Barry’s Blog # 438: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Twenty

Part Twenty

Pay no attention to that genocide right in front of your face – Caitlin Johnstone

We mention “Super Tuesday” not for the predictable sweeps by Biden and Trumpus, but for the fact that over 200,000 people cast “uncommitted” or similar votes, including nearly 20% of the vote in Minnesota, 29% in Hawaii and 12% in North Carolina. Getting re-elected was already looking difficult well before the Gaza war began, but now, writes Jeet Heer,

…the Biden reelection campaign has developed an elaborate system of denial to wave away bad news…Ironically, with the growing movement of “uncommitted” voters, the Democrats who are angriest at Biden are trying to save the president from his worst instincts of overconfidence and smugness…“Uncommitted” suggests a feckless unwillingness to make a choice. But “uncommitted” voters are super committed.

In a nation where only 20% of news consumers will read past the headline and the media routinely resort to false equivalences, a new poll reveals that half of Americans have no idea whether more Israelis or Palestinians have died. However, while propaganda may keep people ignorant, they are not inherently stupid or morally obtuse. Fifty-five percent now disapprove of Israel’s actions.

The State of the Union address took the usual Democratic tactic of bragging about mild domestic policy initiatives, while almost completely ignoring the incomprehensively wasteful and expensive foreign policy. As Margaret Kimberley wrote,

The State of the Union address exemplifies everything that is wrong with this country. Trivialities are spun as being important, the most serious issues are glossed over, and lies are said to be true.

How does this Democratic government – and its Republican predecessors, to be sure – continue to spend trillions on war without raising taxes? By borrowing the money from the mega-rich and from other countries, and, in a subtle version of the sacrifice of the children, by punting the consequences onto future taxpayers. The national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days.

The speech provided no subsequent ratings bump, despite Robert Reich’s favorable (“feisty, bold, energetic, and upbeat”) assessment, with its deeply ironic title: “The case for nauseous optimism”. You can’t make this shit up.

Biden’s popularity dropped to a new low, as he trailed Trumpus (48% to 43% among registered voters) at the beginning of March and over 60% doubted his mental capability. Ironically, it says much about the actual “state” of things that while his most vulnerable political weak point is the fact that he’s sponsoring a genocide, Republicans can’t attack him on that point because they agree. Except for Trumpus, of course, who briefly interrupted his immigration fear-mongering and judge-insulting to endorse Bibles for sale and claim that Israel must “finish the problem…never would have happened if I was president” and “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion”, while Jared Kushner gushed over the valuable potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property”. Newsweek contrasted all this to prove that Biden is the adult in the room. Indeed.

Doubting the cognitive capability of either of these geezers is an old sport. What’s new, and – let’s face it, this is good news – millions are doubting Biden’s moral capability. Disapproval of his handling of the Gaza genocide is at 60%, up eight points since December. Undaunted, Biden continued to double down, vetoing yet another UN resolution that would have condemned Israel for the flour massacre. The U.S. has sent Israel over 100 separate arms shipments over the past 150 days – that’s two shipments every three days – and you almost certainly didn’t know that. The government has been able to avoid reporting the sales publicly because they fall under certain value thresholds that would require it to notify Congress.

Liberals who consume the usual media believed they saw something else: a compassionate, caring government policy! Biden was “privately” upset with Netanyahu! Kamala Harris made a wimpy call for a ceasefire. Eight Senators called for an end to arms sales – unless Israel immediately stops impeding aid deliveries.

Then Chuck Schumer, one of AIPAC’s favorite beneficiaries, gave a speech that would have been universally condemned had it been given by Putin, but which was utterly characteristic of American arrogance. He called for new elections in Israel with the express purpose of replacing Netanyahu. Liberals saw puff pieces such as Alternet’s “The anguished courage of Chuck Schumer”, which couldn’t imagine that his “independent” speech had been well-vetted by the foreign policy establishment. They also saw MSNBC hiring former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, who had previously attempted to overturn Biden’s victory (she was quickly fired, by NBC still pays retired generals and admirals with personal stakes in what they “analyze”).

Conservatives saw the Wall Street Journal, in a defining statement of American innocence, expressing shock – shock! – that Schumer would engage in such “unwelcome interference” in a democracy! Residents of the dozens of countries that the U.S. has overthrown – as well as two million second-class Israeli Arab citizens – may have had a good laugh.

Schumer’s apparent message was that Democrats’ support for Israel is no longer unconditional, although even Time Magazine could see that “getting rid of Netanyahu” wouldn’t change Israel’s genocidal strategies. Schumer’s actual message was that the Dems are finally taking the polls seriously.

This bloviation was followed by talk of the “Biden-Netanyahu rift” and tiny air drops of food that were nothing more than “humanitarian aid theater” and hollow talk of building a pier for ship deliveries, as if the U.S. couldn’t simply allow thousands of truckloads into Gaza if it really wanted to. “In reality”, wrote Aaron Maté, “the emergency project underscores Biden’s real priority: to prolong Israel’s rampage in Gaza, the US is even willing to deploy its own military for face-saving public relations stunts”. Sure enough, the U.S. soon proposed a bogus Security Council resolution which conditioned a ceasefire to “immediate” release of all “remaining hostages”. China and Russia vetoed it, with the Russian envoy claiming that the resolution would “ensure the impunity of Israel, whose crimes are not even assessed in the draft.” Then Biden signed the $1.2 trillion Budget Bill, the great majority of it being $895 billion for the War Department, with nothing for UNRW.

It’s the season of crazy. The U.S., which had vetoed multiple UN ceasefire resolutions, put forward a fake “ceasefire” resolution that didn’t actually demand a ceasefire and accused Russia and China of “sabotaging” peace when they vetoed it. When an actual ceasefire resolution was passed, the U.S. abstained from voting on it, and then declared that the resolution that did pass is “non-binding”. On 3/25, the State Department quadrupled down, as a spokesman told the press: We have not found them (the Israelis) to be in violation of international humanitarian law…”

American politics is about nothing but fear: fear of Trumpus, fear of the “socialist” Biden. Naming his candidate for Vice President, RFK Jr (who still has not received Secret Service protection, and who still hasn’t veered from his pro-Israel stance) provoked the usual “conspiracy theorist” descriptions from liberals and genocide-avoidant progressives who worry that he will syphon votes away from Biden. If they bothered to read the polls, however, they’d realize that he’ll take just as many votes from Trumpus. And he will bring progressives out to vote – not for lesser-evil Biden, but for pro-abortion rights congressional candidates, who will suffer if these folks stay home.

Schumer’s call for new Israeli elections raises a fascinating question that I proposed in Part Fifteen of this series: Is Israel merely a puppet and regional enforcer of the U.S. empire, or does the tail wag the dog through funding, lobbying and outright blackmail? Johnstone identifies the new strategy: trying to lay all the blame for Gaza on Netanyahu:

By trying to make this mass atrocity solely the fault of Netanyahu and not the…institutions which made it possible, they’re working to ensure that no changes will need to be made to any of those institutions…The western empire has chosen a single scapegoat to carry away its sins so the status quo can march on unhindered by guilt or consequence.

If Bibi takes a well-deserved fall, we will see the recurrence of an old pattern in American myth-making, as I wrote in Chapter Eight of my book:

Around 1985, the “Other” became more personal when television identified many charismatic Third World villains. After the first generation (Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro) came Moammar Khaddaffi, Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Manuel Noriega, Kim Il Sung, Slobodan Milosevic, Hugo Chavez, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and…Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was too good to be true: a Holocaust denier who sought to possess nuclear weapons.

Note three themes here. First, U.S. propaganda attacks were often timed to impact (or obscure) domestic issues. Second, only Milosevic was white (but Slavic). Third, several of these men had previously worked for the U.S. Back in 1932, Roosevelt had said of Nicaragua’s Anastacio Somoza, “He’s an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.!” It is as if the U.S. keeps them on ice, allowing them to quietly do their work until it needs to reveal them as the Devil’s latest incarnation. Then they become expendable…

In Part Sixteen of this series I quoted from Pete Seeger’s anti-war song, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Older readers will remember the reference to the collapse of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” social programs due to the public’s disgust with that earlier genocide. Johnson chose not to run for re-election, and of course many are still hoping that Biden will make a similar decision. May it be so, but we also need to see how the mythic issues of 1968 (Joe Biden entered the Senate only four years later) are still relevant, at least for the younger voters and voters of color who, four years ago, propelled Biden into the presidency. As I wrote in Chapter Eleven of the book:

Millions marched against the war, not merely because it was a mistake (as apologists still contend), but because it was mad, imperialist genocide. Their parents, the generation that had survived the Depression, saved Europe from the Nazis and consumed the myth of innocent intentions could only respond with, “My country – right or wrong!” The youth, however, who always see the mythic issues quite clearly, chanted: “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

…Many commentators insisted that the source of the generation gap was the Oedipus complex. Certainly, there was rage against authority. But if young people dreamed of patricide, it was directed against Kronos’ insatiable appetite for his own children, and it was driven by a sense of betrayal. After all, hadn’t oracles warned Ouranos, Kronos and even Zeus that their children would overthrow them? Isn’t that fear at the root of the patriarch’s reign of terror? Two myths intersected in the 1960s. The universal dream of the hero’s journey collided with a nightmare, the refusal to anoint the new kings and queens of the world. Youths demanded initiation and meaning, while elders stiffened and offered the false choice of either stultifying conformity or literal sacrifice.

The dominant myths of a culture transform very slowly. Has anything changed in the American psyche, which D.H. Lawrence described a hundred years ago as “…hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer”? Johnson’s refusal to stop a genocide gave us a Nixon presidency.

On March 29^th, Biden acknowledged “the pain being felt” by Arab Americans. The next day, Reuters reported that the U.S. had just quietly authorized yet another “transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs to Israel”, with over 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs. The Mark 84 produces a crater 50 feet wide and 36 ft deep. It can penetrate up to 11 ft of concrete and causes lethal fragmentation to a radius of 400 yards. When used against urban populations it is a tool of genocide. Even the WAPO admitted:

The 2,000-pound bombs, capable of leveling city blocks and leaving craters in the earth 40 feet across and larger, are almost never used anymore by Western militaries in densely populated locations due to the risk of civilian casualties.

The arms sale will also include 25 F-35 fighter jets. Israel has not lost any jets over Gaza, so these planes are not replacements but augmentation of existing stock, which will likely be used in a war against Iran. The only way to justify attacking Iran will be, in the old mythic manner, to fabricate a false-flag event.

Days later, after the Israelis murdered several World Central Kitchen food distribution workers (who had given the Israelis – and hence the Americans – their exact coordinates), Blinken announced:

The victims of yesterday’s strike join a record number of humanitarian workers who have been killed…They have to be protected. We shouldn’t have a situation where people who are simply trying to help their fellow human beings are themselves at grave risk.

Antony Blinken, your Secretary of State, is a psychopath who will lie to your face just for the fun of it.

We survived Nixon, who left us a recharged reactionary movement. This time around, with the stakes arguably much higher than during Watergate, Biden’s parting gift to America, writes Chris Hedges, “will be Christian Fascism”.

Read Part Twenty-One here soon.

Barry’s Blog # 437: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Ninteen

Part Nineteen – March 1st

The best lack all conviction; the worst are filled with passionate intensity. – W. B. Yeats

The Democrats, trying to convince you that Biden’s colossal cash advantage over Trumpus has any meaning, forget four things:

First, the fact that Hillary Clinton outspent Trumpus in 2016 reminds us that resentment trumps reason.

Second, Gaza is the first genocide to stream in real time. With the news of each new massacre, Genocide Joe’s support among Blacks, Latinos, Muslims and the young plummets further, especially in the swing state of Michigan. Rashida Tlaib urged Democratic primary voters to cast their ballots as “uncommitted”, hoping for 10,000 votes to protest the murders. She got 100,000.

Third, despite the media barrage, few people outside of reliably Democratic strongholds give a damn about Russian interference in elections.

Fourth, once it becomes clear that Republican judges will keep Trumpus out of jail before the election, any single billionaire will be able to equalize that cash advantage with a single Venmo transaction. And those Republican billionaires are not idle; they are gleefully funding conservative Democrats intent on knocking Tlaib and other members of the “Squad” out of Congress. Trumpus may be broke, but AIPAC isn’t. Alexander Sammon writes:

AIPAC has made it a clear goal to defeat every progressive Democrat it can in 2024. At the end of January…the United Democracy Project super PAC already had $40 million on hand…nearly double the $26 million it spent on the 2022 midterms.

On the other hand, as the members of the Squad called for a ceasefire, their campaigns got an influx of donations.

But we are talking about the presidency, and we return to the basic psychological question: Who wants to lose more? Trumpus blustered that he’d encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who don’t pay their bills, insulted Nikki Haley’s soldier husband, warned Pennsylvanians that if he was not elected, Democrats would change the state’s name, and – wait for it – couldn’t resist asserting his own position in the dementia sweepstakes:

(Putin)…did announce the other day that he’d much rather see Biden as President. And I agree with him.

Still, in the Iowa caucus his support among women exceeded his support among men, 53% to 49%. It’s the season of crazy.

A special counsel’s report cleared Biden of possessing classified documents but revealed that he could not recall what year his son Beau died or when he served as vice president. Liberals such as Robert Reich tried to spin the news. In true Shakespearian fashion (“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”), many insisted that the forgetful but well-intentioned old guy was still better than the forgetful but nasty and authoritarian old guy. Yet even as Biden bragged about his excellent memory, he referred to Egyptian dictator (and U.S. puppet) El-Sissi as “the President of Mexico.” Later, he mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice. You can’t make this shit up.

Well-intentioned? Liberals are nervously swinging between their desperate and appropriate fear of Trumpus and their natural revulsion that Genocide Joe continues to give Israel the green light for mass murder, and that, for their own cynical reasons, the Republicans are now clearly the party of peace (except for Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, who says, “I think we should kill them all”).

Well-intentioned? White House tacticians finally realized the need to distance Biden from his own unpopular policies. The MSM published several “leaks” indicating that Biden is privately “venting his frustration…over his inability to persuade Israel to change its military tactics”, while doing precisely nothing to force Netanyahu to stop the murders. Politicians vented crocodile tears. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen called the Israelis “war criminals” and in the same speech admitted he’d be voting for increased military aid. You can’t make this shit up.

“Venting his frustration”? While lamenting Israeli plans for an invasion of Rafah, Biden made another classic gaffe that revealed his actual stance:

Our military operation in Rafah…Their…the major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan…for ensuring the safety and support of more than one million people sheltering there.

This was followed by the U.S.’s third veto of a U.N. call for a ceasefire, the only “No” vote.

The MSM is facing the usual hard choice of supporting the lovable old guy or, as CBS president Les Moonves made clear years ago (“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”), giving tons of free publicity to the guy who is great for business. Lee Camp, however, poses some questions for liberals beginning with If Trump were president right now, would you act a little more sane?

If Trump were president right now would you be furious about the US-backed genocide Israel is perpetrating?

If Trump were president right now would you be irate about the fact the administration has done nearly nothing about climate crisis?  

If Trump were president, would you care that the US government can’t provide good healthcare to millions of Americans?

If Trump were president right now would you have your undies in a twist over the U.S. government spending more on military than the bottom 170 countries combined — and spending more every year no matter how much the Pentagon proclaims they have no idea where the money is going?

Johnstone adds:

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that if a Republican president were to back a genocide it would be an evil and unforgivable atrocity, whereas when a Democrat president backs a genocide it’s a minor foible that you’d better shut up about unless you want Trump to win…The difference…is that Republicans do evil things for evil reasons, whereas Democrats do evil things for noble humanitarian reasons. The difference…is that Republicans want to start a world war with China, whereas Democrats are strongly in favor of starting a world war with Russia.

Alexei Navalny’s suspicious death elicited vast sympathy (much of it from people who could care less for Julian Assange, let alone for Gonzalo Lira, the American journalist who died in January in a Ukrainian prison, or Aaron Bushnell, the American airman who immolated himself to protest the genocide. Most commentators, of course, blamed the usual bad guy, Putin. However, as Blake Fleetwood writes,

Putin cannot be happy with Alexei Navalny’s death, at this time…Biden is using this death to launch a massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign to goad Congress into passing a $60 billion aid bill to keep the Ukraine war going…Defense Secretary Austin admitted months ago that the Ukrainian war was an effort to degrade Russia’s military capability. In effect he acknowledged the reality that Ukraine’s conflict is a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia…Sadly, Navalny, as a martyr, has become more useful to the West and attracted more attention than his statements from his Arctic prison ever did.

Cui bono? Who benefits? Follow the money to Ukrainian intelligence, American arms merchants and, yes, the Democrats, who will try to make the election about defending freedom in the north as they starve children in the south. It’s the season of crazy.

When we acknowledge yet another American foreign policy initiative ending in catastrophic and hideously expensive failure, and we preface the notion with the phrase “well-intentioned”, we are dipping back into American mythology. We are attempting to reassure ourselves – we who, as Aaron Bushnell lamented, have colluded in evil – of our own innocence.

Again, it’s not my place to argue that you shouldn’t vote (for the Supreme Court, for abortion rights). It is my place, however, to encourage you to look at the election, like all public phenomena, through the lens of mythology, and specifically through the lens of the myth of American Innocence. And from that perspective, we can certainly agree that more people’s lives would be improved under Democrats. But when we speak of the three major, systemic issues that will most impact the lives of our children (and Palestinian children) – the economy, the climate and the ravenously hungry military empire – we must at least consider Johnstone’s words: a dementia patient Is President because it doesn’t matter who the President is.

Read Part Twenty here.

Barry’s Blog # 436: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Eighteen

I’ve been focusing on Gaza because unless Biden listens to the great majority of Americans and drastically changes course, his obstinance will very likely lose him the election.

I focus on Gaza because it is the world’s first televised genocide. Anyone on the planet with a TV or internet access can see it happening daily, and now we can even know the names of thousands of the victims. No one can claim that they don’t know about it. Their only choice is to be against it or to justify it out of a murderous ideology with deep mythic roots.

I focus on Gaza because one cannot deny that it would be impossible without American tax dollars.

I focus on Gaza because, nine years after Trumpus first declared his candidacy, liberals still spew out reams of naïve commentary about how he is Putin’s puppet and what a liar he is and how dumb his supporters are, as if they weren’t preaching only to their choirs, as if the Democrats had nothing to do with his popularity and as if the two parties are indistinguishable on this issue.

Finally, I focus on Gaza because, like few other political issues, it brings into focus the themes that underlie the myth of American innocence.

1 – The Killing of the Children. Here is the danger of not knowing our myths: if we remain unaware – or innocent – of the traumas we have experienced, we are likely to continuously re-enact them. Like people in abusive marriages, we are likely to think that the current dystopia of child murder is normal.

From the Hebrew stories of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac and Noah’s cursing of his descendants, to the Greek mythic patriarchs Ouranos and Chronos who buried or ate their children, to the Christian myth of Herod’s slaughter of the male children, to the Crusades, to the various Holocausts of the 20^th century, to the 1970 massacres of teenagers at Kent State and Jackson State, to Madeline Albright (who as Secretary of State was asked on television in 1996 about the deaths of a half million Iraqi children caused by American economic sanctions seven years prior to the 2003 invasion, responded, “…it’s worth it”), to the anti-welfare legislation of our time, to congressmen who claim that the hundreds of babies murdered in Gaza “are not innocent Palestinian civilians”, the literalization of initiation rites into child murder is the foundational narrative of western culture. And now, the privileged can choose to safely watch the action. As I write in Chapter Six of my book,

War allows the old to enact the sacrifice of the children. They project their ambivalence toward their own uninitiated, “inner” children onto actual soldiers, while safely and vicariously experiencing Dionysian intensity. War is an end disguised as a means: deferred infanticide, the revenge of the old upon the young.

Jason Sattler explains (“Yes, Republicans really believe in starving kids”) how these myths situate themselves in our psychology by referring to George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics:

…Governor Reeves recently announced that Mississippi will be one of 15 red states that refuses to participate in this summer’s (2024) federal free lunch program and is denying food to a total of 8 million kids. Why?…Tate Reeves thinks he’s being moral.

… The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline – physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

…the way to discipline children — especially the children of others — is denying them food, books, love. That’s how you show them you care. And by doing so, the strict-father brain believes it is demonstrating morality.

No politicians, of course, including Tate Reeves, actually believe any of this. But they know very well that millions of Americans do. And they know that people who can condone such disgraceful treatment of their own nation’s children will not be moved by appeals to stop the slaughter of other children, especially if they are dark-skinned.

The killing of the children is the sacred secret – sacred because no one will speak its name – underlying all our civilized values.

2 – “It’s their own fault”. The colonialist belief in Original Sin led to the unique mixture of Calvinist Puritanism with racialized “othering” (see Chapter Seven). This was the genesis of the American myth of heroic, radical individualism, a story that originated in the eastern forests, passed through Social Darwinism and made a beeline into 20^th-century thinking. Hillman claimed that the first assumption of the “therapeutic culture” is that emotional maturity entails a progressive differentiation of self from others, especially family. So American psychology mirrors its economics: the heroic, isolated ego in a hostile world. But the Hero has a series of shadow figures: the villain, the loser and the victim. The essentially religious nature of this myth allows men to project their fear of losing face by blaming the victims of violence, prejudice or economic unfairness for their own suffering and, in the worst cases, rationalizing war crimes. Only in such a culture would Howard Zinn have needed to ask “…why babies…should be penalized – to the point of death – for growing up in a poor family”.

Periodically, when cracks appear in the veneer of American myth, the storytellers of the media perceive (or receive) the call to re-invigorate it, and the threat of losing our innocence justifies furious, Biblical vengeance. The “other” face of the loser becomes the threatening, dark Other, the villain, who, throughout most of our mytho-history has literally had a dark face, from the Red Man to the Black Man to the first Brown Man (Mexicans) to the Yellow Man, with an intermission for the faceless Communist. Around 1990, with the collapse of communism, the American psyche (and the American empire) needed a new external Other and quickly found it in the second Brown Man, the Arab terrorist. In the mind of the racist, all Arabs and all Muslims, regardless of whether they are Americans or Palestinian infants, are tainted with that projection, and unthinkable collective punishment of the demonstrably innocent for the crimes of a few becomes thinkable.

This is what traditional rituals of conflict have been reduced to in our demythologized world, where non-combatants are 90% of the casualties. Meanwhile, constant, massive, fictional death in film, TV and video games reduces the emotional impact of actual death. By age eighteen, an American will have seen 18,000 virtual murders. “Harmless violence where no one gets hurt,” writes Hillman, “breeds innocence…the innocent American is the violent American.” Here is the genesis of the myth of American innocence. Since viewing the suffering of others, real or fictional, leads us to believe that they deserve their fate, we, who by contrast, do not share that suffering, can feel justified in our sense of innocence. In Israel, it looks like this: Former Mossad Official Says Children in Gaza Over the Age of 4 Deserve to Be Starved.

3 – Dissociation, Abstraction and the Denial of Death. Statements of rational, scientific, masculine consciousness arise from a mind that has discarded part of itself. We call this thinking Apollonic, says Hillman: “…like its name sake…it kills from a distance (its distance kills)…” Claiming objectivity, “it never merges with or ‘marries’ its material…” It defines our “very notion of consciousness itself.”

Although our essential humanity threatens to break through in opposition to the killing, millions of Americans can ignore the horrific images because they are perpetrated through Apollonian (and therefore often emotionless) violence at a distance, where viewers remain insulated from the human consequences. Fifty years ago, Philip Slater identified the pattern:

America has developed more elaborate, complex, and grotesque techniques for exterminating people at a distance than any nation in the history of the world…perhaps the distance itself carries special meaning.

Monotheism broke up the primordial union of opposites into the duality of spirit over matter. It followed that the spiritual world is more real than the physical world. This radical separation became a crucial feature of both the Christian myth and the Western psyche. Men dominate women and whites subjugate blacks. Any images, like Dionysus, that dissolve these artificial dualities are relegated to the darkness. The only way out of this condition is renunciation. Women must reject the feminine, Africans must deny their tribal heritage, and all must condemn the body. Whether that repudiation occurs through asceticism, capitalist sublimation or alcohol – spirits – hardly matters. All long to escape matter, mater, the mother. But repression of one’s nature always constellates its shadow of libertinism. And the repressed always returns.

Until then, we move from revealed dogma to theological exclusivity to demonizing of difference. Outside the pale, the Other questions our fragile self-definition by his or her mere existence. So the final, logical step is jihad or crusade. The Israelites, then the Christian Church, then the Puritans, and finally America itself are called to a mission from the Old Testament God.

But, writes Joseph Campbell, this God is “a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side,” who repeatedly commands his people to destroy every living being in the cities they capture. We can interpret such passages metaphorically, but metaphorical thinking requires the ability to imagine the subjectivity of the Other, a skill that monotheistic thinking deliberately destroys.

Once the religious mesocosm began collapsing, secular movements (nationalism, fascism and communism) motivated millions to similar extremes of sacrifice. Although religious symbols have largely lost their power, the heritage of “chosen people” and “holy war” persists in the modern psyche, which still equates the salvation of one people with the destruction of another.

To understand metaphors and tolerate ambiguity is to resist a profoundly durable inheritance, and we easily slip into the default mode of literalism. Hillman writes, “…we are each… like it or not, children of the Biblical God. It is a fact, the essential American fact.” Our monotheistic heritage determines our thinking about identity, race, gender, body, war, time, sin, self and other. Regina Schwartz concludes, “… if we do not think about the Bible, it will think (for) us.”

We all suffer from the long-term, collective emotional effects of the shift from paganism and animism to monotheism and eventually to scientific rationalism. We all suffer from dissociation. Our disease – the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh – appears as misogyny, consumerism, racism, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, perpetual war and genocide.

We are the net products of a process that has taken some two hundred generations to unfold, reaching its peak with the narcissism of our current political and corporate leaders, our media gatekeepers and our preachers. Psychiatrist Russel Lee writes, “The very qualities of egocentricity and megalomania characteristic of many psychoses are precisely those that lead men to aspire to high office.” Bruce Bower describes psychopaths as “superficially charming, intelligent people who…lie about almost everything because they neither understand nor care about others,” and argues that in the business world, “increased corporate rewards for risk taking and nonconformity can offer the psychopath faster career movement than before.”

The redemption hero, whom Americans admire above all others, has inherited an immensely long process of abstraction, alienation and splitting of the western psyche. He gives us the model, writes Hillman, “for that peculiar process upon which our civilization rests: dissociation.” This Hero, whom practically all young men aspire to emulate,

…is utterly disconnected from relationship with the Other, whom he has demonized into his mirror opposite, the irredeemably evil. Since he never laments the violence employed in destroying such an evil presence, he reinforces our own denial of death. His appeal lies deep below rational thinking. This hero requires no nurturance, doesn’t grow in wisdom, creates nothing, and teaches only violent resolution of disputes (Chapter 9).

His attitude, already half-formed in the first generation of English invaders, was a unique dimension in which religious zeal, the rule of uninitiated men, sacrificial ritual and a heritage of barbaric atrocity merged to create the willingness to engage in, justify or ignore genocide. In 1636, Puritans massacred and burned 500-700 Pequots:

…It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in the fryer, and the streams of blood … horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them…

Hatred – and joy – of this intensity expresses a “metaphysic” (a term Melville used in 1840) that begins in abstraction and alienation from the body and drapes itself in innocence. Ritual sacrifice – fire and blood – gives its practitioners a consistent moral self-image. Currently, 23% of Americans, most of them undoubtedly Republicans, agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” On the other side, astonishingly, it is Democrats who support the CIA more than Republicans. And it is their leaders – people who you probably voted for – who are allowing these appalling, unspeakable war crimes to continue, and who lie to your face that they are trying to stop it.

Who wants to lose more? Who is calling down retribution on own their heads more? Nancy Pelosi’s brutal call for the FBI to investigate peace activists reminds us of the scene in the Bacchae when King Pentheus, unconsciously dooming himself, orders his henchmen to

Go, someone, this instant,

to the place where this prophet prophesies.

Pry it up with crowbars, heave it over,

upside down; demolish everything you see…

That will provoke him more than anything.

Read Part Nineteen here.

Barry’s Blog # 435: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Seventeen

February

No one is above the law – Joe Biden, 2023

Our friend Elmo is right: We have to be there for each other, offer our help to a neighbor in need, and above all else, ask for help when we need it. Even though it’s hard, you’re never alone. – Biden, 2024 

Seen from a psychological perspective, the election has already become a self-sabotage, passive-aggression roller derby. At best, the primary slogan is Vote for me because I’m not that guy. At worst, it becomes Who wants to lose most? Not to be outdone by the two older men, RFK Jr broke his silence on Gaza with: “It’s not Israel’s fault that Gaza is poverty stricken”…the Palestinians are the “most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world.”

Biden’s people, terrified at the prospect of losing Michigan, attempted to meet with a dozen Arab and Muslim leaders in the Dearborn area but were rejected. “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a livestreamed genocide backed by our government,” said Dearborn’s mayor Abdullah Hammoud. One of the Palestinian-Americans invited was Tariq Haddad, a Virginia physician, who responded:

The Biden administration has helped kill 85 members of my family. Of course I refused to meet with Antony Blinken.

The Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed: “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,” and alleged that thousands of residents in the predominantly Muslim city, including “imams and politicians” are siding with “Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.” The Op-Ed was so blatantly racist that even Biden had to denounce it.

In 2017 Robert Jay Lifton wrote in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide:

…genocidal projects require the active participation of educated professionals — physicians, scientists, engineers, military leaders, lawyers, clergy, university professors and other teachers — who combine to create not only the technology of genocide but much of its ideological rationale, moral climate, and organizational process.

Two days after the Dearborn fiasco, Nancy Pelosi decided to channel Joseph McCarthy and vomited out her opinion of Americans (currently about 2/3rds of the public) who want a ceasefire:

For them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.

That week, a poll found that 49% of Americans aged 18-29 agree that Israel is committing genocide. Undeterred, Rolling Stone (remember when RS was progressive before being bought by a billionaire?) echoed Pelosi:

Russia and Putin have supported a ceasefire and have used Israel’s aggression in Gaza to criticize the United States for its role in the conflict. Russia has also attempted to interfere in the last two U.S. presidential elections.

Later, while a coalition of 1,000 Black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants nationwide demanded a cease-fire, Pelosi told peace advocates: “Go back to China, where your headquarters is!”

Seeking clarity, we ask two questions:

1 – Nancy, who are the real puppet masters? China or Russia?

2 – Really…who wants to lose most?

The administration admitted that it was preparing troops for ground action in Gaza and began a new bombing campaign on 85 Iranian and Shia militia targets in Iraq and Syria, killing 40 people, including civilians, all actions absolutely guaranteed to increase regional hostilities, in retaliation for a drone attack that killed three U.S. troops – even though the Pentagon has admitted it has no evidence Iran was directly involved.

In the latest poll results, 53% of Democrats, 60% of non-white Democrats and 70% of Democrats under age 45 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the crisis, while 90% of Democrats favor a permanent ceasefire. Regardless, the DNC calculus is that the public will not abandon a wartime president. Sadly, the longer Biden’s advisors hold to this thinking, the more the bombing, the killing and the escalation will continue – and this will only give Trumpus more reason to pretend to be the peace candidate.

By that same calculus this is a binary choice (now that Kennedy has ensured his irrelevancy) that liberals will eventually accept. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been forced into endorsing Biden. But binary assumptions are precisely why conventional political analysis is unscientific at best and corrupt at worst. For at least 56 years (since the election of 1968), the actual binary has been between those who vote and those who don’t, and this gap will certainly grow this year.

As I wrote four years ago and eight years ago, Liberals can agree: yes for the Supreme Court and yes for abortion rights. Beyond that, what? I subscribe to the notion that anything worth saying is worth exaggerating. So I cite Caitlin Johnstone regularly because, more than anyone else, she expresses in provocative language what we all should be saying: “Biden Is Everything People Feared Trump Would Be”:

If it had come out in 2020 that Trump was plotting a genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign in which his victims would be cut off from humanitarian aid, the shrieking from Democrats would have broken glass.

Most liberal politicians, knowing this, understand by now (without admitting publicly) that the only thing that will prevent a Trumpus victory would be not just his conviction but actual jail time for one crime or another (none of which, BTW, amount to anything like provoking wars and enabling genocide).

For their part, Biden’s people, criticized from the right by the usual Republican war whores, claim to be frustrated with the Israelis, but neither the flow of arms nor the blackballing of student peace advocates and medical professionals and other professionals nor the anti-Muslim crimewave nor the ostracizing of progressive celebrities has slowed at all.

Indeed, literally one hour after the International Court of Justice handed down its opinion finding sufficient evidence for genocide, the U.S. and several of its European puppets, led by Germany, cut funding (itself a violation of international law) for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East after the Israelis alleged that 12 UNRWA workers had been involved in the October 7 attack. This was more than merely the latest example of collective punishment by white Europeans; it was a move from complicity to participation in genocide. Israel, BTW, has already killed at least 152 UNRWA employees. The U.S. media made much of the allegations and made very little of Blinken’s admission that the U.S. has been unable to investigate the Israeli “evidence”, and it made even less of an actual investigation that Israel “provides no evidence” of its claim against UNRWA.

A few European countries, notably Belgium, refused to follow the Empire’s lead and cut aid to UNRWA. Shortly afterwards, Israel bombed and destroyed the Belgian Agency for Development Cooperation’s building in Gaza. Johnstone is – and we should be – clear about the implications:

Cutting off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth would be a psychopathically monstrous act all by itself, even without having caused their extreme needfulness in the first place by backing a genocidal bombing campaign on a giant concentration camp full of children.

This is the season of crazy. And it is always the season of preaching to your choir. Not to be outdone by Biden’s cruel decision on UNRWA, the Republican-dominated House Foreign Affairs Committee set in motion legislation to permanently defund the agency.

But we must understand this: Biden is known internationally as “Genocide Joe” only because he is the current occupant of the White House, which is to say, he is the Empire’s current spokesman. If Trumpus reclaims that title, he will ardently support both Israel and Ukraine. He will continue bombing Yemen and Syria, starving Cuba and Venezuela – and provoking Russia and China, because that’s what his bosses will want him to do. And it won’t matter, as with the current occupant, if he is demonstrably demented.

The major themes of Western myth are staring us in the face. Johnstone writes:

The entire western liberal worldview is currently balanced on the ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the mass atrocities in Gaza and what western governments are doing to perpetuate them. Everything that mainstream liberals claim to oppose is on full display in Israel’s actions in Gaza…Yet they must necessarily avoid throwing themselves into opposing these things there at all cost, because it would mean acknowledging that their own political allegiances are inseparably interwoven with them. The western liberal is therefore in the year 2024 engaged in an exhausting regimen of nonstop mental gymnastics to avoid having an authentic relationship with the reality of what’s happening…

This observation should be an invitation for us to look much deeper, as I will try to do in Part Eighteen.

Barry’s Blog # 435: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Sixteen

All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.

– Pete Seeger, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”

 New year’s resolutions, brought to you by AIPAC. Here is the campaign news over the final two weeks of this annus horribilis, as I see it.

Nervous democrats attempted to restrict the election to two issues: Trumpus’ (very real) threat to democracy, and mildly good economic news (inflation is still climbing, but at a lower rate than last year). Some of that nervousness may be about the imminent release of the names of 150 of Jeffrey Epstein’s associates. The liberal media followed, maximizing those two domestic issues and minimizing Biden’s foreign policies. For example, Alternet, which posts two dozen news articles and opinion pieces per day, no longer criticizes or even mentions RFK now that he appears to be more of a threat to Trumpus than to Biden, and it has not posted any articles about Gaza since November.

Republicans were still holding up money for Ukraine by demanding more border walls and further cuts to the I.R.S. Trumpus, always willing to play his role in the self-sabotage roller derby, victim-raged about being disqualified in Colorado, admitted that an economic collapse would enhance the possibility of his election and claimed immunity from any act committed as President.

Meanwhile, the elephant in Washington’s living room was growing so large it threatened to push everyone out of the windows. Congress, standing proudly with genocide, passed several grand political gestures, affirming Israel’s right to defend itself; blotting out any reference to the Palestinian cause; condemning Hamas; calling upon it to release the hostages; stonewalling calls for a ceasefire; criticizing antisemitic student activities on college campuses and around the world; censuring Rashida Tlieb; repeating that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and condemning ethnic-bias crimes while overlooking the shootings of several Palestinian Americans. It finished by humiliating three female university presidents, demanding that they “atone” for allowing anti-Semitic speech on campus. You can’t make this shit up.

Not to be outdone, Genocide Joe bypassed Congress entirely to send more weapons to Israel – twice in a month. He was playing the old Democratic game: emphasizing an apparently liberal domestic policy while compartmentalizing the foreign policy of a dying but increasingly brutal empire. In response, Caitlin Johnstone pointed out what is perfectly obvious to normal people but apparently difficult for liberals to understand:

Saying a politician is relatively good on domestic policy but bad on foreign policy is like a woman saying her boyfriend cooks and cleans and treats her nice, and his only negative is that he also happens to murder a lot of sex workers.

The Nation, trying to sound optimistic, claimed that “Several recent surveys have him leading Trump.”  But poll results, especially with the election ten months away, are notoriously inaccurate. We recall that Hilary Clinton had a double-digit lead only weeks before the 2016 disaster. National presidential polls tell us little because they typically measure total popularity rather than individual state electoral college numbers. The fact that Democrats always win the total national vote is as meaningless as the population differences between California and Montana. Two senators each. Who cares if, nationally, more people vote against Trumpus than vote against Biden? Republicans certainly don’t.

But this is the year of crazy. Adding to Joe’s woes, A federal court ruled that the challenge to 360,000 Georgians’ right to vote, suspiciously targeting Black voters, does not violate the federal Voting Rights Act. Biden won Georgia in 2020 by 11,000 votes. He can kiss Georgia goodbye.

His approval rating had risen a bit, but it was still the lowest of any modern-day president at the same stage of their first term. One reason for this has nothing to do with inflation. Jacobin wrote of a recent survey in Detroit – predominantly African-freaking-American Detroit!

…given that Michigan is a key state that the president narrowly won in 2020, and where multiple polls now show him losing to Donald Trump, sometimes by wide margins…has 67 % of likely voters backing a cease-fire and finds Biden’s approval rating across the board shooting up if he hypothetically backed one…Either he doesn’t realize there’s a new political reality or he simply doesn’t care.

When even Newsweek warns, “It’s Becoming Clear. Israel Could Cost Joe Biden Re-Election”, he’d better start caring, regardless of what Israel may be blackmailing him with.

Read Part Seventeen here.

Barry’s Blog # 434: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Fifteen

The Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the Senate. – Senator J. William Fullbright, 10/07/1973

All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. – Israeli general Yitzhak Brick

Caitlin Johnstone reminds us:

Brick’s comments fly in the face of narratives fed to the press by the Biden administration saying that the White House is frustrated by Israel’s complete disregard for human life in Gaza but finds itself powerless to influence its ally’s actions in a more humanitarian direction…This is of course a load of bullshit. The Biden administration could end all this with one phone call, in the same way it commanded Israel to restore Gaza’s communications in October after the IDF cut the enclave off from the world, and in the same way Israel’s 1982 assault on Lebanon was halted with a phone call from President Reagan…The ongoing massacre in Gaza is happening because the US empire wants it to happen.

Who’s in charge here? Can geopolitical analysis fully explain the homicidal violence sometimes perpetrated upon their own servicemen or the gleeful sadism with which American leaders have so consistently supported and protected Israel? Perhaps – bear with me – conspiracy theory may help, explicated by some scenes from The Godfather Part Two:

Michael Corleone has moved to Nevada, where Senator Geary, expecting the usual bribes, insults Italians. Michael arranges for Geary to be implicated in the murder of a prostitute and fixes the problem in return for his political support. Geary then staunchly defends the Corleone family before a Senate committee on organized crime.

The movie succeeds in part because of the profound archetypal family themes – but also because we all suspect that the political system actually works this way.

BTW, one of the film’s major characters is the gangster Hyman Roth (based on the real-life Meyer Lansky). After being refused asylum and entry to – wait for it – Israel (as was Lansky) on tax evasion charges, Roth returns to the U.S., where a Corleone gunman promptly murders him. You can’t make this shit up.

And this is where Jeffrey Epstein comes in, he of the “suicide” that absolutely no one believes happened.

Former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe, claims in Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales that Epstein, his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, publisher Robert Maxwell, were all Israeli espionage agents who provided young girls to prominent politicians and celebrities for sex, recorded the incidents and then blackmailed them to attain information for Israel. Ben-Menashe worked for Mossad from 1977 to 1987 and claims to have been involved with both the October Surprise and the Iran–Contra affair. He was arrested in 1989 in the U.S. on charges of arms dealing and was acquitted only after a jury accepted that he was acting on behalf of the Israeli state. Later, Ben-Menashe also claimed that Robert Maxwell (who “fell” from his yacht) had been assassinated by Mossad for trying to blackmail it. The fact that his 1991 funeral was attended by no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence as well as several high-ranking Israeli politicians and prime ministers does not refute that claim.

Epstein, lest we forget, was connected. Prior to his 2008 sentencing for soliciting sex from a minor, Alexander Acosta – then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida – signed off on a lenient sentence. Acosta later told Trump transition officials prior to his nomination for Secretary of Labor that his decision to approve the “sweetheart deal” came after he had been told to back off in the Epstein case because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Whitney Webb of MintPress News writes that “the Ant-Defamation League’s long-time top funders have close ties to Epstein and his sexual blackmail network…”

The MintPress investigation asserts that the

…sexual blackmail operation involving minors and connected to intelligence agencies — was one of many such operations that have taken place for decades, developing from the nexus forged between the CIA, organized crime and Israeli intelligence shortly after World War II.

People who visited his island or flew on his plane (the “Lolita Express”) include Trumpus; Mark Zuckerberg; businessmen Leon Black, Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito and Les Wexner; actors Kevin Spacey, Chelsea Handler and Chris Tucker; media gatekeepers Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos; Mohammed bin Salman; Elon Musk; Bill Gates; John Glenn; Alan Dershowitz (a hard-core Zionist, the lawyer who negotiated Epstein’s unprecedented 2008 Non-Prosecution Agreement, and a major player in the ongoing scandals and lawsuits); U.S. Virgin Islands Governor John de Jongh; banker Jes Staley; Bill Clinton; Itzhak Perlman; Stephen Hawking; Lord Peter Mandelson; Prince Andrew; former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak; New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, numerous U.S. senators including Majority Leader George Mitchell – and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In January, a huge list of Epstein’s associates, employees, friends and victims was released. Of the nearly 90 names included in the documents, four were apparently so sensitive that they were redacted. Granted, no one’s presence on this list necessarily implies anything. But we take note that one of the allegations states:

[Epstein made] her available for sex to politically-connected and financially-powerful people…to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information.

It’s an old story, says Republican Congressman Tim Burchett:

Why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing out of Congress? Here’s how it works. You’re visiting, you’re out of the country or out of town or you’re in a motel or at a bar in DC and, whatever you’re into – women, men, whatever — comes up and they’re very attractive and they’re laughing at your jokes. And you’re buying them a drink. Next thing you know, you’re in the motel room with them naked.

And next thing you know, you know you’re about to make a key vote. And what happens? Some well-dressed person comes out and whispers in your ear, “Hey, man, there’s tapes out on you.” Or, “Were you in a motel room or whatever with whoever?” And then you’re like, “You really ought not be voting for this thing.”

…if it’s women, drugs, booze, it’ll find you. And they say, and in most elected offices, and that’s what people of power and influence do…I’ve been in this game my whole life. I spent 16 years in the state legislature in Tennessee and eight years as county mayor. And now I’m in my fifth year in Congress…the stakes are higher. But the game is still the same.

What has any of this got to do with mythology, aside from the ubiquitous celebrities who have replaced the old gods in our imaginations? Like many myths, these are stories that we tell ourselves about other people – so we can take a safer look at ourselves. And to the extent that they do not support the dominant paradigms (Joseph Campbell’s fourth function of mythology) of progress, good intentions and heroic individualism, they contribute to another role of mythology: to bring the shadow forward, out of the unconscious.

Many the characters in this drama were, or thought they were master media manipulators. I’m only using reports like this, this, this, this, this, this and especially this, which suggests that the Israeli impact on recent U.S. elections has been far greater than anything the Russians may have done, so that we may speculate about what drives people like Biden, and perhaps Kennedy.

Or Bill Cinton. Webb interviewed Ben- Menashe, who claimed:

…the Israelis feared that Mr. Clinton, when he was campaigning for President, will be a repeat of Mr. Carter. He wanted to press them for peace with the Palestinians…I think Mr. Epstein was sent early on to catch up with President Clinton…I believe his biggest client was Mr. Clinton…and he had a few other congressmen and…but Clinton was his biggest catch.

Webb writes:

Of particular importance are Epstein’s relationship to the Clinton Foundation and the alleged role of Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based hedge fund and the Clinton Foundation in money laundering activity…during Clinton’s reign as governor a small town called Mena, nestled in the Ozark Mountains west of Arkansas’ capital Little Rock, would be propelled into the national spotlight as a hub for drug and arms smuggling and the training of CIA-backed far-right militias…Under the close watch of the CIA, then led by William Casey, the Mena Intermountain Regional Airport was used to stockpile and deliver arms and ammunition to the Nicaraguan Contras. The arms were sometimes exchanged for cocaine from South American cartels, which would then be sent back to Mena and used to fund the covert CIA operation…Clinton split with many other state governments in sending a contingency of the Arkansas National Guard to Honduras to train the Nicaraguan Contras…Bill Clinton was eventually blackmailed by the state of Israel and his administration was also targeted by Israeli espionage as part of the “Mega” spy scandal. Epstein’s involvement in the Clinton administration and his visits to the White House date back to Clinton’s first year in office.

To accept even some of these allegations is to throw the whole “Russiagate” narrative into the trash, if we haven’t already, and along with it the notion that the Russians influenced the 2016 election in any meaningful way. Along with that, we should jettison the liberal (and just as binary as the conservative) version of the American myth of innocence which assumes that all the nation’s problems are caused by “them”, whether they be Putin, Trumpus or MAGA Republicans.

It is quite naïve to ignore the evidence that all powerful (or paranoid) nations, especially Israel, spy on each other and attempt to influence each other’s elections. At times, the U.S., which has interfered in dozens of foreign elections, has had its own reasons to suppress the news of Israeli espionage in this country or the common knowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons.

At other times, as in the case of Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. has chosen not to, or has not been able to suppress such news. In 1984, Pollard sold thousands of highly classified secrets and disclosed the names of many people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. In 1985 he confessed to spying for Israel and received a life sentence. In I987 Israel acknowledged its role and formally apologized, but it did not admit to paying him until 1998. Many celebrities including George Schulz, Henry Kissinger, Dershowitz, 39 congresspersons, 18 retired senators and of course Netanyahu, lobbied for his release, which occurred in 2015. Now residing in Israel, he recently called for some of the families of those taken captive by Hamas on October 7th to be imprisoned because they dared to criticize their government.

Conspiracy students have long debated the case of the five “dancing Israelis” on 9/11/2001. American antisemites, reflecting 2,000 years of European bigotry, have long blamed “the Jews” (but, curiously, not Israel) for all the nation’s ills. Who can forget the Charlottesville racists in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” But when Israeli leaders speak openly about their special relationship with the U.S., as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did on 10/3/2001 (note the date), perhaps we should pay attention:

Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We the Jewish People control America, and the Americans Know it.

BTW, can we all please acknowledge that to criticize Zionism (an ideology) or Israel (a political state) is not antisemitism (hatred of a religious group), and move on?

Is Israel an expendable puppet or does the tail wag the dog? Or is it all one empire? Which comes first? Israel compelled to enforce American imperialism because it can’t afford to detach itself from the U.S. money teat? Or American politicians, who have – at the least – been addicted to a similar money flow, or – at worst – have become, willingly or not, agents of Israeli intelligence?

Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice. – Israeli General Moshe Dayan

And since the 60^th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination has recently passed – just when you thought you’d heard all the theories – Sam Husseini summarizes a very long and detailed debate in his article Israel and the Kennedy Assassinations.

The majority opinion among assassination researchers has always centered on the CIA. The following speculations move the dial over to Israel’s role, although we certainly can’t ignore the long-term connections between both of these criminal enterprises. Jefferson Morley, for example, writes that the CIA’s James Angleton played a key role in enabling Israel to obtain nuclear weapons.

Mordechai Vanunu exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal in 1986 (and subsequently was kidnapped and spent 18 years in an Israeli prison, including 11 in solitary). In 2004 he claimed that JFK was killed due to “pressure he exerted on Israel’s then head of government, David Ben-Gurion, to shed light on Dimona’s nuclear reactor.”

Rick Sterling’s article summarizes JFK’s strong criticisms of Israel and the changes in U.S. policy that were instituted after his assassination. Lyndon Johnson told an Israeli diplomat: “You have lost a very great friend. But you have found a better one.” He ended American support for a resolution to address the Palestinian refugee issue. In 1967, the foreign policy establishment quietly gave the Israelis the green light to invade several Arab countries, and in the process, very nearly started a nuclear war. The result was the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank, a second Nakba and the turning of the remaining Palestinian population into prisoners. During that conflict, after the unprovoked Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the U.S. media covered up the investigation. The Cleveland Jewish News notes:

LBJ soon abandoned pressure on Israel to come clean about the Dimona reactor. He increased arms sales to Israel and in 1968…the United States became Israel’s main supplier of weapons…

Here are two interesting articles:

— The Debate Over Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’

— The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East

When we move farther out on the spectrum, into the realm of more alternative views, we proceed with caution and a sense of humor, invoking the principle that even a broken clock is right twice a day – and this principle that I made up: If even one-tenth of what these people say is true, then we’re all screwed. You can read other articles on the Kennedy/Israel subject here, here, here, here and here.

 The speculations extend into the present moment, as many activists, searching for a real alternative to Biden, have been deeply disappointed that RFK Jr, alone on the national level, can articulate a complex anti-imperialist vision while staunchly defending Israel. After five weeks of massacres in Gaza, he told a crowd that it is antisemitic to call Israel an apartheid state. You can’t make this shit up.

Perhaps you can’t make this up either: After October 7th, the media was filled with headlines calling the event “Israel’s 9/11”. The interpretations ranged from this, which spoke of “…fueling a sense of patriotism unseen in years…” to this, which noted, “Both the U.S. and Israel were stunned to experience the ultraviolence they mete out to others”. At either extreme, the comparison was between American Innocence and Israeli innocence.

By late November, however, after the world had observed two months of mass murder, after the news that Netanyahu had been supporting Hamas financially for years, darker comparisons to 9/11 surfaced. The NYT itself proclaimed that “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago”. Such an admission from this trusted gatekeeper immediately reminded the conspiracy community of allegations that shortly before 9/11, unnamed investors had made fortunes by “short-selling” stocks of certain companies that would be directly impacted by the attacks on the World Trade Center.

On December 7^th, the 82^nd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor (another event in which some researchers claim the U.S. had advance knowledge), the Senate voted 13-84, rejecting a resolution to withdraw the 900 U.S. troops who have occupied Syrian oil fields since 2014, and Blinken sanctimoniously marked the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the U.N. right in the middle of the Nakba). That day, even more damning reports surfaced, claiming (here and here) that there had been “a deluge” of short-selling on the Israeli stock market just days before October 7^th.

By then, by their own admission, it was clear that the Israeli leadership’s long-term intention was to cleanse Gaza of its entire population. Looking backwards, perhaps only the shock of another “unprovoked” attack could have motivated the world to avert its eyes from this ongoing war crime, to keep Netanyahu in office – and to enable Genocide Joe to request another $106 billion in military aid for Ukraine and Israel, or send American soldiers to fight Russia. Cynically confident that most voters agreed with them, the Republicans (imagine: the Republicans as good guys!) were still holding up Biden’s request.

On December 12^th, Biden lied to the media once again, repeating that he had personally seen the pictures of the 40 babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas on October 7^th: “They’re animals. They’re animals. They exceeded anything that any other terrorist group has done of late that I — in memory.” It was a claim that even the Israeli military had admitted a month before that it could not confirm. You can’t make this shit up, although Genocide Joe, for some mysterious reason, keeps trying. Is he cynical? Is he protecting someone? Or is he simply cognitively impaired?

On the 14^th, dozens of Biden administration staffers, masked to protect their jobs, held a vigil outside the White House calling for a cease-fire.  But Congresspersons and Senators, awash in AIPAC money and aware that there are military contractors in nearly every Congressional district, easily passed a record $874.2 billion defense bill, plenty of which is destined for Ukraine and Israel.

 

Read Part Sixteen here.

Barry’s Blog # 433: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Fourteen

Part Fourteen – November 30th

Nothing justifies this. Nothing. President Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life…Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly. – Chris Hedges

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. – Hannah Arendt

Democrats are so morally bankrupt that right now they are angrier at people who say they refuse to vote for Biden because of his support for the Gaza massacre than they are at Biden for supporting the Gaza massacre. – Caitlin Johnstone

With less than a year to go, American politics in general and the presidential campaign in particular have already entered the realm of “truth stranger than fiction”, or “you can’t make this shit up”.

I refer to Trump as “Trumpus” to remind the reader that, at every level of interpretation, the man is us. He embodies and enacts our national myths. It’s time to for intelligent people to graduate from binary thinking and stop blaming him, the Republican Party or Vlad Putin for all our problems. If he is our problem, then we are the problem. To paraphrase Biden (see below), if Trumpus didn’t exist, we’d have to invite someone else to play the role.

But none of Biden’s nicknames (“Hidin’ Biden”, “Sleepy Joe”, “Let’s go, Brandon” or “Dementia Joe”) have stuck for me until this one: Genocide Joe, which, sadly, should remind the reader that this man also expresses much of the worst in us.

Can his popularity sink even further? Oh, yes. In mid-November a NYT poll showed him virtually tied with Trumpus among voters younger than 30, with 30% backing him, 29% backing Trumpus and 34% supporting Kennedy. Four years ago, Genocide Joe had won 61% of them. As for Arab-Americans: In Michigan, Biden won by 154,000 votes. The state’s Arab American population is at least 278,000. He won Arizona, which has 55,000 Arab Americans, by 10,500 votes. And he took Georgia by 11,800 votes, where the Arab American population is over 57,000.

By December, the U.S. had provided Israel with 57,000 artillery shells and 15,000 bombs, including over 5,000 “blockbusters” with 2,000-pound warheads.

The Nation lamentd that “Biden is tearing his own coalition apart”. Two-thirds of all voters (80% of Democrats and half of Republicans) want him to call for a cease-fire. Some 500 U.S. officials signed a letter protesting the massacres, while 100 A.I.D. employees signed another letter blasting his “unwillingness to de-escalate”. Over 130 former Obama campaign staffers and political appointees – including, ironically, Rashida Tlaib – urged a ceasefire. Over 400 of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign sent her a similar letter, and another 400 former Bernie Sanders staffers sent him one as well. Sanders responded by telling the WAPO that Hamas wants “permanent war and the destruction of Israel” and wouldn’t abide by a ceasefire.

By the end of the month, the list of Congresspersons calling for a ceasefire had grown to about four dozen, although some of their statements raised questions about their actual motives, since some were coupling their calls for a ceasefire with conditions like – you can’t make this shit up – the removal of Hamas. But the mainstream media avoided the obvious, wrote Adam Johnson:

Recent reports on Biden’s bad polling in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, ABC News, New York Magazine, and Financial Times ignore the role of Biden’s backing of Gaza’s bombardment entirely. None of the above polls even asked respondents specifically about Biden’s role in Israel’s scorched earth bombing and siege of Gaza.

Eventually someone in authority must have noticed the polls. Emmanuel Macron became the first Western leader to call for a ceasefire. On November 14^th, after 5 weeks of mass murder (and still discreetly sending arms shipments), the U.S. began to push a bogus narrative that it is seeking to moderate Israel’s tactics. Genocide Joe made a weak and hypocritical plea: “Hospitals must be protected” – but only after being directly asked by a reporter.

You can’t make this shit up. That same day, at a pro-Israel rally on the National Mall, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries shared the platform with anti-Semitic, homophobic televangelist John Hagee, whose words (God sent Hitler to carry out the Holocaust “to help Jews reach the promised land”) even John McCain had found “deeply offensive and indefensible”.

On November 22nd, the administration doubled down once again, as White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “This word ‘genocide’ is getting thrown around in a pretty inappropriate way…” and accused Hamas of being the party seeking genocide. Ignoring six weeks of horrific photos and multiple statements by Israeli leaders themselves, he willfully denied that genocide was taking place. In the following weeks, Harris, Blinken and Austin used unusually blunt language to warn against the massacres. But the money and weapons kept flowing. On December 8th, 13 of the 14 members of the U.N. security council voted for an immediate cease-fire. The U.S. vetoed the motion. Hours later, the administration bypassed Congress to sell the Israelis 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition. Even the NYT reported, “The arms shipment has been put on an expedited track, and Congress has no power to stop it.” Aaron Mate writes:

The White House’s circumvention of Congressional review is consistent with its refusal to follow US law, which bars weapons transfers to countries that commit serious human rights abuses. The Biden administration has evaded this requirement by simply pretending that it is a helpless bystander, rather than willing accomplice… The White House commitment to Israel is so devout that it cannot even ensure the paltry levels of humanitarian aid that it has promised.

Trumpus couldn’t tolerate Genocide Joe getting all the publicity, even if it was bad (and of course, for him bad publicity is great publicity). So he doubled down on his theatrics, telling a crowd he’d “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…” and demanding live TV coverage of his trial over election subversion. But his biggest, most brilliant move was to vow to resume his role as the “Peacemaker” president with the slogan “peace through strength”:

So whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or independent: If you don’t want your sons and daughters drafted to fight and die in distant foreign lands, if you don’t want your nation wrecked, if you don’t want your economy destroyed, if you don’t want American blood and American treasure squandered in a needless global war…

It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about Gaza, Ukraine or China, or what “peace through strength” meant, or how it would differ from Biden’s record military expenditures, provocations and support for war crimes. I doubt if anyone believed him, but he definitely offered a brand that was “not-Biden”. Readers of this series may recall that I predicted this (at least in terms of Ukraine) in August:

…if both of these old fools make it through the primary season next year without being arrested (or in Biden’s case, impeached), we will be faced with a situation in which Trumpus will run against the war (even though absolutely no one will believe him, including Vladimir Putin) and Biden will be forced to defend it…

Elie Mystal sums up the situation from the liberal point of view:

I will be voting for Joe Biden. I am a single-issue voter—that single issue is the Supreme Court—and (this) allows me to put on ethical blinders to just about everything else…But my vote is not the one I’m worried about. I do not think establishment Democrats and hard-core Biden supporters appreciate how useless the “Trump would be worse” argument is to young voters…What Arab Americans and especially Palestinian Americans are saying is not that Trump would be a better president for their community, but that Biden’s decision not to do anything to stop the bombardment and killing of their families and friends means that the differences between the two hardly matter.

Welcome to the world of the other fifty percent – those who haven’t voted at all for decades, for the same reason: Why bother? There’s no difference. Long before Joe Biden became Genocide Joe, he was already profoundly unpopular among independents, young people and people of color, all of whom are rapidly abandoning him. True, they won some important state-level elections in early November, and many MSM writers hailed the news as biding well for next year. But these votes were about protecting freedom, not for Biden.

The young and the people of color who were critical to his 2020 success in swing states were activists – precisely the kind of people who, a thousand of them, shut down the California Democratic Party convention in Sacramento on November 18th over the demand for a cease-fire. Some may hold their noses next year and choose the lesser of two evils, but they won’t be motivated to hit the streets and canvass for votes. What were they chanting in Sacramento? We will remember next November.

The leaders of the DNC may be corporate stooges, but they aren’t stupid; they understand this. So we ask once again, why is Biden committing political suicide and inviting the very fascist takeover of the nation that he seemingly fears? Why is he – like every president for over forty years – especially Barack Obama – defending, supporting and resupplying mass murder?

Analysts such as economist Michael Hudson have long offered geopolitical explanations centering around Israel’s function as a trusted, white, Euro-facing outpost of the American empire in the Middle East and how it has repeatedly sabotaged U.S. nuclear diplomacy with Iran, as well as the massive influence of American televangelists. And of course, they are right. Biden himself said it – in 1986:

There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region; the United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.

Caitlin Johnstone, however, reminds us (because many of us need to be reminded):

Biden wasn’t fully lying when he said “Were there not an Israel the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” He’s just telling a half-truth, because by “the United States” he means the U.S. empire, not the U.S. as a nation.

The money spent by the Israeli lobby is almost infinite, and not just to keep moderates and liberals on their side.

The 8-story AIPAC building

The money spent by the Israeli lobby is almost infinite, and not just to keep moderates and liberals on their side. They even offered Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez $100,000. Alan MacLeod’s article “Blood Money: The Top Ten Politicians Taking the Most Israel Lobby Cash” begins with Genocide Joe himself. He is followed by the usual crowd: Robert Menendez, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, etc.

AIPAC was new House speaker Mike Johnson’s top donor in 2023, pouring $95,000 into his coffers just after he led the passage of a $14 billion aid package to Israel. The billionaire Sheldon Adelson was a two-issue sugar daddy (the other issue of course was cutting taxes on the rich) who spent over $500 million in support of Republicans to maintain a hardline Israel policy, while Haim Saban has similarly piled cash onto Democrats with exactly the same agenda. Palestinians of course have no lobby in Washington. Nor do they have government agencies charged with the explicit purpose of targeting U.S. universities, including outlawing peaceful student groups, using wealthy benefactors to threaten to withhold donations and deeming students accused as antisemites ineligible for employment. The results fit a long-term pattern: the top recipients of pro-Israel contributions in recent elections were centrist Democrats who defeated progressives in primaries.

On the other side of the ledger are the companies profiting from the destruction of Gaza, such as Boeing, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, General Electric, L3Harris Technologies, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX (formerly Raytheon), as well as vehicle manufacturers Ford and Toyota, and drone manufacturers AeroVironment, Skydio, and XTEND.

But I can’t help but wonder: Is following the money enough? Does even this tsunami of cash fully explain the genocidal madness that American leaders have so consistently supported and frequently enacted for so long? Perhaps – bear with me – conspiracy theory may help, as we’ll see in Part Fifteen.

Read Part Fifteen here.

Barry’s Blog # 432: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Thirteen

Part Thirteen – Nov. 5^th

We cannot let this, we’ve never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way around, 16, we have never, never let our democracy sakes second fiddle, way they, we can both have a democracy and…correct the public health. – Joe Biden, April 2020

Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible. – Trumpus, 2016

The news since October 6th was dominated by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and anyone with eyes or a heart could see that Netanyahu is a bloodthirsty war criminal. Nearly 4,000 children are dead. But the implication for the election is that Biden, who could have taken the opportunity to play peacemaker, asserted himself as an equal partner in mass murder, Bibi’s main cheerleader, a ghastly voyeur of war pornography.

Biden hides behind three prominent Black women who debase themselves by associating him with the heritage of Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter: Harris, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and U.N. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (along with other people of color Pentagon Deputy Spokesperson Sabrina Singh, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel, House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, who joined Republicans and 21 other Democrats to censure Rashida Tlaib, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and fellow con-man Barack Obama, who pontificated the usual “Israel has a right to defend itself” garbage). Harris doubled down on unquestioning support for mass murder; Thomas-Greenfield vetoed a cease-fire resolution; and Jean-Pierre compared non-violent Palestine activists to the racists who had marched in Charlottesville in 2017. Caitlin Johnstone wrote:

(The Democratic Party) selects a high number of women and racially diverse officials for its cabinet positions to convey the illusion that it has transcended the abusive bigotries of the past, while subjecting impoverished, brown-skinned foreigners to a nonstop barrage of high-tech explosive munitions in massacres that would be the envy of the worst white supremacist imperialists in history.

The combined AIPAC / Christian Nationalist lobby would be stronger than the military-industrial complex, if their aims were not identical. The bottom-feeder Gavin Newsome followed Biden, Blinken, Schumer, Kathy Hochul and Emmanuel Macron in visiting Israel to “offer California’s support”.

They fooled no one outside of the usual, reliable constituencies – one of which has disappeared. Biden’s support among Arab Americans has fallen to 17%, especially in swing states, marking a 42 point decrease from 2020. The latest Gallup Poll revealed that his job approval rating among Democrats dropped by 11% in the past month, to the lowest in his presidency. As progressives and young people noisily voiced their disappointment, even the NYT had to admit that “Mr. Biden is already struggling with low Democratic enthusiasm, and it would not take much of a slip in support from voters who backed him in 2020 to throw his re-election bid into question”.

With a year to go, a political scientist might argue that the DNC is banking that the usual lesser-of-two evils fear will motivate progressives such as Ralph Nader. Two days after the Gaza attack, Nader wrote – in the WAPO, which usually ignores him – that he is supporting Biden because he’s terrified of Trumpus, that the Democratic Party “isn’t fascist but autocratic”, and (exhibiting a remarkably short memory) that “they don’t suppress votes”.

A depth psychologist, however, might ask, Does Biden really want to be re-elected? (See below)

Meanwhile, even though an intruder was arrested twice at Robert F. Kennedy’s home, Biden rejected his third request for Secret Service protection. Fox News, now aware of polls indicating that an independent RFK would take more votes from Trumpus than from Biden, adopted a noticeably more aggressive approach to him. The Kennedy campaign website stated,

As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. More specifically, Kennedy vows that “We will bring the troops home…We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening.”

The website did note that “The failure to address the Palestinians’ plight has led to endless cycles of violence with no peaceful and just solution in sight.” But it did not call for a cease-fire, not even the mild humanitarian pause that even Biden has suggested. Apparently, either Kennedy thinks that Israel is not part of the empire or the bulk of his funding is also from AIPAC. His silence on the matter was both shameless and stupid, as it alienated progressives looking for an alternative to Biden.

Dementia Wars

Trumpus mixed up Jeb Bush with George W. Bush, repeatedly said “Obama” while trying to criticize Biden and called Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán “the leader of Turkey.” He warned that Biden would lead the U.S. into “World War II” and told a crowd in Sioux City, Iowa that he was happy to be in Sioux Falls (South Dakota).

Of course, he’s been doing this for years; of course it’s all about body language, smirks and entertainment, not logic; and of course his audiences love it. But that doesn’t mean he is not losing his mind. Meanwhile his campaign posted several videos of Biden stumbling or brain freezing. You probably didn’t see them, but Fox News viewers certainly did.

Nothing new here, except that these geezers are four years older and now each is literally arguing that the other’s encroaching senility is worse than his own. Four years ago, in Parts Four, Five and Six of my series “A Mythologist Looks at the 2020 Election”, I asked in all (psychological) seriousness, “Does either of these guys really want to win?”

For at least eight years Trumpus has been constantly upping the ante to see how much he can get away with, deliberately pushing the envelope of provocation and self-incrimination. I imagine his internal, unconscious logic like this: Well, they wouldn’t punish me last time; maybe this will get their attention! Isn’t some part of him hoping to get caught and have clear limits set on his behavior? Isn’t he proclaiming, I can’t stand myself! Someone catch me, stop me, punish me before I do something really awful! I don’t want to do this any longer! Get me out of here! Is it possible that – for his entire life – poor Donald has just been asking for help?

Conventional psychology might speak of psychological ambivalence or see his behavior patterns as indicating self-hatred. But we need a mythopoetic approach. Depth psychologist Robert L. Moore argued that just below grandiosity lies depression and that the path toward healing involves puncturing the grandiosity to allow the deeper wounds to emerge into the light and be cleansed. From this perspective, everything that Trumpus does is expressing an unconscious teleological drive toward self-knowledge.

Biden’s mode is only slightly different. Throughout his career he has continually subverted his goals with foolish and entirely preventable errors. Some of his gaffes really seem to be Freudian slippage on a monumental scale: Biden Vows He’s ‘Going to Beat Joe Biden’

Our American Innocence has conjured up these two men: one who embodies the very worst of our possibilities but who is, literally, us; and the other who models for us all the futile attempt to hide the truth from ourselves.

My image for Trumpus is the smirking, entitled but uninitiated boy-king who is so desperate to know himself, for others to know his pain (and perhaps finally be loved for who he is) that he will unconsciously invite his own – and our – destruction by provoking the wrath of the gods. What is he really saying? Stop me before I drive this red sports car into my wall!

Biden is driving that same sports car – but with his foot on the emergency brake, wondering why he isn’t going anywhere. What is he really saying? I don’t deserve to be President! I don’t even want to be President! Don’t vote for me!

What really drives these guys? Please, please don’t tell me that either of them is motivated at any level of consciousness by a sense of duty to the nation, by a desire to serve the people. To do so is to reveal your own insistence on American innocence. It is to reveal your addiction to the culture of celebrity, your willingness to project your own inner nobility onto a brand, an image of a person, not the person himself.

In the short run there’s nothing we can do to change this, but at least we can try to understand through reframing. These two man-boys are unconsciously seeking initiation, to die to their lesser selves so that their better selves may emerge and be welcomed in the world. They are clumsily modeling what this entire nation must eventually experience as they pilot their runaway sports car. But the longer they put off their descent into the underworld, the less time this world has to heal.

In West Africa, they say that problems in one world can only be repaired by beings on the other side of the veil. It’s November 5^th. Some would note that it’s exactly a year until the election. Others will observe that it’s only been three days since Dia De Las Muertos, and that perhaps the veil between the worlds is still thin. May beings on the other side give us all the help they can. We can’t do this by ourselves.

Read Part Fourteen here.

Barry’s Blog # 431: Playing Chicken

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad – Mark Nepo

We’ve had chickens for over ten years, during which our hens have given us over 11,000 eggs. I’ve built a secure coop to keep predators (abundant, even here in Oakland) out.

Despite those measures, possums have broken in on two occasions and killed several hens. The first event confronted me with a rather profound crisis. There I was, at 3:00 AM, standing in my bathrobe and flip-flops over two dead chickens (the possum hadn’t even eaten them, only bitten their heads off), shining my flashlight at about face level at a (probably very scared) possum sitting in the roost, unable to escape. I did a quick moral inventory: If I even could let it out of the coop, it would certainly get back in. So I had to set my nonviolent philosophy against my responsibility to protect my girls. The debate lasted about a minute. I killed the intruder as quickly as I could and felt quite bad about it.

This story is real, but it comes to me like a sequence of dream images.

Despite my attempts to shore up the cracks in the coop fence, another possum got in a couple of years later and killed a couple more of my girls. This time, with no internal debate, I quickly eliminated it, this time with extreme prejudice. C’est la vie.

I, like other chicken owners, also had another dilemma: what to do with older hens who had stopped laying eggs? I put the question to a local Facebook group and was quickly shamed into allowing them to die of old age. They were, after all, my girls and they had served me well.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends! – Shakespeare, Henry V

It’s October 19^th, 2023. Hamas broke out of its pressure-cooker cage, entered Israel and, well, you know the rest. Well, I hope you do; the mainstream media disinformation has been unrelenting. Langston Hughes wrote of a similar pressure cooker 72 years ago:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The border cage was quickly repaired, but Gaza has been without any new food or water for over two weeks, under continuous bombardment. Over 2,000 Gazan children are dead, murdered by predators who sit safely outside the fence. An Illinois man stabbed a six-year old Muslim boy to death after listening to conservative talk radio.

Joe Biden, before requesting another $100 billion in military aid, ghoulishly quipped that the “other team” had bombed the Gaza hospital in which 500 died, and his U.N. ambassador vetoed a resolution calling for a cease fire.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky

These obscenities – both the murders and the cruel rhetoric — are nothing new. In 2007, after Gazans had voted Hamas into power, Israel’s military calculated the minimum number of calories per day that Gaza residents would need to avoid starving, an average of 2,279 calories/day. After subtracting for locally produced food, they estimated how many truckloads would be required to prevent malnutrition and for three years allowed only that much food into the area. But hostilities continued and open warfare, along with mass bombardments like we’ve seen this week ensued several times. Israel has completely blockaded the border since 2016. Gaza’s median age is 18, so half its 2.3 million people, like my chickens, have never known any reality other than being fenced in to the world’s largest outdoor prison.

This land is mine, God gave this land to me. – Theme song to Exodus

Our local fence story began about the same time as the Hamas raid. A small skunk got into the coop somehow. Apparently uninterested in the chickens, it feasted at their feeder and (happily for us all), found its way out on its own, and has not returned.

Then on Tuesday, in the middle of the night, our upstairs daughter-in-law Emily (first to hear the shrieking), banged on the ceiling to wake us up. By the time I got something on, grabbed a flashlight and got down to the coop, the action was over: two of our girls were not only dead, they were nothing but carcasses, having been mostly eaten, and in a very short time. But there was no perp – I doubted it was a possum – and I couldn’t find any evidence of ingress.

Wednesday morning, I checked for breaches in the fence and again shored up some very small holes, but this was a mystery. I put the two carcasses into a garbage bag, sealed it tightly (dammit, it wouldn’t be garbage day until next Tuesday — this could really stink by then) and deposited it into a garbage can. That evening we left windows open. Fortunately, it was quite warm.

I heard the sounds at 1:00 AM. Prepared with bathrobe and flashlight at the ready, I raced downstairs, a knight set to do battle in defense of his ladies fair. What I found was one chicken on the ground, screaming a hideous lament, some tailfeathers missing, keeping her head wedged into a corner where the perp (What perp? There was no perp!) couldn’t get to it. The other two surviving hens were up in their roost. Again: no signs of ingress. What the fucking fuck???

1:30 AM: more sounds, she’s downstairs screaming, no perp present. I manage to calm her down.

2:00 AM: I can’t sleep. The sounds begin again. This time she’s gone from the coop, along with the perp. Mystified, I check the garden area outside the coop. She is lying on the ground, a ghastly, bloody sight, her head mostly bitten off – images of burnt Gazan children at the bombed hospital flash through my mind – and a big raccoon is staring at my flashlight.

Part of me demands revenge, or at least the necessary species-cleansing. I consider getting a shovel and killing it. But I’ve seen enough violence. I just chase it off. I turn back to the exterior of the coop, where I see a really small, maybe 6” x 15” tear in the chicken wire about three feet off the ground. The hen is still breathing. I’ll put her out of her misery later, but first I need to repair the breach.

2:30 AM: There I am again, in bathrobe and flip-flops (all praise to warm Oakland Octobers), rooting through my woodpile for junk wood and screwing it into the studs of the fence as a temporary fix. I turn back around – the hen is standing up! – Is she in misery? I remember the book I’ve been reading just this week, Gordon Grice’s The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, a discussion of the life patterns of some common predators, including black widow spiders and praying mantises, two species in which the females eat or kill the males just after or during copulation. He writes:

She (the mantid) is slowly eating the right half of his head…He doesn’t seem to mind. He stays on her back like some undersized Headless Horseman…she eats rapidly…The brain is not involved…The cockroach, a cousin to the mantid, has the same peculiar wiring…roaches are capable of learning; they can run mazes and can even be conditioned to flee darkness and love light. This later exercise has been replicated with headless cockroaches…Their learning ability is not in the head…Well it does need its head for eating. After a few weeks, a headless roach starves to death.

Of course, I’m mixing metaphors madly. But as Michael Meade has suggested, anything worth saying is worth exaggerating.

When the Israeli ground invasion begins, government spokespersons will deny any intentions of harming civilians  — they killed 400 last night — and assert the necessity of “beheading” Hamas of its leadership. At some point, they will claim to have killed another “senior” commander. No one will feel safer. The Palestine Chronicle reports:

It is now common that when bodies of dead and wounded Palestinian civilians arrive at hospitals anywhere in Gaza, names of victims would be written on their wrists…so that their bodies might be identified and receive proper burial.

I get a bucket to transfer the wounded hen back to the coop to die peacefully. She really doesn’t seem to be in distress, or far less distress than when she’d been screeching a half hour earlier. As I shove her into the bucket she briefly screams again.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker asked,

What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart… pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence…and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him.

Late Wednesday night: Sleep? Are you kidding? My mind is busy re-creating the crime scene:

The skunk finds or makes the tear in the chicken wire (3 feet up!) and enters the coop only to eat chicken feed, then exits when finished. A week passes without me noticing the tear. But the raccoon (hungry, resourceful, determined; perhaps it’s pregnant or a mother) certainly notices it, enters, kills the first two victims and leaves by the tear in the wire, which she has enlarged. I don’t notice it when I’m shoring up small breaches at ground level. The next night, it enters again, twice, but lights coming on and the sound of my footsteps running down the stairs chase it away (each time it must climb 3 feet of the interior chicken wire, squeeze through the tear and jump down). Finally, it decides, fuck this, I want that chicken! I’m taking her (hostage?) with me before that human can get back down the stairs. It re-enters, grabs her by the neck — and I can barely imagine this — climbs back up the interior 3 feet of chicken wire, squeezes both herself and the hen through the tear and escapes. An open and shut case.

Thursday AM: I pick up Emily’s compost bucket for the chickens and take out the chicken (!) bones from last night’s meal to put on the railing for the crows. I enter the coop. She’s still alive, standing without moving, her head area a bloody mess with flies crawling over it. I pass my hand back and forth in front of her, but she doesn’t react. She appears to be blind, but still standing, not even lying down, as I’ve seen chickens do when they’re dying.

What should I do? Put her out of her misery? Is she in misery? Certainly, she can and did express terror and/or fear– but misery? What is misery? Pain? Sadness? Should I kill her because she’s sad? Because I’m sad? What if I had caught the raccoon? Would I have hesitated (having crossed that moral bridge years ago) to kill it? Do the premature babies in Gaza hospitals feel any pain when their incubators stop working for lack of electricity?

If you’re lucky, you die quickly. – Gaza doctor, on Israeli missile wounds, when he has no anesthetics.

But doesn’t she, like all the other characters in this dream, exhibit an astonishing will to live despite her degraded condition? Does she, an animal who lacks our highfalutin’ human sense of purpose, imagination and intentionality, have a reason to go on living?

Yes! She lays an egg this morning! Blind and unable to eat, she lays a freaking egg!

Friday AM: She has died during the night – of what? Starvation? Dehydration? Generalized trauma to her central nervous system? Of, as Irish poet Evan Boland wrote, “…the toxins of a whole history”? Or, since she couldn’t see any more, how could she know where the other hens were? Did she die of loneliness?

You can’t die of loneliness in Gaza. At 15,000 people per square mile, including the rural areas, it’s the most crowded place on Earth. I suppose you could die of loneliness if your entire extended family (over fifty of them) has been murdered. Can anyone deny that the Jews of Israel have replicated the trauma of the Holocaust by inflicting it upon another people, or that Europeans have displaced their guilt for 2,000 years of pogroms onto Muslims?

Well, she’s out of her misery, if indeed she was in misery. I suppose it would make some kind of ecological sense if I were to throw her corpse into the bushes so the raccoon or some scavenger could at least recycle her body’s nutrients. But remembering what an uneaten animal smells like, or perhaps simply out of spite, I bag her. She joins her deceased sisters in the garbage can.

We’re down to two aging hens. I think of nature having culled the flock. Then I remember that, as Ramzy Baroud writes,

‘Mowing the grass’ is an Israeli term used with reference to the habitual Israeli attacks and war on besieged Gaza, aimed at delineating the need for Israel to routinely eradicate or degrade the capabilities of the various Palestinian resistance groups on the street. ‘Mowing the grass’ also has political benefits, as it often neatly fit(s) into Israel’s political agendas — for example, the need to distract from one political crisis or another in Israel or to solidify Israeli society around its leadership.

Some Israelis are tired of periodically mowing the grass. Chris Hedges reports:

The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops…a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948…”Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them…Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live…Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them…If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”

If I could have, should I have let her live a few days and then die by starvation? What should we do with the children of Gaza? Allow another Nakba? Kill them all and put them out of their – our – misery, out, once again, of our awareness, out of the debilitating grief that will certainly arise when we can no longer repress that awareness – or just let them fester in that sinkhole until they all starve to death?

I am so sad and everything is beautiful – Mark Nepo

 

 

 

 

 

Barry’s Blog # 430: A Mythologist Looks at the Election of 2024, Part Twelve

Part Twelve – Mid-October

Why must we save our sanity, who said we ought to stay sane, how is it even decent to remain sane in this world we are so recklessly and callously deranging?…It is a kind of madness to always hear the keening of the dead, this hurt canticle. It is a madness not to hear. – Anna Badkhen

In Congress, the inmates took over the asylum. As MAGA Republicans battled for control of the position of Speaker of the House, no government news got done. Some might consider that good news, as Biden’s latest request for more military aid for Ukraine was tabled. But that didn’t prevent him from sending not one but two aircraft carrier fleets to the Mediterranean.

Aside from making an attempt to play the adult in the room and announcing (mostly minimum wage) job increases, Biden had plenty of bad news. His disapproval rating hit the highest mark of his presidency (56%). Invoking the ghost of Richard Nixon, former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern, regarding the ongoing investigations, wrote:

The Joe Biden-friendly Establishment media has mounted a full-court press to “prove” that Biden is, well, not a crook…But time is about to run out, and pre-emptive propaganda is unlikely to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. IF the facts do come out and IF they are reported, Biden’s presidential hopes may suffer a mortal blow.

Kennedy, still denied Secret Service protection, despite the agency’s determination that he is at an elevated “risk for adverse attention,” and despite the fact that an armed man impersonating a U.S. Marshal had been arrested at a Kennedy event, finally gave up on the Democrats and declared himself an independent candidate. His campaign announced that within six hours of the announcement it took in over $11,000,000 in contributions (over $28 million in the past year). Later that week, however, Kucinich quit as his campaign manager. Kennedy replaced him with his daughter-in-law, who, reported the NYT, “is best known for a memoir about her tenure in the C.I.A.”

How does the news of Kennedy becoming an independent impact the race? David Talbot writes:

Worried Democratic donors were convened on Zoom…to discuss how the party’s wealthy sponsors can stop challenges like the Kennedy campaign. “People are very focused on this threat,” corporate activist Matt Bennett… told Politico. Kennedy’s Democratic Party opponents are strategizing how to keep his name off state ballots and how to keep spreading disinformation about him.

Polls, notoriously inaccurate, especially this early, do indicate trends. One appears to show that Kennedy is the highest-polling independent or 3rd party candidate to enter a presidential election in the modern era, entering at 19% with Biden and Trump at 38% each. Another interpreter explains, “While trust (in the federal government) has hovered near historic lows for the better part of the last 20 years, today it stands among the lowest levels dating back nearly seven decades.”

Although Alternet ran its first hit piece since July, the Democrats, terrified of his candidacy within the party, can relax for a while now that he has left. One poll shows that 48% of Republicans have a favorable view of Kennedy (more than of most Republican contenders), while only 14% of Democrats do. This is partly due to the media demonization and partly to his regular appearances on conservative media, a result of course of the MSM refusing to interview him).

It means that he could pull more support from Trumpus than from Biden. And it explains why (writes Talbot)

Trump allies have also admitted Kennedy makes them “anxious,” with one Trump advisor telling Semafor, “We’re gonna be dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views, dating back to 2012. We have a lot of stuff on him.”

Newsweek dropped its demonization of Kennedy long enough to note, “Republicans Start to Panic About Trump’s Chances Against RFK Jr.” ABC News agreed: “RFK Jr.’s switch to independent campaign draws criticism from Republicans — not Democrats”. MSNBC reported “MAGA Republicans’ top political tool has betrayed them. And they’re furious”.

Prediction: If polls continue to show him taking more votes from Trumpus, we’ll quickly see that Secret Service protection.

Then Palestine / Israel erupted yet again. Mainstream media went into overdrive, repeating lurid claims that Hamas fighters had killed and beheaded 40 Israeli babies. Just as with the bogus line on Ukraine, “analysts” tripped over each other repeating the one word: “unprovoked”. Biden quickly maintained his pathological support for genocide and stated (outright lie or advancing senility?) “I’ve been doing this a long time. I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children…” His handlers retracted the statement when the source of the claim – a right-wing settler – was quickly revealed. But the administration ignored 55 Congressional progressives (after 2,200 Palestinians including over 700 children were already dead), who made the mild request that the attack on Gaza “must be carried out according to international law and take all due measures to limit harm to innocent civilians”. Too extreme for mainstream democrats.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky

But Biden did have good news during this insane week. Who would claim the mantel of primary “PEP” (progressive except for Palestine)? Kennedy also doubled down on his unqualified support for Israel:

This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I’ll make sure that our policy is unambiguous…I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need. However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action…

Kennedy could not have engineered a more arrogant, shameless and ignorant denunciation of any claim to being a progressive – or any appeal to progressive support – than if he’d had Steve Bannon as his speechwriter (perhaps he did). This is probably why Kucinich quit the campaign. By contrast, Cornell West, an actual progressive, said: “The escalation of the barbaric violence in the Middle East must stop. The vicious Israeli occupation and the ugly Palestinian retaliation results in the killing of precious innocent people on both sides. We must have a lasting peace based on justice!”

With Kennedy shooting himself in the foot, Biden no longer needs to worry about him siphoning off progressive support, in either the primaries or the general election. But he can’t deny the low ratings. Still, the DNC gives every indication that they are willing to go down with him.

But just in case they can no longer make excuses for the dementia or the Congressional investigation gains media traction, Gavin Newsome has been vetoing every piece of progressive legislation that reaches his desk (such as allowing striking workers to collect unemployment benefits), rather obviously and shamelessly attempting to appear more conservative. Should he succeed in overthrowing Biden, however, here’s another prediction: the Republicans will portray him as a flaming socialist anyway, and his attempts to play moderate will merely alienate the left just when he’ll need it.

Read Part Thirteen Here.