Near Dark

But first the light. The Kennedys at their Virginia country home, 11 days before Dallas.

No sound, plenty of heartbreak.

Iran

(A Re-post from 2010. Sadly, more relevant than ever...)

It looks as if American and Zionist gangsters are moving ever closer to the mass murder they've planned for years: the blockading, economic strangulation, carpet-bombing, and possible nuking of what is perhaps the most beautiful (and certainly liveliest culture) on the planet: Iran's.

It's sad that the society which has produced many of our greatest contemporary filmmakers, poets, painters, classical composers, bloggers, sculptors, short-story writers and novelists is being seen through the prism of whether or not it poses a threat to the two dumbest and sickest cultures on the planet: America's; and that of the wee gangster state of Israel. One needn't bother to search for signs of poets, novelists (Dan Brown doesn't count; neither does Jonathan Franzen), sculptors, or serious musicians' impact on recent US pop culture. How ridiculous. But where is the Israeli Rahmani or Varand, Panahi or Kiarostami, Ziapour or Maryam Hashemi? No, all Israel (pushed hard by Uncle Sam) seems willing to produce and celebrate are assassins.

Not only has the soul of American pop culture been destoyed by the incubus of Corporatism, Corporatism also attempts to take over how we view other cultures as well. So the rich, humane, complicated, contradictory, intensely political and oh-so-feminine culture of Iran can only be judged by the standards of a filthy back alley; or a C-block in prison. For the psychopathic liars of the American media, Iran is all Ahmadinejad/Ayatollah/Atomic all the time. What's never mentioned is Iran's active, fertile political culture -- the most hopeful in the world. A real street politics, close to USA 1968. [Instead of a "political culture" of cowards typing into blogs and keyboards. Such as myself. 'Though I would run off to a Sierra Maestra if there were one.] Also never mentioned -- in the idiot view that Iran must be so politically incorrect because their women don't act like Sex and the City skanks -- is an intensely courageous and beautiful feminist movement: a view of feminism rejecting achievement as advancement along CEO lines; instead, a belief in a more basic feminization of society: something more communal and emotional, less materialistic, domineeering and ego-based, less belief in change-for-change's-sake.

And that -- along with the more traditional motives of grand strategy, racism, and material theft -- may be the center of American and Zionist hysteria over a culture which hasn't invaded another land since the 16th Century: Iran is the one of the last cultures remaining in the world not under the boot of post-modern, post-human Corporatism. (Compare the street demonstrations and deaths in the wake of Ahmadinejad's theft of last June's election to the "get over it already" response when Bush/Cheney did the same thing here in 2000.) The mass hatred expressed toward Iran in the Western media cannot be based on anyone actually believing Iran is some sort of military threat, some destablizing force in the world. No chance. It is rather the hatred of the cowardly toward the brave, the plastic toward the human, the barren toward the fertile. Two cultures of death seeking the extinction of a culture filled with messy life. Simple, yes. But it makes a lot more sense than Iran being a threat to anyone, except by the threat posed by the example of a real culture in a what is becoming every day a cultureless world.

Part of the real Iran, something which can be felt and touched daily by people in all parts of the culture, and something almost impossible to find here (and what the Israel Firsters seek to kill):

The Only Half That Counts

The woke shitpile known as Saturday Night Live (long dead!) actually had the guts recently to tell a real political joke, causing mass menstruation among Zionists, Neo-Cons, Neo-Libs, and other racists.

 

Abby Martin explains.

 

Hell Without End, Amen

Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, in a way Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and that government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want spirit, we want likability, we want a return to the sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
-- Barry Obama

We know better.



America's Big Dark descended (and continues to deepen) on November 4th, 1980 -- the night Reagan was elected President. It was the beginning of everything that WASP devil brought to the "spirit" of the country, as one-by-one the lights went out: the demonizing of all things communal, subtle, kind, and modest; the hatred of one’s own government, local, state, or national; the solidifying of the malignancy known as American Exceptionalism; the collapse of Hollywood and the takeover of genuine anti-Hollywood independents (do we need even ten fingers to count the number of great American movies since the early 80s? Five fingers?); the destruction of unions; the destruction of anti-trust laws, financial regulations, and the Fairness Doctrine; the transformation of “Christianity” into a theology of corporatism, violence, and privatization; the destruction of Liberation Theology (his time begins with the assassination of Archbishop Romero and ends with the massacre of the Salvadoran Jesuits); the worship of the psychopathically ambitious over the human. He oversaw an Administration of sex haters, race haters, Christ-Firsters, America-Firsters, Israel-Firsters, oil junkies, S.S.-worshipers, mob guys, fascist intelligence agents, military dictators, tweed-covered garbage such as Bill Casey and George H.W. Bush, death-squad commanders, right-wing publishers and editors, drug executioners, psychopathic politicians, Birchers and Goldwaterites. Mister Conservative opened the floods for the wounding and murder of the local, the varied, the traditional, the patient, the folk, the truly mythic – for all that cannot be commodified. He turned the mythic into the Mythomaniacal, style into Styling, the rooted into MadAve-stroked envy. He was the set-designer for the workplace and schoolplace massacre. (The best book ever written on Reaganism is Mark Ames's Going Postal.) After 40 years of moral vomit, we have yet to turn away. Far from it. We celebrate him. So in our Obama-ian/Trumpian/BiteMe culture, this incubus haunts us more than ever. Every busted highway and closed library: Reagan. Every crappy little product we take home and swear at: Reagan. Every over-crowded classroom: Reagan. Every price we can't find as we move through the grocery store aisles: Reagan. Every second of air-time spent on meaningless celebrity. The suffocations and anxieties of the office. The humiliations felt by all who must face every day the sniffers capable of judging only by externals and bizniz cards. The somnolence and passivity in the face of endless war. The narcissism which has narrowed US politics to the range of A to B, FoxNews to MSNBC, DailyKos to the Drudge Report. And the lies. The endless lies!

Reagan walks through The Killers (1964), his last movie, with a look of little but lemon-sucking petulance on his face. Even without having to confront Lee Marvin, it is a face Reagan would often make throughout the 1980s, for he was a monster of sexual sterility. Far more than Nixon (within whom one can feel a deep sexual and emotional longing, unmet), Reagan was the political equivalent of a sex doll without organs, the sire of our current corporate environment where there’s about a 1% difference between the sexes. Reagan, the first Metrosexual. Not even that. He was the Anti-Man. Take responsibility for nothing. When caught, exposed or challenged: lie and forget. Never admit a mistake. Never show regret or remorse. Demonize all who disagree with you or get in your way. Demonize your own past, if it suits the needs of your endless present. He was the ultimate confabulator. The huckster who made his political bones by dumping on imaginary welfare cheats and “professional victims” is the one who made permanent a national belief in victimization: we do nothing to others – it’s all done to us.

While he roasts for eternity over on open Hades fire, Reagan continues to choke us every day. So on the 110th Anniversary of his spawning, let us celebrate him for what in fact he is: The Father of the Great American Shitpile.

Lee Marvin for President.