And next for Egypt? These chapters are unwritten, but the world is bracingly different this week than what it was a month ago. Rulers and tyrants everywhere know that. They know bad news when they see it, same way we know good news when we hear its welcome knock on the door of history.
February 14
The Reagan cult celebrates the centenary of their idol’s birth this month, and the airwaves have been tumid with homage to the thirty-eighth President, who held office for two terms, 1981–1988, and who died in 2004. The script of these recurring homages is unchanging: with his straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering terms he and his PR crew catered expertly to the demands of the American national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the vigor of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.
When he took over the Oval Office at the age of sixty-six whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed off.
The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launch pads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the Joint Chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan’s brain, most of them to the effect that “we need more money.” The President really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
March 11
The inhibitions that prompted his stutter extended to other regions of the King’s body, as Kitty Kelley narrates in her fine book The Royals. Sexual dysfunction plagued poor George VI. Allegedly, Elizabeth and Margaret were conceived (respectively in 1926 and 1930) with the help of artificial insemination, donor undisclosed.
My maternal grandfather, Jack Arbuthnot of the Scots Guards, could be a candidate as the mystery donor for the future Queen. In terms of physiognomy Margaret is less likely. When he was commanding the guard detail at Balmoral, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later George VI’s consort, would visit from Glamis castle as a young girl. The high-spirited Elizabeth used to insist that Major Jack play “Horse,” carrying her about on his shoulders. Perhaps in 1926 the Duchess, as she then was, remembered that early, fairly intimate proximity and sent him a royal request.
The popularity of the Royal family after the war should not be overestimated. In his excellent history Austerity Britain, David Kynaston quotes James Lees-Milne as recording in his diary for November 18, 1947—apropos the announcement of the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip of Greece—a disturbing dinner with Simon Mosley of the Coldstream Guards: “Says that 50 percent of the guardsmen in his company refused to contribute towards a present for Princess Elizabeth. The dissentients came to him in a body and, quite pleasantly, gave him their reasons. One, the Royal Family did nothing for anybody, and two, the Royal Family would not contribute towards a present for their weddings.” Moreover, “when Simon Mosley said that without the Royal Family the Brigade of Guards, with its privileges and traditions, would cease to exist, they replied, ‘Good! Let them both cease to exist.’ ”
March 17
Last Sunday my phone rang a couple of times from people watching 60 Minutes reporting that in a segment on Christopher Hitchens, the following exchange occurred:
INTERVIEWER (Steve Kroft): Alexander Cockburn, a former friend of yours, called you a “self-serving, fat-ass, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical contrarian.”
HITCHENS: Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with that … though he should see my ass now.
I was puzzled. It’s not my argot of abuse, and besides, I haven’t written anything recently about Hitchens. Why, unless occasion absolutely requires it, publicly kick a man in as tough a spot as he’s evidently in?
It seems that 60 Minutes, an immensely popular and profitable adornment of CBS News, can’t afford to hire conscientious or experienced researchers and checkers. The phrase is taken from the headline of a torrent of measured abuse of Hitchens written by Jack McCarthy for CounterPunch in 2002, a year when emotions were running high, amid the work-up to the attack on Iraq. Any moderately seasoned checker knows headlines are no-nos for specific attribution without detailed inquiry, which certainly did not occur in this case.
March 18
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi, speed to the pharmacy to look for iodine and ask, “It’s happened there; can it happen here?” They already know it can, and almost certainly will.
President Obama took plenty of money from the nuclear industry for his presidential campaign and in his State of the Union address last January reaffirmed his commitment to “clean, safe” nuclear power, as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice clean form of syphilis. This week Obama’s press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy “remains a part of the President’s overall energy plan.” As Will Parrish reports, Obama was flacking for boosted plutonium production even as Fukushima Daiichi went into meltdown.
The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nation. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless leaks and kindred malfunctions, all of them dangerous.
Perhaps the news that Japanese nuclear reactors have been damaged and that clouds of official deception are already rising above them will cool the revival of enthusiasm for building new nuclear plants here in the US, spearheaded politically by President Obama and okayed by major Green groups using the cover of alleged anthropogenic global warming, as long ago planned by the nuclear industry.
April 4
In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, a 327-page volume by three scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko, the definitive study to date. The book stresses that the cover-up began immediately. Official secrecy imposed by the Soviet government lasted three years, during which time an unknown number of people died from early leukosis. There were 830,000 “liquidators,” as the clean-up workers were somewhat bizarrely termed, and for three years “it was officially forbidden to associate the diseases they were suffering from with radiation.”
Set the desperate efforts to avoid apocalypse at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima plant next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Compare the hundreds of square miles of abandoned land in Ukraine next to the evacuated zone, already twenty kilometers in radius on Japan’s northeast coast. Think of southern California or North Carolina or … The United States has 104 nuclear plants.
Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez writes that a single spent fuel rod pool—as in Fukushima or Shearon Harris—holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast “perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster.”
Significant sections of the environmental movement here, impelled by monomaniacal concern over the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, have made their shameful pact with the nuclear industry. It’s over. Look at Chernobyl, look at Fukushima. There’s no middle ground.
April 9
Fox News says Glenn Beck’s daily program will “transition” off the network show some time before the end of this year. Beck cosigned the statement and confirmed this on his show on Wednesday, April 6, speaking vaguely of sustaining the two-year relationship with Fox by “developing things.” He sounded shell-shocked, like a man who’d been shown the door.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Beck, partly because of his deep roots in the mulch of American nutdom, fertilized by the powerful psychic idiom of rebirth and redem
ption. “Progressives,” today’s milquetoast substitute for old-line radicals, have trembled at his ravings about the left’s conspiracies against freedom. Personally, I found them heartening. Respect at last! Who but Beck could turn a conservative African-American Harvard grad, an errand boy for corporate America, into a latter-day re-creation of W. E. B. DuBois and Malcolm X, now installed in the White House?
A fairly typical reaction from the pwog sector was that of Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way, who swiftly proclaimed that “It’s encouraging to know that it is no longer economically viable for a major television network to support the demagogic rantings of its most unhinged conspiracy theorist.” But from Keegan’s point of view, aren’t demagogic and unhinged rantings exactly what he and his liberal fellows should want from Fox? Isn’t it good to have a clownish ideologue bringing the Republican Party into disrepute?
Give me Beck any day.
April 14
What began in Britain in 2005 as “a third-rate burglary” of voice-mails, supposedly limited to a criminal invasion of privacy by a News of the World reporter and a private investigator, has flowered beautifully into a Level 7 scandal that threatens the careers of two of Rupert Murdoch’s top executives, not to mention the heir apparent to the News Corp. empire, James Murdoch. It even laps at the ankles of the eighty-year-old magnate, threatening the final financial triumph that was scheduled to usher him into Valhalla.
Will Rupert himself be enmeshed? Bruce Page, author of a fine book on Murdoch, suggests to me that what could drag the dirty digger into the swamp would be the disclosure of any deal he may have made to stem the scandal when Gordon Brown was still PM. Brown won’t confirm or deny that Murdoch approached him.
April 20
It looks as though eastern Libya will slide into the Mediterranean under the sheer weight of Western journalists assembled in Benghazi and Misrata. A tsunami of breathless reports suggests that Misrata is enduring travails not far short of the siege of Leningrad in World War II. The reports have been seized on by President Obama, British Prime Minister Cameron and French Prime Minister Sarkozy to raise the ante on Mission Odyssey Dawn. In their joint newspaper column published on both sides of the Atlantic they now say that to leave Gaddafi in power would be an “unconscionable betrayal” and speak of Misrata as enduring “a medieval siege.”
Not yet, surely. A medieval siege was something that usually lasted at least a year, in which the city’s inhabitants were reduced to eating rats, then each other, and the besiegers all succumbed to plague.
Maybe it will turn out that way, with reporters eying each other from a gastronomic perspective and wiring Ferran Adrià, seeking recipes for preparing Haunch of Hack sous vide. “So long as Gaddafi is in power, NATO and its coalition partners must maintain their operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds,” write the three leaders. This is not Mission Creep but, once again, Mission Leap, way beyond the UN mandate.
It seems that the rebels might actually be under the overall supervision of the international banking industry, rather than the oil majors. On March 19 they announced the “designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”
CNBC senior editor John Carney asked, “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.” Ellen Brown, author of the terrific Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, wrote recently about the rebels’ sophisticated financial operations in the following terms:
According to a Russian article titled “Bombing of Lybia—Punishment for Gaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar,” Gaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead: the gold dinar. Gaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. During the past year, the idea was approved by many Arab countries and most African countries.
The only opponents were the Republic of South Africa and the head of the League of Arab States. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Gaddafi was not swayed and continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.
And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed: “One seldom mentioned fact by Western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned … Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.”
I’d really like to see an objective account of Gaddafi’s allocation of oil revenues versus the United States’, in terms of social improvement.
April 22
For a nation that loves anniversaries, the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War—April 12, 1861—crept by on tiptoe, like a burglar slipping through a darkened house. The reason for this eerie semi-silence is not hard to find. The Civil War is contested political terrain, particularly in the racist backwash after the 1960s and the civil rights movement which naturally looked back on the Civil War as one in which tens of thousands of Americans gave their lives for the principle that all are born free and slavery is a shameful blot on any society.
These days we live in the shadow of Nixon’s southern strategy, which became Reagan’s southern strategy and is now standard issue campaign politics for the Republican Party: Play the racist card, throw money at think-tanks to churn out papers delivering an onslaught on quotas, deride all attempts to level the racial playing field. Speak “frankly” about the supposed pathologies of the black family.
Meanwhile, up north, the forthright honoring of a war waged for honorable principles has faded amid revisionist histories of what the war was really about. Add to this a general wan feeling that the fruits of a terrible conflict were the appalling racism of the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War, when the Ku Klux Klan began to burn and lynch, and the migration of southern slaves and their descendants from the Deep South to the slums of Chicago and other northern cities. Ahead lay decades of poverty and oppression that prompted the riots of the 1960s.
So the Civil War is a dangerous football to start kicking around on network TV, bad for the advertising business, except for the deadened hand of Ken Burns. The arrival of a black man to the White House has naturally intensified these divisions.
April 28
Americans were offered closure Wednesday to one of the multifarious strands of our national dementias. It took the drab guise of the “long-form” birth certificate, signed and filed in Hawaii on August 8, 1961, indicating that the President is a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office. But will the White House’s release of the certificate finish off the “birther” movement? Certainly not.
Harold Camping, President of Family Stations Ministry, has been preaching for some time now to a vast and devoted national audience that God’s plan is to inaugurate the Second Coming and end the world by flooding on May 21, 2011 (thus achieving a Judeo-Christian planetary closure before the prime cu
rrent pagan rival, the end of the Mayan calendar, scheduled for December 21, 2012).
It’s a safe bet that Camping and his disciples will be saying on May 22 that his math was merely a year or two off, and the end is still nigh. His congregation will have its faith fortified. Membership will probably increase, as it did after the failure of Camping’s last prediction of the Second Coming, which he scheduled for September 6, 1994.
Sociologists call the phenomenon of increased commitment to a batty theory, at the very hour of its destruction by external evidence, “cognitive dissonance.”
May 6
Peering briefly at the royal nuptials in a house high up in the mountains above Malibu, I was surprised to see how spectacularly tacky the British upper classes have become. They looked very vulgar. The appalling cuteness of the Aston Martin supplied the coup de grace. The groom didn’t know how to stand up properly. Contrary to effusive comparisons, the bride’s much touted dress from the atelier of the wildly overpraised late Alexander McQueen was a far cry from Grace Kelly’s, designed by Helen Rose, who had dressed her in High Society and The Swan. The bride’s headdress hung like a dishrag.
The only vestments borne with confidence and aplomb were those of the churchmen. The Archbishop of Canterbury, with his emphatic beard and specs, had a splendid cape. His voice was confident. I’d like to see him in debate with one of Tehran’s ayatollahs. But the Anglo actresses watching the event on our mountain were ecstatic. My daughter Daisy, returning to London two days later, reported that the young women she was encountering were all swept away by the event and eager for marriage.
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