Skip to main content

Rorschach Test

I'm finding the online - mostly Facebook - reaction to billionaire child rapist Jeffrey Epstein's "suicide" particularly informative.

As a global sex trafficker with ties to some of the wealthiest, most powerful business, academic, entertainment and political figures around the globe, Epstein mysteriously died in his jail cell the same night his case files were unsealed.

The timing couldn't be more obvious.  He was apparently taken off suicide watch a few days before (why?), the guards didn't make their usual rounds the night he died (curious), there's a report that Barr himself visited the jail recently (WTF?), and now we've learned the surveillance cameras weren't working (hmmm).  If this wasn't a hit, it's the most amazing string of coincidences in world history.

Frankly, I find the whole notion that a raging narcissist like Epstein - a guy who wanted to seed the human race with his DNA (you can't make this shit up) - would kill himself this early in his incarceration ludicrous.  He was certainly in talks to finagle some kind of a plea deal in return for his testimony against what would likely be dozens of men (and probably a few women) charged with raping or assisting in the rape and sex trafficking of children. Why pick now to off himself?  Makes absolutely no sense.

Amazingly, the vast majority of the people commenting on this spectacle online have managed to grasp all of these salient points.  It's pretty astounding to watch the bulk of the public stray off the carefully managed corporate media plantation to note the blindingly obvious - this is some seriously third world fucked up shit.

Unsurprisingly, the folks who are clinging to the, "let's not be harsh and jump to conclusions" party line are almost universally well-heeled professionals deeply steeped in servitude to the rentier class. They're actually worried about looking like a crazed Comet Pizza conspiracy theorist when the most prominent prisoner in America's vast jail system suicides at a particularly noteworthy time.  This is the result of decades of false equivalence and both-siderism on the part of the corporate media - we now have a bourgeois population that thinks being endlessly servile to hopelessly corrupt power is "prudence".

Our supposedly best-educated people are so far up the oligarchy's ass they can see what Trump had for lunch.  Their whole worldview is ossified, still clinging to a vision of America that never really existed and certainly hasn't since the 1980's.  I used to wonder how this bunch could have been delusional enough to back Clinton in the 2008 and 2016 primaries.  I don't wonder anymore.  They're living on another planet of their own imagining, shielded in a tidy corporate bubble.  When the reality of the collapse finally hits, they're going to be shell-shocked into a stupor.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erotica

Out of all of Madge's albums,  Erotica  is probably most deserving of an extensive writeup, especially given that it's now passed its 25th anniversary (seems hard to believe).  It’s deserving of attention not just because musically it was quite a departure for Madonna, but also because culturally this is probably when she was the most relevant, and when she became the most controversial.  In fact I can’t think of any celebrity operating at this level of prominence who deliberately chose to become this controversial.  Madonna was bold or crazy depending upon your point of view, but certainly not your typical paycheck cashing celeb. You do still hear hints of the old Madonna on this record, thanks to producer Stephen Bray's involvement most likely, but for the most part this record is Madonna using the success of The Immaculate Collection ’s "Justify My Love" as an escape hatch out of the '80s and into the '90s. Part of a multimedia assault on ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Something To Remember / Evita

Don't have much to say about either Madonna project from this era - her ballads collection Something To Remember  or Evita  - other than it was clear Madge was doubling down on the slow, classy, pretty ballads in the wake of the monster success of "Take A Bow".  Commercially I suppose this made sense, up to a point.   But Madonna was never just about ballads, and the disturbing run of them began to make it sound like she'd been taken over by a pod person.  From the planet B'oring. It was nice to get single hits like "This Used To Be My Playground" and "I'll Remember" collected in one place, since they hadn’t appeared on a proper Madonna album before.  When coupled with tasteful , ballady album hits like "Rain", the collection helped to demonstrate that Madonna could, in fact, do justice to ballads (and write 'em, too).   Hello, Mr. Evita Producers! Here's my audition tape! It's sure breezy where love d...
Post a Comment
Read more

True Blue

Another iconic cover - her second. This was the first Madonna album I bought, on CD, a good while after it came out but - if memory serves - before You Can Dance was released. "Live To Tell" sold me on the album, and I still think it's one of the finest singles of the '80s - Kate Bush caliber stuff. The video is dynamite too, especially for one of those "film clip" videos of the era. She gives a better performance here than in most if not all of her movies, somewhat dressed down as a housewife, rendering the song (by turns heart wrenching and ominous) even more effective.  As the lead single for True Blue in the late spring of ‘86 it was something of a mindblower - this was not what we’d come to expect from Madonna - and the moody ballad shockingly made it all the way to #1.  I was not a big fan of ballads, and at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I quickly grew to love “Live To Tell” and it ultimately forced me to completely reappraise ...
Post a Comment
Read more