I cannot pretend to comprehend your writings, but I instead cling to the simple thoughts like “ they cover up crimes with scandals”, “ they strip America for its parts and sell them”., “they do not mind being caught,they do not want to be punished”
Those Sarah precious nuggets help me understand what has happened and is still happening in our govt and politics
But maybe,hopefully, you have raised my consciousness and I understand more and I may now hold onto to today’s nugget “For their operation to succeed, the public must abandon critical thinking in favor of cult logic. Memes and mantras replace contemplation and compassion, rendering humans indistinguishable from bots”
I think I now better understand the racial and misogynistic quotes and tweets they repeat”
Thank you for the continuing education
Before I leave this earth in a few years , I do hope we hold one another accountable for terrible deeds, seditious acts and high crimes of treason so we can return to decency
Thank you! I too want to see accountability and resolution, because the lack of it has created cults that make our world less creative on top of all its other problems.
Excellent. I have no critique, as I agree. Your article could very easily have been titled, “The lesser of two evils.” There is a completely different reality occurring at the same time as the one most of us live in. The reality of the power brokers, the game of kings, and queens. A reality most will never imagine. Is the good accomplished worth the evil it takes to accomplish it ? Does the end justify the means ? Do we have to negotiate with evil ? How many dead, is too many, in any scenario. The end of autocracy? Never, while people remain. I have lived close to 30 years further than you, and it has always been shit. I have tried to run to the end of the earth, only to find it there as well. It is not easy to live with vision. Sometimes, I feel it a curse. How many dead is too many, is a game played by kings and queens, of all sides, all political stripes. I, like you, will vote the best choice, which is Harris. I will do so with my eyes wide open. I have watched the negative responses you have received as of late, the price of vision. How many dead is too many. Some are given the gift of vision. Those who have it, don’t consider it a gift. Maybe, at some point, there will be so many dead, the shooting will just stop. Shooting takes on many forms, we kill in so many ways............ Like you, I need to go for a paddle. I feel best in the deep woods. Take care of you. 💜
I don't know what I will do when I enter that voting booth. I know I will vote down ballot for Democrats. I suspect that I will not vote at all for President. I've sucked it up and voted for people I did not believe in since B. Clinton. And I don't think I can do it even one more time. It betrays everything I know to be the truth.
This has been the plan for at least 50 years. The US was never a democracy. It's always been an oligarchy. Every US president is guilty of crimes against humanity. The US was birthed by British Lords who never knew a day of tyranny, with the genocide of the indigenous people. It was built by slave labor. The ruling class wants WWIII. Oil and other resources are getting scarce. It's the same reason Putin invaded Ukraine, land and other resources. Ditto, the genocide. No matter who wins the upcoming election, we all lose😞
I was born during the Iranian Revolution and remember no time before powerbrokers in this country weren't plotting a war with Iran. The closest I felt they got before this year was in Bush's second term during the Iraq War, when it seemed to be winding down (it wasn't) and like they would move the war into new "axis of evil" territory. Now it seems we are closer than ever, because these alliances and rising bipartisan militarism make little sense otherwise. I left out my thoughts of how Netanyahu and the Kahanist government have also found their moment, because the article was getting too long, but that alliance is key as well.
The Iraq-Iran War was an American creation as well. We supplied one side intelligence and the other weapons. The Middle East has been divide and conquer for oil ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. IMO, this looking away from the Gaza genocide and supplying 92 percent of Israel's weapons is the reality of the approaching end of oil. Without little doubt, the final and real reason to go to war with Iran. I'm going to try to find AIPAC's contributions to the Harris campaign as well, probably there from the Biden war chest she inherited. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/the-end-of-oil
Has the US ever not been at war or overthrowing governments that wouldn't submit to its wishes? Chilie, Iran, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam... Colonizers will just continue to colonize. We've all been gaslit into a trap. Biden locked down the southern border. The wall is being built. They have blimps to monitor the Canadian border. Cop cities are everywhere. They've streamlined selective service registration making it automatic. Israel just bombed Lebanon. What's truly unnerving is how many people don't see what's coming because they're freaking out over Trump instead watching what the current administration is actually doing.
Post-debate, I mentioned to the group at my house that I was disappointed by Harris’ comments about foreign policy. I was not allowed to speak. I was interrupted and more or less told to stuff it. It feels like my 60 ish crowd of friends has lowered their expectations into a subterranean trough.
I was struck by how much Harris sounded like Bush/Cheney, how conservative she sounded, even since the convention. Scary.
Of course they wouldn't let you speak. They're in their own cult- which is so ironic, that they can see cults on the other side, but not their own. I thought she did a disappointing, bad job at the debate. I don't think she should have shaken his hand, nor looked at him, for starters. And I saw none of that so-called prosecutorial demeanor. Her voice in the first half sounded shaky and nervous. The entire time she treated him like an equal, not like a despicable fascist criminal who tried to overthrow our government. I am so sorry I watched, and so much more scared, now.
Well said: "I saw none of that so-called prosecutorial demeanor. Her voice in the first half sounded shaky and nervous. The entire time she treated him like an equal, not like a despicable fascist criminal who tried to overthrow our government"
_____
First, I do have to admit that I couldn't stand to watch the debate to completion, but I saw most of it — as well as "highlights" that Harris supporters have compiled — and your description perfectly captures what I saw.
I didn't expect miracles from a genocidal psychopath, but I DID expect that she could "prosecute" the criminal fuckwit she shared a stage with. Apart from a weakly-delivered jab or two, I saw nothing I could describe as a "prosecution."
I was attacked similarly for not feeling “the joy”. 2 men mansplaining politics to me. I held my own. All you can do is offer another perspective; although, people don’t tend to remember what you said.
The world is like the solar eclipse to me, it hurts too much to look directly at it so I look off to the side and pretend I can see it, or obscure it with colored glasses and only get a glimpse.
I'm the same way these days, which is why I end up writing about art or nature while tackling these topics, because to focus purely on politics at this point would hurt me and the readers -- I doubt people would even finish reading. There needs to be some style and some release.
I appreciate you sharing your writing, whatever the topic. You are very gifted. Your books are a must read. My release is to go deep into my woods and stay with the squirrels and deer and let it all go away for awhile. Thanks again.
This is the key to you success. Expressing your views and knowledge without being too brutal. Though some will disagree, they will be entertained and educated in an artful way. Your balance is very good.
I'm terrible about modern art so I had to google Beckmann. His impassive expression really speaks to me ngl. Since I'm one of "those people" who still masks in public spaces, even though I have the freedom of uninhibited facial expression beneath the N95 (which I do indulge in on occasion!), I've noticed that my expression has gone flat more often than not. Maybe it's just the grinding down of my energy, or seeing all the horrors online and the almost willful, happy oblivion on all the naked faces around me "not living in fear." (It's an instinct for self-preservation, not fear. :P) Still, it's isolating and alienating. Luckily I have a lot at home that keeps me busy & focused (gardening, putting up food for lightening the load of the grocery bill and in prep for the guaranteed impending hard times, etc).
I had the same reaction to Harris' performance. It was the Kavanaugh hearings, but she's embracing the trajectory of Dems becoming GOP 2.0. At least I've given up on politicians doing anything constructive. I'm sad but not disappointed. They're acting true to form. As you've said, whoever wins in November, we lose. I'd proffer that we started to lose back in 2006 when Pelosi preemptively said impeachment was off the table after Dems won the midterms. I keep returning to that moment as the last meaningful off-ramp that could have arrested this institutional death drive. After that, I figured accountability was never going to be on the menu so I never felt that Trump would be taken to task like all the grifter cheerleaders kept assuring was coming Any Day Now, Just Trust the Plan.
I understand why you have such persistent haters in your replies and mentions. You ruthlessly hold up a mirror to "Team Good" and they absolutely refuse to acknowledge what they're seeing. The "free speech zones" that were such a source of outrage when first utilized under Bush is now standard OP in Dem cities big and small & the act of protest has become so choreographed and tame with an army of tone police enforcers from the same ranks that balked at its imposition during the Iraq War. Watching the slide of US liberals into becoming the soft power foot soldiers of fascism has been quite the reality tv show that won't be getting canceled anytime soon. The cult logic is firmly embedded and it was never more apparent than Team Blue's cosign of Biden's murderous COVID response from mid-2021 onward.
Vice President Harris saying she wants us to have the “most lethal military” certainly makes your concerns about war with Iran more valid than not. No healthcare, guns out of school, affordable higher education in sight, but constant money for death and destruction. It’s tiring to be led by those with ghoulish mindsets about our fellow humans.
She’s saying it multiple times, and I doubt she came up with the line. This doesn’t strike me as her plan, but a long-formed one that she will be asked to carry out. It’s unnerving. Particularly, as you note, after these years of mass death — and the attempted normalization of it.
As a woman running for president, Harris has to prove that she is as tough as any man to avoid the stereotype of a weak woman. So repeating “most lethal military” makes political sense. This in no way means that the goal is not to acclimate the public to military action and violence. Only that the dual rationals reduce scrutiny of creeping militarization.
Yes, but if one of your goals is to normalize the use of military force, “lethal” is better, and you can still cover for it by saying that a female candidate needs to project strength. Creepy, but with plausible deniability.
Since Garland did what he was put into his post to not do, our machine has been presenting us with this on-going binge watch cliffhanger with all those cottage industries built around it much like a post episode breakdown with some of the players of the moment, ala Talking Dead...
They've milked the terror as well as the amusement and given us the freakiest, most cartoonish boogey man of all time, but IT hardly "ends" with his defeat in this election. I understand the need to lift up a nation's morale, but there wouldn't even be a reason to if everything had been on the level in the first place concerning Trump. A mighty risky optics game of villains and heroes to play when we've been down this deceptive road before in the selling of the invasion of Iraq by our profiting machine.
Exactly. Biden has the most power, now, a president could ever have -- and Harris, if elected, will have it too. And Biden sits there and twiddles his thumbs, and tells US, who have no exemption from prosecution, to go do something about it. Horrible.
And here is an image you can see in full screen and then use your mouse scroll to enlarge so you can see the detail: https://www.artchive.com/artwork/the-king-1934-37-by-max-beckmann/ Yes, I know. Most people these days use their phones, but I'm still a laptop person. It's a remarkable painting, Sarah. Thanks for telling us about it. After I'm done here I'm going to spend some time with it.
What concerns me most about the Iran war hawks is that most Americans probably don't know much about Iran, especially the fact that it has a very large population of young people who long to be free from the mullahs. They have protested and paid the price--imprisonment and execution. It breaks my heart to see pictures of their fresh, young, handsome, faces after they've been executed: "Please don't tell Mom they're going to execute me," a young man in his early twenties recently texted his father. If more Americans actually knew that young people in Iran are risking their lives for freedom, they would be in a better position to protest their own Iran war hawks.
We continue to feel the consequences of the Iraq War, even if most Americans have forgotten about it. And two of those consequences are 1. it has emboldened Iran and 2. pushed Erdoğan closer to Russia. To be sure, Turkey has always had to be careful about what it does, considering its proximity to the Russian Federation and the fact that it controls the Turkish Straits. Then of course there's the Black Sea. But precisely for those reasons, alienating Erdoğan was a pretty stupid thing to do. Not even to speak of the fact that after the US destroyed the state of Iraq, Iran moved in.
So after the neocon nitwits fxcked things up, they now want to fxck them up even more?
I watch from the UK, as we are marched down the road to authoritarianism , it does not make any difference which puppet is King.
Sarah, the painting is a great way to weave the darkness of these times with those in 1930’s Germany. Sadly there are so many similarities my cloud of foreboding is getting bigger by the day.
Strangely, I take comfort from how you write about your experiences and brilliant insights, you are appreciated.
Thank you! I’m struck by the parallels too. It’s also wild to me that Beckmann ended up living near my neighborhood, teaching at the college I attended, and working with the art museum I love. To witness all he did in Europe, and then end up here in St Louis. On the outside of the St Louis art museum, a building that long predates Beckmann’s arrival, it’s engraved “ART STILL HAS TRUTH: TAKE REFUGE THERE”. I know he saw those letters, too, and I wonder what he thought.
I’ve finally gotten wise to you. This time I jumped to the end to see the painting before reading. It was helpful to have the visual in mind as I read your words because only through art can we discern the absurdity of the world we enable and inhabit. You shatter my illusions regularly, and I am thankful to you for that. I always become unraveled trying to make the jump from the binary to how to act on critical thought, and can’t see the way. Hopefully I will in time, before time runs out.
Thank you! I wanted people to decide themselves when they wanted to see the painting so I left it at the end. I encourage folks to read any way they please. As for the rest of your comment, there is so much pressure on people to act before they think -- but figuring out what is happening when so much is obscured is a major part of the battle. We need to understand what we're fighting in order to succeed. Contemplation is as important as action, and contemplation takes time, and that's OK.
That's a very powerful painting. I can see it bridging the world's time between it's origins and today. Thank you. (unfamiliar with his work & plan to see more of it. )
All his work is great. He's been my favorite artist since I was a teenager, and it was a total happy coincidence that I ended up living in St. Louis, where the biggest collection of his work is.
Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. I read your stuff because it actually hurts to read it. I gloss over the ambivalence and the discontinuities and dissonances in everyday discourse until I hit this stuff and then I trip and fall when I run into your work. Ouch.
But there's a lot here, and some of the connections you make suggest PURPOSE and MOTIVATION where I've considered it just, well, incompetence and ignorance.
Four points:
1. Why wasn't Trump prosecuted rapidly and effectively? I thought from the start that Garland was the most feeble and feckless choice possible for AG. That we needed someone less shackled by institutionalism and more of, say, a motivated hunter who would chase Trump to the ends of the earth. Like Kamala Harris. (Really, my choice for AG at the time. No kidding. She would have been great.) So, was the choice of Garland an intentional one, meant to soften the approach to the seditionists? I'm sad to think so.
2. As an American Jew, I am so ready to stop funding Israel's endless war machine. Is Israel so great a cause that it can't be poisoned by Netanyahu and the rest of those monsters? Of course not. Germany was a lovely country in 1925. (They only started that one other war.) Leaders matter. They can change countries. Make them drive off the side of the road and turn them into murder machines. George Bush did it in Iraq. Should we act like a country is sacred because of its distant history and purpose, regardless of who is leading it today?
3. War with Iran. I am old enough to remember that my Jewish grandfather would visit Tehran as a part of his annual round-the-world business trips. I remember the itineraries ... Okinawa, Delhi, Baghdad, Tehran, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Paris, London, home. (He always said that Beirut was the most beautiful city in the world.) Tehran was of course hardly "free" under the Shah. But the transformation of Iran has been one of the great historical events of the last century, and it inspired a kind of continuing madness in American foreign policy and politics. John McCain singing "Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" WHAT?? The warmongers have never even looked at a map of Iran (or Afghanistan for that matter). It's a HUGE country, it's full of mountain ranges and valleys and impossible to conquer and didn't we learn anything in Afghanistan?? I really hoped that when we got Cheney and Co to leave in 2009 that the madness would subside.
4. But but but ... Is Kamala Harris really the monster you suggest? Will the need to lure the Never Trumpers turn her administration into Obama Redux (another Republican Lite administration)? I don't know. I like to think we've learned to stop drifting right hoping to lure just one more insane Republican to vote for a law they proposed 2 years ago but now oppose because they just thought up something just a little more extreme. But maybe we haven't.
You're not helping my sleep, Ms Kendzior. But you're making me think. That suggests you're doing your job. Thanks. Sort of. :)
I deeply appreciate your writing and wish I could support you financially. I too, am a writer, trying to wake people up to climate, change, the reality of the end of oil and a record rate of species extinction. Needless to say, it's a struggle. I have a rapidly growing base of unpaid subscribers, not so much paid ones. It is what it is. I'd be better off financially writing about pet cats. Sigh.
Sarah, I so enjoy your writings as they reflect the precious gifts to humanity of love of family, nature and the arts. Three things that hold no regard to the corrupt power mongers… endless wars and killing, destroying our planet, and removing freedom of expression. And for what, they all die as well.
I cannot pretend to comprehend your writings, but I instead cling to the simple thoughts like “ they cover up crimes with scandals”, “ they strip America for its parts and sell them”., “they do not mind being caught,they do not want to be punished”
Those Sarah precious nuggets help me understand what has happened and is still happening in our govt and politics
But maybe,hopefully, you have raised my consciousness and I understand more and I may now hold onto to today’s nugget “For their operation to succeed, the public must abandon critical thinking in favor of cult logic. Memes and mantras replace contemplation and compassion, rendering humans indistinguishable from bots”
I think I now better understand the racial and misogynistic quotes and tweets they repeat”
Thank you for the continuing education
Before I leave this earth in a few years , I do hope we hold one another accountable for terrible deeds, seditious acts and high crimes of treason so we can return to decency
Thank you! I too want to see accountability and resolution, because the lack of it has created cults that make our world less creative on top of all its other problems.
Excellent. I have no critique, as I agree. Your article could very easily have been titled, “The lesser of two evils.” There is a completely different reality occurring at the same time as the one most of us live in. The reality of the power brokers, the game of kings, and queens. A reality most will never imagine. Is the good accomplished worth the evil it takes to accomplish it ? Does the end justify the means ? Do we have to negotiate with evil ? How many dead, is too many, in any scenario. The end of autocracy? Never, while people remain. I have lived close to 30 years further than you, and it has always been shit. I have tried to run to the end of the earth, only to find it there as well. It is not easy to live with vision. Sometimes, I feel it a curse. How many dead is too many, is a game played by kings and queens, of all sides, all political stripes. I, like you, will vote the best choice, which is Harris. I will do so with my eyes wide open. I have watched the negative responses you have received as of late, the price of vision. How many dead is too many. Some are given the gift of vision. Those who have it, don’t consider it a gift. Maybe, at some point, there will be so many dead, the shooting will just stop. Shooting takes on many forms, we kill in so many ways............ Like you, I need to go for a paddle. I feel best in the deep woods. Take care of you. 💜
Thank you -- I really appreciate this comment, which is all too relatable.
I don't know what I will do when I enter that voting booth. I know I will vote down ballot for Democrats. I suspect that I will not vote at all for President. I've sucked it up and voted for people I did not believe in since B. Clinton. And I don't think I can do it even one more time. It betrays everything I know to be the truth.
There are no answers, just damn tough decisions. You’ll do what’s right for your conscious. I respect that.
wonderful comment. i feel the same
This has been the plan for at least 50 years. The US was never a democracy. It's always been an oligarchy. Every US president is guilty of crimes against humanity. The US was birthed by British Lords who never knew a day of tyranny, with the genocide of the indigenous people. It was built by slave labor. The ruling class wants WWIII. Oil and other resources are getting scarce. It's the same reason Putin invaded Ukraine, land and other resources. Ditto, the genocide. No matter who wins the upcoming election, we all lose😞
I was born during the Iranian Revolution and remember no time before powerbrokers in this country weren't plotting a war with Iran. The closest I felt they got before this year was in Bush's second term during the Iraq War, when it seemed to be winding down (it wasn't) and like they would move the war into new "axis of evil" territory. Now it seems we are closer than ever, because these alliances and rising bipartisan militarism make little sense otherwise. I left out my thoughts of how Netanyahu and the Kahanist government have also found their moment, because the article was getting too long, but that alliance is key as well.
The Iraq-Iran War was an American creation as well. We supplied one side intelligence and the other weapons. The Middle East has been divide and conquer for oil ever since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. IMO, this looking away from the Gaza genocide and supplying 92 percent of Israel's weapons is the reality of the approaching end of oil. Without little doubt, the final and real reason to go to war with Iran. I'm going to try to find AIPAC's contributions to the Harris campaign as well, probably there from the Biden war chest she inherited. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/the-end-of-oil
Has the US ever not been at war or overthrowing governments that wouldn't submit to its wishes? Chilie, Iran, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam... Colonizers will just continue to colonize. We've all been gaslit into a trap. Biden locked down the southern border. The wall is being built. They have blimps to monitor the Canadian border. Cop cities are everywhere. They've streamlined selective service registration making it automatic. Israel just bombed Lebanon. What's truly unnerving is how many people don't see what's coming because they're freaking out over Trump instead watching what the current administration is actually doing.
Remarkable how enormous lies are able to hide in plain sight. Just keep the public entertained.
Pretty much😕
Post-debate, I mentioned to the group at my house that I was disappointed by Harris’ comments about foreign policy. I was not allowed to speak. I was interrupted and more or less told to stuff it. It feels like my 60 ish crowd of friends has lowered their expectations into a subterranean trough.
I was struck by how much Harris sounded like Bush/Cheney, how conservative she sounded, even since the convention. Scary.
Of course they wouldn't let you speak. They're in their own cult- which is so ironic, that they can see cults on the other side, but not their own. I thought she did a disappointing, bad job at the debate. I don't think she should have shaken his hand, nor looked at him, for starters. And I saw none of that so-called prosecutorial demeanor. Her voice in the first half sounded shaky and nervous. The entire time she treated him like an equal, not like a despicable fascist criminal who tried to overthrow our government. I am so sorry I watched, and so much more scared, now.
Well said: "I saw none of that so-called prosecutorial demeanor. Her voice in the first half sounded shaky and nervous. The entire time she treated him like an equal, not like a despicable fascist criminal who tried to overthrow our government"
_____
First, I do have to admit that I couldn't stand to watch the debate to completion, but I saw most of it — as well as "highlights" that Harris supporters have compiled — and your description perfectly captures what I saw.
I didn't expect miracles from a genocidal psychopath, but I DID expect that she could "prosecute" the criminal fuckwit she shared a stage with. Apart from a weakly-delivered jab or two, I saw nothing I could describe as a "prosecution."
It feels like 2016.
And if it turns out the same way... I don't know where to run, where to hide, or how to protect others.
She used that word "lethal," again.
I was attacked similarly for not feeling “the joy”. 2 men mansplaining politics to me. I held my own. All you can do is offer another perspective; although, people don’t tend to remember what you said.
The world is like the solar eclipse to me, it hurts too much to look directly at it so I look off to the side and pretend I can see it, or obscure it with colored glasses and only get a glimpse.
I'm the same way these days, which is why I end up writing about art or nature while tackling these topics, because to focus purely on politics at this point would hurt me and the readers -- I doubt people would even finish reading. There needs to be some style and some release.
I appreciate you sharing your writing, whatever the topic. You are very gifted. Your books are a must read. My release is to go deep into my woods and stay with the squirrels and deer and let it all go away for awhile. Thanks again.
This is the key to you success. Expressing your views and knowledge without being too brutal. Though some will disagree, they will be entertained and educated in an artful way. Your balance is very good.
Thank you!
I'm terrible about modern art so I had to google Beckmann. His impassive expression really speaks to me ngl. Since I'm one of "those people" who still masks in public spaces, even though I have the freedom of uninhibited facial expression beneath the N95 (which I do indulge in on occasion!), I've noticed that my expression has gone flat more often than not. Maybe it's just the grinding down of my energy, or seeing all the horrors online and the almost willful, happy oblivion on all the naked faces around me "not living in fear." (It's an instinct for self-preservation, not fear. :P) Still, it's isolating and alienating. Luckily I have a lot at home that keeps me busy & focused (gardening, putting up food for lightening the load of the grocery bill and in prep for the guaranteed impending hard times, etc).
I had the same reaction to Harris' performance. It was the Kavanaugh hearings, but she's embracing the trajectory of Dems becoming GOP 2.0. At least I've given up on politicians doing anything constructive. I'm sad but not disappointed. They're acting true to form. As you've said, whoever wins in November, we lose. I'd proffer that we started to lose back in 2006 when Pelosi preemptively said impeachment was off the table after Dems won the midterms. I keep returning to that moment as the last meaningful off-ramp that could have arrested this institutional death drive. After that, I figured accountability was never going to be on the menu so I never felt that Trump would be taken to task like all the grifter cheerleaders kept assuring was coming Any Day Now, Just Trust the Plan.
I understand why you have such persistent haters in your replies and mentions. You ruthlessly hold up a mirror to "Team Good" and they absolutely refuse to acknowledge what they're seeing. The "free speech zones" that were such a source of outrage when first utilized under Bush is now standard OP in Dem cities big and small & the act of protest has become so choreographed and tame with an army of tone police enforcers from the same ranks that balked at its imposition during the Iraq War. Watching the slide of US liberals into becoming the soft power foot soldiers of fascism has been quite the reality tv show that won't be getting canceled anytime soon. The cult logic is firmly embedded and it was never more apparent than Team Blue's cosign of Biden's murderous COVID response from mid-2021 onward.
Vice President Harris saying she wants us to have the “most lethal military” certainly makes your concerns about war with Iran more valid than not. No healthcare, guns out of school, affordable higher education in sight, but constant money for death and destruction. It’s tiring to be led by those with ghoulish mindsets about our fellow humans.
She’s saying it multiple times, and I doubt she came up with the line. This doesn’t strike me as her plan, but a long-formed one that she will be asked to carry out. It’s unnerving. Particularly, as you note, after these years of mass death — and the attempted normalization of it.
Could it be about some of tRump's recent public insults against military? Arlington, medals?
As a woman running for president, Harris has to prove that she is as tough as any man to avoid the stereotype of a weak woman. So repeating “most lethal military” makes political sense. This in no way means that the goal is not to acclimate the public to military action and violence. Only that the dual rationals reduce scrutiny of creeping militarization.
She could’ve said “robust” or “strong” military. Lethal is a whole different level of derangement.
Yes lethal has only one meaning — to cause death. I wrote about the word choice in a different piece: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/birds-of-a-feather
Yes, but if one of your goals is to normalize the use of military force, “lethal” is better, and you can still cover for it by saying that a female candidate needs to project strength. Creepy, but with plausible deniability.
I’m not on Tik Tok but part of this essay is! I appreciate this woman for reading it and sharing an excerpt in audio form so I’m posting a link to her clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@caroclaireburkeee/video/7414145288920681771
Since Garland did what he was put into his post to not do, our machine has been presenting us with this on-going binge watch cliffhanger with all those cottage industries built around it much like a post episode breakdown with some of the players of the moment, ala Talking Dead...
They've milked the terror as well as the amusement and given us the freakiest, most cartoonish boogey man of all time, but IT hardly "ends" with his defeat in this election. I understand the need to lift up a nation's morale, but there wouldn't even be a reason to if everything had been on the level in the first place concerning Trump. A mighty risky optics game of villains and heroes to play when we've been down this deceptive road before in the selling of the invasion of Iraq by our profiting machine.
Exactly. Biden has the most power, now, a president could ever have -- and Harris, if elected, will have it too. And Biden sits there and twiddles his thumbs, and tells US, who have no exemption from prosecution, to go do something about it. Horrible.
And here is an image you can see in full screen and then use your mouse scroll to enlarge so you can see the detail: https://www.artchive.com/artwork/the-king-1934-37-by-max-beckmann/ Yes, I know. Most people these days use their phones, but I'm still a laptop person. It's a remarkable painting, Sarah. Thanks for telling us about it. After I'm done here I'm going to spend some time with it.
What concerns me most about the Iran war hawks is that most Americans probably don't know much about Iran, especially the fact that it has a very large population of young people who long to be free from the mullahs. They have protested and paid the price--imprisonment and execution. It breaks my heart to see pictures of their fresh, young, handsome, faces after they've been executed: "Please don't tell Mom they're going to execute me," a young man in his early twenties recently texted his father. If more Americans actually knew that young people in Iran are risking their lives for freedom, they would be in a better position to protest their own Iran war hawks.
We continue to feel the consequences of the Iraq War, even if most Americans have forgotten about it. And two of those consequences are 1. it has emboldened Iran and 2. pushed Erdoğan closer to Russia. To be sure, Turkey has always had to be careful about what it does, considering its proximity to the Russian Federation and the fact that it controls the Turkish Straits. Then of course there's the Black Sea. But precisely for those reasons, alienating Erdoğan was a pretty stupid thing to do. Not even to speak of the fact that after the US destroyed the state of Iraq, Iran moved in.
So after the neocon nitwits fxcked things up, they now want to fxck them up even more?
Umm, yes.
I watch from the UK, as we are marched down the road to authoritarianism , it does not make any difference which puppet is King.
Sarah, the painting is a great way to weave the darkness of these times with those in 1930’s Germany. Sadly there are so many similarities my cloud of foreboding is getting bigger by the day.
Strangely, I take comfort from how you write about your experiences and brilliant insights, you are appreciated.
Thank you! I’m struck by the parallels too. It’s also wild to me that Beckmann ended up living near my neighborhood, teaching at the college I attended, and working with the art museum I love. To witness all he did in Europe, and then end up here in St Louis. On the outside of the St Louis art museum, a building that long predates Beckmann’s arrival, it’s engraved “ART STILL HAS TRUTH: TAKE REFUGE THERE”. I know he saw those letters, too, and I wonder what he thought.
I’ve finally gotten wise to you. This time I jumped to the end to see the painting before reading. It was helpful to have the visual in mind as I read your words because only through art can we discern the absurdity of the world we enable and inhabit. You shatter my illusions regularly, and I am thankful to you for that. I always become unraveled trying to make the jump from the binary to how to act on critical thought, and can’t see the way. Hopefully I will in time, before time runs out.
Thank you! I wanted people to decide themselves when they wanted to see the painting so I left it at the end. I encourage folks to read any way they please. As for the rest of your comment, there is so much pressure on people to act before they think -- but figuring out what is happening when so much is obscured is a major part of the battle. We need to understand what we're fighting in order to succeed. Contemplation is as important as action, and contemplation takes time, and that's OK.
That's a very powerful painting. I can see it bridging the world's time between it's origins and today. Thank you. (unfamiliar with his work & plan to see more of it. )
All his work is great. He's been my favorite artist since I was a teenager, and it was a total happy coincidence that I ended up living in St. Louis, where the biggest collection of his work is.
Agreed. Love the painting.
Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. I read your stuff because it actually hurts to read it. I gloss over the ambivalence and the discontinuities and dissonances in everyday discourse until I hit this stuff and then I trip and fall when I run into your work. Ouch.
But there's a lot here, and some of the connections you make suggest PURPOSE and MOTIVATION where I've considered it just, well, incompetence and ignorance.
Four points:
1. Why wasn't Trump prosecuted rapidly and effectively? I thought from the start that Garland was the most feeble and feckless choice possible for AG. That we needed someone less shackled by institutionalism and more of, say, a motivated hunter who would chase Trump to the ends of the earth. Like Kamala Harris. (Really, my choice for AG at the time. No kidding. She would have been great.) So, was the choice of Garland an intentional one, meant to soften the approach to the seditionists? I'm sad to think so.
2. As an American Jew, I am so ready to stop funding Israel's endless war machine. Is Israel so great a cause that it can't be poisoned by Netanyahu and the rest of those monsters? Of course not. Germany was a lovely country in 1925. (They only started that one other war.) Leaders matter. They can change countries. Make them drive off the side of the road and turn them into murder machines. George Bush did it in Iraq. Should we act like a country is sacred because of its distant history and purpose, regardless of who is leading it today?
3. War with Iran. I am old enough to remember that my Jewish grandfather would visit Tehran as a part of his annual round-the-world business trips. I remember the itineraries ... Okinawa, Delhi, Baghdad, Tehran, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Paris, London, home. (He always said that Beirut was the most beautiful city in the world.) Tehran was of course hardly "free" under the Shah. But the transformation of Iran has been one of the great historical events of the last century, and it inspired a kind of continuing madness in American foreign policy and politics. John McCain singing "Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" WHAT?? The warmongers have never even looked at a map of Iran (or Afghanistan for that matter). It's a HUGE country, it's full of mountain ranges and valleys and impossible to conquer and didn't we learn anything in Afghanistan?? I really hoped that when we got Cheney and Co to leave in 2009 that the madness would subside.
4. But but but ... Is Kamala Harris really the monster you suggest? Will the need to lure the Never Trumpers turn her administration into Obama Redux (another Republican Lite administration)? I don't know. I like to think we've learned to stop drifting right hoping to lure just one more insane Republican to vote for a law they proposed 2 years ago but now oppose because they just thought up something just a little more extreme. But maybe we haven't.
You're not helping my sleep, Ms Kendzior. But you're making me think. That suggests you're doing your job. Thanks. Sort of. :)
I deeply appreciate your writing and wish I could support you financially. I too, am a writer, trying to wake people up to climate, change, the reality of the end of oil and a record rate of species extinction. Needless to say, it's a struggle. I have a rapidly growing base of unpaid subscribers, not so much paid ones. It is what it is. I'd be better off financially writing about pet cats. Sigh.
I can't do a paid subscription, but I've subscribed!!!! It's so important. Thank you.
I appreciate all my subscribers, regardless. Thank you for considering my work.
Sarah, I so enjoy your writings as they reflect the precious gifts to humanity of love of family, nature and the arts. Three things that hold no regard to the corrupt power mongers… endless wars and killing, destroying our planet, and removing freedom of expression. And for what, they all die as well.
Thank you for reading!