Mob Rule & Songs of Dismemberment

Mob Rule & Songs of Dismemberment

Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.”

Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money."

A top Saudi doctor of forensics had been brought along for the dissection and disposal of the body — an addition to the team that Turkish officials have called evidence of premeditation. And as the agents cut off Mr. Khashoggi’s head and dismembered his body, the doctor had some advice, according to the senior Turkish official.

Listen to music, he told them, as he donned headphones himself. That was what he did to ease the tension when doing such work, the doctor explained, according to the official describing the contents of the audio recordings.

-      Audio Offers Gruesome Details of Jamal Khashoggi Killing, Turkish Official Says,   NY Times

“YOU DON’T hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob,” President Trump tweeted this month. “Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern.”

-     The GOP’s ‘angry mob’ rhetoric is a dangerous assault against democratic norms, Washington Post

By J.M. Hamilton (10-20-2018)

Political discourse has sunk to new levels in this country, but particularly from the institution that used to be known as “the leader of the free world," a/k/a The President of the United States.  (The term, “leader of the free world," was widely used during the Cold War to denote democratic values, freedom of the press, and the free exchange of ideas & opinions that took place in the West, and the US, vis a vis, The Soviet Union and Communist China.)

Apparently, as Messrs. Fitzgerald & Hemingway noted, the elite and powerful aren’t like you and I.  Not only do they have more money, but they also have notoriously thin skins.  Mr. Trump and his best buddy, Prince  Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (MBS for short), are both a case in point; but the same could be said of many of today’s global elite.  China, apparently w/ the help of Google & assorted US multinationals, has ramped up repression, and the Democratic reforms seen in the former Soviet Union, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, all but gone now, under Putin.  Autocratic rule & oppression go hand in hand and crush civil liberties, democracy, and human rights.  And if one thinks the US is exempt, one is very sadly mistaken.

Many of the rich & powerful live in hermetically sealed bubbles… an airtight chamber filled with sycophants and yes men & women.   And when this bubble is burst, all sorts of hell often breaks loose.

The Saudi-Khashoggi Affair being a case in point. 

After Khashoggi was killed - to the hear the Turks tell it – by a Saudi hit squad consisting of fifteen men (including one doctor, who, in the ultimate act of premeditation, was there to offer guidance on corpse dismemberment), the Saudi dictatorship, first, disavowed all knowledge, then they threatened to shut down the oil spigot, and as of this writing, and after a visit from the US Secretary of State, have come upon scapegoats and mass arrests.  Anything but the truth, and anything in order to protect the Saudi prince.  The whole thing reeks of the Kavanaugh cover-up, and faux- FBI investigation.  Perhaps Pompeo, or McKinsey & Co., gave the Saudis some pointers?

Oh, and Mr. Khashoggi’s crime: he wrote, in the free press, articles and opinion pieces critical of Terror, Inc. and the Saudi royals. 

For Trump, the whole affair meets at the very nexus of what he has come to stand for: a deep disdain for the fourth estate; a ruling international plutocracy, where all that matters is the next deal & the bottom line (where citizens are mere peons and all too often, collateral damage); and a reckless disregard for the democratic principles, and civil liberties, for which this country long stood (albeit far from perfect in its execution).  The latter demonstrated, by Trump’s affection and love for dictatorships the globe over.

Like the Saudi Prince, Trump, too, is hyper sensitive.  And so when his SCOTUS nominee, Mr. Kavanaugh, suffered the slings and arrows, associated w/ allegations of serial sexual assault, Trump described the women protestors as an “angry left-wing mob.”  Trump, however, is not alone.  Many Republican Senators, and Congressmen, have expressed similar views.  Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner recently threatened to tap dance on the face of his opponent with “golf spikes.”

All this GOP anger, pathos, rage, much of which is driven by fear and a recognition that their party is sadly lacking in new blood & ideas….  It’s most unbecoming.   Why I can remember when the GOP was the party of ideas, when William Buckley stood athwart history, and yelled: “Stop.”  But alas, no more… the Republicans are at the barricades, backs against the wall, like Confederate dead-enders, hanging onto power (Bibles & guns), no matter how bankrupt or vacuous, The Cause.  

Presently, the GOP is very much like an anachronistic/preternatural creature forever sealed in amber... political Darwinism in action; and establishment Dems, GOP-Lite, are right behind them.

Instead of being the party of ideas, today, we are treated to ad hominem attacks, denials, lies, and if a Republican is particularly gifted, perhaps a little sophistry.  Most of the argumentation today is puerile and elementary:  the co-opting of the left’s argumentation, the equivalent of a playground taunt:  I know you are, but what am I?!.  We saw this recently when the Senate Majority leader attempted to blame, on Bloomberg, the manufactured deficit explosion on social spending, instead of credit card wars and more tax cuts for the rich (all evidence notwithstanding, and almost universally understood, even among some Republicans).

Or we get the authoritarian line, per Mr. Trump, recently expressed in his 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl,  “I’m President, and you're not.”

Alrighty then: game, set, and match.

Richard McGuire’s “Fat Cats,” at The New Yorker

If we look up the word “mob,” in the Oxford English Dictionary, it has several meanings.  As Mr. Trump used the word, he was dismissively talking of a disorderly crowd of people bent upon causing trouble (a/k/a democracy).  The dictionary goes on to note that the word “Mob” also refers – in North America -  to the mafia or a criminal organization.

Unfortunately, for us mere mortals, the globe’s citizens, this is the Mob we truly need to be frightened of…. A band of one percenters, who - in an organized & criminal fashion - prey upon the 99% the planet over.  Their first means of attack, economically, is via cartel, the exploitation of obscene amounts of debt, financial engineering, globalization, and monopoly & monopsony; the second order of attack is political - stirring up division, social unrest, & war – as a means to distract from the first order of attack (and as a profit making venture unto itself); and the third order of attack – very much like Hitler – is to co-opt, and destroy, democratic government, norms, and institutions by any means necessary (as democracy is the only known viable check/ threat to authoritarian rule, kleptocracy, and oligarchy).  This third order of attack, if successful, ultimately, leads to capture & ownership of fiscal, foreign, judicial, and monetary policy in the service of the elite, the billionaire class.

And of course, if all else fails, there’s a fifteen-man hit squad to take out one honest - 60 year old - journalist, via La Cosa Nostra (per the Saudis, in a fist fight gone horribly wrong).

I wonder...  when the bone saws were deployed, did the Saudi mercenaries listen to Bach, Coltrane, or Madonna?

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2018