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

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

I'm Breathless

I'm probably one of the few people who liked this album, some of it quite a lot. I was spinning it off and on recently, and the years (and my subsequent experience with standards) have afforded me a better appreciation of the record. I liked it in 1990, but in 2017 I better understand why I liked it, and how it compares to other singers' (and composers') work. For starters, I think the tracks are all pretty much perfect for the Dick Tracy character of Breathless Mahoney, one of Madonna's few good cinematic performances. Maybe she could have been a star in a different era. The album also sounds phenomenal - it's an analog recording but sounds digital, very cool, crisp and transparent. It does not however suffer from '80s-itis. There's considerable bass, it's rich and not boomy, and it's deep. The low end is satisfying and natural on both the acoustic and electronic-driven numbers. Great EQ, excellent mastering by Stephen Marcussen. This might...
Post a Comment
Read more