What To Say On A Job Interview or Hiring The Least Bad Candidate

Give this one a try: the next time you go in for a job interview, proudly and loudly proclaim that you have never called Mexicans murderers and rapists. Explain to them that you have never bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, inform them you have never called a third-world nation a shithole, and then demand they hire you.

They will ask you questions, assuredly, so it is best to prepare yourself. If asked if you have the best interests of those who you will be working for at heart, tell them the other candidate is a buffoon and a Nazi. If they ask you if you are able to avoid going to war with other companies and killing millions of people, make some comment about the orangeness of the other job candidate. If they ask you if you ever sent all the work of a company you worked for to other companies, tell them that while there were some losers, on the whole everyone was better off for it. And if they ask you if you will help to prevent someone from turning up the thermostat in the office so high the heat kills everyone…well, don’t worry, they won’t ask that question.

The important thing is that you dress nice and use all the right words. The worst resume can be doctored by the right team to—if not make your work history seem impressive—at least obfuscate the many crimes you committed while in previous positions.

And when they don’t hire you, do not for any reason ask yourself why they did not, but instead shriek at the top of your lungs about how irrational they were for not hiring you. Tell them they were sexist for not doing so. And then, if you are lucky enough to have connections in the company that was advertising for the open position, have people well-positioned in the corporation start saying that the chosen candidate was picked because of a rival business.

This is the case now put forth by the Democratic party. The entire thrust of their argument is that they are not the golden-coiffed monkey. They have long been making similar arguments, beginning with loudly crying that they were not the party with a legacy president who felt himself entitled to the office based on having the same last name as a former president. The argument did have appeal, it must be admitted. The candidate they were running against in 2,000 was so bad it was hard to justify throwing one’s vote away when the realistic choice was between a bad leader and a really bad leader. Who would, if given the choice between a bad apple and a really bad apple, not choose the merely bad apple? Unless, of course, one was uppity enough to believe that a fresh and nourishing apple was actually an option. If you’re kept in a constant state of starvation, you take what is available and won’t contemplate a future of nothing but increasingly more rotten apples.

So instead of soul-searching or tweaking the resume, the Democrats opted for upping the volume. The shrieking did not begin immediately. The illusion of choice was given at first, but the end result was predetermined. It was only as the situation became tense, when the crazy old socialist became a concern, that the hysteria gradually increased, until the talking heads in the media shifted from presumed objectivity to the role of shepherds for which they are given their seven figures. At this point, those who are paid to report between commercials for insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and weapons manufacturers, now become our wise councilors, instructing us on the difference between good intentions and madness. Third parties, and by extension the freedom to vote for who you will, become lunacy and treason. The choices have been drawn—bad or worse—and stepping outside the box they would contain you in calls for a Joe McCarthy type response. Those unwilling to eat of the fruit inside the bushel of bad and worse are marginalized, subject to the same low-level threats and implications of treason they were once subjected to when daring to question the Weapons Of Mass Destruction narrative.

Is this our destiny, for the rest of our lives be made to choose between applicants with dismal resumes and an utter lack of respect for their employers? Are there no good and trustworthy candidates for the job? Must we resign ourselves not only to horrible candidates but increasingly horrible candidates? Perhaps it’s time we fold up our business and go into selling shoes.

The problem, perhaps, is we’ve relied on the same hiring agency for too long. They’ve been sending us nothing but gum-snapping, smartphone-pawing candidates who think they’re doing us a favor in consenting to work for us. In their minds they rightfully should be earning billions in the private market but, hey, you gotta start somewhere. The agency insists they have the cream of the crop and that you’ll be wasting your time trying to hire a qualified candidate off the street. They tell us it’s just the way things are and you can’t expect anything more. And all the while they grow richer and more complacent. They send you job candidates that don’t help you at all but somehow seem to make others rich off your dollar. Rather than them working for you, you can’t help get the feeling you’re working for them and paying for the privilege.

How much longer do we listen to their pitch? 

Reflections On Martin Luther King Jr. On His Birthday and On The Fiftieth Anniversary Of His Death

I was two years old when Martin Luther King Jr. died. I should say “when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered”, am tempted to say “when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But in my youngest memories, political and social leaders being shot was just a way people died. Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcom X, they were all gunned down within a span of five years. Violence was just a way of life, though thankfully it was only something I ever saw on the TV screen.

King’s death meant nothing to me, couldn’t mean anything to me. In some way I was taught that he was one of the good guys, that he was part of some change that was taking place. It was a change that frightened a lot of my elders but excited and energized the younger generation, of which many of my relatives were a part.

Looking back now I can’t help wonder why I didn’t know more about Martin Luther King than I did. He was a Christian preacher in a supposedly Christian nation, not only speaking the words of Jesus, but living the Gospel as taught by Christ. With all the fear in our society at that time, why was a man who repeatedly talked about peace and love so ignored?

I must admit that in my youth I didn’t think much about the man. Oh, I agreed with civil rights issues, was myself a Christian, but somehow the idea of non-violence did not appeal to me. Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and the like combatted in the ring to prove through strength and violence who was the manliest. I grew up watching war movies and war documentaries. I played with fake guns, had countless toy soldiers which I would spend hours setting up in order to conduct mock battles. My father had been in World War 2, and the idea of a just and necessary war was a constant reminder that freedom had to be protected. Peaceful resistance was all right as a theory, it’s just there were times when more was needed. Who would have saved us from Hitler, otherwise?

So Martin Luther King remained a person of acclaim and yet not a person very well known by me. What I knew about him I learned from the media, which is never a very good way to learn about anyone. I learned that he protested for the rights of Blacks in America, which was a very good thing. But there was a bigger struggle going on in the world, and King was already starting to slip into the irrelevance of history for me.

Until I happened to watch the PBS documentary, Eyes On The Prize, in my early twenties. It told the story of the civil rights movement and for the first time in my life I was given some perspective of not only the injustices Blacks faced, but the incredible movement they were able to put together and keep together in order to advance the cause of justice and equality for people of color. There were moments that made me cry, not only at the ugliness but of the beautiful acts of courage and faith and commitment by so many in pursuit of a higher cause. I’m not sure if there is anything comparable in American history, precious few in all the world’s history.

And yet the point I took away from watching this 14-hour documentary was not the greatness of a leader but of the commitment of so many people working in disciplined fashion to achieve progress. As much as King was a driving force in the movement, I was yet more impressed with the ability of so many to work together for such a noble cause.

And so it went for many years. I did not delve into the writing or speeches of Dr. King, and the society I was a part of was not eager to share the brighter aspects of his teaching and example. He was still a black man whose main usefulness was in the advancement of black rights. All very good, but not especially relevant to my life.

But through diligent searching we in time discover what it is we are searching for. By circuitous routes and by lesser travelled paths, I chanced upon Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience. In time it led me to The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy, to Mahatma Gandhi who gained independence for his country from England through non-violent means. In short, I followed a path not too different than the one Martin Luther King himself must have travelled, though in thought only and not in action. And that path led me eventually, inevitably to Martin Luther King. My path of learning led to Dr. King because there is no other path that leads forward. The road humanity walks now goes nowhere but merely circles back around itself. It is a road strewn with the corpses of war, leading to eventual nuclear annihilation. Dr. King saw a path that led to the Promised Land, and no other will do. Any road that was not highlighted on the map by King himself is a dead end.

There is no doubt in my mind that the future of human life on Earth is dependent upon the values Martin Luther King Jr. espoused. We need not give him all the credit since it is obvious his primary influence was The Bible, but we damned well better embrace the values and principles which King was able to draw from it and apply to the injustices he confronted. King’s fight for racial equality was not even the primary gift that he gave humanity but the way he went about it. He taught us—and even more importantly, he exemplified—that hatred could be fought and defeated by love, that violence could be bested by non-violence. He taught us that peace was not the absence of violence but a power unto itself. He demonstrated that non-violence was not an impotent turning away from conflict but a very brave and potent way of overcoming violence. 

Not to make too much of the man. He was but a human, after all. It is best we remember him as such, rather than try to build him up into some great leader. In realizing his humanity and imperfection, we can not only greater appreciate his struggles and successes, we can see we are made of the same stuff ourselves. We can understand that King’s life was not a moment in time or a part of history cut off from the present, but part of a chain that stretches not only to us but into our future. For history is a relay race, where our elders pass onto us the baton with the hope and expectation that we will carry it further than they were able to, even if they gave their every effort and even their lives to bring it as far as they did.

As I watch the final words he ever spoke to the world, I hear him speaking not to any one section of humanity but to humanity itself. The struggle of which Dr. King threw himself into so completely is not finished. Perhaps it will never be finished. Perhaps that is the very meaning and purpose of living, to take up the struggle for justice, love and peace. It is our turn. Maybe none of us will ever be the next Martin Luther King Jr., but each of us can surely be influenced by his words and deeds, and each of us in our small way can contribute to the struggle that will not only make a better society, but is necessary if we are to have a future at all.

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Honor And Shame

Once upon a time, our nation was quite familiar with the notions of honor and shame. Any nation must be if it is to survive and grow. Societies cannot develop without such concepts, nor can established civilizations do anything but fall once they have abandoned them. Honor is a necessary foundation to any successful communal undertaking, for there can be no trust without an implied understanding of honor. In valuing the idea of honor, we are recognizing ideas and interests beyond the selfish and self-serving. When we strive to become honorable, we must necessarily view our actions not only through our own eyes and own interests, but through the eyes of society itself. We see ourselves as others see us, try to make ourselves—our true selves--worthy of the admiration of others. To have a sense of honor is to have a deep regard for the opinions of others, a respect for universal and timeless values.

We cannot be forced to act honorably, but if we fail to do so, we shall inevitably be reminded of shame. Shame is an awareness that others see you as you are and do not like what they see. It is a reminder that you have failed to live up to a common code of decency, that you are not to be trusted. There is certainly a negative aspect of shame, one that can be used by bullies and abusers to denigrate and subject others to their will—but shame is also a natural consequence of poor behavior towards others. Shame has its place in that it teaches us to avoid treating others as we would not like to be treated.

Honor is taught by example, is taught best by those who would take on the burden of leadership. Shame is a result of hubris, the fate of those who sought to be more than they were or else presumed to partake of honors they did not earn. There can be no honor without the risk of shame, can be no shame where we no longer strive for honor.

There is no shame anymore, our leaders have done away with the idea. They want power without responsibility or accountability. They have no interest in being judged by their actions. Honor asks that we remember someone’s achievements and noble deeds, whereas today our leaders rely on society’s forgetfulness and ability to be distracted. It is an effective strategy so long as the public is willing to forget the notions of honor and shame.

And for the most part, voters and citizens have no interest in the honor of those they vote for, more concerned are they with their hatred for those they vote against. Like their leaders, they are so intent on the struggle for power they have abandoned the very principles that are worth fighting for.

So today we have politicians who engage in the most shameful behavior and, when caught, prefer spin to accountability. Let us for a moment consider the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee. You cannot vote for a war based on lies and expect to keep you honor intact. People died. Many thousands of real people died because of what was deemed politically expedient. As far as moral crimes go, that has to rank right up there. There has to be consequences for the actions of politicians or they will begin to feel unaccountable. Democracy cannot exist when its elected leaders feel unaccountable.

I can understand why people decided to vote against an establishment candidate for president, one who had demonstrated a complete disinterest in accepting responsibility for her actions. They wanted to view the United States as an honorable nation. What I can’t understand is why so many of them voted for a man who is incapable of understanding concepts like honor or shame. Honor would have led him to fulfill his military duties, shame would have prevented him from using heel spurs as an excuse. There has never been an instance where Donald Trump has exhibited the slightest degree of honor or shame or even an understanding of what such things mean. If I am wrong on this, please cite me an example. Pride, yes. Vanity and egotism, yes. God help us all if we as a nation cannot distinguish vanity from honor. Or just don’t care.

If our leaders are incapable of grasping the values of honor and shame, it is up to us to remind them. Otherwise we will be led—no, we in fact are led—by people with no honor, and no capacity for shame. Each and every one of us are to blame for that. It is our honor as human beings, as citizens in a democracy, and as Americans, that is on the line. It is our shame if we permit it to continue. The rest of the world is watching, even though we and our media have chosen to keep us ignorant of outside opinions.

In a society whose leaders have no honor, there are still those who seek to gain honor themselves by performing their functions faithfully. There are men and women willing to serve and to give even their lives in that service. But there is no honor to be gained by serving an unjust cause or an unjust leader. How can you honorably serve those who have no honor of their own? And if you serve for honor itself, then it is empty honor: it stands for nothing. It is vanity. No, there is no honor in serving an ignoble cause.

We have forgotten the very idea of democracy. We are constantly lectured about our freedoms, mostly because the powerful and wealthy use the concept of freedom as a way of acquiring more power and wealth. It is a selfish and twisted sense of freedom, a freedom that can never be held by the many but only by the few. Nevertheless, it is the narrative spun by the propaganda machines who wish to make you believe yourselves to be nothing more than passive consumers in a society that is about nothing more than selfish acquisition.

But democracy in its essence is not about freedom but about participation. It is the idea that all of us have a say in our government and a responsibility for the way it operates. As those who want to send others to die for wars that have nothing to do with freedom so often remind us, freedom is not free. Democracy is not the right to behave like unattended children but the tool by which we may act as unsupervised adults. It is only in the service of others that we gain honor, it is only in selfish action that we accumulate shame.

Democracy is in a very real sense dependent not so much on our leaders but upon its citizens. No power can strip democracy from us, we can only lose it through an inattentiveness to our own best interests. Democracy exists to a degree in all societies, is strongest when the citizenry is most willing to claim its role in the political process.

And we can best do this by applying the values of honor and shame to our political representatives. They have no desire to be held accountable to such standards, and will twist and turn in order to avoid being fit into such constraints. Those without honor will seek to sully the earned honor of others. Those without honor will seek to sully the very notion of honor itself. Those without honor will seek to change the conversation from honor to seemingly more practical or pressing issues. It is up to us, only us, to demand better of those who would exercise authority.

It is up to us as citizens to raise the bar once again, to honor ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our nation enough to demand honor of our elected officials. If we cannot respect ourselves, our politicians never will, either. We have to ask more of ourselves if we ever want more from those who we choose to represent us. And the way to do that is to remember such values as honor and shame, values our leaders would rather we just forget.

A Leaky Roof

A line of reasoning may make sense to you until you try to use it in a different situation. Here’s an example:

You live in a condominium along with several others, and you all have the same roof over your heads. You notice from time to time as you gaze up while entering the building that the roof looks a little shabby and mention it to others occasionally as you chance to meet them. But since you and they both know it would involve effort and expense, you tend to ignore it and get on with your life. But then you wake up one morning to a drop of water splashing on your forehead and you know something needs to be done. So after putting a pail of water under the leak, you knock on your neighbor’s door.

“Good morning, neighbor,” you say. “I know we’ve discussed the poor shape of the roof before but it’s suddenly become a problem and we need to do something about it.”

“Roofs are the problem, not the solution,” says your neighbor, irritably. In the background you hear the television turned up loudly as an angry voice speaks.

You are quite dumbfounded and ask him to clarify himself. “If we didn’t have roofs, we wouldn’t have leaks," he says.

“But we need a roof,” you protest.

“If we didn’t have a roof it wouldn’t rain. And if it did rain, well, the humidifier isn’t working either, not that I believe in humidifiers. If we didn’t have a roof the sun would warm us and the rain would provide the perfect amount of water in the atmosphere. Roofs interfere with the natural order of things.”

Needing to solve the roof problem before the bucket overflows and soaks your bed, you attempt another approach. “That may well be true, neighbor, but the existing roof has served us quite well for a good amount of time now and I don’t think it prudent for us to take drastic measures such as removing the roof but should instead repair what has worked for so long.”

“Once you get a roof you involve a bunch of people profiting off of it," says your neighbor. "The last people who installed the roof went over-budget and sold us a roof that was over-designed.”

You don’t disagree, remembering that one of the condo owners had talked all of you into using his brother-in-law’s company to do the job and had slipped in a lot of extra conditions into the contract that ended up making the cost far more than was expected or, indeed, necessary.

“Oh, for sure, we shouldn’t use the same people as we did the last time. In fact, I suggest we make sure we hire an entirely new group of people and investigate them thoroughly before permitting them to do the job.”

But you get nowhere with your neighbor, who hadn’t yet felt the effects of the leaky roof, or else blamed it instead on the innate leakiness of roofs. So you go away, hoping to find a neighbor with a little more common sense.

You knock on the next door and hear a swish swish of fabric as the tenant approaches his door. He opens it and you see the man in front of you dressed in rain gear from head to toe. With his yellow cap, his yellow jacket, and black rubber boots, he reminds you of nothing so much as the Gorton Fisherman. Behind a salt and pepper beard, a broad friendly smile beams back at you.

“Nice to see you, neighbor, what can I do for you?”

“Well, I was going to inform you of the fact that the roof was leaking, but I can see you are already aware of it.” As you gaze into his condo unit, you can see the roof is covered in heavy plastic and a complex system of gutters has been erected in order to re-route the water that was coming through the roof in steady streams. The whole system, you can’t help thinking, is ingeniously designed, a series of gutters that divert the water to pour out the window. And yet you can’t help thinking the whole system could have been avoided if he had alerted the rest of the tenants to the fact the roof was leaking.

“Ah, yes, the leaking roof. As you can see, I am a self-sufficient man who is able to find solutions to his own problems. I do not require a roof. In fact, I think roofs make us lazy and unaccountable for our own actions. In an ideal world, everyone would be responsible for constructing his own roof, as I have done. This, my good neighbor, is the key to happiness. You have the right to choose whether or not you want to have a roof over your head, and no committee should force you to have any roof that is not your desired roof.”

“But I’m not all that particular about what kind of roof I have over my head, provided it does not leak,” you tell the genial fellow in the rain gear.

“But you do not have a right to a dripless roof over your head,” he said, still cheerfully but a little paternally. “I fail to see why I should be forced to pay to fix the leak in your apartment when it does not affect me. That is socialism.”

“But the roof is leaking in your apartment as well,” you say, incredulously. “A new roof would solve both our problems, and with far less effort and—most likely—expense than what it required you to set up your own system.”

“Ah, but I reserve my freedom to have or not have a roof according to my own desire, and not on the whims and demands of my neighbors.”

He offers to share with you his plans for constructing a sub-roof system, even going as far as offering to lend you tools and help in the installation, but you demur. Surely there would be someone in the building who would see the need to repair a roof that would soon result in flooding and water damage for all. As bad as your drip is, you are able to see that it is far worse in other parts of the building.

In desperation, you remember a fellow condo owner you used to discuss condo business with. You remember her as being fair and open-minded about matters that concerned the whole. You knock on her door to find her in quite a degree of distress, though you do not see any sign of leaks or water damage.

You tell her about the leak in your apartment and she is eager to speak about the deplorable state of the roof. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she cries, almost hysterically.

“So you agree that the leaking roof is a problem?,” you ask, almost doubting that at last you have found a level-headed person who will assist you in finding a solution.

“A problem? No, it is a disaster,” she cries, and starts to hyperventilate at the mere thought of it.

“Well, yes, it is rather bad, isn’t it?” you say. And then, seeing the desperate state of mind of your neighbor, you attempt to console her by adding, “But we can take care of this situation if we just roll up our sleeves and get to work. Nothing we can’t solve once we put our minds to it and work shoulder to shoulder, eh?”

“Oh, I’ve already got the ball rolling,” says your neighbor, momentarily catching her breath. “I’ve called the roof company and they are on top of the situation.”

“Surely not the same roofing company who installed the roof we have now?” you ask. “I mean, they are the ones to blame for the situation we’re in now, aren’t they?”

“No,” she says, revealing a degree of hatred I would not have imagined her capable of. “It’s those damned kids throwing rocks at the roof who are responsible.”

“Kids throwing rocks?” you ask doubtfully. For you have seen no young ruffians in the neighborhood, nor any rocks, nor any damage on the roof that appeared as though it had been caused by rocks.

“Yes, those little bastards with rocks who have made a shambles of our roof!” Again, the glint of anger in her eyes shocks you, as though she was capable of great violence against any kid with a rock she might come upon.

You are almost afraid to say anything, such is the look in her eye, and the passion in her voice which causes it to tremble with rage. Nevertheless, you feel compelled to say what seems to be obvious to you.

“To be fair, the roof never looked too healthy,” you say sheepishly. Ignoring her rising wrath, you continue: “In fact, for a long time now I’ve noticed how shoddy it was looking. If you’ll recall, we actually had a discussion about it not a year ago, at which time you were in complete agreement with me. Why, you yourself complained about the untrustworthiness of the company that—

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she cries, cutting you off.

“One of who?”

“The roof company told me the kids with rocks had a lot of people working for them.”

“What kids with rocks?” you ask. For in truth, you have seen no kids with rocks, though you don’t dismiss the possibility that they exist or that they had in fact thrown rocks at the roof. You just don’t require a “kids with rocks” hypothesis to explain why the roof was in the condition it was. In fact, you view it as very suspicious that the roof company would be so certain that kids with rocks were responsible for the condition of the roof. If you were a disreputable roofing company—you think—a “kids with rocks” story would be a great way to avoid taking responsibility for your own shoddy work.

Innocently lost in conjecture about how the whole “kids with rocks” story didn’t seem to add up, you happen to look into the eyes of your neighbor and find there none of the questioning that was going on in your own mind. In fact, you see a certainty there that defies logic. You see a certainty that can be seen in the eyes of a true believer, the kind of certainty that shuts down minds and gives justification to the most irrational and violent of acts. People who blow up buildings have such a look in their eyes. It scares you.

So you go back to your apartment, feeling utterly alone and helpless, cut off from neighbors who are united by a common problem but unable to find any kind of common sense solution. You are tempted to sell your share in the building, but are already in debt more than you can ever hope to get for a unit with a leaky roof and weird neighbors. You listen to the drip, drip, drip, and cannot help but notice its tempo is increasing. You haven’t looked in the basement yet but fear it is already underwater. Drip. Drip.

A World Without Russia

I think the problem we are having with Russia at the moment is that it exists. I mean, I know we all know Russia exists, but it’s not supposed to occupy space on the planet we inhabit. It’s like those other countries, Kazakstan, and Tajikastan and Uzbekibekistanstan: we know they exist somewhere, but we’re never supposed to hear about them. We permit them their existence so long as they do not intrude upon our consciousness. When they do, I’m pretty sure the pat answer is to bomb them. Isn’t that what we do with any country we’ve never heard of and don’t care about when it suddenly is mentioned in the media? Would Afghanistan mean anything to anyone if we weren’t bombing and droning the crap out of them? Would any of us visit Afghanistan, or any other country for that matter, if we weren’t paid to put on a uniform and kill people there?

That’s the problem with Russia. They serve no useful purpose to our worldview. They are not part of Europe, at least not the Europe we like to think about, those countries that fought as allies with us against the evils of Nazism and Fascism.

 Well, granted, The Soviet Union fought against the Axis powers too. I mean, if you want to get technical about it, the USSR had more casualties than all the rest of the Allies combined. And if you really want to get out the fine tooth comb, we can say that they killed more Nazis than every other country combined, but this is just the sort of train of thought that gets annoying. Mention this on Facebook and you risk getting your page banned. Better to stick with cute puppy pictures (unless you’re from Russia, in which case puppy pictures are considered propaganda). But I digress.

Russia is comparable in our minds to those tiny—or simply remote—nations that exist despite the fact that their existence is inconsequential to our narrative. Nations like Senegal, that participated in the European wars and lost tremendous amounts of their young males fighting European battles for European purposes. They exist for our pleasure, like Japanese had their pleasure women, who were disposed of when they had served their purpose.

Russia is not part of Europe, not really. Nor is it part of Asia, not the way we think of it: after all, they provide us with neither televisions nor cheap plastic goods. 

It is a place holder, a blank spot on the map. Like Nigeria or Greenland, it pads out a globe. Without such countries, we’d only have a hemisphere, containing The United States and Western Europe. Come to think of it, we really have no use for the Southern Hemisphere either, do we?

  

Russia did serve a purpose for a time, did play a part in our narrative. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the war machine needed a raison d’etre, and the Soviet Union was the perfect excuse for increased military spending. It’s good to have an evil empire. One cannot have a military industrial complex without an existential threat.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was only a matter of time before we found another existential threat to justify a constant state of warfare. Seeing no major threats, we had to latch onto terrorism as the ultimate evil. Initially, it wasn’t up to the task, we had to guide it along, encourage it. In order to puff terrorism into a legitimate threat, we had to poke various countries until they reacted in the only way minor powers can react to the violence of major powers: through terrorist tactics. Eventually we provoked them enough—through our military presence in their countries and our support for brutal regimes--that they hit us back in a rather impressive fashion. This was a goldmine for us, as it gave us carte blanche to unleash the full military money-making machine upon them. It was the ideal situation in that we were at war against not a nation that could be defeated but an idea that could never be defeated. The mere fact that we killed people in distant nations and occupied their lands guaranteed that we would perpetuate terrorism, giving us the endless war we had so long desired. And there were no boundaries! We had an excuse to attack anyone we wanted anywhere in the world and justify it by calling them terrorists.

There was only one problem: as much as we liked our war against terrorism, we also liked using terrorists to advance our own agenda in overthrowing governments we did not like. It was hard to use terrorism as the existential threat against which we had to place all our energies when we were simultaneously using terrorists against other countries and governments. It all hit the fan in Syria when, in the midst of our attempt to overthrow a government with the use of terrorists, Russia stepped in on the side of their ally, using the claim that they too wanted to combat terrorism. America’s hypocrisy was suddenly exposed for all to see. And like any other hypocrite, America was not very happy to have its hypocrisy exposed. America was in the very difficult position of having to pretend that they weren’t supporting the terrorists which they claimed were their mortal enemy while at the same time trying to overthrow the government of Syria using internal organ-eating monsters as “freedom fighters”. What was a poor empire to do?

Pivot. That’s what we do best. That’s what spinmeisters, crisis management teams, marketers and propagandists are trained to do. If the current ad campaign isn’t moving product, move on to a new one. If we can no longer sell terrorism as the excuse for our inexcusable behavior, simply move on to a new paradigm.

Ladies and gentleman, let me introduce to you the newest model existential threat to the United States (and its democratic institutions which are the envy of the world): Russia 2.0. Forget for a moment that Russia is no longer the Soviet Union and that the Soviet Union wasn’t the threat to our nation the Military Industrial Complex and its intelligence agencies made it out to be. It is the land to the East, where the shadows lie (i.e. it is a country we know nothing about because our media is busily telling us about the Kardashians). The great eye of Putin, lidless and wreathed in flame, looks always to the west, hateful of all that his nation can never be: bright, glorious and free.

This, this is what your great heroes sacrificed their lives to deliver you from, people like John Wayne and Rambo, who put aside all thoughts of personal gain so that you might bask in the glorious sun of liberty. Will you now turn away from the eternal battle against darkness? Will you not pick up the weapons which warriors like Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson once so courageously carried into battle?

If Russia has the impertinence of existing, then they damn well better exist on our terms. Like any other nation you care to think of that attempted a degree of self-rule, Russia needs to be put into its place until it can once again be a nation we never speak of or are forced to acknowledge. If they must suffer, let them suffer in silence, as they did when IMF-imposed austerity programs forced the elderly into poverty and the young into homelessness and prostitution during the nineties.

 Russia is not a communist nation anymore, but it is something just as bad. Russia is now an oligarchy, which as we all know is a very bad thing. At least when we aren’t talking about the one in our own country. Which we never do. Let us not contemplate how the United States oligarchs imposed oligarchy on Russia by imposing “reforms” on Russia so that they might have an economy that mirrored our own.

Let’s put all that aside and focus instead on what is needed of us: hatred. Let us put aside all that we have done to Russia and think only of what anonymous sources from intelligence agencies tell us Russia has done to us. Let us blindly trust them as we did during the days leading up to the Iraq War.

Hate is all that is required of us. You can even use gay-shaming as a means of expressing hatred as long as it is applied to Vladimir Putin. The hatred demonstrated against Putin is at least as strong as it was in the case of Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega or any other figure we used as an excuse for war. Hatred has stopped you from being able to evaluate Russia or Putin in any sort of rational way.

Don’t believe me? Ask yourself, what could Vladimir Putin say that you would not immediately assume was the worst kind of sinister lies? Name me one person you don’t like who you would defend from collusion charges if nameless sources insinuated their guilt. Tell me one thing the United States has ever done that wasn’t fair to Russia or may have been to blame for our poor relationship with them.

Envision for yourself a healthy Russia with a government that worked for the Russian people and their interests. What would that look like? Could you ever see them being equal partners with the U.S. in a military alliance?

Is this your idea of ideal Russian leadership? 

I know, it would be so much simpler if Russia didn’t exist. But they do. It is a large country, large enough to demand a spot on the world map, powerful enough that we cannot control it or bomb it into submission. The imperialist model we have been using for the last quarter of a century cannot continue indefinitely. It was, in fact, a bad idea to begin with. We will have to find another way for our country to interact with other nations, or our future will be darker than we will permit ourselves to imagine.

The Boy Who Cried Whatever Intelligence Agencies Told Him To

Once there was a village whose principle means of income was raising sheep. As the flock needed looking after 24/7, a teenage boy was selected to take the night shift. Now this boy was neither very smart nor much of a worker. All he was interested in was his video games and his cell phone. His only interest in sheep was the mutton sandwich his mother packed for him his first night of work. One wonders why the village chose such a mutton-head to guard their principal source of wealth. My guess is his father was well-connected and his mother was eager to get him out of her house that smelled like Axe Body Spray and Taco Bell from his constant presence.

The kid was not eager to do his job, and to make matters worse, his cell phone wasn’t getting any connection out there in the pasture! After a few moments grumbling, followed by a few more spent distracting himself by teasing the sheep, the boy stumbled upon a (to his mind at least) genius idea. At the top of his lungs he started yelling “Wolf! Wolf!” And sure enough, within a matter of minutes, he could see a series of lanterns being lit and carried towards him by awakened villagers.

The kid was as amused as hell by this, the villagers not so much. But that made it all the more fun for the kid, who did the same thing the next night and the night after. Eventually, the amount of people who came to check on him dwindled, but it didn’t matter to the kid because the ones who did show up were even angrier than before. Until, one night, his face lit by the cell phone he gazed into, the boy thought he heard a noise. Finishing up his text and hitting send, the boy scanned the pasture in search of any sign of wolves. But as his eyes were used to staring into a lit screen, he couldn’t even see the white sheep, let alone any wolf prowling in the shadows.

So it wasn’t until the shit hit the fan that the boy realized there were wolves amidst the flock. Like the little spaz he was, he ran around, wildly crying “Wolf! Wolf!” while posting “OMG. Wolves!!!” on Twitter. But nobody came because nobody believed him.

And that is the end of the story as you know it. Most people assume the kid was eaten by the wolves and justice was done, but that wasn’t the case. See, in the real world, it is always the innocent sheep who suffer while those in charge go on to bigger and better things. While both are dumb and easily frightened, sheep, not pimply teenagers, are the preferred dinner of wolves. When the option is between a tasty lamb and a kid who reeks of Axe Body Spray and has metal piercings in unusual places, the wolf is going to go ovine every time.

So the kid got away with his life. Not only that, an intelligence agency that had been observing his Twitter account really appreciated his moxie, his attitude, and his ability to commit to a story. They hired him on to work for them.

You might be familiar with some of his work. Some years ago he wrote a story about wolves breaking into the sheep incubators and eating the children alive. You see, the pasture is gone now. The village was pretty much decimated by the loss of their sheep. Fortunately, Sheep Tech© saw the pasture as a great business opportunity and the state’s governor gave them a sweetheart deal on taxes to move there. So instead of sheep in a pasture, there is now a factory farm. Those few villagers who chose to stay saw their real estate value plummet even farther as the smell of sheep dung has become most intolerable. (The boy, who moonlights as a spokesman for Sheep Tech©, says it’s not bad and really rather reminds him of the old pasture days. He calls the smell “bucolic”).

The kid’s really grown up since his first temp job, as he now refers to it. Not only did he sell the wolves in the incubator story, he followed it up with the story about the wolves developing WSDs (Weapons Of Sheep Destruction). As with most of his stories, he’s had to lay low while the fallout happens, but once again he’s back to announce confidently that the wolves are up to their old tricks again. It’s a different pack of wolves this time, Eurasian wolves with sharp teeth dripping saliva in anticipation over feasting upon the carcass of our democratic institutions.

The valley wherein the pasture once lay, where now sits Sheep Tech’s© massive factory farm, has few people left nowadays. What with downsizing and automation, there isn’t much call for autonomous human beings anymore. But there is a greater herd of sheep than ever before, and their freedom and democratic institutions are of paramount importance to Sheep Tech©, which is why Sheep Tech’s© executives were so shocked to learn that the wolves were once again up to their dirty, underhanded tricks.

It seems that the wolves have been conspiring to disrupt the sheep’s sacred freedom to opt for which slaughter tunnel they entered, the left one or the right one. Apparently, at least according to the kid whose job it is to inform the sheep, these wolves have been leading the sheep to choose the slaughter tunnel on the right by telling the sheep the tunnel on the left leads to them having a steel pin shoved through their heads and then their bodies stripped of all their meat to be sold in supermarkets. Now even the kid whose job it is to warn the sheep about the danger of wolves has to admit that what the wolves were (allegedly but uncontestably) saying was true, but the mere fact they (allegedly but most certainly) said it proves what a danger the wolves are. Now more than ever, cried the boy, we need to fear the wolves.

And the sheep did what sheep do. They gathered frightened in a herd and looked for someone to lead them, which the people at Sheep Tech© most obligingly did. But as unintelligent, docile, and easily spooked as sheep can be, there is a limit to the amount of times they will respond to the habitual shrill cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” A trick that works once may work again, may work many, many times, but eventually, if only through weariness, the sheep will refuse to react to the boy and his well-worn game. And on that day they will prove themselves to be more than mere sheep.

Dinner For Six

The table is set for us to eat. The most succulent morsels from all over the world are on display. The rarest treats and the finest delicacies are piled decadently high. All of our most advanced technology has been applied towards a bountiful harvest. Forests have cut been cut down to make way for farmland on which to grow corn to feed the fatted calves. Our oceans have been over-fished to a critical degree in order to make this feast worthy of those who are to gorge themselves on more than they possibly need.

And yet there are only six seats. There is no place for you at this table, set with gold-plated eating utensils and bone china, resting upon the finest linen hand-spun by children working in sweatshops. Your place is somewhere lower. Your place is as a shim for the table leg in order to ensure stability, and if you work your way out of it you will be hammered back in. Your place is to sit patiently with the dogs, hoping for a scrap to be thrown to you. Your task is to either be the most obedient or the most entertaining. Perhaps if you are cute enough and obsequious enough you shall get special attention, an extra-large slice of meat.

True, there is a children’s table, where the more successful and more self-promoting table shims are allowed to eat, but they shall be served last and silence and acquiescence will be demanded of them. They will be called upon to dutifully step away from their meal should someone at the big table drop their knife and require a clean one. Most of them will do as they are told, remembering what it was like to be a table shim. Having climbed up from beneath the table, they now view themselves as like unto those six who sit at the big table, eagerly looking towards the time where they can sit at the big table where someone other than themselves props it up.

There is a table upon which half the wealth of all humanity sits, constructed by and heaped full of the earth’s harvest through the effort and the labor of us all. So heavily laden with obscene portions of animal flesh is it that it crushes those below whose task it is to hold this table up. So heavy is it that the floorboards groan at their burden, and yet daily more is piled upon it. It is surrounded by six ornately decorated chairs more luxurious than any throne any king or pharaoh, emperor or monarch, has ever sat on. And below it, more people than Genghis Khan had in his hordes, more people than ever worshipped Ramses II as a god. Animal-like, many of them clamor and fight each other to lick at the occasional drop of gravy that falls on the floor. Others simply starve for lack of anything to eat. But their lives and deaths take place beneath the table, covered by the fancy linen so that those at the table never have to contemplate such unpleasantries. When dining with the elite of society, such conversations should be avoided at the dinner table.

There is room at this table for many. There is room, should the effort be undertaken, for all. It is not that the table needs shims to prop it up, it is that there is too much placed upon it for a mere six individuals to consume. The table is too heavily laden, and when it eventually falls it will fall upon those who have been doing the thankless task of holding it up.

It is simply a matter of how we choose to set the table. Those who sit at the table now are the ones who established the seating arrangement, though they would have you believe they have harvested the crops and cooked the meal as well. It is time we once again remember to thank the cooks for their efforts, the farmers who toiled in the fields that this dinner might be possible. They deserve respected seats at the table. We all had a hand in making this meal possible, and we must remember to be appreciative of each other, not just the six who sit above us. And we must remember, too, those outside who have nothing, and invite them to share in the bounty, for when we cannot see the humanity in the least of us, we begin to stop seeing it in everyone else as well.