Author: John Grant

 
Founded and preserved by acts of aggression, characterized by a continuing tradition of self-righteous violence against suspected subversion and by a vigorous sense of personal freedom, usually involving the widespread possession of firearms, the United States has evidenced a unique tolerance for homicide.

-David Brion Davis
Homicide in American Fiction 1798-1860

 
The Trayvon Martin story is not going to go away. It was a narrative event waiting to happen, and the story only gets richer with meaning as time goes on. There are the obvious racial aspects, but the most important elements are about police power versus citizen power — and who can get away with shooting whom.

Since the police and the various paralegal and wannabe versions of police are the first-line of contact between individuals and The State the incident’s outcome is important in the struggle between citizens’ rights and state power.

So far, the police and a flawed criminal justice system are winning most of the battles.

George Zimmerman, the Retreat at Twin Lakes and Trayvon Martin

The Supreme Court just ruled five to four that police departments and jail officials have the right to strip search anyone once the person is ensconced in their clutches. These five male robed eminences agreed it was just fine for a police officer to make you stand in a room buck-naked, lift your nut sack, bend over and spread your cheeks. The officer doesn’t need a reason, other than having you in his control. It’s an elitist ruling ripe for abuse.

 
When does a determination to look on the bright side turn into a state of denial? That is, when do leaders of a secrecy-obsessed US government admit the decision-making surrounding the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan was misguided from the beginning and the endgame is a mess because of it?

While the leadership of America is mud-wrestling with itself in the election “silly season,” the nation is watching the wheels come off its military occupation of Afghanistan. It feels like that special effects TV ad for a new SUV in which, as the SUV speeds forward, thousands of its parts magically come flinging loose until we see nothing but the truck chassis speeding ahead.

In Afghanistan, we’re down to that truck chassis. And its wheels are now coming loose. Once again, US leaders have reached a crisis endpoint in yet another counter-insurgency commitment. Once again our leaders insist on “victory” when that kind of end is impossible.

Images of colonialism, empire and imperialism

The story began just over a century ago. Smart, moderate historians like Andrew Bacevich (Washington Rules and The Short American Century: A Postmortem); Chalmers Johnson (The Blowback Trilogy and Dismantling The Empire: America’s Last Best Hope) and others have made the imperial master narrative clear. In a nutshell, the expansionist militarist energy that began with the Spanish American War — the so-called American Century — is over. Or at least we’re climbing down the mountain we ascended so gloriously during the last century. The empire that was launched with great bully, outward-rushing enthusiasm by Teddy Roosevelt and others is now circling its wagons.

 
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (or AIPAC) is holding its annual meeting in Washington DC in an atmosphere of beating war drums and rattling sabers against Iran. It’s a full-court press of pro-war power working to make the White House cave in and assume an even more belligerent posture vis-a-vis Iran that it already has.

Israel preemptively starting a war with Iran would be bad enough, but the assumption that the United States will be part of that war should be very disturbing to Americans — who are just getting over one misguided, costly war in Iraq and are still involved in another in Afghanistan.

In an election year with such cynicism about government in the air, one might think more Americans would question the propaganda for war that AIPAC represents and that sadly goes so hand-in-hand with the uncritical pandering too many American politicians and mainstream journalists engage in.

Most Americans are sheep when it comes to criticizing Israel. A tax-paying American has to be a particularly willful contrarian — be willing to be called “unpatriotic,” an “antisemite” or a “terrorist” — just to raise even a reasonable question in the face of this PR juggernaut for Israel.

A Teheran rally and Israeli F-15s

President Obama is to speak Sunday before the AIPAC meeting, and he has scheduled meetings with both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Peres told a New York Times reporter, while the prime minister rules, his role as president of Israel “is to charm.” He then lectured the reporter and Americans that we needed to be tough and establish “red lines” that Israel approves of.

The United States is finding the occupation of other nations more and more challenging. Witness the clueless US soldiers or contractors who burned a dozen Korans at the Bagram Air Force Base trash dump in Afghanistan. The uproar in response has only begun.

Then there were the ace troopers who filmed themselves urinating on corpses. And let’s not forget the perplexing US assault that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Plus a host of other disasters. We’re failing at Occupation 101. Economic challenges at home only add to the difficulty.

Meanwhile, as the US tries to control an occupation AND be the nice guy, dictators like Bashar Assad in Syria and Omar Bashir in Sudan employ classic scorched earth counter-insurgency tactics and hold onto power. In such a frustrating quandary, what is a poor superpower to do? Washington and Pentagon leaders have decided to fall back on what they feel the US does best: Secret killing.

In Part One of this story, I suggested there were similarities between the new US military doctrine of Special Ops hunter-killer teams and Dexter, the popular novel and TV character who is an upstanding police forensic expert by day and a gruesome psychopathic killer by night. Dexter calls his killer persona his “dark passenger,” a killer “dressed in red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue” who kills only people who deserve to die.

In Part Two, we go to Hollywood.

Scenes from the feature film Act Of Valor

The US government wants its war machine to look good when the budget crunch is on. So with our ten-year Iraq occupation going south and Afghanistan headed in that direction, it’s understandable the Pentagon might want to shill its new, shiny War Doctrine in the marketplace of popular culture.

After two controversial wars, we’re now watching a situation in which Israel could attack Iran, but do it so ineffectually that it would pull the US into what could snowball into a Third World War. This is happening in the context of the Arab Spring upheavals that suggest people around the world are rising up and demanding the removal of the repressive yokes around their necks. China and India and Brazil are on the way to being competitive peers in the capitalist rat race. This dynamic is already driving gasoline prices higher and higher. The future is getting very troublesome and foreboding to contemplate for the average American.

 
I could have been a vicious raving monster who killed and killed and left towers of rotting flesh in my wake. Instead, here I was on the side of truth, justice and the American way. Still a monster, of course, but I cleaned up nicely afterward, and I was OUR monster, dressed in red, white and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue.
 
-Jeff Lindsay
Dearly Devoted Dexter

 
I teach creative writing in a maximum security prison in Philadelphia. During the week I scour two thrift shops for 35-cent paperbacks that I haul in to stock a small lending library I created for inmates. Amazingly, the prison had no library.

In the process of collecting used books, I’ve surveyed the crime, mystery and noir genre of popular fiction. I collect some books for myself and have read many in part or end to end. The range of quality in such a genre runs from garbage to genius.

I’m a Vietnam veteran and a veteran anti-war activist who follows the US war news closely. The psychological and mythic forces of Eros and Thanatos (Death) interest me and how they play out in popular culture. Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents writes about “the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction.” Eros is the force that brings humans together and Thanatos is the force that drives us apart. “This struggle is what all life essentially consists of,” Freud writes. Chris Hedges also writes of this split in his great book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

The other day I picked up Jeff Lindsay’s second book in the Dexter series — Dearly Devoted Dexter — about a Miami police department forensic expert by day and psychopathic killer by night. Lindsay’s Dexter novels have spun off into a popular Showtime TV series. The Miami Herald called the book about a lovable serial killer “A macabre work of art.”

Personally, I wouldn’t pay the full cover price for this book. Still, Lindsay is a fine prose writer whose characters are well drawn and set within a fast-paced plot that ping-pongs from the sweet, personal and mundane to the truly horrific blood feast. Dexter as first-person narrator speaks in a tone of light, ironic gallows humor with the reader assumed as a friendly confidant. His day job is as a blood-spatter expert with the Miami-Dade Police Homicide Department.

Dexter author Jeff Lindsay, actor Michael C. Hall and a John Hoagland shot of a body dump in El Salvador circa 1985

In this book, Dexter has a relationship with a woman named Rita who has two kids, a boy and a girl, Cody and Astor. All three are wounded from abuse by her ex-husband. Interestingly, Dexter makes it clear he doesn’t care so much about Rita and is not interested in sex. At one point, this disciple of Thanatos is drinking beer and finds himself in bed snuggling with Rita and succumbing to the Erotic. “She was just so nice and smelled so good and felt so warm and comfortable that — Well. Beer really is amazing stuff, isn’t it?”

The State Department has threatened to withdraw the $1.5 billion it sends every year to Egypt because the Egyptians are holding US citizens connected with pro-democracy groups the Egyptians claim have instigated the Tahrir Square movement.

Specifically, the Egyptian military government prevented a half dozen Americans — including Sam LaHood, director of the US International Republican Institute in Cairo — from leaving the country. LaHood is the son of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Such entities, some supported by US funding, are notorious for meddling in places like Venezuela. In this case, there is an interest in influencing the turmoil in Egypt.

Before this incident, President Obama warned Egyptian military strongman Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi that the upcoming installment of US military aid was contingent on his playing ball with US interests. The snatching of LaHood and the others turned the situation into a diplomatic incident. LaHood was quoted in The New York Times as wondering whether he would be brought to trial for meddling in Egyptian affairs.

“[T]he whole thing is ludicrous,” he said.

That may be true, but even more ludicrous is the failure to provide a similar warning on the other side of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. That is, according to several recent reports, Israel’s top leaders are making it known they feel a massive air attack on Iran by Israel is a manageable thing — that suggestions such bombing attacks would lead to a major conflagration are all bluff. A Sunday New York Times Magazine article by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman concludes “Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Why do US leaders threaten to withhold patronage military funds when Egyptian militarists drag their feet on democracy, but not when Israeli militarists seem ready to drag us into World War Three?

Of course, we know the answer to this. Egyptians are backward brown Arabs with a history of living under the thumb of British colonial rule and US imperial hegemony. We know the drill: Bernard Lewis and the failures of Arab modernization. Israel, on the other hand, is just like us, a western garrison state run by a Prime Minister who went to Cheltenham High School just outside of Philadelphia and who likes to mentally link Iranians with Nazi Germany and the holocaust.

By Brazil's Carlos Latuff

With the middle east in upheaval, the fact Israel finds itself a vulnerable fortress state wound so tightly it won’t even budge an inch to recognize obvious Palestinian grievances is a global tragedy. To say it did not have to be this way and that there were other choices from the very beginning is at this late date pointless. That’s the nature of tragedy; decisions are made and one has to live with them.

 
Hugo Chavez is at it again, sticking his thumb into the eye of the overbearing United States of America. And, true to imperial historical form, the US is playing the outraged hemispherical nanny and blustering back.

Chavez is currently playing a round of the game my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend and is hosting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Caracas. The Iranian president is on a tour of friendly leftist regimes in Latin America, while the leaders of our great nation whistle and look at the ceiling when Israeli agents murder Iranian scientists in broad daylight.

Fighting cancer, a chemo-bloated but grinning Chavez greeted an equally grinning Ahmadinejad at the Mireflores Palace in Caracas. At a press conference in the palace under a painting of Simon Bolivar they made jokes about nuclear bombs and the imperialist giant to the north so obviously worried about remaining top dog in the world.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad welcomed by Hugo Chavez; and General Henry Rangel Silva

“Despite those arrogant people who do not wish us to be together, we will unite forever,” Ahmadinejad told Chavez.

Referring to an area near the palace, Chavez replied, “That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out. The imperialist spokesmen say Ahmadinejad and I are going into the Miraflores basement now to set our sights on Washington and launch cannons and missiles.” He and Ahmadinejad both laughed.

If that isn’t enough to pique imperialist leaders, President Chavez had earlier announced the appointment of his loyal pal General Henry Rangel Silva as national defense minister. Rangel was formerly head of the nation’s intelligence services and was a member of the failed but famous 1992 coup led by Hugo that brought him to prominence. This worried his opponents, since Rangel is a really tough guy who doesn’t always play by the rules.

Ever since George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 souls and was selected President by a right-leaning Supreme Court, the United States has seemed to me devoted to a twisted fate of slow-motion Armageddon.

What seems to guarantee this is one of our most characteristic American traits: We don’t learn from the past; instead, we choose to officially forget embarrassing history so we can move on from our debacles without losing an ounce of glory. We all know how it goes: Sure, mistakes were made, but we need to keep our eye on the ball and move forward. The costs are paid in slow motion and out of sight.

Our leaders are either complicit in the gig or they feel compelled to pander to this weakness for forgetting history as they pump up the boilerplate myth and symbols. We’re now, of course, officially entering the silly season in America, so maybe we should not be surprised that the idea of going to war is in the air.

Torture victims of the Shah's Savak, an election office in Teheran and an Iranian guided missile test

The fear of history became clear to me back in 1992 when President George Bush Senior was pushing something called Education 2000 and decided to make a speech at Norristown High School outside Philadelphia, where my wife taught Art. The President’s advance team asked that the school’s Art Department provide a painted backdrop for the President; they wanted a large book. Being artists and, thus, by nature subversive, my dear wife and her colleagues asked themselves what was the subject matter the President of the United States would be most uncomfortable with. They chose HISTORY and painted that word on the cover of the book.

Early on the day of the speech, the White House advance party arrived and right away told the Art Department to change the book’s title from HISTORY to MATH. History, of course, was not even a part of the President’s Education 2000 program. The America of the first George Bush was forward looking. Yes, mistakes had been made in our history, but it was mathematics and cold-blooded technological advancement that had to be emphasized. We want to hear the confident hum of a machine future, not the human shrieks of horror from the past.

 
(Photos: John Grant)

Ft. Meade — Saturday, December 17th was Bradley Manning’s 24th birthday, and at least 300 supporters gathered outside Fort Meade, Maryland, where the military was in its second day of a preliminary hearing process that’s expected to take about a week. Manning worked in military intelligence and is alleged to have released military secrets to WikiLeaks, which released the material publicly.

After collecting at the main gate, Manning supporters set off for a two-mile march to a gate nearer the military hearing site. The group was quite spirited and, despite Anne Arundel County Police efforts to keep marchers on the sidewalk, insisted on taking up a lane of the street. The police wisely did not attempt to stop them and there were no problems.

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Following a decade of military invasion and occupation in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the United States is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of empires: “We get no respect!”

The undisputed post-World War Two top dog in the world, on virtually every front the United States is more and more playing catch-up with two-faced, Clintonian shuttle diplomacy around the world and a well-entrenched regime of secrecy and sophisticated public relations aimed at keeping the dismal story of decline out of the domestic mind-space.

Economic realities dictate that the US government ratchet down its exorbitant military from the strutting days of Colin Powell’s two-front shock-and-awe doctrine to a leaner doctrine centered on highly mobile, focused assassinations. Instead of bombing cities and structures like a boxer who batters the body, we now go for quick, well-placed head shots, especially to the key, sensitive areas of the brain that provide inspiration and leadership to the movements we deem threatening to our declining future.

US citizens are absorbing this accelerating imperial decline without being informed that’s what’s going on. The myth of exceptionalism must be kept alive and the donut hole of our global empire — the American homeland where we all work and raise our families — must carry the burden of sacrifice.

The imperial system isn’t working like it used to; and much of it is being held together by political fantasy. What else can explain the incredible degree of unreality and nonsense more and more at the core of American politics? As the secrecy rises, formal bullshit, as defined by Harry Frankfurt, has become an American language.

Democrats are accomplished with it, but for the masters of bullshit you have to witness the current preposterous level of argument and thinking among the presidential candidates in the Republican Party. There’s no presumption of even a grip on reality; it’s a struggle for power and nothing else — with the mainstream media keeping score.

We Live in a Noir World

As part of a personal study, I recently watched two classic RKO noir films from 1947 – Out Of The Past and Born To Kill, the former very famous and the latter more obscure. The sensibility of these black and white films seems perfectly in synch with the incredibly corrupt times we live in.

(Noir means black in French. The symbolism of blackness as evil goes way back in white, European culture, so unfortunately noir imagery as used here does collide today with the desire to be racially neutral. Human symbolism is complex; for example, in places like Haiti, funeral hearses are often white.)

The Nagasaki bomb and Robert Mitchum in Out Of The Past

In his book Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, Nicholas Christopher suggests the late 40s and 50s noir films were mining and expressing the deep-seated anxiety – the “collective shudder” – of a culture on the threshold of the post-Hiroshima atomic age that had not yet fully sorted out the demons of the Great Depression.

“The war ends but there is no closure,” Christopher writes. “Forces are unleashed. Organized crime, street violence, political corruption, poverty. … GIs returning to the United States from Europe and the Pacific carry, not microbes, but lethal infirmities of the mind and spirit after four years of living day in day out with brutality and violent death, and surviving a war in which 1,700 cities and townships were destroyed and 35 million people were killed.”