Six Articles that Made Me Think: [After the Recent Elections] Most of the issues that truly matter remain rawly unaddressed

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philip panaritis

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Dec 7, 2018, 11:06:14 AM12/7/18
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Six Articles that Made Me Think: [After the Recent Elections] Most of the issues that truly matter remain rawly unaddressed and unacknowledged; 'Civility' Is for White People; Spare me the American tears for Jamal Khashoggi; The View from 35,000 Feet; The Cold War is over. Someone needs to tell the west; Isle of Madness: A Series of Miscalculations Has Brought Britain to the Brink;

Most of the issues that truly matter, that require a fundamental shift in American politics, remain rawly unaddressed and unacknowledged

"This country has been spiraling in the wrong direction for a long time. Some progressives determined to change the game were among those who gained office in this election, which is something worth celebrating — but hardly reason to heave a sigh of relief. Most of the issues that truly matter, that require a fundamental shift in American politics, remain rawly unaddressed and unacknowledged. They were essentially invisible in the mainstream election coverage, which, as usual, presented it as a horse race for the entertainment of Spectator America, not the creation of the future.

These issues include:

A. Militarism, endless war, unconscionable military spending, nuclear weapons. This was utterly off the table in the midterms. As Chris Hedges pointed out, some 85 percent of Senate Dems voted for this year’s $716 billion military spending bill, indicating a “unity” of surrender to military-industrialism. We no longer glorify our wars, we ignore them. And even progressive candidates seldom declare an intent to challenge the culture of war. Is there any political traction whatsoever for the antiwar movement? I fear there hasn’t been for four and a half decades — since the defeat of George McGovern.

B. Climate change, environmental catastrophe. This is not unrelated to the issue of war, since the world’s militaries are by far the biggest polluters. While environmental sanity is at least something that can be addressed politically, the urgency of global warming hardly has political traction. And, as a headline on Vox summed things up regarding the midterms: “Fossil fuel money crushed clean energy ballot initiatives across the country.”



C. Poverty, inequality. “In the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” writes Maria Svart, national director of Democratic Socialists of America, “many of us live in quiet desperation. Farmers are committing suicide, and so are taxi drivers in New York City. That’s why in the battle for the soul of our country, we must win.” Capitalism is still sacrosanct and Donald Trump, the alleged working class populist, cuts the taxes of the rich and is, as Hedges notes, an “embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats.” But socialism is no longer a taboo word in American politics and self-declared socialists are getting elected. Medicare for all and publicly funded college tuition are gaining political traction. The 99 percent have a voice. But of course the rich still have almost all the power; for the most part, this means that their self-interest rules.


D. Guns, violence, mass murder, a culture of violence. This issue still carves a deep gouge across the American electorate. Mass murders keep occurring. Should we get serious about gun control or should teachers and rabbis be armed? There is no real dialogue across the divide. We still live in a culture that worships violence. Just as we will not, as a nation, consider demilitarizing, neither will we disarm. And war keeps coming home.

E. Militarized police, police shootings and racism. The antidote emerges in concepts such as community policing and restorative justice — security that involves connecting with and understanding others, even those we dislike and distrust. This transformation is taking place across the whole planet, quietly, and for the most part beyond the world of politics. From my point of view, it’s one of the biggest sources of hope — it’s the cultural path beyond the worship and glorification of violence.

F. The prison-industrial complex. The United States has the largest prison system in the world (and it’s becoming increasingly privatized), with 2.3 million people — mostly impoverished people of color — behind bars. Our prison system is a regrouping of Jim Crow America, which can’t stand having a country without second-class and tenth-class citizens. But here’s some good news from this year’s midterms: “Florida restored voting rights to more than 1 million people with felony records, which amounts to the biggest enfranchisement since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the women’s suffrage movement,” Vox reports.


G. Immigrant scapegoating, hatred and fear. Because our unwinnable, endless wars can no longer serve the function of unifying the country, Trump has turned to immigrants — in particular, that “invading caravan” of desperate, shoeless Central Americans — as the Other he needs to rev his base and get the vote out. However, the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants, including the cruel separation of parents and children, has shocked and enraged much of the country, putting the country’s long-standing policy of cruel indifference to global suffering (and of course one of its leading creators as well) into the national spotlight like never before.

H. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, hacking. Ah, democracy, a nuisance to the powerful, a system to be gamed! If the voting can’t be controlled, my God, Republicans could lose. Witness Georgia and North Dakota, where bureaucratic twists deprived African-American and Native American citizens of their right to vote in large enough numbers to skewer election results. Stacey Abrams may yet prevail in her quest for the governorship of Georgia over Secretary of State and Purger in Chief Brian Kemp. But American democracy is not safe from itself, no matter how much the media insists on blaming all its flaws on the Russians."







Robert Fisk - Spare me the American tears for Jamal Khashoggi

"Can I be the only one – apart from his own sycophants – to find the sight of America’s finest Republicans and Democrats condemning the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia for murdering Jamal Khashoggi a bit sickening? “Crazy”. “Dangerous”. A “wrecking ball”. A “smoking saw”. These guys are angry. CIA director Gina Haspel, who was happy to sign off on the torture of her Muslim captives in a secret American prison in Thailand, obviously knew what she was talking about when she testified about Mohammed bin Salman and the agony of Jamal Khashoggi.

US government leaks suggest that Haspel knew all about the shrieks of pain, the suffering of Arab men who believed they were drowning, the desperate pleading for life from America’s victims in these sanctuaries of torment in and after 2002. After all, the desperate screams of a man who believes he is drowning and the desperate screams of a man who believes he is suffocating can’t be very different. Except, of course, that the CIA’s victims lived to be tortured another day – indeed several more days – while Jamal Khashoggi’s asphyxiation was intended to end his life. Which it did."






The View from 35,000 Feet

"Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights is about movement, and it so happened that I read it in motion, mostly on planes. At first, it felt like one of those airplane encounters that confirm barely six degrees of separation between you and the passenger in the next seat: both Tokarczuk’s unnamed female narrator and I grew up in Eastern Europe; she studied psychology and I was raised by a psychotherapist father; both of us travel a lot, alone; I also wrote a book about life on the hoof. There was a map of my city of birth on page thirty-seven! I became giddy: it was like looking in the mirror. I delighted in the affinity—delighted doubly because of the exquisite intelligence of this new traveling companion, because Tokarczuk’s prose is hypnotic, spellbinding in both imagination and rendering.


Then I noticed: something in the mirror was awry.

The travel Tokarczuk portrays is the stuff of airport hotels and dinner vouchers. The protagonist, a perpetual traveler, intersperses essayistic observation on motion with sketches of other eccentric voyagers, real and fictionalized: Frédéric Chopin’s sister, a Scandinavian woman who documents abuse against animals worldwide, a Russian housewife who runs away from home. This narrator is “drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken,” largely of the Kunstkammer variety: she lingers in museums of curiosities; several of her characters dismember and preserve dead bodies for the purposes of science or passion or for personal bemusement.

The travel I witness is often forced: exodus, the tribulation of exile, flight from violence or famine. I have spent my life documenting the world’s iniquities, and my own panopticon of brokenness comprises genocide and mass starvation, loved ones I have lost to war, friends’ children who died of preventable diseases. For nearly each elegant vignette I read in Flights, my world seemed to proffer an evil twin, until the looking glass of the novel became akin to a funhouse mirror: the book smoothed away much of the wretchedness I know.

On my flight from Atlanta to Raleigh, as my plane prepared for descent over the flooded Carolina coast where Hurricane Florence had made 20,000 people homeless and left half a million without power, I read: “Everything is well lit; moving walkways facilitate the migration of travelers from one terminal to another so they may go, in turn, from one airport to another… while a discreet staff ensures the flawlessness of this great mechanism’s workings.” On the trip from Honolulu to Dallas, I read: “The flight attendants, beautiful as angels, check to make sure we’re fit to travel, and then, with a benevolent motion of the hand, permit us to plunge on into the soft, carpet-lined curves of the tunnel that will lead us aboard our plane and onto a chilly aerial road to new worlds”—as south of my flight path thousands of migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador trudged northward in pursuit of a new world of safety and dignity.

The aggregate effect was a strange and haunting polyphony. “Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim,” the narrator of Flights repeats throughout the novel. But where did anyone I knew to be real—the hurricane victims and the migrants, my makeshift families and temporary hosts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, in the refugee camps of the Caucasus, fellow travelers who share with me their most intimate joy and grief— fit in to Tokarczuk’s world of these others? How was it possible that Tokarczuk’s intricately rendered cast of characters in movement—a young husband who goes mad after his wife and son briefly go missing during a family vacation, a émigré scientist who returns to Poland to help her ailing ex-boyfriend die in dignity—does not include these transitory people I’ve come across? In Flights, the traveling world exists as an antipode to the sedentary world from which Tokarczuk’s narrator feels alienated because she “did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots”—but both worlds are sanitized of the people who belong to the less privileged realm of forced uprooting."





The Cold War is over. Someone needs to tell the west

Four decades ago, Mary Dejevsky spent a year as an exchange student in the Soviet Union. On her return this year, she found much had changed for the better and wonders why western narratives about Russia are still stuck in the past 





 'Civility' Is for White People

"Protest is supposed to be uncomfortable. I imagine there were agitated white people who just wanted to take the bus to their grandmothers’ house during the Freedom Rides. I bet there were people who just wanted lunch at the local diner during the sit in. As Alabama state troopers fractured John Lewis’ skull, I bet he was called undignified for blocking traffic. Just before Bull Connor turned Klansmen, dogs and fire hoses loose on children in Birmingham, I bet they called those kids “disrespectful.”

But we remained civilly disobedient.

Furthermore, I am willing to bet my life savings that somewhere, right now, there is a black mother or father wondering if their child will make it home safely. After the evening of November 22, April Pipkins and Emantic Bradford Jr. no longer had to wonder.

They, like countless other black parents, found out the answer was “no.”

Now that is the most uncivil thing of all"






Isle of Madness: A Series of Miscalculations Has Brought Britain to the Brink

"Brexit was to allow the United Kingdom to reclaim its former glory. Instead, the country's leaders have bumbled their way into catastrophe. Built on a false premise from the start, the UK's move away from the EU has been dominated by mistakes and miscalculations."







McMansion Hell 4.png
A map of Hell by Joannes Stradanus, 1587..jpg
celli’s Map of Hell..jpg
Michelangelo_Caetani_Cross_Section_of_Hell_1855_Cornell_CUL_PJM_1071_04.jpg
Defending Our Borders From Hell-Demons From Another Dimension.jpg
NYC's Mighty Hell Gate.jpg
The Garden of Earthly Delights is Bosch’s most ambitious work – it features a frenetic hell wing full of monsters.jpg
McMansion Hell 3.jpg
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Herri met de Bles - Hell, mid-sixteenth century.jpg
A 19th-century painting by José Casado del Alisal depicts Semiramis in Dante's Inferno, part of the poet's great 14th-century work The Divine Comedy. Dante placed the queen in the second circle of hell, reserved for sins .jpg
Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is alleged that Bosch self-portrait is in the upper center at right under the table..jpg
The Astoria swimming pool with Hell Gate Bridge in the distance..jpg
re illustrative version of Hell by Jacques Callot, 1612.jpg
A Hell map from an edition of Divine Comedy printed in the late 15th century by Aldus Manutius, a Venetian publisher..jpg
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