Von Stroheim’s Greed

Never a truer, more iconic image has been put on film than the end of Von Stroheim’s Greed, 1925. Two men, former friends but now bitter enemies, in Death Valley with no water, a dead mule and a dead horse and no chance of rescue; the sun like the blazing eye of God. Marcus, the shrewder of the two, grasps their situation and says to McTeague, “We’re dead men.” And they fight, to the death, over a bag of stolen gold. Blood spatters on the coins strewn on the desert sands. The coins reflect the sun, beams of light rise from them. Men had felt powerful holding them in their hands. Mined from the earth, measured and shaped, now sand will drift over them, over the dead animals and dead men.




The Bigger Hole

Between human avariciousness and human stupidity we the living don’t stand a chance. “Despair is collaboration with the enemy.” Sorry. It’s over. They (in suits designed to convey sobriety and manly authority, in authority-drag) say our military is there, at great expense, so how can they stop now? Avaricious. Stupid. To place themselves and others in a mechanism, a doom-machine, and then abdicate control. “The machine did it.” Yes, they will have wasted billions and so therefore must blow trillions. Better to call the whole thing off, no , not the invasion but life itself (the Good Book vindicating them) to save (what? what?) embarrassment. I read of an Enron executive (this is an Enron administration) who, seeing he’d made a bad business deal, built on it, made things worse. “You lose a hole, ” he explained, “in a bigger hole.”




George W. Bush, Twentieth Hijacker

George W. Bush failed at everything he attempted, yet, through family connection, was lifted from each failure to a still higher position. Failure, ever greater failure, is his accomplishment. Imagine, it took him only two years to bring down a towering economy. It’s as if the twentieth hijacker had been placed in the White House throne.




Monica says, “This is what a President gets impeached for.”

Bush created the present situation with North Korea when he shunned their diplomat upon coming into office and turned back Clinton’s peacemaking arrangements (recall the images of North and South Korean family members meeting again after many years of separation). He estranges our allies over his obsession with Saddam Hussein (whose head, rumor is, he wants in a box), has floored our economy (we are entering The Greater Depression and the music won’t be near as good as those lucky folks of the early Thirties who got “Blue Moon,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Keep Your Sunny Side Up,” and “Your Feet’s Too Big”), is abrogating the Constitution while ratcheting up terrorist threat to unprotected U.S. citizens. Personally, I can’t take watching his rehearsed manly stride to the lectern. If George W. Bush is as sure and calm and sleeping as well as we’re told he is it’s because he’s out of it. Indications are that he’s in a state of religious delusion.

We’re told an alcoholic is an alcoholic for life, even after giving up drinking. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t confront the traumas that turn a person to alcoholic dependence, it offers a one-solution-fits-all cure: it substitutes a more socially acceptable addiction, religious mania. Bush is in a trance of missionary assignment. Not far-right Supreme Court appointees but God working his mysterious ways placed Bush so far above his earned station. In his delusion he is God’s agent for bringing about Apocalypse and the return of Jesus to a fire-purified earth, cleansed of Jesus-deniers. Scratch any Born-Again to see if this isn’t core belief. The corporate mobsters in the Iraq oil venture figure they’ve got a winner in this boob but he’ll take them further than they wish, into an Arab nationalist and religious war (bio-chem attacks won’t spare enclaves of privilege) plus a concurrent war with go-for-broke nuclear-armed North Korea. Forget about the reach of North Korean missiles, nuclear bombs travel in suitcases. A couple of detonations and, with USA in confusion, Allah will be hitting Jesus upside the head in the Bronx and everywhere else. Hi-tech societies don’t regroup and bounce back, they’re brittle, they break. The mobsters would do better joining in the move to impeach now, in this fragile moment of just-possible deterrence. Drunk drivers get arrested for “reckless endangerment.” An alcoholic — which is to say, suicide — is at the Presidential wheel and accelerating into the turn.




The Fix Was In, The Fix Is In

Word was getting around, the cult practices of the Scientologists were being exposed. One response adopted, other than to tie up the enemies in litigation, was to create a supposedly independent cult-abuse hotline. Relatives of victims would be phoning in their stories to the very people doing the brainwashing, signaling the Scientologist leadership to secure their dupe-captives further out of reach. Sympathetic voices voices would draw out then intimidate callers to disable rescue efforts.

American government today has something of a similar scam going. The Democratic Party is dominated by New Democrats, who are in fact positioned where most Republicans were before the Republican Party itself was taken over by far-rightists. They lean right and generally support Bush administration moves. Their presence explains how quickly and willingly the Democratic Party folded in face of the Supreme Court decision to stop the Florida vote-count lest an accurate count harm the plaintiff, George W. Bush (all consequential harms incurred by the decision dismissed). To appeal to the Democratic Party today for protection from Republican predations is like calling the Scientologist cult-abuse hotline.




“Shock and Awe”

3.14.03    Today a government spokesman on the radio told us the movie-name for USA-prepared blitzkreig* of Iraq is “Shock and Awe.” The idea, he explained, is that an immediate rain of 2000-pound bombs, “creating a Hiroshima-like effect,” will so stun Iraqis, and their losses “as brought upon them by Saddam Hussein” will so demoralize them, that only a two or three day “mopping up operation” may be necessary before declaring victory. The Awe in the name assures us this is God’s Work, as was the reference to Hiroshima. Precedent for this interpretation of calamity visited upon a people as a pair of post-WW2 Hollywood movies, The Beginning or the End? and Above and Beyond, which depict the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima, a civilian target as you know, as the miraculous release of God’s transcendent and awesome (and re-birth engendering) energy into our tainted lesser dimension. “God!” Robert Taylor says when he sees the great phallic smoke-and-debris pillar after the screen-image returns from pure white light, a unique screen-interlude in Hollywood cinema. By way of an all-male military priesthood (much as made of the necessary distancing from women) strictly following an exacting techno-military ritual, the fissure was created to allow Mother Earth to be successfully fertilized by the Beyond, inaugurating a New Age. The bomb had also been given a name: Little Boy.

An immediate result of our blitzkreig of Iraq, however, will be nuclear weaponry in the hands of jihad Islam as the military junta in Pakistan vaporizes. India may then be destroyed and perhaps we will be destroyed. 9.11 was intended less as an act of war, an injury, than as a message: “America, you can come down, in your entirety, just as suddenly and inconceivably as you see the World Trade Center coming down. You are hubris-possessed like these buildings but we will turn your great strength back upon you. It will be done with pocket money, small change, exactly as before. Empire State Building…Indian Point….”

*Lightning War, Nazi-refined technique of invasion; Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia an infamous example.




The Consumer’s Strike

Representative-democracy, winner-take-all, largely disempowers us while assuring us our vote every 4 years puts us in the saddle! Whether we vote or not we sign away, to representatives who may or may not represent us in office, what amounts to our civic right of attorney. Fact is our one remaining direct-participatory expression is economical, in how we spend our money. The grape-boycott that Cesar Chavez promoted worked. King’s Montgomery Bus Boycott worked. Let us, to the extent individually possible, not purchase or invest in belligerent nations’ commodities. We are millions. Extend, borrow, barter put off, make do.

We are The Profit Margin.