In his 1988 book Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion, author Lewis Lapham recalls a dinner with U.S. senator Patrick Moynihan, who laughed “uproariously about the absurdity of his predicament.”
“As a senator, he said, he was expected to hold informed opinions under as many headings as were listed in the Federal Directory — on weapons and civil rights as well as on nuclear energy, education, Indians (American and Miskito), communications theory, military intelligence, Arizona ground water and the volume of barge traffic on the Mississippi river,” Lapham writes.
“It’s a joke, of course,” he [Moynihan] said. A dangerous joke, maybe, but still a joke.”
The senator’s moment of black humour dated back to the Carter era, when the term “consumer electronics” mostly meant pocket calculators and boom boxes. Today we have more sources of information on more platforms than ever. It’s an embarrassment of clickbait riches for the leaders and lead alike.
“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on,” observed the 19th century British Baptist minister Charles Spurgeon. Today, by the time a falsehood has been stomped on by Reddit or Snopes, the planet has been circled several times over by Trump-level whoppers.
Consider the supposed origins of the Syrian refugee crisis. In the authorized version, President Bashar al-Assad attacked his own people to stifle uprisings, resulting in a civil war and millions fleeing to neighbouring countries and beyond. For most news consumers the narrative stops there, with the moral simplicity of a Marvel superhero flick.
Yet matters are complicated by the fact that ISIS/IS/Daesh — a threat NATO is apparently out to eliminate — is also fighting Assad’s regime. So NATO is said to be supporting “moderate insurgents,” a term reminiscent of comic George Carlin’s favourite oxymorons, “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence.”
But let’s back up a bit. From 2006 to 2011, half the area of Syria was afflicted with the worst drought on record, which researchers connect to climate change. The drought is believed to have played a large role in the violent uprising that began across the country in 2011.
Complicating things further, in 2010 Goldman Sachs made more than $400 million in profits through dangerous and damaging food speculation practices, according to a 2011 report in The Telegraph. Emboldened by widespread droughts in the Mideast and elsewhere in the world, banksters used commodity speculation to profit from the poverty and suffering of others, sending the price of wheat and other commodities through the roof.
“In 2012, researchers affiliated with MIT demonstrated that there was a correlation between rising global food prices and the outbreak of civil unrest worldwide: Whenever prices eclipsed 210 on the UN’s FAO Food Index, a measure of the monthly change in international prices of core food commodities, riots and conflict became much more likely,” notes a report on Vice.com.
And we can’t talk about the Syrian crisis without going back to the American neo-con’s pre-9/11 plans for regime change in the Mideast. Of the nations identified as threats to the U.S. — North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria — two have fallen under Bush and Obama’s undeclared oil wars, while a third is joining a long-term humanitarian crisis in the region.
The human fallout is only nominally about dictators resistant to freedom by force. It’s really about the invasion and destruction of sovereign states using NATO forces and proxy armies, resulting in mass deaths and a predictable refugee crisis, coupled with a rebranded terrorism threat — with the effects possibly amplified by climate change and a Wall Street-inflated food bubble.
The planet now hosts the largest number of refugees and displaced peoples since the end of the Second World War. It’s the kind of overdetermined mess that would have made the late senator Moynihan’s head swim.
Charles Fort, an early 20th century chronicler of strange phenomenon, knew a thing or two about multiple causation. “If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere,” he observed in 1931.
In this case, anywhere could be Damascus, Tehran, Tel Aviv, London, New York, or Washington, DC. But the line always circles back to Empire.
Geoffolson.com
@geoffolson
