Hillary's Republican

 

As the non-race of the Trumpist party's pretend primaries moves towards its inevitable conclusion, there's a peculiar bit of pushback against the candidate who appears to be consolidating her position as a futile, distant second.

From Trump's camp, there were recent efforts to make hay of the fact that Nikki Haley once noted in passing that she was inspired by Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency.  

"Ahah," cried his hounds.  "Look at her!  Haley said a nice thing about Hillary!  Hale-aree!  SHE'S JUST LIKE HILLAREEE RINO RINO CLINTON HILLARY HALE-AAAA-RrrEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (insert inaudible dogwhistle sound here)!"

This is an odd thing for Trumpists to highlight, simply because were it not for Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump would never have won the Republican nomination in 2016.   

By saying this, I'm not saying "Donald J. Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 because he was the best person to win against Hillary Clinton."  I am also not saying:  "Hillary Clinton was such a terrible person that opposing her made Donald J. Trump seem like a perfectly reasonable choice."

I am saying: "Donald J. Trump was the person that Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign chose to win the Republican nomination in 2016, as she and her campaign successfully did everything in their power to get him nominated."

Why?  Because Trump was (and is) not just the worst possible candidate for the Presidency...venal, amoral, incompetent, and self-evidently unfit for office.  He was also the only Republican candidate in 2016 that Clinton's internal polling told her she had a shot at beating.   In the emails that Russian operatives hacked from Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta, which were subsequently disseminated through Wikileaks, it's without question that Hillary's strategy revolved around manipulating the media to cast Donald J. Trump as her main adversary. 

I mean, it's right there.  There are receipts.  It's a Known Known, as Rumsfeld might have put it.

Knowing how much the Clinton Industrial Complex was loathed by the far right and ultraconservatives, positioning Trump as her opponent would naturally strengthen him in the primary process.  It worked.  Rank and file conservatives took that bait.  I mean, if you're one of the souls who voted for him, you're living proof.

It produced...like about half of what the Democratic party does, and most of what McKinsey recommends...the sort of disastrous outcome that rises from being too smart for your own good.  

Because whenever you intentionally bend probability in a dark direction to your potential gain, your gamesmanship increases the chances for a catastrophic outcome.  If your candidate only beats a potential opponent...whose incompetence is a danger to the republic...by only two to three percentage points, you shouldn't be thinking about elevating that opponent.

What does it benefit you, to paraphrase an old friend, to gain a few percentage points but lose your republic?

The Word "Tragedy"

The images of the scattered, burning debris of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 were still fresh, and the fires were still burning, as the first words describing the event were put out there.

And for some reason, a single word--or the nuance of the meaning of that word--just felt wrong.

A "tragedy," they were calling it.  "Tragedy."

That was the word from the White House.  That was the specific word used by Vladimir Putin.  That was how Fox News described it, and CNN.  "Tragedy."

And it was tragic, in the most rudimentary sense of the term.  Hundreds of dead, meaning thousands and thousands in mourning.  Here, scores of lives that were promising and full of potential, now ended.  In that, it is immensely sad, and a somber thing.

But tragedy has other connotations, deeper and more complex ones, and that's where the word seems to break down for this terrible event.

Classical tragedy, of course, is a narrative form that revolves around fate and human hubris.  A person has a single abiding flaw, one that is typically woven up with their greatest strength.  Their pride.  Their strength of purpose.  Their passion.  Their love for one another.  Their commitment to their promises.  Their desire to return home, having proved themselves worthy by killing bullies and oppressors just like dad used to do, and finding a wife who reminds them of dear ol' mom.  Their calculating, world-weary cynicism.

In a tragic narrative, that flaw destroys them.

But those who died yesterday had no such flaw.  In that classical sense, their deaths were not tragedy, not quite.

Tragedy weaves up deeply with the idea of fate, of an unchosen, inexorable destiny.  When an accident of fate places human being in harm's way, it is tragedy.  It is tragic, for instance, when thousands die because they happen to be small living things in the path of a tsunami or a tornado.  When a beautiful spirit succumbs to cancer, that is tragic.

But all of those deaths yesterday were not tragic, not completely.

They were chosen.  It was a choice that they should die.

A group of soldiers have been placed into a disputed region by a singularly calculating tyrant, who masks his involvement there behind a thicket of lies and subterfuge.  Operating in secret, they are equipped with a sophisticated weapons system, which they use to target a passing aircraft.  Their intent was to destroy that aircraft, and to kill all of the people on board.

That was precisely what they did.  Oh, sure, they weren't the people they'd intended to kill, any more than that gangbanger intends to shoot the little girl when he sprays gunfire from a passing car.

They believed it to be a transport plane, although no Ukrainian transport craft looks even vaguely like a 777.  Soviet-era radar guidance may not be quite so discerning, though.

And so they shoot down the plane they tried to shoot down.  They kill hundreds of Dutch, Australian, and Malaysian human beings, where they hoped to only kill dozens of Ukrainian human beings.

This is not tragedy.  It could be tragedy, but it is not yet.  Tragedy comes with awareness of the reality of what hubris has wrought.  It is Othello, realizing he has killed his faithful Desdemona.  It is Juliet, awaking to her dead Romeo.  It is Oedipus, tear-filled eyes wide with horror, the needles clutched in his hands.  It is the smell of the smoke in Jephthah's nostrils.  It is Eugene Onegin, seeing Tatyana's beauty too late, with new eyes.

I do not doubt that some of the men involved this morning feel that sense of tragedy, as the images of families and children from that flight play through the world's consciousness.  Those men may or may not be allowed to express their pain.  When you are acting covertly and in secret, agents of a power that wants your involvement in a conflict kept hidden, your ability to express regret is limited.

As for that power?

I am not sure that existential knowledge of the meaning of tragedy yet rests behind the cool, precise eyes of Vladimir Putin.

The Things that Don't Concern Us

As happens on a regular basis, the Washington Post had an insert on Monday, one that's sort of vaguely news-ish.   I'll wager that we're the only market for this particular insert, which wends its way in with the HH Gregg and Best Buy circulars.

It's "Russia: Beyond the Headlines," published by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta.  That meaning it's a talky, cheery paid regular "supplement" that shills for the Putin regime.

Must show face in DC, yes? America and Russia are such good and profitable old friends, yes?

I've commented on these before, and I'd been wondering when the "Ukraine/Crimea" edition would come out.   Propaganda looks so different, in this era of global capitalism.

Anyhoo, it showed up, and given the state of things, I actually bothered reading all the way through it.  Mostly in-between-the-lines, of course, listening for implicit assumptions and the worldview they were trying to pitch.

What really jumped at me was an article by a businessman, a developer who's worked in Russia and has pulled together a "how to" book for doing business with our wery profitable Russian friends.

It being a bit of news-esque fluff, it had to have a list.  Where would we be without our lists?  This one was the Five Rules for developing properties in Russia, and it was fascinating.

Item one: Learn Russian.  This seems only fair.  Fine!

Item two:  Ignore things that don't concern you.  Um, what?  The businessman went on. There are going to be bad things that might seem unsavory or perhaps evil--although, really, who is to say what that word really means-- happening, and powerful people doing what they must.  Do not meddle with them.  Your job is to do business.  Just do your business, and keep your eyes to yourself.

Item three:  Keep your eyes on the prize.  That sounds uplifting, very like a civil rights hymn.  Which it was, if I recall.  Only here, if you read on, it's a bit different.  Just a bit. The "prize" is getting your job done.  If you're building a building, do that.  If you're investing in a natural gas pipeline, do that.  Make sure, says the businessman, that those around you know you are not interested in social change or "saving the world."  Then, all will be well.

I didn't get to items four or five, because...well...I think items two and three really do tell you everything you need to know about what it means to do business in Putin's Russia.

Why the Olympics Make Me Miss The Soviets

I miss the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  I really do.

Watching the Olympics in Sochi, as I am here and there, reminds me of this.  Oh, there are plenty of things I don't miss.

I don't miss the brutal oppression of the Russian people under the Soviet regime, and the hard hand turned against the peoples of the USSR's satellite states.  In many ways, I don't need to miss it, 'cause it's still there.  Czar Vladimir has proven himself quite capable of maintaining that dark old habit.

I don't miss staring down the barrel of thousands of Soviet ICBMs.  That was the stuff of so many childhood nightmares, the kind of pointless, species-ending absurdity that only glazed-eye ideologues could embrace.

But I do miss the pretense of Communism and Soviet Socialism, because America needed it.  Our society has grown notably weaker and more dissolute since the fall of the Soviet Union, as the darker demons of capitalism are let play.

Why is this happening?  Because suddenly, there's no competition.

And I miss the competition, because as the Olympics show us, competition makes us stronger.

Who is holding us to our ideals?  If we claim to be a free nation, founded on principles of justice and equality, who's poking us in the eye if we treat a particular group like they're just a little bit subhuman?  Who goads us to excel and challenge ourselves, stirring us to reaching a strong arm up into the heavens and stand on other worlds?  Nobody.

And if we claim that capitalism provides wonderfully for all, and yet it clearly ain't, who's providing a potent...false, but potent...apparent alternative?

Our current enemies, such as they are, offer us nothing desirable.  The Taliban?  Al Qaeda?  Who would wish to be them?  Cold, ugly, backwards, ignoble, and hateful, there's nothing about their worldview that would appeal to the vast majority of human beings.  North Korea?  Lord have mercy.

But the Soviets did things.  Badly, often, but they did.  They felt like they were giving us a run for our money, and they drove America to suppress the darker demons of capitalism and to strive.  We're better than that, we'd say, and we were right.  We made sure we were right.

Oh, sure, correlation isn't causation, but I'm reasonably sure it's a nonrandom thing that the cradle-to-grave care provided by America's businesses vanished like a morning fog the moment the Soviet Union collapsed.  It's a nonrandom thing that American CEO pay has soared to Russian Oligarch levels since communism sputtered out and died.

Back then, no executive or Senator would have wanted the average American looking to the Rooskies and saying, "You know what, this whole mess is terrible.  Maybe them Commies ain't all wrong."

But now, now that we're all living in Potterville, stressed out and working two-dead-end jobs without benefits, up to our eyeballs in debt while we struggle to figure out how we're going to pay for the Xanax we need just to keep it together?

Now, there's no-one there to rub our noses in it.  Which is a real pity.

Because Khrushchev, as it turned out, was wrong.  They weren't going to bury us.  We're managing to do that ourselves.

Jesus Loves the Little Spammers

With all the talk about welcoming and inviting that bounces around the church lately, I find myself wondering if there is ever an instance when a visitor might not be welcome.

Like, say, the "visitors" whose presence is announced daily in my blogstats.   I'm a small potatoes blogger, and will remain so.  This blog is too diffuse, too "what I happen to be thinking about today" to be successful.

So my traffic on a daily basis is about half-human, and half...well...what?

They have urls like vampirestat and and visa-plus and pornogig.  Sometimes their bots will leave comments, in semi-coherent English or...if the algorithm is good...a sentence or two culled from the post to feign connection.    The country-code and tracking data indicates that they're Russian and Chinese, mostly.  These particular Russians and Chinese aren't interested in the blog, or interested in crosscultural exchange.   They are clumsy masks, worn by criminals and predators, intent on deception and theft.   They are not real visitors, any more than that email you received about $1.5 million waiting for you in a Nigerian widow's account is real.

You'd think autocratic regimes would be better at cracking down on lawlessness, but they are evidently unaware that all of their efforts to pretend that all is well mean nothing if every single blogger in America is being relentlessly spoofed and spammed from their shores daily.

So daily the links come, and I am meant to click that link, which will then permit them to cull the data that they can then either sell or use to access accounts.  I am not a fool, so I do not.

And yet, in the deep cybernetic thicket of spoofed servers and fake addresses, under the mediating structures between myself and those intent on theft, there is a real relationship.  Somewhere hidden behind those thousand lying masks is another soul.

A broken one, at that.

What is my responsibility in such a relationship, where I know the Other does not see me as a person?  Does not see me, in fact, at all.

You can reach out to the thief before you, or show incongruous forgiveness to those who harm you, when they are right in front of you.  That can establish the possibility of transformation.

But how can I convey grace to damaged souls who hide so far away, and so deep under layers of falseness?

Such a spiritual challenge, this new world is.