A story credited to the Pakistan Daily is making the rounds throughout the blogosphere:

Another Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache, stated that she was not worried about negative ramifications the Israeli onslaught on Gaza might have on the way the Obama administration would view Israel.

She said ‘You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel.”

Nobody has found a second source for this allegation. I've been unable to find any other trace of this Tzipora Menache.

The original story includes this equally inflammatory section:

The Israeli spokesman, Nachman Abramovic demonized Palestinian children stating "They may look young to you, but these people are terrorists at heart. Don’t look at their deceptively innocent faces, try to think of the demons inside each of them … I am absolutely certain these people would grow to be evil terrorists if we allowed them to grow… would you allow them to grow to kill your children or finish them off right now? … honost and moral people ought to differentiate between true humans and human animals. We do kill human animals and we do so unapologetically. Besides who in the West is in a position to lecture us on killing human animals. After all, whose hands are clean?"

Human animal mentioned by Abramovic refers to the Judaic religious belief that Jews are Gods chosen people; the elite and the pure-blooded, while all others (non-Jews, Goyims, gentiles) are animal souls incarnated into human bodies to serve the Jews. Killing a human animal is just a sport like hunting deer or birds.

Again, I can find no other accounts mentioning this Abramovic person.

The original story also carries this outrageous comment:

Israel’s former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu advocated carpet bombing of Gaza stating that "there is absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during massive military offensive on Gaza" (The Jerusalem Post, 30 May, 2007). His son Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu amplified his father’s genocidal call stating: "if they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000 and even a million"

This section is reasonably accurate. Eliyahu is a real person, and he and his son are indeed well-known in Israel for insisting that Jewish settlers remain in Gaza (a small strip of land which belongs to the Palestinians). The elder Eliyahu called for the carpet bombing of Gaza and argued that soldiers in the IDF should disobey orders if they are told to force Jewish settlers to leave Gaza. The Jerusalem Post piece is here.

This blog prints a quite different version of the Pakistan Daily story, containing the questioned material. I don't know which version of the story appeared first. The Pakistan Daily writers seem to have stitched together material from the internet, and thus may be the unwitting parrots of a hoax, and not the originators.

The assault on Gaza was horrifying enough; there is no need for the creation of hoax material. In fact, the concoction of an anti-Semitic forgery will only increase the paranoia of those Jews who believe that Hitler's heart beats within the chest of every gentile. As Norman Finkelstein has written:

Appropriating a Zionist tenet, the Holocaust framework cast Hitler's Final Solution as the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews. The Jews perished because all Gentiles, be it as perpetrators or as passive collaborators, wanted them dead. "The free and 'civilized' world," according to Wiesel, handed the Jews "over to the executioner. There were the killers—the murderers - and there were those who remained silent." The historical evidence for a murderous Gentile impulse is nil. Daniel Goldhagen's ponderous effort to prove one variant of this claim in Hitler's Willing Executioners barely rose to the comical. Its political utility, however, is considerable...

The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state. To account for criticism of Israel, fiction writer Cynthia Chick had a ready answer: "The world wants to wipe out the Jews...the world has always wanted to wipe out the Jews." If all the world wants the Jews dead, truly the wonder is that they are still alive — and, unlike much of humanity, not exactly starving.

This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: Intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense. Deploring the "Holocaust lesson" of eternal Gentile hatred, Boas Evron observes that it "is really tantamount to a deliberate breeding of paranoia.... This mentality ... condones in advance any inhuman treatment of non-Jews, for the prevailing mythology is that 'all people collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of Jewry,' hence everything is permissible to Jews in their relationship to other peoples."

In other words, every time someone concocts an anti-Semitic hoax, Jews in America will mutter "They're at it again" -- and they will redouble their support of Israel.

More than that: They will presume that anyone who tells an uncomfortable truth must be a hoaxer. If the Eliyahu quote, or some similar quote, proves embarrassing, one may simply deny the accuracy of the citation; anything one does not want to hear may be dismissed as just another anti-Semitic fabrication. I've run into this phenomenon on several occasions. I've even seen this passage from the Bible dismissed as inaccurate and "out of context." (It isn't.)

The verifiable record suffices, and we should stick to it. Hoaxing is counter-productive.

(Yes, I myself have been guilty of a leg-pull or two. But those pranks don't address truly serious issues, and I practice the evil art only on a certain date.) Permalink

On April 1, 2006, Cannonfire published its most famous post. In that essay, I laid out the evidence favoring the proposition that the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley was the father of Barbara Bush and the grandfather of George W. Bush. Years later, rarely a day passes without my learning of a new site linking to that story. (Example.)

It has been brought to my attention that quite a few YouTube videos have discussed or dramatized the story of Crowley's linkage to the Bush family. Most of these film-makers advertise themselves as religious teachers, dispensers of the Truth of Truths. Oddly enough, not one of these sages contacted yours truly for further information, perhaps because they developed independent sourcing.

I give you a sampler:

1. Here's a segment from a multi-part epic which bears the lyrical title The Antichrist/Dajjal Will Be A Reptilian Shapeshifter. (Catchy!) This bit of video also contends that those awful, awful Rothschilds created Hitler.

2. Here is a broadcast by a terribly erudite radio preacher named Frank Lordi, which I'm sure is the name on his birth certificate. Lordi believes that Aleister Crowley was a very important world-historical figure, a theory previously promulgated only by Aleister Crowley (and maybe Alan Moore). Lordi's website has lots of important information: Did you know that the Washington Monument is the Shaft of Baal?

3. Here we have an elaborate production titled crowleys illigitimate grandson is a smooth criminal. Is that spelling "ligit"? Also, where's the apostrophe? Why do we see the disappearance of so many apostrophes that ought to be there, and the appearance of so many apostrophes that have no right to exist? (When driving through rural parts of California, don't be surprised to encounter a sign informing you that "Jesus Save's.") The scariest thing here is the soundtrack by Michael Jackson.

4. Here we learn that the AC-BB linkage is Much More Then Just A Conspiracy Theory... Before you mutter "Yes, but that was than and this is now," ponder the wise words which close this video dissertation:

I know that the Elite have had over 100 years of dumbing us down...
with things like television, sodium flouride, a very weak educational system and many more...
But how are we going to let the Order of the New Age continue when it's being orcastrated by a bunch of inbred clowns?

Treur words where never spokin. Speaking of orcastration, did you know that Mozart once wrote a part for a chestrato? Mozart was a freemasin, you know.

Ah yes, it all comes together....

5. Hey, all you hep cats and finger-poppin' mamas: Check out the cool jazz background score for Is Satanist Aleistar Crowley, Barbara Bush's Father?? AC might have bridled at the "Satanist" label, and he surely would have wanted to correct the punctuation on display in that title. But the misspelling "Aleistar" probably would have amused him.

6. Here's a radio broadcast which bears the memorable title Reptilians in the Matrix Part III. Your host is "Jack," who brings aliens, mind control, Dracula, angels, underground bases and the dreaded Illuminati into the Crowley/Bush tale. Did you know that Shirley McClaine is a member of the Illuminati Beatty family? Did you know that The Bourne Identity is a true story? Did you know that Hitler greatly admired Madam Blavatsky? Did you know that George Bush is a 42nd degree Mason? (If you work your way above degree 33, you learn about the interplanetary secret societies.) And did you know that Bernard Hermann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still actually gets kind of annoying after awhile?

7. Here's a classic. Alex Jones. Did I ever tell you people that I wrote a script with a character based on Alex Jones? He gets killed in a most delightful way.

8. This photo montage proves that the OTO is a tremendously powerful organization and not just a gathering of fey artsy types, pretentious "supermen" and neurotic chubby chicks who give great BJs.

And finally...the ultimate...number nine number nine number nine...

9. This is a segment from a well-produced full-length documentary about Aleister Crowley, with "interview" segments featuring actors playing the roles of various AC associates. The title is In Search Of The Great Beast, and you can find the whole thing for sale here. If you want to read reviews, go here and here. For the most part, the documentary is pretty accurate, although the actors routinely mispronounce occult terms. ("Goetia" is pronounced "go-WAY-sha." Trust me on this. I got it straight from the mouth, so to speak, of a neurotic chubby chick.) In spite of all, a recommended production.


This era has finally given us an answer to Pilate's question: Reality is whatever you want it to be.

Some of you may now expect me to deliver some follow-up information about AC, given the demonstrated popularity of the original post. Alas, right now I am busy working as a "ghost" on Frank Miller's gritty, blood-soaked, ultra-noir graphic novel adaptation of Song of Bernadette. I should have a report on that project in, oh, say, a couple of months. Give or take. Permalink

During its bad decade, Japan spent trillions on its own version of a stimulus package. Much of the money went into infrastructure -- roads, bridges, and so forth.

In this country, you might be able to get the GOP to go along with that kind of spending, since the roads are most needed in pork-lovin' red states. Besides, one could package a road-building program as a military necessity. Thus was born Ike's interstate highway program; history could repeat itself.

But:

Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending.

Edumacation? That's a much harder sell in America.

But:

In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade.

Okay. So that brings us to an appallingly simple question: What should we concentrate on exporting?

I mean aside from jobs. Permalink

You have probably already been alerted to Paul Krugman's important Op Ed piece in the NYT. He emphasizes that the economic news is even grimmer than you may think. Here's one point that gnaws at me...

Developers of commercial real estate, watching rents fall and financing costs soar, are slashing their investment plans.

Why are rents falling? And are they falling in the non-commercial sector?

For years, lots of people have predicted a housing implosion. In 2005, I read several articles in which potential buyers announced their eagerness to pounce on homes once those properties entered foreclosure. So the loss in value is not a surprise. What surprises me are lower rents, since everyone presumed that people forced out of their McMansions would crowd the rental market. (I've seen some signs of lowered rents here in southern CA.; your mileage may vary.)

Deflation: Here's a bit more to chew on, from the same Krugman column...

As the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out almost 80 years ago, deflation, once started, tends to feed on itself. As dollar incomes fall in the face of a depressed economy, the burden of debt becomes harder to bear, while the expectation of further price declines discourages investment spending. These effects of deflation depress the economy further, which leads to more deflation, and so on.

And deflationary traps can go on for a long time. Japan experienced a “lost decade” of deflation and stagnation in the 1990s — and the only thing that let Japan escape from its trap was a global boom that boosted the nation’s exports. Who will rescue America from a similar trap now that the whole world is slumping at the same time?

Actually, we had deflationary periods during the Bush years. The only things going up, up, up were home prices; everything else headed in the opposite direction. Without the housing boom, we would have had an official period of deflation. So how long has this crisis actually been going on?

Bonus: According to The Big Picture, $140 billion of taxpayer loot went to the top six financial concerns. Of that figure, more than half -- $85 billion -- went to bonuses.

Yes, I know that Obama has promised to cap executive pay in his stimulus program. But there are ways around that cap.

First, they apply only to companies that receive government bailout money in the future. For companies that don't receive "exceptional financial recovery assistance" -- such as the outsize bailouts that went to AIG and Citigroup -- the restrictions on executive pay would be waived if the company discloses the compensation and allows a nonbinding shareholder vote.

Companies that don't have the restrictions waived still could pay an unlimited amount in restricted stock and other incentives.

Also, while executive salaries are capped, there are no limits on the scores of mid-level Wall Streeters such as bond traders or investment bankers who typically pocket million-dollar bonuses.

The Republicans will publicize these outrages (even though the previous bailout package occurred on the watch of a Republican president) in order to turn people against the stimulus package. In fact, the plan is rapidly losing support...

The Gallup Poll, taken over the weekend, asked Americans if the plan should "pass as proposed," "pass with major changes," or be rejected. While 38 percent of respondents said it should pass as proposed, 37 percent wanted major changes. Seventeen percent said it should be rejected.

Is the Gallup poll an outlier? I don't think so...

A Rasmussen poll released on January 21 found that only 45 percent of voters supported the stimulus plan, with 34 percent siding against it.

The Republicans have an alternative: Lowering taxes on the wealthy -- to make sure that the execs who got taxpayer hand-outs keep more of their $85 billion. Those execs will probably stash the dough in a Swiss bank account, because this country is heading down the tubes.

In other words, the GOP propagandists -- who have not lost their muscles -- will scream, with some justification, that Obama plans to give away more money to the wealthy. The GOP alternative is to give away more money to the wealthy.

Aren't you glad we have a two-party system? Permalink

Jobless: New unemployment claims rose to 626,000 -- much worse than expected.

Some suggest that the time has come to combat the outsourcing of American jobs by taxing outsourcing. Specifically, we should raise tarrifs on goods and services now produced in foreign countries after an American corporation outsourced those jobs.

What stimulus plan? There's been a lot of overheated talk on Obama's ill-considered attempts to reach out to the GOP. I think Krugman is right:

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.

Obama may be able to get a few Republican Senators to go along with his plan; or he can get a lot of Republican votes by, in effect, becoming a Republican. There is no middle ground.

But he's trying for the middle ground anyways, by framing his stimulus as a tax cut, even though "tax rebates" are going to people who don't pay taxes. And much of the money is going to bail out bad banks without taking the logical step of outright nationalization. The execs who got us into this mess should all be fired by a new boss named Uncle Sam. Instead, Sam is helping the fat cats stay fat. (Update: There is now a $500,000 limit on fatness. That's a start, I suppose, but hardly sufficient to those of us who want to see the incompetent bastards get pink slips.)

A "rebate" or a giveaway of $500 or $1000 will do little to help those who have lost jobs. That kind of money will buy a family, what, maybe a week or two or three. Then what? We need government-run jobs programs. The time has come to resort to the employer of last resort.

Israel: Polls show that support for Israel remains strong, but is slowly eroding. According to the Jerusalem Post:

57 percent of Americans polled defined themselves as Israel supporters, compared to 8 percent who called themselves Palestinian supporters, and 34% who said that they were neither or were undecided, according to the survey carried out for the Washington DC-based 'The Israel Project.'

Last year, 69% supported Israel, and 6% supported the Palestinians.

Here's an interesting comparison: Back in 2001, the ADL found that 17% of Americans hold "hard core" anti-Jewish beliefs. Of course, many of the people who support the Palestinians (and I count myself among the 8%) are not anti-Semites -- they simply feel, as I do, that the Palestinians are getting a raw deal. I also feel that the Ethiopians got a raw deal from Italy -- yet I don't hate Italians.

The grim bottom line: The Palestinians are despised even by the vast majority of the America's anti-Jewish bigots.

Spinning the unspinnable: lambert made a great catch when he drew our attention to this screencap from Google News:

As lambert puts it:

Escort, attack, seize — same difference!

Remember David Ignatius? We were just talking about him. He's the WP reporter -- and son of a former Navy Secretary -- who behaved in such an irritating fashion at Davos. Now he has this telling advice for Barack Obama:

Whom should President Obama appoint as his emissary to Iran, to take on what may be the most important diplomatic mission in decades?...

My nominees are Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisers for Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively. They would elevate the Iran mission, connecting it to the tradition of bipartisan strategic thinking that shaped America's role in the modern world. And, like our youthful new president, these two octogenarians understand the need for America to "turn a page" in its foreign policy and to connect with what Brzezinski has called a "global political awakening."

I know Brzezinski's and Scowcroft's views about dialogue with Iran because I spent many days with them last spring, moderating a discussion that yielded a book, "America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy."

Scowcroft is, of course, a figure from the Bush era -- the Poppy Bush era. Is that change?

As we've noted earlier, Zbig is -- in essence -- a neocon who supported Pol Pot.

Remember, neoconservatism began on the Democratic side of the aisle, with a cabal surrounding Scoop Jackson. Of course, Brzenzinski now claims to despise the neocons, and he did denounce the Iraq war, as did Scowcroft. But Daniel Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz both emerged from the Brzenzinski orbit.

He also supported the slaughter of 200,000 people on East Timor by the Indonesians. He supported the creation of the Iranian theocracy as a buffer against the Soviets. He supported the Afghan Mujahadin -- which is to say, he supported Osama Bin Laden. When asked about this record (the result of a blinkered anti-USSR strategy), he gave this classic response:

"What's a few riled-up Muslims?"

There was a time (1980) when the mere mention of of Zbig's name at the Democratic National Conventional was enough to raise a rafter-shaking mass boo. But now, too many people have forgotten why he was once hated. Youngsters seem to be of the impression that anyone who voiced opposition to Bush's Iraq war policy must be cool. That's a simplistic attitude: The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

At least I know how to draw, Shep: Artist Shepard Fairey modified an AP photo of Obama when he created his ubiquitous red, white and blue image. Now AP wants compensation.

All ribbing aside, I think AP should let the matter slide. One can argue that Fairey has created an essentially new work of art. I mean, Warhol used a well-known studio photo of Marilyn Monroe, yet he never credited the original photographer. Permalink

I was asked to cross-post this piece, which raises a very important issue. It's by Seth Wessler, and the original can be found here. Ignore the Obama-worship which slips into a couple of sentences: This piece addresses a matter of life and death -- and I don't think our current president is going to press for the necessary changes.



It’s Time to Rethink Our Welfare Policy

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that even as many states have skyrocketing unemployment, their welfare rolls are shrinking. As a researcher for a racial justice think tank, I’ve been traveling the country collecting accounts of how this recession is playing out in the lives of every day people. Millions who are out of work, losing homes and struggling to stay afloat are nevertheless denied access to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The punitive rules established after twenty years of racially coded frenzy to “end welfare as we know it” have left Americans with no safety net during this deepening economic crisis.

TANF replaces the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (to insert the “temporary”) and its creation relied on mythologized images of the “welfare queen” driving Cadillacs conjured by Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. This kind of racial scapegoating, the politics many believe we outgrew with Obama’s election, vilified welfare recipients (who have always been mostly white) and led to rules that are so complicated and punitive that many struggling families cannot get the help they need. Now that all of us – not just people of color— are in recession free fall, there is nothing available to catch us. To fix TANF, we will have to put aside racial stereotypes to do what is best for the largest number of people.

When Welfare Reform passed in 1996, our macro economic outlook was optimistic and the rhetoric of "personal responsibility" was ubiquitous. The welfare rolls plummeted and conservative and liberals alike declared success. But unknown numbers of families (we mostly stopped counting) were left underemployed, underpaid and unable to comply with punitive regulations. According to Robert Wharton, the president and chief executive officer of the Community Economic Development Administration, "Ten years into welfare reform, caseloads may have decreased, but the number of people living in poverty has not". Welfare reform set up countless barriers to access. The most egregious of these are punitive work requirements and 5-year maximum time limits for lifetime eligibility.

One of the places I stopped in my travels was Detroit. Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country, passing 10 percent last month. Detroit has been hit even harder. Yet, reports the Times, the state cut its welfare rolls over 13 percent last year. In Michigan rules, like those in many states, public assistance is tied to work. A 30-year-old woman I met, lets call her A, lost her job as a teacher's assistant in a Detroit area public school, and then lost her TANF because she was no longer working. Now she has neither job nor welfare, and she's facing foreclosure with her four children. I heard dozens of examples like this. People who couldn't find a job, or even a decent volunteer opportunity, without childcare, transportation, and more help than the new welfare system provides.

A society cannot survive without a safety net and we don't have one during the worst economic crisis in decades. TANF needs serious reconsideration including a rescinding of punitive work requirements and an end to the time limits that cut people off after 5 years total enrollment. We need to ensure that families have access to supplementary benefits like food stamps, fully subsidized child care, transportation and housing assistance and we need to remove debilitating eligibility requirements that exclude many documented immigrants and people with past involvement with the criminal justice system. To do these things Americans have to be willing to move past their racial stereotypes about people of color and welfare.

The country recently came together in a proud moment to inaugurate our first president of color. We did so by putting our racial divisions aside in the name of collective economic self-interest. Now we need to do the same by rebuilding a system of support for everyone. Permalink

IBM has a solution for those American workers whose jobs have been outsourced to India. They've come up with a program to outsource the workers themselves to India!

If you're planning on making the switch, a word of warning: ALL the movies produced in India are musicals, and they're all three hours long, or longer. (Unless things have changed since I went through my Bollywood phase.) The actresses are incredibly lovely. They don't want to date you. Permalink

A post below discusses David Ignatius, the WP reporter who pissed off the president of Turkey (and a lot of other people) at Davos. My piece refers to him as being of Jewish and Armenian descent. I mentioned his heritage for the same reason so many others did: He had demonstrated clear bias while moderating an Israeli/Turk debate.

Turns out he's not Jewish. That bit of misinformation crept into quite a few sites by way of Wikipedia -- and the Wikipedia entry was manipulated by disinformationatists working a fairly obvious angle. The full details are here. I did not get the information from Wikipedia, but from another source which I should have double-checked; apologies.

By the way, his father is Paul R. Ignatius, who was the Secretary of the Navy under LBJ. That little factoid may go some ways toward validating my pet theory that the younger Ignatius may have been secretly recruited into a profession other than journalism. If I were more paranoid, I could patch together a cute little theory based on the fact that Liberty attack occurred on the watch of the elder Ignatius. Permalink

I normally save non-political posts for the weekend. This discursive piece, although somewhat political, does not address current events.

I'm here to ask a broad question: Why is the art produced by right-wingers so strange?

Many of you may presume that the right produces no art at all. In America, the intelligentsia and the bohemians all lean left. Obama made his home among the so-called "creative class." All the well-known writers, from Gore Vidal to Stephen King, are liberal or worse. Progs own the cultural infrastructure, from the galleries in New York to the studios in Hollywood.

By contrast, you can find the conservative's idea of a great painting in the Thomas Kinkaide catalog. Anything else scares Mr. Right. He prefers sports. Oh, sure, the wealthier reactionaries may buy experimental contemporary art for investment purposes or for status enhancement, but nobody on that side of the political aisle makes the stuff, or genuinely enjoys it.

So runs the general presumption.

But that presumption is wrong.

Right-wing artists do exist, and some of them have created transcendent, hallucinatory works. Such artists often start on the left and then move to the far right. On rare occasions, they hop back to the left again. These artists tend to be...strange.

Very strange.

I began thinking about the relationship between Weird Art and far-right politics while listening, earlier today, to a recording of Wagner's Parsifal. As you probably know, Wagner segued from a hard-left stance (exiled in 1849 for revolutionary activities) to the tar-pits of reaction. Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal -- the chronicles of a great sin and a great redemption -- are transcendent, hallucinatory and very strange works. In fact, they get stranger every time I look closely at them. (It's no accident that the Liebstod was always a great favorite of the surrealists.)

I was introduced to Parsifal via the work of a man whose name will -- I hope -- be known to some of you: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the mad genius of Munich. He's known for ultra-long, ultra-surreal "dissertation" films which defy classification as either fiction or documentary. In 1981, he made a film of Wagner's opera Parsifal, which I saw at a special advance screening at the Samuel Goldwyn theater (the home of the Academy).

Syberberg was there -- yes, he speaks English -- and he was very weird. Charming, but weird. He conveyed a rather gnostic sense of unease in the material world, as if unable to hide his annoyance with all the mundane crap (money, food, clothing, cars, other people, gravity) which impeded his pursuit of the beatific vision.

If you're interested, here's his visualization of the prologue to Parsifal. If you click on that link, you'll see puppets deliver a backstory that can make sense only to those who've already seen the movie. You'll also glimpse the boy and the girl who jointly play the titular hero/heroine. The woman playing his/her mother also plays his/her lover, a combination of Mary Magdalene and the Eternal Jew. Here's a snippet (so to speak) of the film's famous gigantic severed penis festooned with the heads of Marx and Nietzsche.

A movie just isn't a movie without stuff like that.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

YouTube can't begin to convey the experience of sitting in that theater on that long-ago night, because Syberberg insisted on raising the volume to a level that made your average rock concert seem like the silence of Yahweh. The prologue sequence ends with a Wagner automaton jamming a spike into a giant ear, an image which we in the audience understood all too well. During the intermission, audience members begged HJS to turn it down. He said no. If his English were better, he probably would have said "No, pussies."

I had already seen (in one sitting, dammit!) Syberberg's best-known work, the 7 1/2-hour long Our Hitler: A Film From Germany. (The word "Our" slips in and out of the title, depending on the print. The reference goes to a notorious coffee-table book, also titled Our Hitler, published by the Third Reich.) Syberberg's film is the craziest thing anyone ever saw -- and you can download the whole insane asylum here, online and for free. You must watch all seven hours in one go, at night, alone, missing sleep. Do it that way or I'll call you a pussy. But before you click, you may want to heed this fellow's advice:

Hans Jurgen Syberberg holds a special place in that same sticky heart for directing the longest stoner flick every made, the massive nine-hour Hitler - Ein Film Aus Deutschland. You had to have a kitchen garbage bag chock full of weed to get through all of it, but it is sooo worth it.

All of which brings us to the point of our essay: Syberberg's politics.

In 1977, when I first saw Our Hitler, my friends and I (and you may recall that my friends were mostly Jewish) automatically presumed that Syberberg was situated somewhere on the left, or at least not on the right. A lot of other people jumped to the same conclusion, including George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola (who distributed the unwieldy epic in the U.S.) and the BBC (which helped fund the work) -- not to mention Susan Sontag, who wrote a famous admiring essay.

Her acquaintances pressured her to take back those words of praise when Syberberg later made some surprising statements in his autobiography. Here's an HJS gem:

So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx and Freud are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information.

He goes on and on like that, sounding rather like Xymphora with a hiatal hernia. It's guff. (Yeah, I'm no friend of Israel, but I still call it guff.) "Jewishness" defines neither Marx nor Freud. As I recall, much of the "West" spent much of the last century aiming nukes at the followers of Marx, and Freud started falling out of fashion in the 1940s. When Syberberg's Hitler movie came out, Freud was despised; Jung was all the rage among the college crowd, because Jung wrote about alchemy and flying saucers and other cool shit.

The Hitler movie is not pro-Hitler, and it certainly betrays no anti-Semitism or insensitivity to the Holocaust. But even on first viewing, it did give the impression that Syberberg can't help loving German Romanticism, even though he also sees Hitler as the end product of Romanticism. After Hitler, art was dead -- at least the kind of art that Syberberg liked. Adolf had given it the baddest of bad names.

Jonathan Bowden, the former "cultural advisor" to the racist British National Party, offers an erudite introduction to Syberberg in an ill-recorded audio presentation which begins here. I was a little unnerved to find myself enjoying his lecture, since his vaguely Nazified weltanschauung differs sharply from my own way of thinking. (Although his former party promotes an obnoxious Holocaust revisionism, Bowden does not seem to buy into that nonsense. Other nonsense, to be sure, but not that nonsense.) Like many others, Bowden seems confused as to where to locate Syberberg politically -- placing him, ultimately, somewhere on the right, though not within those extreme realms that the BNP, David Duke and the ghost of Adolf would call home.

So why, back in the 1970s, did my friends and I -- and Susan Sontag -- presume that Syberberg was hip, liberal and one of us? Because the guy served up one big bowl-full of bug-ass weird, and we liked weird. He was surreal, he was avant-garde, he cared not a shit about lucre, and he had a fuck you attitude toward the established order. He just had to be a compatriot, a fellow citizen of Bohemia who shared our basic ideology.

How naive we were. In the late 1970s, my merry band of bohos had yet to learn that fascist rabies tend to infect the masters of Weird Art.

Think of Salvador Dali, the artist generally considered the king of surrealism. He pissed off his less-talented Marxist comrades in the surrealist movement when he painted a picture of Lenin with a five-foot-long butt. Then he pissed off everyone else on the left by embracing Catholicism and sucking up to Francisco Franco.

Think of Ezra Pound, a mad genius (certified as such) who spent the war years plumping for Mussolini on the radio. In the process, he even pissed off Benito himself, because Pound tossed away the script and wrote his own propaganda screeds.

Think of T.S. Eliot, the mad genius who gave us The Waste Land (another spacey Grail tale). He once wrote:

"What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."

(He later regretted the fact that his ragged claws had ever typed those words.)

Think of Jean Cocteau, the French surrealist who neither fled nor criticized the Nazis after they had invaded his nation and sicced the Luftwaffe on the lines of refugees. Even though Cocteau was bisexual, and even though he had come close to sharing the fate of those who wore the pink triangle, he had nevertheless flirted with fascism during the Occupation, having worked hard to further the cult of Arno Breker, Hitler's official sculptor. (After the war, he was acquitted of charges of collaboration.)

Cocteau was the alleged leader of a right-wing secret society called the Priory of Sion, which is either a thousand-year-old mega-conspiracy or a two-man hoax, depending on which books you read. Although the Cocteau connection is probably spurious, the two fellows who did run the society (Philippe de Chérisey and Pierre Plantard) had links to the Vichy government -- and to surrealism. Quite a few people suspect that their massive hoax was actually a work of surrealist conceptual art. (That's a long story which nearly everyone on the web has gotten wrong. I'll get into it one of these days.)

Even American surrealist David Lynch was once an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Libertarianism -- although I'm told that his politics are now more centrist/Democratic.

You can probably come up with a half-dozen further examples. My point is this: One can indeed find major artists on the right, even on the wacko far right. They are not all hacks like Breker. Some of them do astonishing work. Not all surrealists are right-wingers, but the really good right-wing artists are usually surrealists. If you don't like that term, then let us simply say that they tend to be major oddballs. Mad geniuses.

(One exception: Degas. A reactionary, an anti-Dreyfusard, and a great painter. But not a weird painter.)

Why the conjunction of surrealism and reaction? I think I have an answer.

Surrealism, like religion, provides a door by which the dream world invades waking reality. Fascism does the same. Fascism will always possess an insidious appeal because it disdains logic and unfetters the Id. (Forgive the Freudian terminology.) As the proverb has it, the sleep of reason breeds monsters. A Ustashi thug burning down a barn filled with Serbian enemies probably had no desire to go home and read a Croatian translation of John Steinbeck -- but he might have enjoyed looking at the works of H.R. Giger, if Giger had been around at the time.

Conversely, a nice, sane liberal like John Steinbeck could not have written a surrealist book even if asked to do so by someone holding his family hostage.

And so we come to the present day. The Bush presidency, at least in its first term, gave our nation its closest scrape with out-and-out fascism. Yet (Lynch aside) the jingoistic culture of those years produced no Weird Art of any lasting value. America has not yet given up on reason. How do I know? Because conservatism -- still the predominant ideology of this culture -- has yet to whelp up a mad genius like Syberberg.

When that happens, get ready either to heil or to head for the hills, because the jig is up. Permalink

I've been up all night and thus haven't the energy to write a "real" post at the moment. So this is going to be a "What he said" post -- the "he," in this instance, being Lambert of Corrente, who suggests making the banks into regulated public utilities.

Why shouldn't paying your mortgage, or your auto loan, or your student loan, be exactly like paying your light bill? None of those businesses should be hard, and none of them demand "complex," "innovative," "financial instruments," and they certainly don't require testesterone-driven Merry Banksters sucking enormous bonuses off the company tit. So cut the parasites out of the business and get back to basics.

Think about it. The banks create money. They do this when they make loans. Why is the creation of money considered essentially different from the delivery of gas to your stove?

One more advantage: Regulated public utilities tend not to fail, unless the privatizers get in and screw them up, and when they do, they're small enough to.

The reference, of course, goes to the way Enron screwed California. Permalink

I cannot believe this. I cannot freaking buh-LIEVE this. Warning: Reading this AP story will turn your face stoplight red.

Major U.S. banks sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers into the country for high-paying jobs even as the system was melting down last year and Americans were getting laid off, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.

The dozen banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.

As the economic collapse worsened last year — with huge numbers of bank employees laid off — the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in the 2007 budget year to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

And the motive...?

Foreigners are attractive hires because companies have found ways to pay them less than American workers.

Companies are required to pay foreign workers a prevailing wage based on the job's description. But they can use the lower end of government wage scales even for highly skilled workers

The bankers are importing workers in this economy?

There's my argument: We must allow exceptions to the laws forbidding homicide.

In general, I am a law-abiding fellow who feels no desire to commit any crimes -- certainly not any violent crimes. But if the U.S. state and federal codes were re-written in order to allow me to slit the throats of the bankers who made that lovely decision, I would see my duty and fulfill it instantly. And I would sleep well that night, secure in the knowledge that I had done the work of the Good Lord. Yes, I'm serious.

Proof once again: Capitalism can work only if the capitalists are kept controlled, chained and whipped. Permalink