I have read it again this morning, the claim that there is some kind of mystery in why Donald Trump loves dictators and hates leaders of democratic (Canada, Germany) and quasi-democratic countries (Britain).
The reason Trump loves even the most brutal of dictators is the same reason Putin prefers to have dictators rule in the countries he's promoting fascism and neo-Nazism in, gangsters like doing business with gangsters, the truth, the rule of law, justice are not conducive to their maximum earning potential and their remaining on the top of the crime world.
It's the same reason that Republicans, especially those in the John Roberts Court, have destroyed any effective means of campaign finance reform for the purpose of protecting our elections from lies, the Citizens United majority in that case, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy (RATS+K) are the ones who, on behalf of the protogees of billionaires here and the "civil liberties" industry, opened up our elections system to even greater billionaire corruption and, as was warned at the time, foreign corporate corruption.
----------------------------
Mark Twain's quip that the indigenous criminal class in the United States was the Congress was only slightly but importantly off. The Congress was only the servant of the indigenous criminal class, as were and are the Supreme Court. The rich and powerful are the indigenous criminal class here as they are around the world. They are the foremost force that tries to control governments for corrupt and larcenous purposes. Mark Twain as a writer who, by that time, was rich and famous himself, knew he couldn't tell that truth directly, though he told more of it than many. He preferred, when he wrote a moral tale about everyday corruption, put it in terms of the relatively common people of his mythical Hadleyburg. Maybe he took that to be an allegory, using common folk as fabulists used animals, so as to stand for the corruption of wealth and the prospect of wealth. But it's one thing I've learned since reading the unedited thinking of so many college educated, even PhD'd folk, that if you want to tell the truth, those old literary forms of allegory, symbolism, etc. are stupid because you can't count on people seeing through the narrative to get to your point. The recent case where I found out that even when that's glaring people in the face, as in The Brothers Karamazov, they won't get it. You give people half a chance, a quarter of a chance, and they'll twist any allegory into meaning what they want it to mean, not into even an obvious meaning that they don't prefer.
And Americans don't read novels much, watching the movie instead.
It's even worse when they're supposed to learn history from movies and TV shows and plays. I wonder if any academic historian has ever made a survey of the handling of history in movies and plays and novels, concentrating on the most important of those for effect in swaying or toppling democracy, the ones with the biggest audiences. I suspect that if all of those popular venues for people getting what they believe is history were fact checked that it would be found that most of them were complete distortions of history and that just about none of them that purported to treat historical topics didn't contain glaring and significant lies and distortion of history, generally for either an ideological reason or, most damaging of all, to try to please an audience. When people get everything they know out of commercial crap like the movies, you can be sure that the "history" they get out of it will, as well, serve the purpose of those financing, producing, directing and writing the movies. As in the case of the movie Charlie Wilson's War, in which Tom Hanks reportedly demanded that they change some historical facts to make his character more likable, even the actors get a hand in lying about it.
Theater, movie "history" is inherently tied to audience appeal, not accuracy, not the truth.
If “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with a budget of $75 million, is a commercial success, its creators will have found a winning formula. You can make a movie that is relevant and intelligent — and palatable to a mass audience — if its political pills are sugar-coated, in this case thanks to Mr. Wilson’s high jinks, his sometime romance with a right-wing socialite played by Ms. Roberts and his escapades with a coarse C.I.A. officer played by Mr. Hoffman. But Hollywood has long found it tricky to find the balance between being taken seriously on geopolitics without falling short on what movies are supposed to do: entertain.
Mr. Sorkin elaborated: “There’s a vocabulary in movies that boozing is O.K., especially if the guy is going to kind of reform himself. That using cocaine, we’re never going to look past. That if we saw him snorting it, we’re no longer going to care about the Russians and the Afghans and the horror over there.”
Yet for all the horror, Mr. Sorkin, Mr. Nichols and Mr. Hanks — each a liberal Democrat — insist that their creation is, of all things, more a comedy than a political movie. “It’s a serious comedy,” Mr. Hanks said. “Funny stuff happens right next to horribly tragic stuff.”
Indeed there’s what Mr. Nichols calls “a Marx Brothers scene,” replete with slamming doors, as Mr. Hoffman’s character is repeatedly asked to leave Mr. Wilson’s office so he can deal with other crises. And who cannot chortle at how the office is stocked with statuesque beauty queens, known as Charlie’s Angels? Comedy or not, the spin from its creators is this: Don’t lump us with those box office disasters with ponderous Iraq-related messages.
One wonders how many people died, were maimed, were left bereaved, how many Afghanis, Americans, Canadians, citizens of the EU countries and the other allies that volunteered to fight on behalf of America in Afghanistan and, even more tragically, Iraqis, Syrians and others, since these Hollywood "liberals" made that comic treatment of the relevant history.
At a time when I would argue the standards of academic historical research and writing are higher than at any time in the history of historical writing, it's an incredible tragedy that a country, a world with more people with more degrees than ever in the history of the world would be turning to this kind of shit sausage factory for not only a cheap but a fatally dangerous substitute on the basis of it being more entertaining and so more salable.
No wonder democracy is in the crapper. It was put there by popular entertainment, even the "high end" of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment