 (fluctuates, yet always unhealthy) price to earnings ratio, and they’re waiting for the bubble to burst. Nichole went on to write a piece in the Guardian: Amazon Seasonal Work  And the Guardian published another one, more than four years ago: Being homeless is better than working for Amazon Bread and Roses — 106 Years Ago, Back to Now: Strike Amazon, Strike US Correctional Institutions, Boycott I got this from a friend, Andy Piascik, a long-time activist and award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion. He can be reached at ###. In the end, in the face of the state militia, U.S. Marines, Pinkerton infiltrators and hundreds of local police, the strikers prevailed. They achieved a settlement close to their original demands, including significant pay raises and time-and-a-quarter for overtime, which previously had been paid at the straight hourly rate. Workers in Lowell and New Bedford struck successfully a short while later, and mill owners throughout New England soon granted significant pay raises rather than risk repeats of Lawrence. When the trials of Ettor, Giovannitti and a third defendant commenced in the fall, workers in Lawrence’s mills pulled a work stoppage to show that a miscarriage of justice would not be tolerated. The three were subsequently acquitted. More than a century ago and it’s rabbit-holed history . . . and what do we fight for in this country now? We have fear of unions, we embrace the gig economy/outsourcing on Kratom (called near slavery by socio-economists), and the unimaginable bullshit and shit jobs have generated aimlessness, screen addiction, be mean to thy neighbor mentality, cold hearts and Homo Retailipithecus. Bullshit jobs, as Graeber states: A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. What is Labor Day or May Day now in a world of Marvel comics and infantilization of every intercourse we have with every sort of humanity? Do we care about solidarity? Do we know how to build communities? Do we see neighbors and people in and on the streets as equals, people, us? What is the value of work when it is drudgery, dog-eat-dog, king of the hill and top of the dung heap relationships? We have to go beyond now this simpleton way of seeing the world from the bifurcated Groucho Marx eyeglasses. This is a great time of upheaval, splintering, hot house planet, Sixth Mass Extinction, a world of capital making more capital off of war, resource theft, thievery of other nations’ and cultures’ futures. Jobs, Who Doesn’t Choose to Collapse, Hothouse Planet, People As I continually teach young people to think, you are what you eat, what you do, what you think, what your read, what you say, what you believe, what you aspire to, what you hope for, what you do or not do to be one with humanity. If your life is one of toil, what is inside the heart, and what do you do with those beliefs and philosophies while slogging away? Are you a believer in exceptionalism, Zionist or Christian superiority? Is the white shade of skin the defining element in your life? Do you have passions that are your own, or are they manufactured, designed, and cajoled by the money changers and propagandists?  The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. This line was from a speech by Rose Schneiderman, Polish-born socialist and feminist and prominent labor union leaders in America. It’s a phrase embodying everything today we workers need to utilize as a galvanizing force upon our souls to break away from these people like Bezos and the entire master crafters of our pain, poverty and penury. When I say “our,” I mean the world’s collective pain in the form of billions of people, for whom Western Culture (sic) has set loose a wildfire of forced displacement, murder, resource extraction, war and disease of the mind and body. It was also a successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, during January–March 1912, which is pretty much universally referred to as the “Bread and Roses” strike. Pairing bread and roses not as counter-balances — fair wages and dignified conditions. Defining “the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances in the light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect,” as Robert J. S. Ross wrote in 2013. I imagine the Bezos types wanting every last penny from every last $2-a-day inhabitant on earth, and I imagine this fellow is as steely-hearted as any in an Upton Sinclair book — and note this first quote by Sinclair is for me about men and women working today, even though Sinclair was writing about a living livestock animal torn from life: One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe…. Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid Fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. ― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Delusions  of Terra-Forming and Mickey Mouse Grabbing Adults’ Attention So what do we do with these Titans of idiocy, with their billions and their algorithms, with their broken telescopes peering into the black hole of humanity? What about the 150,000 chemicals in human cells created by the industrialists, those synergistic variant effects we have zero knowledge about, which have helped push our American society into a chronically ill species of over 50 percent of a population cycled through Western (Un-)Medicine. Children with autism or on the spectrum — count that as possibly 30 percent of all births by 2040. Diabetes 1 and 2, more than 15 percent or more of the population by 2040. According to Dr. Winchester: This is a really important concept that is difficult to teach the public, and when I say the public, I include my clinical colleagues. Still, atrazine is not the only human hormone-altering chemical in the environment. Dr. Winchester tested nearly 20 different chemicals and all demonstrated epigenetic effects, for example, all of the chemicals reduced fertility, even in the 3rd generation. Still, why do 150,000,000 Americans have chronic diseases? Researchers believe that every adult disease extant is linked to epigenetic origins. If confirmed over time with additional research, the study is a blockbuster that goes to the heart of public health and attendant government regulations. According to Dr. Winchester: This is a huge thing that is going to change how we understand the origin of disease. But a big part of that is that it will change our interpretation of what chemicals are safe. In medicine I can’t give a drug to somebody unless it has gone through a huge amount of testing. But all these chemicals haven’t gone through anything like that. We’ve been experimented on for the last 70 years, and there’s not one study on multi-generational effects. Environmental Working Group tested more than a dozen brands of oat-based foods to give Americans information about dietary exposures that government regulators are keeping secret. In April, internal emails obtained by the nonprofit US Right to Know revealed that the Food and Drug Administration has been testing food for glyphosate for two years and has found “a fair amount,” but the FDA has not released the findings. Ahh, the melting planet, the water cycle’s disrupted, the entire mess of planetary re-shifting is on a collision course with Homo Sapiens. Everyday I get more and more notifications from friends and thinkers about the impending collapses, the impending peak this and peak that (Peak Everything). Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote … can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That’s why I wrote this book.” ― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Feudal Factories of Propaganda and Propagating .001 Percenters — Water, Man, Water We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both. ― Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West We are seeing this circling of the billionaires’ wagons (vultures circling the 7.8 billion marks, us), this Bezos and Musk lust for space, for some planetary gated-armed-Utopian community. These fellows and dames are something else, and the conjurers of news unfit to consume fall over them, recording and publishing story after story about their wisdom and foresight and shamanistic ways of predicting the future. Remember George W. Bush and his big ranch buy in Paraguay? That was 12 years ago, readers, yet, back to the future, with news (sic) report after news report (sic) keeps tracking the next billionaire economic ejaculation. W, and we thought he was only painting pets! The Chaco is a semiarid, sparsely populated area known — to the extent that it’s known at all — for its abundant wildlife, rapid deforestation, nothing in particular… and what lies beneath it… Our Real Wealth Trader and Outstanding Investments contributor Jody Chudley thinks he knows the true gen about the Bush land grab. Jody says he has a “secret” about the Bushes. And he adds, “It has to do with an investment idea that’s hardly on anyone’s radar.” The real reason Jody thinks Bush 43 and family snapped up nearly 300,000 acres in those semiarid, sparsely populated wastes of Paraguay? Water. That’s right, blue gold. Bush bought the rights to a veritable ocean of fresh, clear-as-glass, Grade A water. His land rests atop one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world: Acuifero Guarani, by name. According to Jody, “Acuifero Guarani covers roughly 460,000 square miles under parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. It is estimated to contain about 8,900 cubic miles of water.” If you can’t quite imagine 8,900 miles of water, picture a pool nearly three times the size of California. That should give you a decent idea. A fair amount when you consider that 98% of this planet’s water is salt water. Of the other 2%, almost 87% of it is trapped within glaciers, hence inaccessible. Jody’s “trusty calculator” informs him that only 0.25% of the water on this cosmic ball is fresh (underground, or in rivers and lakes). Just a drop in the figurative bucket… Now, we knew this sort of stuff was going on with the elites, who look at us all as easy marks, broken money bags, the fat cows or broken pigs of their global stockades. What’s happened is this trickle-down lust-love-longing for these people who get plastered in the headlines as being grand and philanthropists, deserving of every cent and every billion made on the back of people, earth, cultures. Their trans-capital and monopolies  and viral presence like Google, Facebook, Walmart, and on and on sucks the revolution out of revolutionary, since we are now shackled to their ways of doing things. The goal of the capitalists is to harmonize their theft with our survival, whatever it takes to put five to a studio apartment (of course, sneaking the other four into the room in the dead of night), whatever it takes to just float through a gridlocked urban and suburban world. So, from Bush and Paraguay, to this Gawker Killer Thiel, we have enough evidence of their feudal ways, their slippery snake eyes methods of shitting on we underlings: Here is Robert Hunziker: Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire and renowned super-super-super libertarian and unapologetic Trumpster love-fester achieved New Zealand citizenship in only 12 days and bought not only his citizenship but a $13.8 M estate in Wanaka, a lakeside community. According to a phone interview with the former PM of New Zealand John Key, “If you’re the sort of person that says I’m going to have an alternative plan when Armageddon strikes, then you would pick the farthest location and the safest environment – and that equals New Zealand if you Google it… It’s known as the last bus stop on the planet before you hit Antarctica. I’ve had a lot of people say to me that they would like to own a property in New Zealand if the world goes to hell in a hand-basket. Hell in a hand-basket, from the former prime minister of New Zealand — 1935 Book, quote: If the average white New Zealander takes the Maori seriously as a human being, he is usually rather too ready to blame him for characteristics which more careful study will show not to be inherent at all but actually the result of the coming of the Europeans themselves, the extensive destruction of Maori life and the virtual dispossession of the Maori people. Little attempt is commonly made to understand the causes which produced, for a time at any rate (for they are passing) those Maori characteristics which have become almost proverbial amongst us. To put it frankly, we blame the Maori for becoming what we have made him. It is interesting to realise that similar circumstances of the contact of peoples have occurred before, and in view of the people referred to there is one instance which it seems particularly fitting that we should bear in mind. The instance comes down to us from the days when another great Empire, an ancient one, was civilizing native peoples. There is on record a letter from a wealthy Roman landowner to his agent in Britain telling him to ship no more British slaves “as they are so lazy and cannot be trusted to work.” Similar causes produce similar effects; we should be less ready with hasty judgment and hasty blame. There is a widespread belief, and it is one certainly cherished by the average white New Zealander, that no native people have ever been so fairly treated by Europeans as have the Maori people. As a matter of fact, if it is fully and frankly told, the story of the contact of Europeans with native peoples is much the same everywhere. What we have are so many varieties of what a leading anthropologist has recently termed “the tragic mess which invariably results from the impact of white upon aboriginal culture.” It is true that the Maori people have survived, but this, on careful analysis, proves to be very largely due to their own qualities and their own efforts rather than to any specially favourable mode of treatment. If we are honest there is little ground for pakeha self-congratulation. Ahh, the evidence of climate change (global warming–hot planet) was there in 1896 researched, formulated and discoursed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and then later, amateur G. S. Callendar ramified the greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels, and then later, C. D. Keeling measured the rising CO2 levels tying that to the greenhouse hot house effect), but for which has been swept into confusion by those marketers and mad men. Imagine, average planetary temps going up from  2.5–11°F by 2100. Imagine that! The more civilizations evolve, the more energy dependent they become, so it’s possible that trillions of civilizations in the great continuum of space evolved, rose, fell and disappeared. If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same. You’re going to have a hard time not triggering climate change. For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have certain emotional characteristics. You can imagine certain civilizations saying, ‘I’m not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those are crazy.’ But climate change, you can’t get away from. If you build a civilization, you’re using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back on the planet, and you’re going to push yourself into a kind of Anthropocene. It’s probably universal. —  Adam Frank, astrophysicist Interlude, Interglacial Periods, Working for the Homeless — Flailing at Windmills   Yeah, these big ideas I broach with homeless veterans and their attendant family members, and while the Gates-Kochs-Zuckerbergs-Bloombergs-Adelsons-et al have zero concern about us, the proles, the  detritus of their Capital, I believe working to change one life at a time — even if it’s a life riddled with evictions, felonies, relapses, epigenetic familial hell, PTSD, trauma, spiritlessness, physical decay — has meaning since in that process I have incredible interchanges with people who sort of want the same thing — paradigm shifts and de-industrialization and ecosocialism a la Marx 3.0. I try to find peace in writing, even these polemics at DV or LA Progressive; and in my own world of fiction-poetry-creative nonfiction, the windmills abound because of a rarefied culture of the M-F-A (masters in fine arts) elite — those gatekeepers of the small literary kind, or even the National Book Award kind. This country is not big on real outliers in anything tied to the arts, and I am one of those round pegs looking to splinter the quintessential square hole. Short story collection? Who the hell would read that? Well, try out a project of mine to get the stories —  thematically (sort of) threaded (sort of) to the “Vietnam experience” — as a hard copy from a small press, Cirque. You can read one of the stories, “Bloody Sheets,” here, starting on page 115. The collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam, is a gathering of fiction, much of which has been published in literary journals. I have succumbed to a Go Fund Me “deal” to help balance-offset the costs of printing a book on paper with ink. I have no idea if a Go Fund Me will even take off. The first and only donation is from filmmaker Brian Lindstrom. Amazing, a struggling documentarian throwing in FIRST. But we are in a new normal of shitting on writers, expecting us to have our day and then our night jobs and then write-write-write for free. That is the question, really, who wants to spend their time reading short stories, outside the very narrow readership of Masters of Fine Arts aficionados who in many regards can be pedantic and puffery artists? Vietnam, no less, in a time of Tim Burns rotting the foundation of the war we committed, or the Obama administration’s scrubbing of the war in his effort to commemorate it (Obama gives killer Kissinger awards). Vietnam. One of my short journalist pieces for an old weekly I worked for in Spokane. How many died in Vietnam and Indochina? 3.8 million? Oh, that Nobel Cause (War) myth I run into daily at a homeless veterans shelter, that is was winnable and worthy. Killing farmers, man, in their rice paddies! Whew, only a Zionist could write that script. Read my short story collection for a different way to frame creativity and that time period, that narrative framing, that time in history that has defined and redefined the ugly wars of today. I am going to give this a shot in a time of blatant skepticism and group-think/act/do. Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam. Be part of the creative impetus. The energy. The publication of a short story collection. With that “ask” of the reader who then gives will receive another book of mine, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber. In my view [Dan Kovalik], this Noble Cause myth may be the most powerful and enduring propaganda trick ever perpetrated. And, it works so well because the audience for the trick — the U.S. people — are such willing and eager participants in the charade. To explain the power of the Noble Cause myth, Marciano quotes from Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize lecture.  I set forth a larger quote from the lecture than appears in the book because it is so profound: The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. John Steppling, my fellow writer who studies intersections of culture-mimesis-art-politics (My review of his book,  Aesthetic Resistence and Dis-interest. That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said, here at DV) discusses the MFA phenomenon, a true watering down and controlled form of check and balances fiction: So, the fact that The Rockefeller Foundation underwrote (and still underwrites) a good many MFA programs (and not just in literature, but in theatre and fine arts) is both relevant, and not. Or maybe a better way to address this is see The Rockefeller Foundation as symptom. I received a Rockefeller fellowship, which I hadn’t applied for. But, the very fact that creative writing programs boomed after WW2, and permeated the academic landscape is without question linked to the patronage of institutions like The Rockefeller Foundation (and the MacArthur Foundation, and…). And to deny that the tacit influence of these institutions is idiotic. Now, it’s also true that what John Crowe Ransom and Stegner and Burrows preached is correct. Or it’s correct up to a point. It is revealing that Melville was derided, because Melville wrote a lot of ideas, and additionally observed the ways those ideas and that knowledge existed in the world. But it is equally true that you do not observe those harpoons so closely, or closely in a particular way, that all you get is a harpoon description. And a so described harpoon that never participates in riots or social unrest, and whose production is unexamined and the harpoon company that distributes it is left blank…the better to describe the fluted morning dew that bifurcates my tabby cat’s shadow on the harpoon handle, and etc etc etc is only a individual’s sensory observation. The harpoon must be known, not just observed. The real point here is that what Iowa started, and many other University programs followed, was to narrow down the definition of “fiction”. Dante would not be considered fiction today. While there is a point in demanding a concrete description, and not a generality, the exclusive focus on the concrete meant that ideas were being eliminated in fiction. The world is not abstract… but that includes History and politics and tensions of daily life. Those offices in New York, or those bad marriages, are not separate from the Chinese Revolution, or U.S. Imperialism, or the blockade of Cuba or the present two million men and women in prison in the United States. ‘Greatness’, whatever that means, and I have no problem with that word, or the ideas behind it, is in discovering both what that connection is, and ..and this is important I believe…how our own personal emotional and psychic formation, and development are related to both Mao and our failed marriages (or, even the successful ones). The emphasis on observation, on brute description, however eclipsed ideas as a subject for fiction. You may not sit down to write ideas, per se, but you certainly have an idea of what a harpoon is. You have to know certain things, and, in fact, the best writing is that which tells you what you don’t know, not describes nicely what you already do know. And there is a tendency in young writers to generalize. So on the one hand it’s natural to emphasize the concrete, but the result, perhaps intentional, or partly so (given the Rockefeller project) was the elimination of ideas in prose, and the narrowing of the definition of what constituted “fiction” http://clubof.info/

[analib2909]

History Revealed - Issue 56 (pdf)

History Revealed – Issue 56 (pdf)

  History Revealed – Issue 56

(Real PDF in Box)

HITLER: RISE OF A DICTATOR

How a bit-part local politician ascended to a pulpit of terror

Also inside the issue…

FATHER OF THE CIRCUS

Before PT Barnum and The Greatest Showman, there was Philip Astley

FEMALE ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS

It wasn’t just men who fought against woman gaining the vote

DEATH OF THE KINGMAKER

The Earl of Warwick meets his end in a War…

[thekingsnecktie-blog]

Into the Streets, If Necessary

Two pieces last week offered grim and pessimistic assessments on the Trump removal front, one by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate ("Is It Too Late for Robert Mueller to Save Us?") the other by Peter Beinart in the Atlantic ( "The Odds of Impeachment Are Dropping"). Both reminded us that impeachment is a political process, not a legal one (and the same would be true for the circumstances that would force a Trump resignation, or his removal under the 25th Amendment). Both also suggested that Republican fealty to Trump has already shown itself to be so craven, and the Republican electorate now so accustomed to bleating “fake news” at any facts that inconveniently conflict with its worldview, that nothing Bob Mueller ultimately produces—not even a proverbial smoking gun—will cause them to man up, acknowledge the truth, and do the right thing.

I suspect they are right. The refusal of even the best Republican senators (it’s a sliding scale) to vote against the GOP tax scam does not bode well for them to do jackshit about Russiagate, even if Mueller turns up with a video of Trump spit-shining Vladimir Putin’s wingtips.

So what can be done when the victims of a crime refuse to recognize what has happened to them….when—on the contrary—they eagerly cheer and support their oppressors and angrily denigrate those who would try to stop (or even just point out) the crime?

Not much. We have already seen that an appeal to reason, facts, and objective reality no longer has any sway with a certain segment of the American electorate. But as we have also seen—most pointedly in Virginia a month ago—that we can leapfrog over that Know-Nothing demographic. The hardcore Republican base comprises at most some 40% of the electorate. The remaining sane 60% of us can simply overwhelm them numerically—if we get out and organize and register and campaign and vote. If we are unable to harness our outrage, if we merely sputter and spin our wheels and do nothing more than vent to each other on social media, if in the face of this absolute monstrosity and threat to the Union we can’t get our act together sufficiently to vote these fuckers out of office, then we deserve to be ruled by them.

 Needless to say, that possibility is why the Republican Party has, for decades now, engaged in a systematic, blatantly anti-democratic effort to suppress the vote, including gerrymandering, propagation of the canard of voter fraud, distortion of the census, and other horrors for which Trump serves as a bespoke, Hades-sent frontman. That, too, is a flank on which we must fight them.

Likewise, if incontrovertible evidence were presented that implicated Trump in a scandal that makes Watergate look like shoplifting and still McConnell, Ryan & Company do nothing but shrug, I have to believe that we will get out in the streets and DEMAND that justice be done….and by “we” I mean a significant segment of the still sane Americans who believe in non-alternative facts, and in the Constitution, and in the rule of law. I’m talking about millions of Americans marching on Washington as they did on January 21, 2017….except this time it will be not in protest but in outright revolution.

Make no mistake, Trump Nation: if you cheat us in Congress we will come for you at the ballot box, and if you cheat us there, we will come for you in the streets.

(Excerpt from “Somewhere, PT Barnum Is Laughing.” For the full essay, go to https://thekingsnecktie.com/2017/12/08/somewhere-pt-barnum-is-laughing/)