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I’ve been busy getting my first movie out and prepping my second movie. Aside from blatantly promotional activities on these pages, I haven’t written any commentary on current events for a while. So taking a breath, here’s me playing catch-up on the last few months.

The Occupus vs. the Occuparty

Occupy Everything

The first indication I had that the Occupy movement had wings was sitting in a casino restaurant in Pahrump, Nevada, and hearing a man from one table ask a man at another table, “Are you part of the one percent or the ninety-nine percent?”

That idea — that we have two distinct classes, with a rich top and a poor bottom — isn’t anything new. It’s business as usual for the human race, which historically has divided between Aristocracy and Commoners, Patricians and Plebeians, Management and Workers, Patrones and peones, and Haves and Have Nots.

America — not as an actual place but as a Platonic ideal — is a rebellion against prior human history. The classical American story — the American Dream — is about a nobody who starts at the bottom and ends up a Somebody at the top. Upward mobility, it’s called, and the history of America — in its abolition of slavery and Jim Crow, in its embracing one immigrant ethnicity after another, in all attempts to allow innovators, the thrifty, and hard workers to raise themselves up along with their families — is the Human Revolutionary Virus, as true in Mumbai or Sofia as it was in New York City.

As a well-financed campaign organized to attain political ends, the Occupus is simply the latest attempt to ignite a class warfare that ultimately works to the benefit of the tops. Chaos in the streets of course demands a police presence, and we’ve seen that.

As a grassroots movement from people — especially the young — who know their future is being bought and sold, the Occuparty is simply more-media-correct language for the same impulse that generated the Tea Party.

When Occupy and Tea Party realize they’re the same movement with different rhetoric — and stop pissing each other off — the Occupus had better hide in inky waters.

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The Mark of Cain

Herman Cain

You’re not going to convince me that the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City — who doesn’t speak of gutting government but of hefty new taxes hard for poor people to evade — is anybody true conservatives, much less libertarians, should consider as their avatar.

But it’s certainly interesting to watch the same sort of people who during Bill Clinton’s impeachment endlessly repeated the mantra “It’s only sex!” now work to mark Herman Cain as a sexual harasser, with the latest Gloria Allred dog-and-pony show being a client who, if Herman Cain did to her what she claims he did over a decade ago, should have brought charges of sexual assault against Cain when the supposed molestation happened.

It will be enough for me if Herman Cain is stopped from further molesting the American taxpayer. But otherwise, political bimbo eruptions are so nineties, and we’re all so over it.

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I Ran from Iran When the A-Bombing Began

Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not someone whose word you can take to the bank, but he recently said something which is so logical on the face of it you have to wonder if he was accidentally telling the truth: “We will not build two (nuclear) bombs in the face of (America’s) 20,000.”

Ahmadinejad is probably lying in that Iran is probably building the two atomic bombs, along with testing missiles that could carry these atomic bombs to targets in Israel.

But Ahmadinejad is also admitting a greater truth. If Iran nuked Tel Aviv with the sort of atomic bomb that the United States first used in 1945 against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles carrying thermonuclear warheads could respond within minutes and eliminate Persia from the face of the earth.

I’m willing to believe that individual Muslims can be nutter enough to strap themselves with suicide vests and blow up a cafe or a bus, but I don’t think any ruling class’s faith in Paradise is confident enough to launch an attack which stands a good chance of annihilating the attacking nation.

Is there anyone who really wants to argue that Iran with the possibility of getting its first A-bombs is more of a threat than a Soviet Union that for decades had thousands of thermonuclear bombs and pretty much a certainty of successfully deploying them against American and European cities?

Please. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown that he’s smart enough to understand the words “Assured Destruction” — and he also damned well knows if he orders the atomic bombing of Israel, what he can do to threaten the United States from killing his country in retaliation won’t be Mutual.

Ahmadinejad is engaging in typical primate behavior, jumping up and down and trying to look scary. But he has no poker face and he’s just shown us his tell. When Saddam Hussein tried this sort of bluff he ended up swinging on a rope. Hey, Mahmoud. Muammar Gaddafi had full diplomatic relations with the U.S. and that didn’t prevent him from being dragged out of a hole in the ground and shot. You really don’t want to make the whale raise you and call.

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“Alongside Night Must Be Made!”

Alongside Night


Cato the Elder ended every speech, “Carthago delenda est!” — “Carthage must be destroyed!” Recently I’ve been ending everything I’ve been writing:

Alongside Night Must Be Made!


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This article is Copyright © 2011 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website and as a DVD on Amazon.com. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

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