JASON HIRTHLER—Schiff and his tentpole pals have evidently no awareness of America’s storied track record of international regime-change efforts. They’ve not watched Our Brand Is Crisis nor seen serpentine Clintonite James Carville teach amoral Bolivian careerists to massage the narrative against young Evo Morales. They succeed in planting an elite-groomed handmaiden of American capital in the presidency, leaving the riveting provocateur Morales to wait another couple of years. The cocalero with the sheaf of sable hair and the sun-warmed smile would soon be carried into power on the backs of rural campesinos.
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JASON HIRTHLER—Nobody does reputation destruction better than Washington and its amplifiers in the press. It is a tradecraft long practiced by beltway PR savants. As Iago limned while soliloquizing his duplicity, “When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows”. This is the case with countless color revolutions spawned by American taxpayer largesse funneled to comprador proletariat in the target country, all of it swept up in a whirlwind morality tale narrated by corporate media. That it happens so frequently, and so convincingly for so many Americans, is testament to our historical naivete and media illiteracy.
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JASON HIRTHLER—Hong Kong is ablaze. Venezuelan streets are thousands-strong with Bolivarians. Gilets Jaunes crowd the cobbled avenues of French capitals. Hondurans are rattling their neoliberal conman. Yet we hear only about the flour-pure pleas of innocent Asians whose petrol bombs bear the stamp of democracy, but not of a Latin demos chanting to loose the chains of imperial sanctions. Only those uprisings that can be suitably cloaked in free-market groupthink are cast in the spotlight.
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JASON HIRTHLER—Votes that might have gone to Sanders will be siphoned off by minor candidates posing as left-leaning reformers. Which means there will be a second vote, at which point superdelegates will again be permitted to sway the nomination in the direction of their choosing (i.e., whomever has bought them off). The field is so packed with pseudo-leftist poseurs that it has had to host two debates on back-to-back nights as it was impossible to reasonably stage manage a single debate of some twenty candidates.
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JASON HIRTHLER—In many respects what all this superhero cinema reveals is the startling infantilism of the American mind. Benjamin Barber foresaw this some years ago in his excellent cultural exposition, Consumed. The infantilization of the American masses produces the ideal state for consumption: blissfully ignorant and driven by impulsive desires and fears, largely uninformed by any evaluative research let alone the consequences of spending. The critical faculties of adults are absent in the infantile consumer. Surely adults that continually appease their fears (or boredom) with fantasies of caped crusaders rescuing the sheeple from certain destruction participate in this sophomoric recidivism.
