A COMMENT ON REMNICK'S "TRUMP AS AMERICAN TRAGEDY

  

 http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-donald-trump

Dear Mr. Remnick,
With all due respect to your piece on the American Tragedy that the election of The Great Huckster represents, it is my feeling that the event is merely yet one further manifestation of an ongoing tragedy whose origins may lie as far back as the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh that was followed by the overthrow of the Guatemalen government, letting the French hang in the wind at Dienbenphu, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Vietnam War, the Carter/Brezinsky destabilization of the 25 million people strong Afghanistan (throwing a country of that size to the dogs of war, with further consequences yet to come); the elections of fascistically inclined demagogues like J.F.K., Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and of Barrack Obama, who ran on the platform „Yes We Can” while not many voters  I expect expected it would mean the retention of his predecesor’s National Security and Economic Team, or that Obama would become a coolest killer from  Chicago yet, and yet be admired as civilized, well-spoken, datable by your daughter, everything that Donald Trump is not – i.e. the difference is one of class, and  and so you are quite willing to disregard his criminal acts (of omission as well as commission) in foreign and domestic affairs, lesser though they be than those of many of his predecessors! Body counts are lower! Hitler Jr. killed only one tenth as many Jews as Hitler Sr.! At the New Yorker you can be a war criminal with class like Obama but not a crude s.o.b., the vilest of the vilest scumbags out of Roy Cohn, like Trump or a war criminal like George Bush (war criminal by the standard of the Nuremburg tribual, or United Nation), which no tribunal will invoke or enforce, Bhoutus Bhutus Gali has no recourse over the U.S. Imperium and we don' apologize! Analogously, HRC (who - like you - was either so stupid - or other-Freedom-fry- directed as only Americans can be - as to believe that Old Badass Saddam Hussein - defeated, supervvised, sanctioned - might pose a threat even if he had one or the other wombat of mass distruction - or fantasize of atomic weapons - and be as gullible and righteous not just once but a second time as in the case of Libya, and dream of doing it yet again in the instance of a Syria that, ultimately, was destabilized into internecine warfare as a consequence of the American Iraq adventure – democracy is, as was 19th century Christianity, a horror that humanity hyenas impose by force of arms, while yet, say since 1945, no imperium has killed a many human beings as has the United States.

Thus your estimate of HRC as intelligent makes me question your own judgment, although in fact I might have voted for her if I lived in a state that was tetering, no mater that her election would have signified a continuation of the ongoing tragedy. HRC deserved to be beaten just not by Trump. She is a cold monster of the kind I encountered quite a few of in NY who are too stupid to learn from experience, but she was not born that way, a Goldwater girl she became that way within the American power struggles - all that the moguls then can do is fight for the ultimate prize of ultimate power - just as the American workers, once Union now disunion, negelected, uncared for by the moguls, have became atomized into chauvinistic racists within the consequences of neo-liberal profit-takig, the indentured servants who think they are better than the straight-out slaves.

Trump does not appear to be part of the imperial team in quite the same way, and so he may never take office, or he might be impeached at the moment that he does; there are all these outstanding legal issues coming to a head. Reagan, Bush, Trump... it’s a fascist country in many ways. What do folks imbibe as of their birth, the boob tube, lying newspapers, advertisements,  major criminals too big to jail while a million petty drug dealers are incarcerated. A formula for fascism, or for socialism with the right leader. Let’s not forget, Bernie would have beaten Trump - Hilary and the DNC went all out to destroy Bernie. One third of the country seemed ready to turn socialist during the primary. The kids, amazingly, were all right! How is it that the kids always seem allright yet from their marvelous heart-leaping inducing joy toddler presence turn into monsters by middle age?

Trump will of course betray the working class just a much as he has his vendors. Atlantic City is going into receivership with the State of New Jersey, chiefly through Trump’s doing, just a Obama betrayed his promises. Trump’s  tax cut for the moguls and piss down on you policy and deregulation while imposing a tax on trade throws the world even further into a Darwinian mode and makes shopping at Walmart a far dearer experience.

BLACK LIVES MATTER & THE CLINTON INCARCERATION ACT & CONSEQUENCES

 Re: BLACK LIVES MATTER & THE CLINTON INCARCERATION ACT & CONSEQUENCES

In the mid-1970s, editor at Continuum Books/ Seabury Press I was fortunate to publish DRUGS AND MINORITY OPPRESSION by John Helmer (1975) (See the Kirkus Review @https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-helmer/drugs-and-minority-oppression/)

 which found that suppressing the newly liberated slaves was linked with the criminalization of drug use. Meanwhile, more than a century later, with African-American ghettos in most major and smaller American cities, both the suppression of drug use – for pleasure & to suppress pain of all kinds - and the incarceration of African-American continues while simultaneously there has developed a black criminal underclass, sort of like the Japanese Yakuza, that is in and out of jail. (The number of incarcerated African-Americans actually exceeds the number of slaves at emancipation.) The underclass that is in and out of jail did not exist at the time when slavery ended, did not come into existence until large numbers of African-Americans started to live in ghettos in the cities, were the poorest paid and first laid off. Thus these gangs have a history and have reservoirs that replenish them generation after generation; that is their college, post-graduate education in criminality.

    As editor of Rober Kalich’s THE HANDICAPPER http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-handicapper-or-adventures-in.html

and one day I happened to be taken along to meet the head of the Jewish Mafia, Abe Margolis, and who would happen to be there but the head of the black mafia in New York,  all that was missing at this fine Fifth Avenue venue with Louis IV furniture, was the Italian equivalent ( whom I then met at “Abe’s Place” on Third Avenue); Abe's brother Robbie was known as Frank Costello's best friend. I forget the name of the black fellow, the year is 1978 or thereabouts, he was arrested of course, and so was Abe. The Jewish mob gambled on college basketball, Robert Kalich their handicapper, novelist! Editing the book meant $ 40 K for Urizen Books. The lives of editors take adventurous turns, don't they? It is/was for the black mobsters that the black kids sell drugs. So the current discussion/ controversy, as far as I am concerned, is what? Meretricious? Out to lunch?    

President Clinton’s accommodation to Reaganism, his crime bill of the 90s, to put masses of “predators into jail,” a law that meanwhile has been used and not only by Black Lives Matter to attack his spouse's presidential campaign, was the usual kind of superficial stop-gap American response to a problem that can only be solved or ameliorated over the course of several generations of assured living wages for all impoverished Americans.

 Michael Roloff

KIRKUS REVIEW

Helmer begins by questioning both the popular wisdom and psychological theories about addiction, but this is not a wide open polemic like Szasz' Ceremonial Chemistry. Instead this sociological analysis focuses on Helmer's contention that narcotics use has for the most part been concentrated among the working class, and that the war on drugs is and always has been a form of class warfare. The second half of this argument is the most convincing. Tracing the rise of public concern over Chinese opium indulging, Mexican-American marijuana smoking, and Black cocaine and heroin addiction, Helmet levels a barrage of statistics to demonstrate a connection between campaigns to stamp out the drug menace and downturns in the business cycle and/or minority group inroads on a limited job market. Helmet isn't as clear about why narcotics should be a primarily working class phenomenon. There are hypotheses--such as the frustration of unemployment and the flooding of the market by drug speculators (Chinese businessmen paid wages in opium during the mid 19th century), but the lack of information on hidden narcotics habits among the upper and middle classes makes the argument problematic. While he is an apparently prodigious researcher, the author doesn't always define the exact scope of his argument and he extrapolates rather freely from his data. Obviously he is on to something, but his model of the dynamic interaction among economic conditions, drug use and law enforcement policy remains fuzzy.