CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Roaming Charges: Bad Citizens

End of the dream in the Imperial Valley. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“War is the manifestation of a society that’s lost its meaning.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

“War is the manifestation of a society that’s lost its meaning.”

Cole Allen seemed like a regular guy. Cole Allen is a sturdy American name, right out of a Louie L’Amore novel. But in America, even regular guys snap.

In the Republic of the Gun, almost all of the regular guys have one or two. When they snap, they tend to grab one.

Cole Allen grabbed two. He also grabbed some knives. Then he took a train, rode the iron rails through the long night into the American outback, nursing his grievances across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin, over the Rockies and the Great Plains. He looked out on the lights of houses, towns and cities, filled with other regular guys late on their car payments, stuck in dead-end jobs sucking up to dead-end bosses, worried about their kids’ rotten teeth and no dental coverage, going thick in the waist, watching their teams lose night after night. Regular guys with gripes and guns and real intractable problems eating away at their souls. They want to settle scores. But how and with whom?

Cole Allen had been sold too many promises that didn’t pan out. The promise of hope and change. The promise of restoring the “soul of America,” whatever that really means. The promise of nostalgia restored, a reified America from the land of promise and dreams. But it’s the little annoyances that can loom large: the rising insurance payments, crappy cell service and internet too slow to stream, the damn heat, the traffic that doesn’t move, the commercialization of everything, even church, the bad TV, and the worse movies, music that grates and irritates, rather than consoles and inspires.

Cole Allen rode the rails twenty-seven hundred miles to do what, exactly? Did he even know? Does he know now? Did he feel betrayed by both political parties, exasperated by years of empty rhetoric, worn down by a ravenous economic system that works only for the super-rich and pits average guy against average guy? Or was he just bored with it all?

Did he want to shoot or get shot?  Was he acting on nihilistic impulse, an American Raskolnikov lashing out against the cultural nothingness leaching the life from him, even if, like most regular American guys, he’d never heard of Rodion Raskolnikov?

Or did he see himself as an avenger? If so, what was he avenging? What was he going to save? Something tangible or abstract? On whose behalf?

Do we really want to know these things? Do we want answers? Or will the answers, if there are any, strike too close to the bone? Have the myths of the country begun to eat itself, to cannibalize the collective psyche of the nation, like the furies in “The Bacchae” of Euripides?

In a country with 500 million guns, everyone has the chance to be an avenging angel, to enter the spotlight and create a spectacle, disrupt the programmed flow of time, if only for a few seconds, and be forever memorialized on security cameras, running down a hallway with a shotgun toward some kind of blazing destiny, you write for yourself, just like those archetypal American guys, Butch and Sundance.

In 1988, George Will attacked novelist Don DeLillo for humanizing Lee Harvey Oswald in his novel Libra and blaming “America” for shaping Oswald’s character. The pious Will denounced DeLillo as “a bad citizen.” DeLillo, who rarely says anything publicly, took Will’s attempted slander as a badge of honor, saying: ”I don’t take it seriously, but being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.”

Am I “humanizing” Cole Allen? He is human, isn’t he? And, for the country that reared him’s sake, he had better be understood that way.

After another brush (though perhaps not as close as first appeared) with the Grim Reaper, this one wielding a shotgun, Trump keeps comparing himself to Lincoln and McKinley, perhaps unaware of how things actually turned out for those two. The more apt parallel is to the man Alexander  Cockburn considered the greatest President since FDR, Gerald Ford, who was shot at (badly, fortunately) twice within a mere 17 days and no one seemed to care…

Trump’s strategy to hire only incompetent people is coming back to haunt him. How else can you explain the Secret Service allowing a guy with a shotgun, handgun and knife, who isn’t Ted Nugent, into the White House Correspondents’ dinner? The Secret Service agents on the scene fired as many as five shots at the alleged shooter in a packed room. They missed the would-be assassin, but may have hit one of their own agents….

Washington Post: “The Trump administration provided a lower level of security for the White House correspondents’ dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials.” The Post’s analysis of the security camera footage shows the alleged gunman being shot at five times, but doesn’t show him firing a single shot.

One of the inevitable problems with leading a conspiratorial movement, as Trump has done, is that your paranoid, conspiracy-minded followers will ultimately come to turn those conspiracies against you, as has happened in the Butler, PA shooting and already just a few hours after the shooting (if there was a shooting) in the hallway of the Washington Hilton…

The bizarre trend of shouting, “USA, USA” after shootings, as happened last night after whatever that was that happened at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, is definitely a “USA” kind of thing. The gun: made in the USA, the shooter: made in the USA, the intended targets: made in the USA.

Trump, hours after the assassination plot, if that’s what it was, used the incident to pitch his White House ballroom: “I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure [sic]. It’s got – it’s drone-proof, it’s bulletproof glass.” (The shooting or attempted shooting or whatever it was took place in the Washington Hilton, not the White House.)

White House Press Secretary Leavitt: “The left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him has gotten multiple people hurt and killed, and it almost did so again this weekend.”

Norman Ornstein, former long-time Republican: “Trump has called the left: – Enemy within – Scum – Terrorists – Vermin – Radical – Lunatics – Demonic – Evil – Fascists – Marxists – Communists – Garbage – The enemy of the people – The enemy within – Treasonous – Animals – Degenerates – Jew haters – Lowlives.”

Was this really necessary, Bruce? This is Springsteen’s version of “thoughts and prayers,” I guess. Though praying for the safety of the volunteer military in the Middle East that is currently bombing girls’ schools, hospitals and girls’ volleyball teams is hard to square with a call against “political violence.” At least two of Springsteen’s own songs, American Skin (41 Shots) and Streets of Minneapolis (admittedly 25 years apart), suggest that “political violence” by the government against the people is pretty much endemic to our “beloved United States.” (After Springsteen performed American Skin (41 Shots) about the killing of Amadou Diallo by four NYPD police officers, the NYPD refused to provide security for Springsteen’s concerts.) American Skin was released in 2001, which was quite a year for political violence in America.

One week he’s Jesus, the next he’s a hit man for La Cosa Nostra…

In the last few days, Trump has said the Iranian regime has collapsed, that they’re ready to make a deal but can’t communicate, that the leadership is hopelessly divided, and that no one in Iran knows who is in charge.

But the real chaos seems to be inside the Trump administration.

According to Seymour Hersh, Trump is now talking about paying Iran $25 billion to open the Strait of Hormuz, having become disgusted with Netanyahu for luring him into a war that even he now realizes can’t be won:

Trump, in a political panic over the economic fallout from the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is now “talking to Iran,” as an Israeli insider put it, about ending the current impasse in return for a payment from the United States of at least $25 billion, and possibly much more, to the government in Tehran. In return, Iran would end its blockade and open the strait to all traffic, ending a crisis for Trump, the US, and much of the world.

Trump, in a political panic over the economic fallout from the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is now “talking to Iran,” as an Israeli insider put it, about ending the current impasse in return for a payment from the United States of at least $25 billion, and possibly much more, to the government in Tehran. In return, Iran would end its blockade and open the strait to all traffic, ending a crisis for Trump, the US, and much of the world.

That sounds an awful lot like the “bags of cash” Trump accused Obama and John Kerry of giving the Iranians to seal the nuclear deal.

Pete Hegseth: “The one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military.”

NBC News is breaking all the news that CBS News used to break and now covers up…

American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage. The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an assessment by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials. The U.S. bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families, though they were largely cleared out in the days and hours before the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran.

American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage.

The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an........

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