Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.
Like Joe McCarthy’s ‘reds under your bed’, the RWNJs got their wearing-white-before Labor Day done during this past weekend.
Unfortunately this occured with casualties in Charlottesville, VA as Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-nazi who drove his car into a crowd of demonstrators. This occurred around counter-demonstrations related to a ‘unite the Right’ rally.
Now James Alex Fields jr. is their current Horst Wessel, a foot-soldier (they disclaim him, but say he met the dress-code so they gave him a shield) for anti-semitism’s National (American) Vanguard, a white nationalist organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Unlike Dyann Roof, he chose as weapon, the analogy no self-respecting gun control advocate wants to use, a muscle car. For some RWNJs, the battle is with some mythical yet pernicious hoard of ‘cultural marxists’.
The trope of “cultural Marxism” has been steadily gaining traction among the broad and diverse entity that is the radical right (although, hating diversity, would baulk at you saying so), where it serves as an umbrella term variously responsible for such un-American and anti-Western ills as atheism, secularism, political correctness, gay rights, sexual liberation, feminism, affirmative action, liberalism, socialism, anarchism, and, above all, multiculturalism. The ultimate goal of cultural Marxism, we’re led to believe, is to slowly and stealthily dilute and subvert white, Christian Western culture, thereby opening sovereign nations to rule by a one-world corporate government. Whether that’s by Jews, lizards, or communists isn’t always clear…
The “cultural Marxist” conspiracy has a slippery genealogy through the American right, beginning with its coinage by Lyndon Larouche in the early 1990s (although Hitler had warned of “cultural Bolshevism” during the 1920s).
It passed through various esoteric journals and hard-right think tanks and was picked up by paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan (author of The Death of the West), William S. Lind, and Paul Weyrich, and over the last decade has spread feverishly through the murkier, more hyper-masculinist and libidinally challenged corners of the web.
In whose name does cultural marxism get its cred, and why doesn’t it have a national, regional, cultural organization to join. In that same context, what about … cultural imperialism?
Everything that is social is cultural, whether it is the knowledge communities of scholars, or the vast simulation and representation cultures reproduced and socialized. Villains were needed, and ‘cultural marxists’ came ready-made since they had had little quantitative evidence, much like Austrian economists.
The geniuses on the Right needed to invent a meme that could combine the anti-communism of the Cold War and the typical anti-intellectualism of college drop-out pundits like Limbaugh, Beck, and Carlson.
They need to believe that an “alt-left” exists, even as we mock RWNJs by uttering it. It is its own legitimation crisis just as snowflakes have no ideology. Something is subverting white(sic) culture and it couldn’t be false consciousness or stupidity. Darn that asymmetry of hierarchy and privilege. Darn those Others.
Hence “cultural marxism” emerged as an enemy conspiracy theory to offset the burgeoning ignorance now ensconced in the WH with Bannonism and its Millerist self-loathing tendencies. Bannon’s own RW interests in traditionalism are developments of a particular European origin reflected in a number of conservative religious sects.
In a recent article, I think Bill Palmer is reading it wrong. A battle hardened Admiral or General, Army or Marine, can not be intimidated or embarrassed by this guy. Could Nimitz, Puller, Patton, Bradley or Montgomery or any of the others be intimidated? In Donnie’s style, he can’t fire anyone, so the Generals are safe from Donnie, and they will not quit.
There are poems that need to be seen on the page because the placement of each word, each punctuation mark, each space is part of the poem.
There are other poems that ride on the tongue, and must be heard, because they have the lithe muscle of the dancer and the breath of the singer in them.
Judy Grahn (1940 – ) writes poems so out loud they will stagger you.
When I first read The Common Woman Poems, and a woman is talking to death, they were in thin smudgy chapbooks of reproduced typewriter manuscript, but they made me get up and move as I spoke them aloud. It was the 1970s, and elegant computer-driven self-publishing wasn’t even a glint on the horizon.
But the long line of ancient poet-singers who predate the written word by centuries would recognize her.
She’s a copperheaded waitress, tired and sharp-worded, she hides her bad brown tooth behind a wicked smile, and flicks her ass out of habit, to fend off the pass that passes for affection. She keeps her mind the way men keep a knife—keen to strip the game down to her size. She has a thin spine, swallows her eggs cold, and tells lies. She slaps a wet rag at the truck drivers if they should complain. She understands the necessity for pain, turns away the smaller tips, out of pride, and keeps a flask under the counter. Once, she shot a lover who misused her child. Before she got out of jail, the courts had pounced and given the child away. Like some isolated lake, her flat blue eyes take care of their own stark bottoms. Her hands are nervous, curled, ready to scrape. The common woman is as common as a rattlesnake.
III.
Nadine, resting on her neighbor’s stoop
She holds things together, collects bail, makes the landlord patch the largest holes. At the Sunday social she would spike every drink, and offer you half of what she knows, which is plenty. She pokes at the ruins of the city like an armored tank; but she thinks of herself as a ripsaw cutting through knots in wood. Her sentences come out like thick pine shanks and her big hands fill the air like smoke. She’s a mud-chinked cabin in the slums, sitting on the doorstep counting rats and raising 15 children, half of them her own. The neighborhood would burn itself out without her; one of these days she’ll strike the spark herself. She’s made of grease and metal, with a hard head that makes the men around her seem frail. The common woman is as common as a nail.
North Korea says considering missile strike near Guam The threat ratchets up tensions after Donald Trump threatened “fire and fury” against Pyongyang. – BBC News
Trump’s already demonstrated his lack of fitness, and a plethora of enabler narratives have emerged ranging from generals standing watch to Congress trying to put war powers safeguards in even as AUMF authorizations remain historically ambiguous.
He now has already had numerous people killed as a result of military actions not unlike his predecessors, but there are high crimes and misdemeanors yet to be discovered as #TrumpRussia continues.
The possibility of war crimes made its appearance recently as a Trump summer break stunt (fire, fury, and frankly power). This raises the interesting prosecution of crimes other than his current obstructions of justice and the possibility of financial crimes among others.
Will Trump be absolved of heinous crimes before/after separation from the office of POTUS. If he’s unhinged, are his capacities diminished.
We don’t have a real sense of Trump addictions unless they’re drugs or sex (he has been described as a “beast” at sex parties, some with underage girls, and the claim has been that he never used drugs at such parties). He claims that he doesn’t drink alcohol.
So will there be a junk-food defense for launching military action with WMDs, considering how much is consumed by Agent Orange.
This recent threat and counter threat by the DPRK against Guam is par for the course with Trump, threatening action and giving the impression he and/or his staff doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Junk food was used as evidence that White was depressed; White’s depression was used to establish grounds for a successful diminished capacity plea; and therefore White was judged incapable of the premeditation required for a murder conviction…
That a jury could rationally have found that White’s actions were not premeditated was incomprehensible and unbelievable to most people, so instead the facts were converted into a story about how a slick lawyer got White off with an absurd “Twinkie defense.”
Dry drunk, wet work. Lord Dampnut. Nixon was not much smarter with Dutch courage.
But in April 1969, mere months into the first Nixon Administration, Nixon’s internationalist savvy was still unproven. That’s when North Korea shot down an EC-121 spy plane over the Sea of Japan. Nixon was furious.
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