Because You Never Asked

THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, II

(6/11, Spain . This is the second in a 2 part series starting with “The International Herald Tribune”)

     The second article that caught my eye was one entitled “With Enemies Like These”, written by another regular contributor to the paper, one Alex Beam. The fact that Mr. Beam and Mr. Cohen (who’s article protagonized the previous essay) are journalists who appear regularly in the “Trib” is significant because it shows the ideological constitution of the publication. In both cases, what we see is a rubber stamping mouthpiece for American business as usual policy.

     Mr. Beam’s article gets its genesis from the unique voice of Oscar Wilde, who claims you can’t be too careful in choosing your enemies. Beam thinks Barack Obama has done very well in this endeavor and goes on to ridicule some of those who’ve been critical of him. His first attack falls upon those who’d question the way in which Osama Bin Laden was murdered. Considering some of the things I’ve recently written in the essay “A New Sheriff In Town”, it could be a direct attack upon me, but my fame is such that Mr. Beam has never heard of me. As a result, he turns his guns on some European parliamentarians who have “kvetched about America ’s appeal to frontier justice.” He then quotes one Sigfried Kauder, a German politician who complained that “a random killing is not permitted according to international agreements, calling the Osama Bin Laden mission medieval and vengeful.” Beam’s response is to snidely proclaim how fortunate it is that Barack Obama “is running for re-election in bloody minded America and not in the white gloved corridors of Europe and Latin America.” If we translate that to redneck, it would be “what a bunch of faggots they all are”, but they don’t print philosophical outbursts of that nature in a bloody minded newspaper like the “Trib”.

     Mr. Beam’s attitude is dangerously unilateral in a world that is not enamored of the extra-judicial, cold blooded manner in which Bin Laden was killed. It is an attitude similar to the one that created the tragedy in Iraq .

     Beam’s next target for ridicule is the well known Ivy League academic and black activist, Dr. Cornel West. His recent rhubarb with President Obama has had him in the news again and Beam sarcastically refers to him not as an academic but a “rap-a-demic”. This joke is somewhat misguided because West’s presentation is sprung from a previous “milieu” of American culture, one that has little to do with the contented ostentation of Jayzee and Lebron. I mean, jeez, this guy West still has an honest to god “afro”, he still calls black men and women “brothers and sisters” and harkens back to a day when such beloved dinosaurs as Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis walked the earth. This, I’m sure, is enough to scare the bejivers out of someone like Alex Beam, regardless of Dr. West’s educational formation or however correct the things he says are. In this writer’s mind, in spite of the fact that his image could use a Madison Ave. update in a mendacious world that responds to image more than substance, Dr. West says a lot of things that make a lot of sense, and he says them in an articulate, unambiguous way, which is another thing that scares the jebivers out of your average honky (see Rev. Wright).

     Cornel West worked his butt off for the election of Barack Obama and the return on his investment has been barely a tongue lick of “trickle down”. His frustrations recently boiled over when he said President Obama is no more than “a black mascot of Wall St. oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” He went on to say that Obama “has become the head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.” These are the 2 remarks that put Dr. West in the cross hairs of Alex Beam’s ridicule. Oh my god, black power, power to the people, hide the women and children.

     I’d like to remind Mr. Beam that as a reward for having destroyed the global economy with what is now seen clearly as not just reckless, but criminal activity, President Obama has given the Wall St. community about one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) of taxpayer money with very few strings attached. “Too big to fail” still exists, no one has gone to jail, the big boys are still making finger lickin’ good bonuses, nobody’s taxes have been raised, and for what? --- to have the economy parked in neutral where the rest of us need to get moving.

     I’d like to remind Mr. Beam that a healthy majority of Americans are sick of these imperial military incursions into places many of them had never heard of before, for reasons that have still not been adequately explained to them. I’d like to remind Mr. Beam of just who is paying for all this. I’d like to remind Mr. Beam that millions of us voted for Barack Obama because he led us to believe that John Wayne and Chuck Norris would not be his inspiration for foreign policy.

     Bravo, Dr. West, for having the guts to stand up and say what millions of us now feel.

     Mr. Beam now turns his attention to the Fonda Family Cinema Dynasty, whose second generation has somehow mutated into subversive progenitors of un-American, anti-Dow Jones devil worship. It seems that Peter Fonda, who Beam refers to as Captain America for his famous role in the movie “Easy Rider”, has been at President Obama for his lack of spinal gumption in dealing with everyone’s favorite corporate neighbor, British Petroleum. According to Beam’s article, Fonda called Obama a “traitor”, and then said in an E-mail to the president that “you allowed foreign boots on our soil telling our military what they can not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do.” My guess is that for Mr. Beam, just the thought of “Easy Rider”, with its Woodstock-like sound track and its hordes of filthy hippies preaching such incendiary ideas as peace on earth, would immediately make Peter Fonda a persona non grata in his world. Uff! Just the thought of it ---

     But Beam uses Peter as bait for bigger fish to fry. He longs for him to get his (I quote) “loopy” sister Jane involved so Obama’s re-election could be assured.

     The attitude of people like Alex Beam with regard to Jane Fonda is dumbfounding. Here’s a woman who was married to Ted Turner, one of the foremost capitalist moguls of the 20^th century, and yet, they see her as someone who should have shared that iconic tee shirt with Che Guevara. Why is this so? Is it because she made all those exercise videos, y’know, the kind of stuff all those snobs munching fruit and granola in Central Park go for? Is it because she made a movie with that Lily Palmer dike, the one where all those corporate bosses are denied their god given right to fondle Dolly Parton’s “whoppers” whenever they please? How dare she! And oh, I almost forgot ---  she was against the war in Vietnam , joining a smattering of tens of millions of other American traitors. Heck, she’d be easier to find than Osama Bin Laden, why don’t we just go and shoot her?

     I’d be remiss here if I did not mention that Mr. Beam also has some choice words for a few right wing elements of American society, people like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who he also sees as excellent enemies for Barack Obama. This is his way of showing how fair and objective he is. I see it more as his way to hide under that centrist rock that has been moving stubbornly to the right since that “axis of evil”, St. Ronald of Hollywood, and the god-like arbiter of the world as he wants it, Rupert Murdoch, came to town. It is a centrist rock where people go to stand for nothing, to dodge the blows, to hunker down and hope it all goes away. It is just the place Barack Obama has been hiding in.

     Being that I cannot even get a baseball score from the “Trib” anymore, can somebody find me a reason to ever buy one of these things again?

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Email: JerryG@postcman.info