JFK's assassination and America's crisis today

[Douglas Caddy]

David Talbot posted the following on Facebook today and I wish to state that I concur in what he wrote:

There was the George W. Bush era of "American Idiot" -- and now we have the Trump era of the "American Id." An out-of-control gluttonous drive to gratify immediate desires, violently settle grudges, spew expletives, and bully everyone into submission. America has been headed this way through my entire life, as I've examined in my books -- turning into a lawless, domineering, exploitative state, year by year, presidency by presidency, ever since the deep state eliminated John F. Kennedy. So in that sense, the Trump era should come as no surprise. But he's ripped off the veneer and fully exposed the full deep ugliness of what we've become as a nation. Because we never blocked the U.S. power elite from doing whatever it wanted, and we never demanded a full reckoning for its crimes and grotesque appetites.

[Douglas Caddy]

David Talbot posted this on Facebook today:

So what are you supposed to celebrate on this Fourth of July if the nation has been hijacked by an imbecilic oligarchy and patriotism is a refuge for scoundrels? If fireworks just remind you of all the missiles and bombs we've hurled at defenseless populations? If the body politic is, by and large, fat and stupid, narcotized and brainwashed? I know this can get you lynched in red-white-and-blue America, but I'm ashamed to be an American. And I felt it even more acutely when t...raveling overseas last month.

Everywhere I went in Italy, there were crude, oversized Americans taking up too much space, braying at one another in restaurants, even when they were sitting at opposite ends of the dining rooms ("Hey, bro, you're from Texas too! What city?") Cannon-balling into public pools, screaming at the top of their lungs, as the dismayed Italians looked on. The Americans I came across in Italy showed zero curiosity or interest in the centuries-old culture around them, treating the treasures and ruins as if they were just a Disneyland backdrop. They should have been moving silently and meekly among the locals, in disgraced penance for the dangerous fool they elevated to world leadership.

Ancient Rome itself, of course, suffered from the same idiotic hubris and clownish leadership in its final stage. Sic semper imperium.

I've been reading British novelist Lawrence Osborne's "Hunters in the Dark." Like Graham Greene and Paul Bowles, Osborne has a good feel for Westerners who stumble into overseas locales where they're way out of place, but too clueless to realize it. Here's Osborne's description of Americans at play in a hotel pool in Phnom Penh: "The men out in the pool all had shaved heads, the concentration camp look, with tattoos hard-edged on painfully white skin. The girls were immensely fat and arrogant and loud, and carrying much the same tattoos though on different parts of their bodies. They disported themselves through those blue waves like elephant seals, and the Asians coolly dressed at the restaurant in their pressed white shirts and cufflinks looked at them with a kind of despairing amazement and a quiet certainty that the economic decline of these beasts was somehow legible in the obscure codes of their tattoos and the weight of their belly fat. They were no longer the lean aggressors and masters of yesteryear."

[Paul Brancato]

Funny you should post Talbot today. Some idiot gun toting Trumper got his knickers up and started posting his blowhard claptrap on Talbot's FB post. I engaged for a bit until I realized how clueless he was. 

Edited July 4, 2017 by Paul Brancato