The Cognitive State of the Union Address
Insufficient Address/Return to Sender
I didn't listen to Mr. Biden's 2024 State of the Union Address. I haven't listened to any presidents' state of the union speech since the last century.
Instead of listening to or watching these performances, I read the transcripts the next day. When you read a speech, rather than listen to it, you can focus on the salient points and reflect on what was actually said as contrasted with what someone tells you was said the next morning.
I encountered this not infrequently as a 45 year veteran lawyer in civil jury trials. If not arguing an outright inversion of the truth, opposing counsel might engage in corny theatrical stunts or appeal to the lesser demons of prejudice, jingoism and irrationality that lurk in the dark recesses of many peoples' minds and hearts. We lawyers are actually taught this "skill" in the guise of zealous advocacy, truth be damned. I learned the tricks, too. It is a matter of survival.
For better or worse, the tactic frequently works. The 21st Century juror expects an entertaining theater production. Just like voters do. A well-played drama, in combination with repetitive and authoritative argument by a chorus of barking con artists, more often than not subverts reality.
There are probably too many lawyers in Washington DC writing too many hackneyed speeches. There are also too many guileless voters who don't have a clue how they are being played.
Mr. Biden's State of the Union Address was pretty awful stuff. But it was no worse than his predecessors' State of the Union Addresses going back for many decades.
The State of the Union Address today is rather like a publicly traded corporation's annual report - and equally as devoid of substance. Like a corporation's annual report, the purpose of the State of the Union Address is not to inform anyone, but to market a narrative, a narrative designed to pump up the "stock price," to create credibility and to promote "buy-in" for what the corporation is currently selling.
This was no different in the past. But, at least, some speeches years ago -albethey not state of the union addresses - had sincere gravitas, dramatic structure and a genuine appeal to deeper reflection, to wit: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence" (the speech at the Riverside Church that cost him his life).
There was no gravitas, no drama and no depth in Mr. Biden's 2024 State of the Union Address. In my opinion, having read the transcript carefully the following day, the speech was 45% dishonest, 15% disingenuous, 60% insipid, 38% obnoxious, 16% hyperbole and 72% delusional. That adds up to a lot more than 100%, but my math is no worse than what the President's speech-writers concocted.
I have selected just one of Mr. Biden's talking points as an example. In order to aide the starving Palestinians of Gaza whose homes Israel has razed and of whom more than 30,000 non-combatant men, women and children have been slaughtered, Mr. Biden proposes, as a "humanitarian gesture," to build a "temporary port" in Gaza to off-load Army surplus boxed K-rations.
This is theater of the absurd.
The privation of Gaza was deliberately created by America's ally, Israel, using American tax dollars, weapons and technical support to perpetrate the crime. This is among the reasons why, in an act of unbelievable courage, 25 year old U.S. Air Force Specialist Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in an act of protest this year in front of the Israeli embassy. If Mr. Biden really wants to relieve the suffering of the Gazans, then all he need do is cut off all aid to Israel - financial, political and military - immediately. But Mr. Biden - just like Mr. Trump and the entire U.S. Congress - lacks the cohones to do the right thing.
Mr. Biden assures us that the Gazan "port" he will construct is temporary and that no U.S. soldiers will step foot on Gazan soil. He is lying.
In the first place, excepting the fugacious military exit from Afghanistan in 2021, no U.S. constructed base is ever "temporary." We know that, like the 800+ acknowledged military bases that the U.S. operates around the world (a figure that does not include the many "secret" bases and bio-chemical warfare laboratories the U.S. operates), any U.S. port constructed in Gaza will be our pied-Ã -terre. Once built, it will have to be reinforced, defended from "terrorists" (who usually are our own creations) and, ultimately, made permanent in order to "help" the destitute people whose lives we have helped to destroy. Worse, according to Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, security for the "temporary port" will be provided by none other than Israel, which is like asking the fox to protect the chicken coop. Ultimately, the installation of a U.S. "temporary port," secured by Israel, is precisely the objective sought by Mr. Netanyahu in the first place: tightening the noose around the necks of the Palestinians, enclosing them in a virtual prison camp secured by the Israeli military, leading to the ultimate "voluntary" exodus of the Palestinians from their homeland.
I repeat: Mr. Biden is lying. If he wants to help Palestinians (which he doesn't, and neither does Mr. Trump), then the way to do this is to rein in Israel, hard, fast and permanently.
But don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen.
Like crime syndicates, the two parties routinely reward their cronies and viciously punish their enemies. Mr. Julian Assange, for example, rots in prison for no good reason other that than he has, journalistically, trod on the toes of the Rich and Powerful. Sometimes, however, the crime syndicates also remove their erstwhile friends when they become burdensome. Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is Exhibit 1. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky might soon become Exhibit 2 should he become less a useful tool than an embarrassing obstacle to shifting objectives and story-lines.
Long ago in your American history classes, you learned about "Tammany Hall" and Mayor Daley's Chicago Machine and the Trusts and Corporate Syndicates that controlled the U.S. government in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Well, they are all back. Only the Trust and Syndicates are much bigger and more powerful than ever. The corruption now is also much worse and much deeper than before.
The parasites have learned. And they have organized. Everyone else...we... that is, the parasites' hosts... have neither learned nor organized.
Today, the corruption - in all of the many meanings of that word - is as incurable as a deep and malignant brain tumor.
I have read the bloggers writing about the threat of fascism if Candidate A or B is elected. This is partisan blather based on facile and ahistorical analysis.
Fascism is the merger of big business and the state. Fascism is not the same as Nazism (the merger of authoritarianism with "the basket of deplorables," as Hillary Clinton once put it), although fascism and Nazism are not necessarily antithetical. The "fasces" were the symbol of state power in the Roman Empire. In a fascist state, the oligarchic class owns the government and its government, just like the Roman Senate, represents the interests of the oligarchs. In a "democratic" fascist state, like in the U.S. and in most western industrialized countries today, you see the illusion of democracy and the reality of fascism.
The 2024 election will not decide whether the United States becomes fascist. That is because the United States is a fascist state and it has been one for quite a long time. The 20th Century comedian George Carlin quipped that "Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it." But it wasn't a joke. The 2024 election contest is not between "fascism" and "democracy;" rather, it is simply a turf war, a contest to determine which crime syndicate, on behalf of the oligarchs, will win the franchise for the ensuing four years to exploit the plebeians - that is, all the rest of us.
Come November, we will have, presumably, the "choice" between two presidential candidates each packaged differently but representing, more or less, the same class of patricians, i.e. oligarchs. One of the two candidates hallucinates. He talks like it's still the year 1948. The other candidate also hallucinates. He talks like we will return to an America that never was. Both of the two major candidates are mean-spirited, meretricious, unprincipled, venal, and conceited ignoramuses. If I vote at all in November, it will likely be for Robert Kennedy. Alas, Mr. Kennedy has his own quixotic delusion that the tumor can actually be excised without killing the patient. Or him.
There has been much discussion recently about whether the President of the United States should undergo cognitive testing as a prerequisite of holding office. I submit that the test need consist of just one inquiry: anyone who actually wants to be President of the United States fails the examination. Anyone who wants to be President in the current political-economic environment is, ipso facto, not intellectually, psychologically nor cognitively qualified.
Rather than test just the presidential candidates, I submit that we, the general population, should also submit to cognitive testing. Should we continue to complacently and complicitly acquiesce to the status quo, then we will have flunked our own citizenship exam.
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