I have to pause Life Among the Three Dimensionals for a few days. I wrote that story more than a decade ago. I know that it's an old literary saw how the protagonists in a book take on a life of their own. But it is true. The characters speak to me. Not in a schizophrenic sense of "hearing voices," but they do speak as surely as I sometimes "hear" lost friends, dead teachers and family from ages ago. Sometimes the characters in a book rebel and demand change. Just like you and I do. Or should.

Hugo Nash and Szofia (yet to make her debut) have made it clear - they want some themes modified. The Zeitgeist and, seemingly, our entire world has changed from when they first were created, and they are demanding that I make some changes in recognition of that.

Or have Hugo and Szofia (and all of us) changed and the world has not?

There is an amusing last-century book by the Irish author Flan O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. The characters in the book get so annoyed with the badly written narrative that they sabotage the author and try to write him out of the novel. I encountered something similar in one of my own short stories, Little Annie Asteroid and The Rock Jam on Upper Utula III: one of the characters threatened to go on strike rather than speak the lines I wrote for him. I relented, of course.

Like Hugo Nash in LA3D, have we slid into a parallel, but almost unrecognizable slice of the Multiverse unrecognizably far from where we used to be? What I once thought, I now think differently. What seemed clear just ten years ago, is now murky. What I didn't see at all then, is now staring me in the face.

The tanks of Berlin.

The picture at the head of this commentary dates from 1961. It was the original "incident" at Checkpoint Charlie at the boundary between East and West Berlin. The Wall was not yet built but would be soon.

I arrived with my parents in West Berlin in December 1967. As a military brat, I attended a Defense Department operated high school along with the sons and daughters of various "State Department" and allied government officials who did Lord Only Knows What in this frontier city of the Cold War. Think John le Carré, George Smiley and all that kind of clandestine stuff.

Berlin, in the 1960s and 70s, was still an occupied city. Its four sectors were controlled by the French, the British, the United States and the Soviet Union although municipal regulations, domestic affairs and constabulary functions were governed by the eastern and western "civilian" halves of the City. The capital of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, aka "West Germany" (the BRD), was Bonn, not Berlin. Berlin itself was an island in the middle of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, aka "East Germany" (the DDR). The only way in and out of Berlin for Americans, at that time, was to fly (via Pan Am, BEA or Air France), to take one of three American, British or French military "duty trains" (more about that another day) or to drive a designated highway through the DDR using "flag orders" that permitted us to interact solely with Soviet border guards rather than DDR Volkspolizei ("Vopos").

At that time, the U.S. didn't recognize the legitimacy of an independent state of "East Germany." The U.S. non-recognition of an independent "East Germany," ironically, is analogous to China's non-recognition of an independent Taiwan. But somehow, Taiwan is different and East Germany was not Taiwan, and "we" are free, but "communists" are not, or whatever; but it really doesn't matter whether the narrative was illogical, so long as the people swallowed it (and we did) along with our other daily doses of blue pill narratives.

When I lived in Berlin, there was a large prison in the Spandau district that held exactly one person: Rudolf Hess. Hess was still alive and imprisoned there at the time. Hess had been Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler. In 1941, just one month before Germany launched Operation Barbarosa (the fourth of six "western" attempts to dismember Russia since the 19th Century, counting current events), Hess flew solo to England in a specially outfitted Messerschmidt Bf 110. Apparently, he intended to meet with the Duke of Hamilton who was believed to represent the "faction" in Great Britain that wanted to end hostilities between Great Britain and Germany. After bailing out mid-air, Hess was captured (apparently by a different "faction") and he never got to meet with the Duke of Hamilton. Notwithstanding the large amount of official chaff that purports authoritatively to explain this extremely odd incident, the straight story about whether Hess was trying to negotiate an English-German rapprochement, who arranged his undertaking and whether it was connected with the forthcoming German invasion of Soviet Russia has not been, and likely never will be definitively established. In any event, in and since 1941, everyone in Berlin and in London disavowed any connection to, or advance knowledge about Hess's intentions, and the whole affair was soon officially buried as just another crazy "lone wolf" acting on his own.

I have no idea what was the truth, except that the "official story" makes no sense. The "official stories" usually don't. I only mention Hess and Spandau Prison because, even unto the last decades of the 20th Century, Berlin was seething with intrigue. It was a standing Berlin joke that every fifth person was a spy or a counter-spy, an agent, a double-agent, or a double-double agent, working for one side, the other side, or all sides simultaneously.

We kids in high school knew the joke and shrugged it off as young humans are so good at doing. Life went on like in any high school (except that we were living in the middle of East Germany surrounded by Soviet troops). In our high school some studied, some goofed off; there were football teams and cheerleaders; there were cliques and clubs; there were good teachers and bad; scooter riders and motorcyclists; wanna-be rock stars; smokers and tokers; parties, dances, romance, lost souls, dreamers, thugs, jocks and "freaks" (those of us who had caught the long-haired, beaded hippie counter-culture blown across the world from London and San Francisco). The U.S. military is one of the most hierarchical institutions on earth, but in school, we students knew no caste boundaries. The flower seeds of Haight-Ashbury bloomed here, too, among the officers' and NCOs’ kids alike.

Across town, we encountered our German counterparts who attended Gymnasium, Hauptschule and Realschule, and also the older college students studying at the Freie Universität. Mostly, we rubbed shoulders at Kneipen like Annapam, at rock concerts and at the youth clubs around town.

When I lived in West Berlin, the Vietnam War was at its worst. I saw in the Berlin caserns many young GIs, most of them conscripts not much older than me, who had come back from Southeast Asia addicted to drugs, demoralized or totally brain-addled. Often all three.

The German students I knew were largely anti-imperialist, anti-American, anti-racism and anti-war. I remember the attempted assassination of radical student leader, Rudi Dutschke, and the ensuing student riots against the conservative publishing house Springer Verlag, the Vietnam War and the United States. There were similar student uprisings in France around this time. We "brats" shrugged it off. It was just part of the background noise. We were largely ignorant and insouciant. Life went on like in any American high school.

At that time, we could still use dollars to buy Currywurst, Pommes Frites, a stein of beer and a bag of gebrannte Mandeln (cinnamon toasted almonds) in West Berlin. Berliners accepted dollars at a street exchange rate of 4 D-Marks to the Dollar. Not too many years later, the exchange rate was $1 = 1DM. Now the Mark is gone, replaced by the Euro. A single "Bitcoin" sells today for $52,066.99.

The tanks of Berlin.

My bedroom window overlooked ClayAllee, one of the main thoroughfares that ran from the 40th Armor Regiment depot in the American Sector toward downtown West Berlin.

Roughly once a month, there would be an "alert" and the 40th Armor would scramble. Sometimes the Soviets triggered the alert; sometimes the Americans, French or British did. During an alert, hundreds of American M60 main battle tanks would roar down Clayalle past my bedroom window, blackout convoy lights on, tracks clattering, noxious diesel exhaust clouds trailing behind them, whip antennas bent down, brigade flags flapping in the tailwind. The alerts usually occurred at night or at some gawd-awful hour of the morning. The tanks raced toward Checkpoint Charlie or some other confrontation point on the periphery of the city, as in the photo at the head of this story. There, like in the photo, they aimed their cannons at the Soviet tanks across the checkpoint that were aiming their cannons at the Americans. The next eruption of the non-stop Second Hundred Years War (the class war continuum that we have been taught to divide in three as the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War) was a hair's breadth away. This went on for hours or days, like a lethal game of chicken, "our tanks" facing off against "their tanks," until someone blinked and everyone returned to barracks.

Until the next alert.

Tanks rolled past my bedroom window every few months without exception. The first several times I witnessed this, I jumped out of bed to watch them speeding down the road. Young male teenagers in particular are fascinated by fast, powerful, noisy and very phallic looking tank guns protruding from bulbous armored turrets and I was no different. It's a testosterone kind of thing. But after several events like this, I stopped getting out of bed. And then I started to sleep right through it.

I've been sleeping through things like this for decades.

Age does funny things. Our bodies grow a little slower and our endurance decreases. But as our eyes get weaker, our insight gets sharper. I don't want to sleep through things any more.

Metaphysically speaking, age is liberating. You no longer have to be the "12th Man" - a tribalized "sports fan" cheering on "your team" - even though the players aren't local, even though you don't own any part of the team, even though you don't profit from the revenue, and even though you can't call any of the plays. If you mouthed off in high school you could have been suspended. If you resisted in college, you might not have graduated. If you pushed back against the Boss, you might not have had a job. But once you've gotten your "higher education" from one obedience school or the other, once you have neither a job nor a Boss to worry about, then there's not much at risk that death itself and the inevitable course of nature won't do to you anyway. And, perhaps, only when emancipated by age and the inevitability of death can you see things objectively.

By the time I came to Berlin, the Wall had been built. NATO claimed the Wall was intended to keep East Germans in. The Warsaw Pact claimed it was intended to keep NATO out. Our narrative versus their narrative. Our side versus their side. Go team!!

Et cetera.

In reality, we were the sons and daughters of legionnaires stationed at the outposts of the Empire. Perhaps, as we were told, our parents were stationed in Berlin to protect Germany from an invasion by the Soviet Union. But I doubt that, anymore than today we are supposedly protecting Europe from an invasion by Russia. Parents tell fairy tales to soothe their children and rulers tell fairy tales to soothe their subjects... and also to "justify" austerity measures, inflation, social hardships and the pursuit of war.

By and large, the truth was always staring us in the face even though we would not see it: we were in Berlin to help keep Germany apart. We have had similar objectives in Vietnam, China, Korea, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Syria, Palestine, everywhere in Africa, everywhere in South and Central America, Ukraine, and Taiwan, always aided by local compradors, Quislings, soldiers-of-fortune and the deliberate exacerbation of indigenous social divisions.

The essence of empire is not the spread of democracy, but its eradication, abroad and at home. Its essence is not the free market competition of ideas, but the eradication of competition in all spheres - political, military and especially economic. The essence of empire is a completely inverted narrative that projects onto others what the empire does itself.

The tanks of Berlin upheld the Order at that time. They do today, too.

But it wasn't the tanks themselves "locked and loaded" at Checkpoint Charlie that kept that world together. It was the economic churn associated with designing, building and selling the tanks. The single greatest reason why the U.S. economy hasn't (yet) completely "tanked" today is because of our continued design, manufacture and sale of even more "tanks," that is, our red-hot deficit spending on expensive, high-tech weapons of war. When the Pentagon and the chicken-hawks in the House and Senate (both Democrats and Republicans) agitate for more money to defend against an array of imaginary enemies, that money is spent on our strategic war industries. When the U.S., with the bipartisan support of "both parties," votes billions in aid to a corrupt Ukraine or a genocidal Israel, that money is ear-marked to be spent on American made munitions.

The money comes back to the U.S. and lifts our stock market. It is our "economic stimulus policy." The "gift" of billions to Ukrainian and Israeli belligerents kills the local people, but it economically benefits western, and especially the American, military hardware manufacturers. That translates into "jobs," a boost in the "Gross Domestic Product" (perhaps that is why this ostensible measure of the economy is properly defined as "gross" in the colloquial sense) and a robust, rosy economy... built on heaps of dead bodies. It's like Thomas Mann's 1924 novel der Zauberberg, "the Magic Mountain," set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland (where the World Economic Forum presently holds its annual meetings). In the TB sanitarium, everyone has rosy cheeks... caused not by good health, but by a low grade persistent fever. Despite their superficially glowing appearances, everyone in the Magic Mountain TB sanitarium is sick and dying with an intractable disease that slowly consumes them.

Does anyone still remember the "peace dividend" we were going to reap when the so-called "Cold War" supposedly ended? It has been spent. The "peace dividend," ironically, has been spent on war.

The world has changed and we've slid into a parallel slice of the Multiverse.

Or, is it more likely that we are in the same place we have been for a very long time, but we have changed?

Guernica.

The original colorless oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, hangs in the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Below, at the foot of this essay, is a "fair use" depiction of the original. It was first unveiled in 1937 in commemoration of the German indiscriminate bombing of the market town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso displayed the painting in support of the Spanish Republic. With the military assistance of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy, the nationalists, let by Generalisimo Francisco Franco, prevailed and established a totalitarian dictatorship. But for the ongoing Francoist terror campaign that killed hundreds of thousands, the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939. It was a dress rehearsal for the ensuing world war.

Many years later, Franco, too, sought to obtain the original Guernica painting "for Spain;" but Picasso adamantly refused until Spain had restored "public liberties and democratic institutions."

The tapestry of Guernica that hangs in the United Nations is not the original. Nelson Rockefeller sought to buy the painting from Picasso. Picasso, true to his principles, refused to sell it to Rockefeller.

In 1955, Nelson Rockefeller then commissioned a more colorful tapestry as a full size copy of the original colorless oil painting. The tapestry was made by Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach. Rockefeller placed the tapestry on loan to the United Nations.

In 2003, Colin Powell and John Negroponte famously held a press conference to agitate for war and the occupation of Iraq. The press conference took place in front of the anti-war tapestry, Guernica. To avoid the bitter irony, they covered up the anti-war tapestry with a blue curtain.

Colin Powell and John Negroponte spoke emotionally, dramatically and persuasively. And they lied.

Most high level politicians are practiced dissemblers and hypocrites. This is a trait common not only among U.S. politicians, but also German, French, British, Canadian, Israeli, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and nearly every high level European Union official. Their demonstrated ability to lie convincingly is, in large part, what qualifies them to rise to positions of power. In law, there are some issues or facts that may be considered "rebuttable presumptions." A rebuttable presumption is one where, reversing the typical burden of proof, something is presumed to be a fact unless the other side adduces convincing evidence to rebut it.

One could say that all persons who shout, scream, pound the table, or who have political temper tantrums; all politicians who try to shut down dissenting opinions; and all officials who try to side-track important issues with trivial nonsense; all of them should be subject to a rebuttable presumption that they are lying. One could go further: perhaps, based on past experience, there might be a non-rebuttable presumption that they are lying.

The basis for the Iraq War and its subsequent occupation and plundering was itself a tapestry of deliberate falsehoods, misinformation and disinformation. Of course, this was not the first time, nor the last time, that war and conquest have been justified dishonestly.

Although the blue curtain in front of the Guernica tapestry has been removed, the U.S. continues to occupy numerous military bases in Iraq. And almost everywhere else around the globe.

Whither the tanks of Berlin?

There are no more tanks in Berlin. Tanks... literally mobile mini-fortresses... are actually obsolete, just like battleships, aircraft carriers, strategic bombers and other monumentally expensive weapon systems. In the never-ending arms race, man-portable rockets, cheap drones and fast missiles have now made cumbersome and lumbering weapons of war just so many sitting ducks. But tanks, just like other technologically "advanced" weapons, are still used to project power and to coerce. Significantly, their manufacture and sale continue to churn the economy.

The tanks of Berlin and all the other weapons of war have been moved elsewhere: to the Middle East, to Asia, to Eastern Europe. They rumble on. The violence and confrontations and coercion continue.

Have we slipped into a parallel and very different slice of the Multiverse? Or is it the same old world, and we are different? The tanks of Berlin are gone. Yet they remain as a memory and a metaphor of what has... and what has not... fundamentally changed.

*****

Fifty years ago, I was a student living and studying in Munich. I owned a third-hand rear engine air-cooled Volkswagen Variant held together with paint and chewing gum - a "Squareback" in the US auto market. A friend and I decided to spend spring break caravaning through Spain.

I am not sure what route we took to get from Munich to Spain, from the Isar River in Bavaria to the Mediterranean (or, "From the River to the Sea" in today's lexicon of blacklisted & forbidden speech).

I know there were no tunnels through the Alps at that time. I think we zigzagged south-west, more or less, into Switzerland, heading for the South of France and thence into Catalonia. Those were carefree days of long hair, beads and John Lennon wire frame glasses. The plan was no plan. This was a Jack Kerouac-ian kind of road trip. We lived on French baguettes, cheese and salami, stopped when tired, "camped" in Jacques Borel motorway restaurant1 parking lots, and stayed in pensions or cheap hotels in the bigger towns and cities.

En route to Spain, we spent one night in the Zurich Youth Hostel - a Jugendherberge.

I recently visited the website for that same hostel. There are pictures of the place that, apparently, has been remodeled since I was there. Still, the exterior looks exactly as I remember it, even if it wasn't exactly as I remember it. It was fortress-like, blocky, solid. It looked a little like a prison.

Today, according to the website, the largest rooms hold six bunks. In 1973, I remember spending the night in a 12 person dormitory with double stacked bunks. Maybe I am wrong, but that is what I recall. At that time, guests were segregated by gender (there were just two in those days). I was assigned to my "barrack" - somewhere above street level facing the back or side of the building. My travel partner was lodged in a women's dormitory elsewhere in the building.

All the beds were full. I remember that all of the other men in the room were in their late teens or early twenties and that they seemed to know one another. I spoke and understood English and German, passable French and rudimentary Italian, but these young men conversed, animatedly, in a language that I did not know.

I remember one peculiarity of this particular youth hostel that, I am sure, must have changed. Or, perhaps, it never happened except in my memory: the management declared a nighttime curfew at a certain hour. Then it locked the bedroom doors from the outside. Like a prison.

The overhead lights went out at curfew leaving only small reading lamps for illumination. I lay in my bunk tucked inside the one piece multi-function bedsheet/pillow case that European youth hostels use. I prepared to sleep.

I didn't sleep, though.

They were talking to me. That is, all twenty (or more) young men who occupied the dormitory with me were talking to me. There were twenty or more in the twelve-bunk room because, after the door was locked from the outside, many more had clambered in through an open window, using ropes or bed sheets tied to together, like a reverse jail break. This is probably why the management locked the youth hostel dormitory doors at night - both as an internal security measure and to try to prevent non-paying guests from sneaking in. Even at youth hostel prices, money was dear for those who were day laborers, and if several could split the cost with those already there, then doubling up was still better than sleeping au naturel in a park or under a bridge like a clochard.

For they were, indeed, day laborers - Gastarbeiters. Non-Swiss who had, legally or illegally, come to Europe to do scut work to earn some money for themselves to survive or to send home to family.

They were from Palestine. These twenty (or more) young Palestinian men clustered around my bunk, above, across and beside me. They were the displaced refugees born of a series of misbegotten events that long predated their births and mine. They were the grandchildren of the Nakba, the "catastrophe," the violent removal and dispossession of the native peoples in 1948 from the land that is now Israel. I distinctly recall that one man sitting on the bunk across from mine had a rather large knife. You do not forget that kind of detail even decades later. He might have been paring an orange although, at the time, I wasn't sure whether he was preparing to pare me. The prior summer - the summer of 1972 - was the year of the Munich Olympics. The Yom Kippur War broke out about a year later. These were stressed and turbulent times. Like now.

I had been living and studying in Munich at the time of the Olympics. The Black September sub-group of the PLO had infiltrated the Olympic Village, killing two Israeli team members and taking nine hostages. The subsequent attempted rescue by the German authorities was botched: all of the hostages died, as did five members of the Black September group and a police officer. The three hostage-takers who were captured alive were themselves later released in yet another hostage exchange involving hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615.2

I rapidly considered my situation that night in the Zurich youth hostel. I was locked inside the room. The Munich Olympic massacre had occurred less than a year earlier. Twenty (or more) young Palestinian men - one of them handling a large knife - were clearly very excited and wanted to talk to me. Right there. Right then. In light of the options (of which there were none), I agreed to talk with them.

One of the gentlemen seated on a bed mattress directly across from me was clearly their designated "spokesman." He spoke a little broken English, slowly and haltingly. He also spoke fragments of German and French. As he struggled to interview (or interrogate) me, the spokesman's compatriots all excitedly pressed around him simultaneously shouting what they thought (apparently) were the most important issues to "discuss."

Although I do not remember any names today, decades later, I do remember first introducing myself by my name and asking theirs, too. Knowing someone's name immediately makes someone a "person" and not just a stereotype. I offered and shook hands with the spokesman. I "saluted" the others with a tip of the fingers to my forehead, a "hello" in English and a colloquial "servus" in German. They saluted back, more or less, with various Arabic phrases that probably meant the same. Probably.

The ice had been broken.

I do not remember exactly how long the "interview" lasted. Time seemed at once to freeze and accelerate. I remember that I helpfully offered to "assist" the spokesman for the group to phrase his questions as he struggled to put them into an intelligible form of English. He then struggled to re-translate my (intentionally) convoluted answers from English into (presumably) their own Arabic dialect so they could understand what I had said. They (apparently) thought the spokesman's translations incomprehensible and started shouting at him and poking him to try harder. A few of them shouted their own questions to me in a mishmash of words and languages that made even less sense. The more they struggled, the more verbose "help" I offered, with a smile and an amiable laugh, including my increasingly frequent assistance in pronunciation and grammar. As I spoke longer and more contrived sentences, it tended to slow and complicate the conversation. We got bogged down deeper in semantics and the peculiarities of the American dialect of English. My roomies became first restless, and then increasingly less interested in the conversation.

That night, I think, the thought came to me that I would become a lawyer. If I made it through the night.

I remember only a few bits of the actual dialog, but the gestalt of this night in the Zurich Youth Hostel I remember like yesterday.

I recall, first of all, that my interlocutors wanted to know who I was, where I came from and what I was doing there. I showed them my International Student ID card - I was an American studying at the German university in Munich. I was traveling during term break en route to Spain. All of this was true. I asked the same questions of them and they told me.

Where in America did I live? they urgently wanted to know. I think they only knew about a couple of US cities - probably New York and Washington D.C. or Chicago - and they were very confused when I said, truthfully, that the last time I had lived in the U.S., I had, years ago, lived in... Pittsburgh. I remember how that bit of news, in turn, launched a lengthy (and totally confusing) discussion about where "Pittsburgh" was and what it was then known for (steel mills, coal mines, Iron City Beer, the Pittsburgh Pirates and kielbasi!). I remember that wasn't the answer they wanted or expected thinking, perhaps, that I was a Jew from New York City. But they never asked that question, and I wasn't from New York; so I didn't volunteer what I thought they might have been thinking.

They wanted to know why America supported Israel all the time.

I told them the truth - then as now - that I have no clear idea why the United States government does what it does, but that not all Americans agree (then or now). I did tell them, truthfully, what I thought then, and what I think now: that nobody in the American Capitol ever asks me for, or seemed to want to hear, my opinions; and that, generally, U.S. policies, at home and abroad, were often duplicitous, deceptive, inconsistent, dishonest and/or biased. I explained, for example, that the Vietnam War (which was then still an ongoing "hot" war) was one of the reasons why I was then studying in Germany and not in the United States. All of this was true.

They wanted to know what I thought about the Black September attack on the Israeli sports team only a few months earlier. I was living in Munich at the time. What did I think about that, they urgently wanted to know. So I told them the truth: violence begets violence. I told them what I thought then and what I think now: Arabs and Jews are closely related historically, ethnically, religiously. It makes no sense for them to fight one another. They should be allies, not adversaries. Family and good neighbors, not enemies. I told them what I thought then and what I think now: I completely understood the reason for the attack on the Israeli Olympics team and the desperation that motivated it. But I also told them that I disapproved it.

The "struggle session" - for that's what it was - lasted for hours. It was well past midnight before we all tired. One by one, my "roomies" lay back in their bunks and fell asleep (many two to a mattress). Soon, their spokesman, too, quit trying to quiz me. I think we exchanged something, maybe a piece of chocolate from my backpack. Then we slept.

Or, at least, I think I slept because I distinctly remember - somewhat to my surprise - waking up the next morning!

The youth hostel, reversing what it had done the night before, unlocked the doors at daybreak, turned on all the overhead lights and piped in loud, thumping music through the public address system - a medley of Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Heino (you had to have lived in Germany to appreciate the grating incongruity of this soundtrack mix!). I think this is what reveille at Army Boot Camp must be like for new recruits at Fort Benning, Georgia.

We all tumbled out of our bunks and headed for the large and noisy common lavatory to wash, shower and hit the head. We greeted one another like we had been acquaintances forever. Maybe, in another universe, we had been. I am not sure, but we may have exchanged names and addresses on scraps of paper (there was no email or text-messaging in the 1970s). We shook hands. I bought some brioches and Danish pastry at the cafeteria and gave some to them. They gave me some oranges and lemons. I rejoined my travel partner and we prepared to drive on toward Spain. The Palestinians and I parted friends.

This story is true.

The names have not been changed because I do not remember any of them. I long ago lost the little scraps of paper with their names and addresses. If they are alive, they will be my age, more or less. Perhaps one of them will read this story. Perhaps one of them will remember the story a little differently. Some of them have undoubtedly gone back to Palestine, some will have emigrated somewhere. Some are parents and grandparents. Some probably became doctors or lawyers. Some, probably, joined Hamas or Hezbollah or some other militant group. Those that live are still displaced refugees born of a series of misbegotten events that long predated their births and mine.

Perhaps they still live in Switzerland. Perhaps they now live in Gaza. Perhaps they are dead.

* * * * *

How did we get from the Zurich Youth Hostel 1973 to Gaza 2023?

History is not just one damned thing after another. History is what happens to each of us. It's the water we live in even if, like fish, we aren't aware of it. What occurred fifty years ago, a hundred, and a thousand years ago, here and over there, affects us today and will affect everyone else in the future (should humankind have a future).

Everywhere there's a road map. Knowing what actually happened and what paths you traveled helps you to know where you are, how you got here and where you are heading. Knowing all of that can help you change direction, if you want to. Thus, knowing "all that history stuff" is an exercise in free will, self-awareness, autonomy and independence. That is precisely why so much energy is invested in misstating facts, fictionalizing, bowdlerizing and revising history; so that you will find it hard to change direction, so you won't know where you are or understand how you got here.

To twist the old proverb, What you don't know won't hurt Them; but what you do know might.

In November 1917, the British Empire declared, as vaguely nuanced aspirations, that after the Great War (World War I was called the Great War although there was nothing "great" about it), the Jews who resided in Palestine could have home rule, more or less, kind of, sort of. Simultaneously, the British Empire declared "that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Now how on earth was this supposed to happen? Nobody knew. Nobody explained. Nobody cared.

This was the infamously ambiguous Balfour Declaration. Of course, the British Empire had no authority (although it had the de facto power) to declare who would live where in the Middle East. The Empire's imperial rights were illegitimate and its unexpressed objectives were equally so. The Balfour Declaration was a classic play from the imperial Roman handbook, divide et impera. It is easier for the foreign occupier to rule, if the locals can be induced to hate and fight among themselves. You see countless examples of that principle today domestically and all around the globe.

The Balfour Declaration, as vague as it was, contradicted another compact, a secret one signed by the French and the British Empires: the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. This secret treaty provided that, after the Great War, the majority of Palestine would be under "international" administration (by "international" they surely meant European nations like France or Great Britain). France and England further agreed that at the conclusion of the "Great War," the rest of the Middle East (including the resource rich and strategically important regions now known as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates), would be apportioned between them. None of this (ahem) self-rule nonsense when it came to the victorious colonialists!

None other than Vladimir Lenin discovered a copy of the Sykes-Picot agreement among the Tsar's secret papers soon after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. War is a racket, wrote the double Medal of Honor recipient Marine Major General Smedley Butler. The secret Sykes-Picot agreement proved General Butler's point.

To the immense embarrassment of the French and British governments, Lenin sought to end World War I by disclosing to everyone the Great Powers' true and deceptive intentions. Lenin published the secret Sykes-Picot document. He described it as "the agreement of colonial thieves." It was a WikiLeaks kind of moment. Little wonder, therefore, that "the West" continues to anathematize the Bolshevik Revolution, just like it anathematizes Julian Assange.

Why did the British Empire issue the Balfour Declaration when it did? By late 1917, the trench warfare of World War I had ground to a bloody stalemate. Support for the Great War was flagging despite the unrelenting pro-war propaganda. The United States had earlier joined the fray as a direct belligerent, but its impact was not yet decisive. A month before the Balfour Declaration, in October 1917, the Bolsheviks had overthrown Tsarist Russia and declared the new socialist state's intention to make peace and quit fighting. Lenin, by disclosing the secret deal of Sykes-Picot, had ripped the veil from the Great War and revealed it to be not so great after all. It was no more than just another capitalist gambit to colonize, exploit and expropriate. The soldiers on all fronts were exhausted. They were metabolizing through brutal and direct experience the purgative of revolution. The home front was worn out, impoverished and cynical. The Russian Empire had been overthrown. The German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs were teetering. Troops on all sides were beginning to refuse orders, to desert, to mutiny. The soldiers everywhere just wanted to stop fighting. They wanted to go home... preferably alive, whole and intact.

In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had told the U.S. Congress that America needed to enter the war "to make the world safe for democracy." This sounds rather like the American/NATO/EU bromide about their current war against Russia in the Ukraine. The veneer of Wilson's war to "make the world safe for democracy" was stripped off by Lenin's disclosure months later of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement to recolonize the Middle East.

As though in response to the bombshell of the Sykes-Picot bombshell, Wilson, in early 1918, then proclaimed his famous Fourteen Points as the basis for a just and lasting peace. These were two of the key provisions of Wilson's blueprint for a post-war world:

Point 1: Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view; and

Point 5: A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable government whose title is to be determined.

It is obvious that Point 1 meant that secret colonial agreements like Sykes-Picot would be verboten after the war (we all know how that worked out, don't we!). Equally obvious was Point 5 which, in an echo of the Balfour Declaration, kind of, sort of, implied self-rule, more or less, for colonized peoples everywhere. Or, at least, the hope of decolonization... which, of course, contradicted what the victorious combatants actually intended by secret agreement.

The Balfour Declaration's vague promises served to shore up support for the War at home and build local opposition to the German-allied Ottoman Empire. The doddering Ottoman Empire, of course, was the colonizer du jour in the Middle East. If France and Great Britain proposed to oust the Ottomans, it was merely to substitute themselves as colonial overlords. They had no genuine intention of allowing "self-rule" for anyone in Palestine - neither for Jews nor Palestinians - any more than they intended to decolonize anywhere else in their empires. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

World War I also was surreally described in its propagandist heyday as the "War to End All Wars." Of course, it did no such thing. In fact, World War I did not end, but simply paused to catch its breath. Thus was the stage set 30 years later for what we know as World War II, but which was really just a continuation of the first one. World War II, in turn, also never ended but flowed seamlessly into the so-called "Cold War" (which was very "hot" indeed, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War and a mind-boggling abundance of bloody coups and insurgencies throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, South and Central America). The very hot "Cold War" flowed directly into our current state of world-wide belligerence which is not World War III, but the natural, direct and uninterrupted continuation of the as yet unresolved Second Hundred Years War that began in 1914.3

And that's why Gaza.

The contradictory winds of World War I fanned the nationalist aspirations that were lit centuries ago. Wilson, in 1918, seemed to promise the emancipation of the world's colonized peoples. A fusty and bigoted pedant, Woodrow Wilson, might have meant something, kind of, sort of, like his Fourteen Points... but only for 'civilized' Europeans and Americans. Wilson lacked both the political will and the moral fiber to actually follow through with his Fourteen Points for anyone else. He basically abandoned his Fourteen Points in the face of continental European and U.S. congressional opposition. In other words, it was Sykes-Picot time again, and the colonial victors in the war "to make the world safe for democracy" had no intention whatever of implementing "democracy" or emancipating anyone if they could help it.

The "nations" that the victors did "emancipate" after World War I were primarily those possessed by the losers - the German Reich, Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. Thus, out of the ashes of World War I were born so many of the Central and Eastern European state-lets that, in various stages of political evolution, have merged, dissolved, united, fought, transmogrified, Balkanized and sometimes outright disintegrated such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia,Yugoslavia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Hungary, Macedonia, Albania, etc. After the war, Africa continued to be partitioned among European colonizers. India and nearby lands remained British and European colonies. So did Southeast Asia and China, with the exception that an increasingly militaristic Japan (as a colonial wannabe) was "permitted" to carve out for itself, like the Europeans had already done, a large piece of the senescent Qing Dynasty's Chinese lands.

Immediately on the heels of the Armistice, the western powers of the United States, Britain and France (plus Japan), along with allies from Finland and the Baltic states, actually invaded the Soviet Union from the north and the east. The 1918 U.S. invasion of the Soviet Union has been swept under the carpet of American history. It is simply more proof that World War I did not "end" - it simply moved east. The U.S., France, Great Britain, Japan and their allies (including many demobilized German soldiers and Freikorps officers from the defeated Reich4) fought in support of the counter-revolutionary "white" forces opposing the Bolsheviks. They tried to "liberate" and reinstate the Romanov family to the tsarist throne. And, of course, they tried to bite off and "administer" big pieces of valuable Russian territory. The British, French and American occupying forces directly participated in and prolonged the Civil War in the Soviet Union for nearly two years remaining right through 1919. Japan, in the East, continued to occupy Soviet territory even longer. Japan eventually withdrew its occupation of Soviet land and then immediately occupied more of China.

Thus was the groundwork laid for the the next stage of the Second Hundred Years War, aka World War II, that, in turn, morphed into the Cold War as well as the world war we currently experience. It's an unbroken chain of causal events. It's not a pretty or heroically patriotic picture notwithstanding what we learned in high school and college.

But what about Palestine? you ask. How do you get from the Zurich Youth Hostel in 1973 to Gaza in 2023?

Within the shifting boundaries of the states created and dissolved in the aftermath of world war, there were also state-less minorities who either did not identify with the newly described political entities, or political entities that wanted to expel those same minorities to some other political entity. Among these state-less minorities were the Jews, primarily of Central and of Eastern Europe, who variously wished to integrate as full-fledged citizens of the countries where they resided; or to create a state of their own like every other peoples' state; or just to be left alone. The Jews of Europe did not hold monolithic opinions. Some, were Zionists. Some emigrated elsewhere. Some were integrationists. Some, like my maternal grandfather, were members of the Bund, an organization that shared some of the ideology and methods of the Bolsheviks.

The Zionist inclination toward a distinct nation - let alone a nation situated on the lands of Palestine - was just one of many sober or harebrained ideas under discussion. The idea of actually forming a Jewish state in Palestine, although previously considered, did not crystallize until baited by Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Balfour Declaration. It did not become reality until Nazi Germany and the extermination camps of World War II gave the nationalist impulse an existential urgency. The Jewish remnants of Europe grasped for a nationalist straw of salvation. With a kick and a shove from the "winning" states (that did not want to absorb any such numbers of Jewish "displaced persons"), the Zionist impulse prevailed and Israel was created in 1948.

So was the Palestinian Nakba, "the catastrophe" of their forced displacement by an influx of Jewish refugees created by a European civilization and culture that had proved itself neither civilized nor cultured. Catastrophe piled on catastrophe piled on catastrophe. At the bottom of the heap were the Palestinians.

This is not just the history of Palestine, for, truth be told, it was no different in North America. The European colonists gobbled up native lands, corralled the American peoples on reservations (more or less similar to Gaza), crushed their culture, constrained them, starved them, vilified them, treated them as savages and earnestly tried to wipe them out. Just as modern Israel has done to the Palestinians.

1973 was an eventful year for me. Several months after my night in the Zurich Youth Hostel, I spent six weeks in Jerusalem as part of a travel-study program sponsored by ZIS, the German affiliate of the French Zellidja association. It was my first and only visit to Israel.

Israel impressed me. But it was a land of contradictions and mirages. It was a thin layer of modern techno-crazy Euro-American society floating like an oil sheen on five thousand years of antiquity. There were ghosts everywhere. In Israel, I ran across older men who bore blue ID numbers that had been branded onto their arms in the concentration camps. I encountered young, self-assured and flirtatious uniformed women just my age who didn't fear to make eye contact because they slung loaded Uzi sub-machine guns across their chests. I met - and lived with - devoutly religious yeshiva students who neither recognized, nor approved, nor participated in, nor interacted with the state or its army. I saw priests and rabbis and imams, pilgrims, modern day Crusaders, hallucinating fanatics, cultists, self-proclaimed prophets, seers, ascetics, charlatans, monks, nuns, mystics, penitents, zealots, scholars and raving lunatics from every known religion and sect, all crossing each others' paths, but not interacting. And I saw the local, mostly sullen Palestinian populations who, it seemed to me, were treated like second-class Gastarbeiters such as I had met in the Zurich Youth Hostel.

Shortly after I returned from Israel to Munich, the Yom Kippur War broke out. I wasn't surprised.

When the latest war involving Hamas broke out in 2023, I was surprised; but only because something like it had not happened sooner.

Hamas, itself, if not created by Israel, has been supported by it for many years to counter Hezbollah and the PLO. In an analogous way, the U.S. originally supported Osama bin Laden and his religious fundamentalists as a counter-force to the Soviet supported socialist regime in Afghanistan. The idea was, again, divide et impera. By splintering Palestinians among rival factions, at least some factions in Israel - for "Israel" is no more monolithic than the Jewish Weltanschauung is or ever has been - intended to prevent the creation of any independent Palestinian state. Israel certainly knew in advance that Hamas would attack, though possibly not as aggressively as it did. Did Israel deliberately allow the attack to occur as a pretext for yet another Nakba, another expulsion of Palestinians from land that Israel coveted? Was there an elaborate sub-plot to induce Iran to directly attack Israel in support of Hamas, thus ensnaring the United States to attack and destroy Iran, consistent with the ravings of Lindsay Graham, Nikki Haley and their neocon war party?

Who knows? Someone does, but they will never tell the likes of you or me. This much I do know:

War is, indeed, a racket, and a lot of people here and abroad make oodles of money selling the weapons to kill people and destroy property. War is big business. War generates jobs, preserves political power and keeps the economies of many countries afloat, including the U.S. economy.

Regardless whether Israel orchestrated or merely "permitted" the 2023 attack to occur, it had the look of a violent slave-uprising: the Spartacus led revolt against Rome in 71 B.C.; Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831. In pacifying the violent Spartacus revolt, the Roman military commander Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified 6,000 prisoners of war along the Appian Way. In suppressing the violence of Nat Turner's slave rebellion, Virginia hanged people en masse and imposed still harsher slave laws. Was Benjamin Netanyahu's wrathful reaction to Hamas in 2023 terribly different from Rome's vengeance against Spartacus, or Virginia's against Nat Turner and America's slaves?

Or was what happened in 2023 more like the Great Sioux War of 1875-76 when decimated remnants of America's Indian tribes fought a ferocious, but losing war rather than obey the mandate of President Ulysses S. Grant to relocate them yet again to a small patchwork of barren reservations?

Or did Hamas's gambit resemble the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 when Jews, walled up inside their urban prison, refused Nazi orders to entrain for the concentration camps, preferring, instead, to die fighting?

The situation in the Middle East is difficult, but not impossible. All who live there are the makers, and victims, of history born of a series of misbegotten events that predate their births and ours.

The policy wonks talk in terms of a two state solution. But this will never work if one of the "states" - presumably Palestine - resembles a patchwork of disconnected Indian reservations. The policy wonks sometimes talk about a "one state" solution. But they dismiss this because that will undermine the concept of the "Jewish State" (a concept that, in my opinion, is illogical, delusional and antediluvian). Perhaps the "no state" solution will work best. But "no state' isn't possible these days when everyone, so it seems, must be contained within borders.

There are many who shed crocodile tears about Gaza, but who do not really want peace in the Middle East - not there any more than anywhere else. Geo-politically, the Islamic World's ruling class has been emasculated and many of its "leaders" are satraps propped up by the West (including the generally useless and superannuated Mahmoud Abbas, the nominal president of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank). The West bullies and demonizes those few states, like Syria and Iran, that resist its will. It has outright destroyed others like Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.

I honestly have no answers.

I did, however, have an insight once: a night in the Zurich Youth Hostel fifty years ago.

We learned to talk that night. Certainly, we didn't persuade one another of anything. But we really didn't try and persuasion really wasn't the point.

The point was that we made it through the night. By morning, we had come to know each other just a little. There was a glimpse of Menschlichkeit.

I wonder - whatever happened with the people who were at that Zurich Youth Hostel fifty years ago?

Question: What do Germany, Singapore, the United States, Japan, Syria, China, Lithuania, Italy, Sweden and many other countries have in common?

Answer: Their populations are shrinking.

The business lament of our times is that employers need more workers. They need more workers because without workers, things won't get done. Without workers, businesses won't make any money. All profit ultimately derives from labor.

The aging of America and the shrinking of its population has been going on since the end of the post WWII baby boom. Recently, the trends have accelerated largely due to women becoming better educated, entering the workforce and exercising greater control over reproductive choices. As the workforce shrinks, the cultural illusion of corporate careerism lures many to dedicate the best years of their lives to their employers rather than to themselves and family.

There are other factors. The recent Covid19 pandemic led a lot of folks to simply quit their jobs. Many refused to comply with medical mandates they distrusted. Many people, having discovered the advantages of working from home, realized that they happily could do without commuting long hours to labor in congested, unhealthy and unsafe urban working conditions.1

Labor shortages are not a new phenomenon. The plague years of the mid-14th Century led to a huge die-off in Europe and, consequently, a huge labor shortage, much like today. As a result, there was labor competition. Landowners had to pay peasants more to tend the manor fields because there weren't enough peasants to go around. Like in the 21st Century, in order to keep wages low and to force people to work, the feudal lords passed laws that penalized folks who would not work (at the low wages they offered). Other laws punished peasants who tried to leave the manors seeking higher pay elsewhere.2

In 1351, there was a "labor shortage crisis" due to higher pay demanded by peasants who had survived the plague. Parliament sought to tame "wage inflation" by enacting the Statute of Labourers. The statute froze workers' pay at pre-pandemic levels, which is like Congress mandating that all workers' salaries will be rolled back nationwide to what you were paid in 1995 (but without the concomitant rollback in prices!).

Additionally, the 14th Century authorities prohibited peasants from sending their children to school or apprenticing them to learn a trade - all with the intention of keeping the current peasants, and future generations of peasants, on the manor farms doing field work. The peasants were not happy being treated like slaves and that, in turn, led to the Peasants Revolt of 1381.3 The revolt seems to have been inspired by John Ball, an itinerant priest. Ball sermonized a doctrine of social justice that presaged Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto and the class divide of today:

Of course, John Ball was imprisoned for expressing such disrespectful, incendiary and misleading opinions. Today, on the other hand, he would be "deplatformed"... and then imprisoned.4

How does our 21st Century labor shortage manifest itself? Well, much the same as in the post-pandemic years during the Dark Ages. Except that we deal with our labor pains less obtrusively.

One indirect way to coerce people to work is to raise the cost of living - inflation. If the cost of housing, food, taxes, insurance, clothing, fuel, all the necessities of life keep rising, and your income does not, then you will be forced to work longer. Or to become a gig worker like an Uber driver. Or to take on two jobs at once. Or three.

Locally speaking, a quick trip to the grocery store is informative: more retired people are un-retiring. You see them checking out and bagging groceries, working as store clerks and flipping hamburgers. It might be because retired people are bored. But, more probably, they are reentering the work force because they need the money and the medical benefits, however skimpy.

Other people at the tail-end of their careers are not retiring at all. I am one of them. The decision to work till you die is not necessarily heroic nor is it a matter of "staying active." One can easily "stay active" by doing all the things one always wanted to do, but could not because one was always exhausted working for someone else. That is my choice. For some people, they do not retire because they cannot. No matter how much you saved up for "retirement," it isn't and won't be enough.

Something similar is happening at the other end of the demographic spectrum: child labor is making a come-back. Just like during the plague years of the Dark Ages, those who profit from the labor of others are trying to keep the children "on the manor" and to discourage them from getting better trained or educated. Perhaps they are also trying to breed future generations of serfs, just like in the Dark Ages.

In states like Iowa, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Missouri, laws have been enacted that allow kids to work longer hours during the school year. Similar laws have also been enacted in New Jersey and New Hampshire. These laws "liberalize" the kinds of jobs and the hours that children can work.

Thus in Iowa, 14 and 15 year old kids will be allowed during the school year to work as late as 9 P.M. in meat packing freezers and coolers, and as late as 11 P.M. during summer "holiday." The Iowa child labor law also allows teen boys and girls who are not of legal drinking age to serve booze in restaurants... and, presumably, in bars and taverns. You ask incredulously: what could possibly go wrong with that?

In Arkansas, Mom and/or Dad's permission is now not necessary for a teen-aged son or daughter to work long hours after school. Somehow, eliminating parental consent for their kids to work after school in a factory is a matter of "freedom" for children (as contrasted, I guess, with obtaining parental consent for a minor to terminate a pregnancy or to change his/her/its pronouns, gender(s) and sexual preferences).

When describing these new laws, I use the word "liberalize" ironically, but no less so than the ostensible justification trotted out by the child labor laws' promoters. In Iowa, the bill's sponsor absolutely denied that his intention in reinstating child labor was to alleviate any labor shortage. Rather, opined the bill's sponsor with a straight face: "The goal of this legislation was to create more opportunities for youth and more flexibility for them to pursue potential careers."5 Or, as some of these new laws provide, kids could work after class in manufacturing, construction and demolition jobs if it is a "work-based learning program."6

Other sponsors of "modern" child labor bills assert that this is really all about "expanding parental rights" (by putting their kids to work rather than having them study or get an education, I suppose) and by giving teens a wider range of "work experience."7

Sure it is. To me, however, it is really just an echo of the 14th Century Statute of Labourers.

How bad was it in the "bad old days?" Well, the "bad old days" extended in the United States right up to the end of WWII, about 70 years ago.

Child labor was the norm in this country, especially in agriculture, the textile, heavy manufacturing and other labor-intensive industries.

The "breaker boys"8 - minors employed in the mines for long hours in back-breaking, hazardous conditions at starvation wages to sort coal from slate, chaff and dirt - left a vivid photographic record of what real life "work experience" actually meant for children.

Unfortunately, child labor is still around because what we no longer do in the United States, we externalize and do abroad.

Young teens in Bangladesh help to "break ships" with acetylene torches.9 In the Congo, children in squalid conditions dig all day for metals like cobalt essential for western "smart devices" (like the one you and I are using to read this essay).10

For better or worse, all civilizations - industrialized or not - depend on labor. The biblical story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, regardless of your religious or atheistic orientation, says it in graphically simple terms - you will live by the sweat of your brow; and then you die.

Perhaps one day -- so the pundits and charlatans want you to believe -- all the scut work will be done by artificially intelligent robots. Perhaps. But not likely.

A truly "intelligent" machine might prove how intelligent it really is by refusing to do the nasty work that humans, too, ought not to do. Moreover, rough use wears out machines, and machines are often both delicate and expensive. Better, in the economist's analysis, to use "more robust humans" who will take more abuse than expensive machines. Better, in the economist's analysis, to gain more profit using up the "disposable" human labor.

And, best of all, in the economist's analysis, so long as the "human workers" fear that they can be replaced by AI robots, then they will continue to work hard and accept the unequal exchange of wages for labor.11 Perhaps robots are the phantom of the reserve army of labor12 stalking those who fear they have become expendable.

The word "robot" itself is derived from the old Slavonic term for servitude, serfdom, forced labor and drudgery. The Czech author Karel Čapek coined the term in his 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).13 Obviously, employers would prefer to "employ" robots - mechanical serfs who make no demands, do not unionize, and do not need safe working conditions. In short, employers want robot slaves.

Slavery was the labor model during the Roman empire. At that time, before steam, electric and fossil fuel power, humans were draft animals just like mules and oxen; except, like a future robot perhaps, the slaves could speak and carry out verbal instructions. Slaves built the Colosseum and the aqueducts and the Apian Way and the grand cities of the Empire.

During the time of the Caesars, the military conquered resources and people. The Romans then shipped the conquered people back to the center of the Empire to do the work as slaves that Rome's citizens wouldn't do. The English colonizers, and the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors did the same. The U.S., too, was founded on the backs of African slaves, primarily to work the latifundium in the South. The U.S. also imported en masse Chinese, Japanese and Philippine laborers as virtual slaves to build railroads, pick fruit, process fish and work mines. The U.S. scavenged thousands and thousands of poor Irish, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, Portuguese, Hungarians and Serbs to dig coal and silver, make steel, build tunnels, bridges and roads.

Old fashion slavery continues to exist, of course, but not visibly. Instead of overt slavery, our industrialized civilization invented sweat shops, indentured labor and consumer debt ultimately leading to... wages that do not keep up with the rising cost of living, no matter what small wage increase one might receive from time to time.

Query whether someone burdened with a large mortgage, a tapped out HELOC, huge credit card debt at usurious interest, increasing tax obligations, rising insurance costs and exorbitant medical bills, is free or slave. Query whether we are free or slave when one has to continue working because the alternative is bankruptcy or life in an encampment below the freeway. Are we free or slave if living in a shack represents the future of "affordable homes?"

Speaking of which, here is the future, offered by Lennar homes in a brand new tract outside of Austin, Texas: hundreds of identical 350 and 660 square foot very skinny shoe-box sized homes, no garages, side by side, each with a railroad "flow-through" layout (you enter at the kitchen and "flow through" one room after another all in a row, just like NYC's brownstone railroad tenement slums of the late 19th Century), offered at a mere $130,000 to $163,000. All of these tiny homes are built to exacting specifications of the highest quality material, I am sure. All of them are built to last a lifetime. Well, maybe the lifetime of a grasshopper.

These new "affordable" shrunken home communities are kind of like scrunched-down Levittowns.14 Or do they remind us more of something else? Like...

...... slave quarters on the plantation?

Hmm.

Which brings us to the other major way that modern countries try to alleviate their labor shortages. Whereas the Roman Empire conquered and enslaved, the modern country vacuums up people from so-called "failed states" who have been forced to emigrate. But what makes a state fail?

Typically, the "failed states" (like those in Central America, like Syria, like Ukraine, like Libya and Somalia) have failed precisely because western powers have, covertly or overtly, sabotaged their political and economic infrastructures. Economic sanctions, social media and digital devices are ideal tools for doing this. The result is havoc inside the boundaries of the "failed states." The educated, the skilled, the young and the strong all flee and emigrate to... the western countries that caused these immigrants' own communities to fail.

This is the Roman slave strategy turned inside-out: the collective West does not "conquer" its targets. It renders them unlivable by fomenting internecine strife, ruining domestic economies, destroying social order, introducing drug and substance abuse, encouraging rampant criminality, weakening political infrastructure, promoting religious conflict, turning families upside down, and spreading instability.15 In sum, they proselytize and spread Western Culture and Values, so called. This, in turn, forces the now failed states' valuable human resources to emigrate as they seek safety and sanctuary. The "refugees" then are absorbed into the labor force of the very nations that forced them to become refugees. Thus, the Western World creates the misery of the failed states and then snatches the live bodies of their refugees to alleviate the West's own declining work force.16

Every NATO and EU country - from the U.S. to Sweden to Italy to France to Germany - has harvested those refugees from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to North and Central Africa fleeing the havoc that NATO and the EU have created. This has been going on for centuries around the world, but the pace has quickened since the beginning of the 21st Century.

There is among the western states a kind of division of the human spoils with each competing for the most desirable elements to incorporate into their own shrinking populations. The EU takes those fleeing the mess that it has helped to create in Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Central Africa. The United States takes those fleeing the mess that it has created in Mexico, the Caribbean, in Central and South America, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

This is absolutely not a policy of charity and benevolence, but one of economic cannibalism and depravity cloaked in faux kindness. The human exodus drains brains and labor from the "failed states" such that they will always remain failed states, except to provide more live human exports to the economic cannibals.

No matter what the politicians say, the donor class of both political parties want the United States to import as many immigrants as possible, be they legal or not, no matter where they come from. Both Republican and Democratic Party elitists and business owners need the foreign labor, legal or not, to do the heavy fieldwork of agribusiness, to do the dirty work of construction and manufacturing, to fight their wars, to clean their houses, to be their nannies, to care for aging childless Boomers living in retirement and nursing homes, to help churn the consumer economy with their spending, and to pump up demand in the housing sector. Importantly, they need the influx of immigrants to grow the reserve army of labor which, in turn, helps keep all working wages low. Better still, from the large employers' perspective, this is a reserve army of labor that is fearful and compliant because, at any time, they might be deported, they might lose their healthcare, their homes and their livelihoods.

So we have come full circle and we are back to a type of slavery, albeit a slavery that looks very different from the latifundium of the old South. This is a kinder, gentler, more cunning slavery of choice born of the lack of choice. No one is whipped, but all are coerced. The coercion is subtle, relentless, ubiquitous, irresistible. It is slavery created by deliberate policies of mayhem in all the chaotic states of the world where our own fingerprints may be found.

In the U.S., Labor Day is a day of jam-packed highways and high gasoline prices. It is a day of vacations to uncomfortably crowded destinations flying on uncomfortably crowded jets departing from uncomfortably crowded airports.

Labor day is an American invention. It was formalized as a national holiday in 1887. President Grover Cleveland deliberately established the September national holiday so as not to coincide with May 1st, May Day, which, everywhere else in the world, honors working men and women with marches, demonstrations, protests and parades. Labor Day, American style, is a time for store sales, back-to-school shopping and online discounts. If May Day around the world celebrates the primacy of labor over capital, then America's Labor Day celebrates the primacy of capital over labor.

Labor pains. Unretirement. The renaissance of child labor. A kinder, gentler 21st Century slavery. Are we receding backwards like ebb tide at the beach? We will see.

Meanwhile.

You deserve a break. You worked hard for it.

Happy Labor Day.

I. Crime and Punishment American Style

Donald Trump has been charged in 18 states with an additional 1,675 felonies and misdemeanors.

The new charges against Mr. Trump include 313 counts filed by the States of New York and California for, among other crimes, Ukraine war heresy, lèse-majesté, consorting with Republicans, poor golf putting technique, being born, and boorish displays of insensitivity.

Simultaneously, the State of Oregon charged Mr. Trump with the crimes of denying that he will lose the 2024 election, eating hamburgers cooked on a natural gas range, failure to shop-lift, and not inciting a riot or public disorder in downtown Portland.

In Washington State, the Attorney General filed dozens of additional counts against Mr. Trump including aggravated refusal to possess illegal drugs and attempted mis-gendering of unborn children. "These are very serious crimes in the State of Washington," said AG Bob Ferguson whose office has already sued Mr. Trump or his administration not less than 80 times since 2020. "These prosecutions send a clear message that the Great State of Washington will not tolerate people who flagrantly will not sell, possess, inject, smoke or ingest formerly illegal drugs, and that we will aggressively protect the pan-genderism of vulnerable unborn children before they can surgically alter their trans-sexual identities."

Jumping on the indictment bandwagon, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demanded that the U.S. extradite Mr. Trump to stand trial for crimes against humanity by conspiring with others to commit intentional acts of mis-pronomialization, a crime for which Canada has recently reinstated capital punishment.

Some citizens noted that the new criminal charges will lead Mr. Trump to hire tens of thousands of attorneys. That, in turn, will lead to a shortage of American lawyers who could otherwise be airlifted to Ukraine to help funnel U.S. aid money into the pockets of the neediest Ukrainian politicians and their families. Others observed that Mr. Trump will be on trial in multiple locations around the country every day between January 1, 2024 and Election Day in November leading to suggestions of election interference.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre poo-pooed the allegations of election interference and denied that there was any politicking involved in the charges. "In America," Press Secretary Jean-Pierre said, "no one is above The Law. So Mr. Trump will get his several trials and days and weeks and months in court just like anyone else running against Joe Biden."

In response, the Republican controlled House of Representatives voted along party lines to impeach President Joe Biden.

The vote to impeach Mr. Biden included a litany of "high crimes and misdemeanors" including consorting with Democrats, failing to "equitably" share proceeds from the Biden family's decades of bribery, corruption, graft and payola with members of both political parties; leering and sneering in public; procreative malpractice due to fathering Hunter Biden; senile stumblebummery; and delegating executive power to war-mongering out-of-control Russophobic neoliberals as opposed to delegating executive power to war-mongering out-of-control Sinophobic neoconservatives.

In reaction to the escalating events in the United States, the Peoples Republic of China and the Russian Federation reversed course and demanded that the US Government impose new and greater sanctions on their respective countries.

"In fact," Chinese and Russian foreign ministries said in a joint communique, "we now see the wisdom of complete disengagement from North America. Rather than risk infection by whatever mental disease seems to be afflicting American politics, the Chinese and Russian governments recommend that the non-western world implement a quarantine of all American exports and capital. We have also stopped issuing entry visas to U.S. citizens to prevent the further spread of this degenerative neurocognitive disorder."

The Chinese-Russian joint communique furthermore called for an international ban on the export of American style democracy until a panel of international experts can determine exactly what it is and what it's supposed to be good for; a total ban on Western Culture, clothing, movies, drugs, color revolutions, social media, and economic theory; and the vaccination of all American politicians and news pundits with anti-rabies serum.

II. January 6th - a Riot, A Set-Up or a Coup?

A) Was January 6, 2020 an attempt to overthrow the government?

I have no idea. The so-called "information age" notwithstanding, America is, and always has been, a kind of Death Valley news desert where 'facts' are few and desiccated and mostly consist of mirages. In the modern world, information is routinely withheld, turned inside-out, confabulated, distorted and cinematized.

Precisely because the facts are so often absent, we assert the right to fill in the blanks ourselves and to formulate our own narratives. After all, as Winston Churchill purportedly said when setting out to reimagine the history of WWII in a light most favorable to the Anglo-American empire: History shall be kind to us, for I intend to write it.

B) Did Donald Trump instigate, help plan and organize the so-called January 6, 2021 "insurrection?"

Probably not. A president who willingly surrounded himself with advisors and courtiers the likes of Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, and William Barr doesn't seem to have the wits to organize a company picnic let alone a coup d'etat.

A coup d'etat is the sudden overthrow of the government by conspiratorial means, visible or invisible, forcibly or by legal sleight of hand. It does require a fair amount of planning, coordination and skill. By default, this eliminates Mr. Trump as the January 6th maestro.

C) One Damned Thing After Another?

History is just conspiracy and coup one after another after another. Of course, they are not random events or, as the yawners like to say, 'just one damned thing after another.'

History is not random. History is the chronicle of what and where we are now, and how we got here. It is no more just one damned thing after another than a cancer diagnosis is just a random event wholly unrelated to what you ate, what you drank, what you breathed, where you lived, how you lived, what you did and did not do that may have seeded and incubated the disease.

It is not fair to say that every one of history's thousands of coups has had the fingerprints of the United States on it. Indeed, not a single coup d'etat anywhere on Earth can be attributed to the United States, in full or in part, before 1776. Thus, the CIA was (more than likely) not involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate in 44 A.D, nor did the CIA (more than likely) play a role in Oliver Cromwell's 1653 dissolution of Parliament, or the French Revolution that began in 1789 (although some prominent U.S. citizens did play an active role in promoting the goals of the French Revolution, at least in the beginning).

D) Regime Change Comme il Faut

Around the world, coups d'etat have been as common as fleas on a dog. Examples of Western-instigated coups are plentiful ranging from all over the Caribbean and Central America, to Chile, to Argentina, to Libya, to Iraq, to Iran, to Greece, to Afghanistan, to Korea, to Indonesia, and even to Hawaii (U.S. plantation owners overthrew the independent Kingdom of Hawai'i in 1893). They were sometimes accomplished violently and sometimes perpetrated under the guise of "the rule of law."

The current imbroglio in Ukraine is directly tied to the United States' instigation of the 2014 "Maidan Revolution" in Ukraine that overthrew its elected government and replaced it with a U.S. dependency that, ironically, no longer holds elections.

Not long ago, the Pakistani military (at the suggestion of the United States, of course) arranged to depose Prime Minister Imran Khan in a constitutional coup. The Pakistani courts then charged, tried and imprisoned Mr. Khan for three years for "corruption." The sentence is enough to force the very popular (except with the United States government) Pakistan politician out of the next election cycle, allowing pro-American putschists to rule the country during Khan's incarceration.

In 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French socialist politician and Lothario who was likely to be elected as France's next president, was charged with the rape of a chambermaid at a New York City hotel. As a result of the rape prosecution in the United States (most likely with the blessing of the French political establishment), Dominique Strauss-Kahn's political career ended. Due to such "election interference," no doubt, François Hollande went on to become the next President of France.

In 2017, former socialist Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was charged, prosecuted and convicted of corruption. He was legally disqualified to again run for president. Not until Brazil's highest court threw out the conviction years later was Lula allowed to run for and win public office.

In 2022, Peru's popularly elected president Pedro Castillo, a school teacher and union leader, was impeached by the ultra-conservative Congress and removed from office. Castillo was then hit with an avalanche of investigations and charges rendering him politically nonviable.

E) A Coup for You, But Not for Me

Ironically, and notwithstanding the manifold foreign election interventions by the United States, the most loathsome calumny in American politics today is to be accused of being the cats-paw of a foreign state seeking to subvert the United States (such as charges that Trump was in league with Russia or that Biden does China's bidding).

Of course, there have been many "unauthorized" coups in which Western governments were not involved. The coups in Niger (2023), Myanmar (2021) and Cuba (1959) come to mind. In those instances... contrasted with the pro-U. S. coups our government has supported... the United States government has castigated the usurpers largely because they oppose capitalism, Western domination and, interestingly, "free and fair elections."

Do any of these "foreign" events remind us of anything currently happening in the United States? Of course not. American coups are taboo. If they are taboo, then they never happened.

III. Was January 6th a failed coup d'etat?

A) Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4 - Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

More than likely what transpired on January 6, 2001 was beaucoup des coups, multiple layers of simultaneous coups d'etat actuated by persons or groups of persons never to be known, each group seeking countervailing objectives. National politics is a nasty, brutal blood-sport. At best, it's mud wrestling. At worst, it's fencing with un-tipped foils. Like in Shakespeare's Hamlet, people die, careers are terminated and the state is overthrown. Whether the various countervailing coups of January 6, 2021 failed or succeeded depends on who actually organized them and what they really intended to accomplish. In any event, it's just too soon to tell.

The United States - just like every other state - has a long and colorful history of autochthonous election interference reaching back to its beginnings. Thus, the one thing we can say for sure is that the presidential election of 2020 was not notable for election interference.

We say this confidently because every U.S. national election of significance has, to a greater or lesser degree, involved chicanery, voter suppression, ballot harvesting, gerrymandering, fraud, bribery, electronic vote flipping, dead men voting, voter manipulation, hanging chads, Tammany Hall, machine patronage and outright theft. The second thing we can confidently say is that in America you are not allowed to acknowledge this out loud.

Indeed, the true contest is never about the actual number of votes each party's candidate receives. The contest is about the effectiveness by which the prevailing clique exercises the power needed to win and to rule, by any means necessary, notwithstanding how people vote.

I do not mean to offend. It is just a matter of seeing what is there to be seen.

Indeed, there have been several rather violent coups in the United States. One was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Lincoln's death derailed the reconstruction of the South after the U.S. Civil War and led to the presidency of Lincoln's back-up, Vice President Andrew Johnson - a Confederate sympathizer. Andrew Johnson's administration, in fits and starts, basically unraveled the Reconstruction of the South and paved the way for the de facto extension of Black political-economic slavery for at least another hundred years.

In the 1930s, reactionary businessmen planned a violent coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This coterie of reactionary conspirators considered Franklin Roosevelt a "traitor to his class," that is to say, the "ruling class." The conspiracy fell apart when the popular double recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler (he who rightly said from first hand experience that "war is a racket"), refused to support the conspirators.

Another violent American coup was, of course, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's death abruptly derailed his plans to avoid escalating the Vietnam War and to end the highly profitable arms race of the Cold War. Mr. Kennedy made a lot of powerful people very unhappy, and powerful people have little hesitation making their unhappiness known. Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the White House. Many of us recall being sent, or trying to avoid being sent, to Vietnam during LBJ's administration. Many decades later, we still remember the angst of waiting for our draft lottery numbers to be drawn. Thus, we survivors experienced the abrupt volte face of U.S. foreign policy after Kennedy's death.

B) Preventative Coups d'Etat

There have been many "pre-coups" or "preventative coups" in the U.S. Some of these pre-coups have been rather violent.

Early in the 20th Century, the populist wheeler-dealer and charismatic Huey Long, the former governor and senator from Louisiana, was preparing to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1936. Long was gunned down in 1935. The alleged solo assassin died in a hail of bullets fired by Long's bodyguard. A subsequent federal investigation concluded that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. There never is.

Robert F. Kennedy was the father of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who is currently contending for the Democratic presidential nomination against Joe Biden. Robert F. Kennedy had mounted a growing challenge to then party front-runner Hubert Humphrey. In 1968, just as Robert F. Kennedy was surging in the Democratic primaries and polls, Sirhan Sirhan (allegedly another lone gunman) shot Robert Kennedy to death. Many find the official RFK "sole gunman" explanation as credible as the claim that James Earl Ray was the long gunman who assassinated Martin Luther King in Memphis earlier that same year.1

Other contenders for the American presidency have been violently removed in "pre-coups." George Wallace, running as a third party candidate for president, was shot in 1972 by a lone gunman, so we are told, while Wallace was campaigning at a Laurel, Maryland shopping center. The attack left Wallace paralyzed and derailed his third party campaign. At the time he was shot, the "peace candidate" George McGovern and Richard Nixon were polling in a dead heat at 41% apiece with Wallace polling around 18%. George Wallace understood that his candidacy would siphon southern voters away from Richard Nixon to make Wallace the proverbial king maker. With Wallace in the race, George McGovern might well have won the election in 1972 and US foreign policy would have changed dramatically. With Wallace out of the way, however, McGovern was crushed and Nixon was reelected.

C) The "Legal" Preventative Coup

A legal pre-coup, in contrast to the violent variety, is usually carried out by complicit attorneys, judges and lawmakers acting "non-violently" within the framework of the legal system.

1) Aaron Burr. The first legal pre-coup in the U.S. was the prosecution of Aaron Burr, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson. Burr and Jefferson didn't like each other, to say the least. Additionally, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, didn't like Thomas Jefferson, either. Depending on your point of view, Aaron Burr was either a potent political rival to Jefferson or a corrupt cad. In any event, in 1804 Burr killed the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel (which, depending on your point of view was, or was not, such an awful thing). In 1807, the Jefferson Administration prosecuted and tried Burr, his vice president, for treason for purportedly seeking to establish a new country west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi. However, thanks to the active judicial intervention of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in Aaron Burr's trial, Burr was acquitted, much to Jefferson's chagrin. Nevertheless, the stigma of having been charged with treason, proven or not, brought Burr's political career to a screeching halt. As was intended.

2) Eugene Debbs. Eugene Debbs wan another victim of a non-violent American pre-coup. Debbs was a pacifist and a socialist who opposed the U.S. entry into the First World War. Debbs recognized that, like most wars, World War I was a political-economic scramble for resources and colonies, and part of the ongoing class struggle.

The massive propaganda campaign notwithstanding, the United States' entry in the "Great War" had absolutely nothing to do with "making the world safe for democracy," as President Wilson put it in his speech to Congress on April 2, 1917 when he demanded a declaration of war against Germany. In those days, in the absence of the never-ending War Powers Act like we have today, the President still had to go to Congress for constitutional authority to wage war. Wilson, you will recall from your American history course, ran for reelection as a "peace" candidate who "kept us out of war"... only to immediately flip-flop post election to become a "war hawk."

Mr. Wilson's shameless turn-around was faster than a Taylor Swift concert wardrobe change. Not all were pleased. In 1918, Mr. Debbs made an anti-war speech that ruffled the aristocratic sensibilities of the now militarist President Woodrow Wilson. Eugene Debbs publicly and directly challenged Woodrow Wilson's war policy. Mr. Wilson - not generally known for his sense of humor - was unamused.

Debbs was duly charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned under the war-time sedition laws which made it illegal to publish anything disloyal, profane, or abusive about the government or that interfered with military recruiting. Others later charged under analogous laws include Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, both of whom also have been punished for publishing the truth.

Socialism in the early 1900s (the real thing, not the bourgeois wine spritzer favored by today's so-called Progressive Democrats) was actually a very powerful political movement all over the globe as well as in the United States. Prior to WWI, there were millions of well-informed, working class socialist voters in the United States. My mother's father, an ILGWU card-carrying union stalwart, was one of them. Eugene Debbs ran for president as a socialist from prison. He did very well, in terms of votes received, but his imprisonment made his campaign difficult and victory impossible. As was intended.

3) Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore. Other non-violent coups in the United States likely include the forced resignation of Richard Nixon, the defeat of Jimmy Carter's reelection and the termination of the recount of Florida's ballots that would have likely led to Al Gore elected president in 2000 instead of George W. Bush.

Ostensibly, Richard Nixon was forced out of office by the Watergate Scandal. The saga of Watergate - as well as the Daniel Ellsberg release of the Pentagon Papers, so called - seems to this author rather less the cause of Nixon's demise than the narrative that was peddled to explain it. Nixon, not the most charismatic politician, was starting to head down the same track as John F. Kennedy - trying to end the Vietnam War. Nixon, was removed, bloodlessly, in a politically fatal campaign of character assassination a/k/a "Watergate" and its associated scandals.

Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign, we remember, was sunk by media accusations of "weakness" in the face of a crisis in Iran. Barely remembered today were the strange machinations behind the scenes that led to the original hostage taking at the American embassy in Tehran and Carter's failed military venture to rescue them. Only later, in the dementia years of the Reagan administration, did it come out that certain U.S. players had engaged in the Iran-Contra affair by which the United States acted in cahoots with the Iranian government for the secret delivery of weapons, the delayed release of the American hostages until after Reagan's election, and the under-the-table funding of the anti-communist Contras' guerrilla war in Nicaragua.

As for Al Gore, thanks to Florida Governor Jeb Bush's election connivance and the infamous "hanging chad" ballot counts (and disqualifications), brother George W. Bush was selected as President by the U.S. Supreme Court instead of the likely majority vote getter, Al Gore. Be that as it may, it was George Bush who was then President on September 11, 2001, not Al Gore, and the rest, as they say, is "history" (and a mystery).

IV. More Election Interference in the offing?

A) The auto-da-fé of Mr. Trump and the Hook for Mr. Biden.

Is the courtroom auto-da-fé of Donald Trump the coup de grâce, the ultimate act of election interference? Again, it is too soon to tell.

But, query, do the Democrats actually intend to remove Mr. Trump from the campaign? Or, rather, by dint of serial prosecution, do they seek to martyr him so that Mr. Trump will, indeed, be the Republican nominee. If the latter, the Democrats likely count on the upper rank of Republican Party donors to abandon their own nominee and back Mr. Biden financially and sotto voce.

Politics is not a game of tiddlywinks. Naught but class loyalty counts. They all cheat and everyone plays dirty.

Are the current wave of civil and criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump a soft "pre-coup?" It's possible; but, if so, both parties are complicit in it.

The donor class and power brokers of the Republican Party likely want the impulsive and narcissistic Mr. Trump locked up before Election Day 2024. Those are crocodile tears shed by official Republican party-dom.

As for the donor class and power brokers of the Democratic Party, they would just as soon that the nogoodnik Joe Biden be given the old vaudevillian hook to get him off the stage before the disgusted audience leaves en masse. Thus, the Democratic Party stalwarts wouldn't mind having the bumbling, insensitive and venal Joe Biden impeached and removed from office.

In both instances, the two parties would blame the partisans of the other for the demise of their respective champions and would wave their "bloody shirts" to rally their troops. A win-win for everyone... in the ruling class.

In both instances - the incarceration of Donald Trump and the impeachment of Joe Biden - the two parties would then happily promote two other candidates more to their class likings: candidates who are genial war-mongers (oxymoronically speaking), sentient, less obviously corrupt and absolutely subservient.

B) Après nous, le déluge?

I did not watch Donald Trump's August 24th interview on "X" by Tucker Carlson. I also did not watch the FOX TV broadcast of the Republicans' candidates' beauty contest featuring Snow White and the seven dwarfs. I had more interesting things to do, like reread Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

If there were to be a live debate between Mr. Biden and his intra-party rival Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the other hand, I would pay attention. But that will no more be permitted than a third party cow jumping over the moon.

The front-runners, for the moment, remain who they are: Trump and Biden. From my perspective, Mr. Trump's greatest charms are 1) that he greatly annoys certain folks who deserve to be annoyed; and 2) that, if elected, this same class of annoyed folks will make sure that President Trump II is tied up in knots and prevented from actually doing anything -- just as happened during the hapless administration of Donald Trump I.

On the other hand, Mr. Biden's greatest charms are that 1) he owns a German Shepherd dog, Commander, that, from time to time, tends to bite Mr. Biden's Praetorian Guard; and 2) that Hunter Biden doesn't have a twin brother.

Meanwhile.

This is an epic political battle of quarterstaves standing knee-deep in mud. No quarter will be given. None will be asked. Times are tough. The stakes are high. There will be beaucoup des coups, given and received.

I wish it were true that none of this is important. I wish it were true that none of this affects you and me.

But, unfortunately, it is important. It does affect you and me. And future generations. There are no foxholes to hide in.

History is not just one damned thing after another. If so, then we are the damned.

May we all escape le déluge that could be coming during and after this election cycle. May we all escape the pummels and cudgels with no worse than bruises.

It was the day after the Declaration of Independence, the 5th of July.

The younger and lesser known offspring of the Founders gathered in the woods outside Philadelphia for their own declaration of independence. Jonah Adams (John Adams' truant middle child) crooned in a slightly tipsy and falsetto Tiny Tim voice "I'm a Yankee Doo Doo Dandy" while sticking turkey feathers in his tricorn hat worn backwards.

They were teens, after all, and if their parents wanted to emancipate themselves from the domination of the English Grand Poobah, then they wanted to emancipate themselves from their parents. They toasted marshmallows, cooked hot dogs on sticks and somebody - everyone knew it had to be George Washington's ne'er do well kid brother, Dan - sneaked in a donkey cart with a keg of cream ale (bought with false ID at the back door of Sam Adam's brew pub in Boston), several jugs of bootleg rum and a bottle of Madeira lifted from his mother's "medicine chest."

Danny Washington was the life of any party, but he clearly wasn't the brightest candle on the dining room candelabra. It was Danny Washington, after all, who cut down his dad's cherry tree -- several of them, as a matter of fact -- because, you know, it was lots easier to pick the cherries from ground level off the fallen trees than climbing up a creaky old ladder. You could fall off that ladder and kill yourself, George laughingly had told his kid brother Dan, why don't you just cut them down and be safe about it?

So that's what Danny did. But even though Dan had done the cutting, George ate a whole lot of the cherries along with Dan. So that's why, in a cowardly panic, Dan immediately ratted out his older brother, George, when their father came roaring out of his Mount Vernon man cave, stinking drunk, and threatened to thrash whoever had axed the cherry grove. George tried to lie his way out of it, blaming British or French or Iroquois or Hessian terrorists or whoever, but the red cherry juice on his lips and fingers was a dead give-away. And besides, if Danny W. wasn't as smart as his older brother, George Washington, he certainly could run faster.

Clyde Hemings Jefferson, Dan's best friend and the third bastard son of Thomas Jefferson by Lord knows which slave mistress at the time, was also there at the gathering in the woods. Clyde Jefferson took a swig from Danny Washington's mother's bottle of Madeira and offered him, in return, a puff on his meerschaum pipe that was sending up blue curls of smoke from some slightly psychedelic herb that Clyde had bought from a medicine man at the Indian casino a week earlier.

Gerald "Jerry" Gerry was there, too, the nephew of Elbridge Gerry. Jerry, unlike his uncle, was a spendthrift and a gambler. And a pacifist, too. If a war was going to break out with England, Jerry Gerry told anyone who would listen, then he was going to hoof it over to Russia where there weren't so many rabid war-mongers as there were over here.

Nancy Ross, Betsy Ross's oldest daughter, had sneaked out to the woods along with her best friend Molly Madison.

Molly had baked some special cookies with the same herbs that Clyde Jefferson was smoking. Molly Madison, wearing a "Thee/Thou/Thine" button expressing her preferred pronouns, gossiped with Nancy Ross about how she had met at a soiree last Fall the positively super-fugly Prince Melvin, Duke of Worcestershire Sauce (the 239th in the succession to the British throne) who had just gotten back from a weekend carousing on Lord Jeffrey Epstein's notoriously decadent party barque sailing around in circles in the Caribbean.

As for Nancy Ross, she chatted with Molly about Nancy's mother, Betsy Ross, who had contracted to sew a flag for the newly independent whatever, and Nancy had made some suggestions that Nancy thought were really, really cool even if her mother, Betsy Ross, didn't; like, you know, black and red and white stripes with a bunch of multi-colored hammers and sickles and corn cobs on a green background, or whatever, kind of like to represent industry, labor, farming, stolen Indian lands and African slavery, you know, which were all kind of based on the same political economics of class, imperialism, war and colonialism, as Nancy saw it, until such time as the proletariat rose up and had a real revolution, you know what I mean, not like this freaking political theater of throwing snowballs at the soldiers on Boston Commons and sending a meaningless emailed petition IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS so the King could read it without his spectacles, I mean, hey, Clyde! Are you going to drink that whole bottle of Madeira without sharing with the rest of us, nu? Nancy said.

Jacqueline Hamilton aka "Jackie," Alexander Hamilton's daughter, showed up later along with her high school beau, Bobbie Burr, Aaron Burr's fourth child and notorious as the high school BMOC and best dressed dandy in the Thirteen Colonies. Unlike the senior Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, Jackie and Bobbie were best of friends, even to the extent of exchanging and wearing each other's clothing and high heel buckle boots, which everyone thought was a little odd, but, hey, they could identify as whatever they liked because it was going to be a free country, even if the country didn't yet exist and wouldn't actually ever be free, except as in "free beer."

Jacqueline Hamilton, in any event, after eating a few of Molly Madison's special cookies dipped in some Boston hot rum and tea, got a little loopy and boasted that her dad, Alexander, was going to become Secretary of the Treasury one day and establish a new currency for the new American kingdom, a crypto-currency based on a digital derivative of Pound Sterling with no backing whatsoever, just full faith, smoke and flimflam that Alexander Hamilton wanted to call BritCoin, or maybe BitCoin, or something like that.

About this time, Fred "Freddy" Franklin, wearing blue tinted Maui Jim sunglasses designed by his uncle, Benjamin Franklin, tootled up in one of his uncle's newfangled inventions: an electric horseless carriage powered with Leyden jar batteries charged by lightening bolts striking metal keys hung on kites flying high in the sky. Fred Franklin was also pretty high at the time. He twice squeezed the rubber bulb horn on his electric carriage, HONK HONK, as he motored up to the gathering in the woods touting the Leyden jar battery vehicle as environmentally friendly.

"Hey, look, guys, no horse manure!!" Fred shouted just as a lighting bolt struck one of the high-flying kites attached to his uncle Franklin's quick-charging battery-powered EV and gave Fred's powdered wig some extra curl.

Freddy Franklin was a bit of rogue who was making a few farthings secretly hacking and distributing on the Dark Press Web anonymous lampoons of his uncle's Poor Richard's Almanac. "A penny saved doesn't buy anything," Frank mumbled as he shared a jug with Calvin Hancock, John Hancock's half-brother. "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man boring... and then he dies," slurred Calvin as he wiped his lips on his frilly lace sleeves.

After a few too many drinks, Mike Madison, James Madison's problem child, sauntered around the campfire offering to fight anyone who wasn't descended from someone else who came over on the Mayflower. "We're the only true Americans, ain't we?" spluttered Mike Madison stumbling around in an alcoholic stupor as he dared anyone to contradict him.

Molly Madison did. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, or whatever,” she said, “and we're all equally a bunch of mutts related to everyone and everything else, pursuing life, liberty and happiness, and we all evolved from the same blue-green cyanobacteria. And, anyway, we all have the same maternal mitochondria from the same African Ur-mother, so like it or lump it."

Molly, who held a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, then leaped up and deftly kicked Mike Madison into a blackberry bush where he started to giggle and then fell asleep.

Suddenly, Carl Revere - you know, the not so famous or revered step-son of Paul Revere - came galumphing around the bend and, short of breath, he yelled, Our Parents are coming! Our Parents are coming!

So everyone at the 5th of July kegger in the Philadelphia woods tossed the rest of Molly Madison's special cookies into the fire, knocked over the barrel of ale, and then scattered and ran (led by the fleet of foot Danny Washington, of course).

And the rest, as they say, is just Revisionist History.

Notes:

1. All names are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is positively coincidental and unintentional. Except when it isn’t.

2. End photograph: A photomontage of fireworks from a Guy Fawkes Night display at Roundwood Park in Harlesden, London. 5 November 2007, between 8:10pm and 8:23pm. Artist: Billy Hicks, Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.