One more iteration of "X" is ruining America and poisoning its youth

One advantage of being on Medicare but not yet senile is that you're old enough to remember previous iterations of "whatever" -- in other words, the moral panic that the media and the politicians are pushing this week.

Today's bette noir is social media in general and Facebook in particular. Although that company is trying to clamp down, still many people are writing whatever they want on Facebook,undermining the company's efforts to help the government tell us what to think. Now, I know a lot of you are saying, "first amendment" but that's just wrong. The Constitution guarantees freedom of SPEECH, not freedom of WRITING (nor does freedom of the press cover it, since that belongs only to those who own one). So thus we have Marc Benioff, a tech company CEO, who told the World Economic Forum in Davos that Social networks would be regulated “exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry.” “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,” he added. You know, I heard the same thing about long hair on boys and AM radio on NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report in 1964 after the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. Later I discovered that the NBC news hacks had plagiarized old stories about Elvis Presley's hip swaying and Chuck Berry's guitar playing and just changed a few names. And over the years we've had both media (television, 8-track tapes) and content (folk music, hip hop) blamed for juvenile addiction. Along, of course, with the perennial triumvirate, sex and drugs and rock and roll. [And the utterly American bat-shit crazy collective hysterias, like the child care centers that engaged in Satanic ritual abuse that sacrificed children to drink their blood, etc., in the 1980s and1990s. [And, yes, it happened and, yes, people were accused, tried found guilty and sentenced. The main difference with the Salem witch trials of the 1690s being that after three centuries, we did not hang people for witchcraft, just sentenced them to prison until they died of their own accord.] So who is this Benioff character that is channeling network news anchors from half a century ago? The boss of Salesforce, which peddles "customer relations management", socalled "solutions." Which is why, I suspect, he's thinks Facebook is so dangerous -- because instead of listening to whatever his outfit is putting out on behalf of its client, we might ask our friends about some product. In other words, the modern incarnation of the noble race of door-to-door fuller brush salesmen. And its not just Benioff. "A string of Silicon Valley heads have spoken out in recent months about their fear that social media could be more psychologically damaging than anyone expected," reports the Guardian. You know, just like Elvis's hips and that pinko commie plot, Sesame Street. This would be hysterically funny except that in a country so farkled as to have Donald Trump become president after he lost by three million votes, anything is not just possible, but actually happens. All the time.

--José G. Pérez

Ping-Pong diplomacy revisited: The two Koreas Olympic love-fest

The lightning negotiations and cooperation between North and South Korea for the Olympics is being compared to the emergence of a bromance between President Nixon and Chairman Mao in  1971, almost a half-century ago.

Ping-pong diplomats: Zhuang Zedong and Glenn Cowan

In the midst of the Vietnam War which had dominated international relations and domestic politics for years, a chance encounter between Zhuang Zedong and Glenn Cowan, two participants in a table tennis tournament in Japan, and the resulting friendly exchanges between the two stars, one an American, the other Chinese, led to the Chinese to inviting the American team  to come on over and stage a few exhibition matches.

After 22 years of American refusal to recognize or even say "hello" to the government of China the contact over a few ping-pong games led to an official Nixon state state visit a few months later.

China's motive --to break its isolation-- was obvious, but how could this be with a rabid anticommunist like Nixon in the White House?

Well, it turned out that Nixon was not the character he'd been portraying in the soap opera of American electoral politics. But mostly, it was about the American defeat in Vietnam.

Defeat? Yes, defeat. War is the continuation of politics by other means. And the United States had been  politically defeated despite its overwhelming economic and military superiority.

Ping-pong diplomacy broke out in April of 1971, and here's how Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., one of the most highly regarded American military historians, described the situation in Vietnam in the Armed Forces Journal in June of 1971:

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.... 

"Frag incidents" or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs....

Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.

In one such division -- the morale plagued Americal -- fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.

Remember, this is a full-bird colonel, one step below a general, describing in real time the state of U.S. forces in the middle of a shooting war. Implicit in this description was not just defeat, but the danger of a mass rebellion or mutiny by troops in Vietnam and perhaps all over the world.

Basically, ping-pong diplomacy was about the Chinese taking advantage of the desperate situation of the United States in Vietnam to break Washington's economic, diplomatic and political blockade against them.

Russia also took advantage of this situation, through detente and deals to reduce military spending on things like nuclear bombs and ICBMs.

What both Moscow and Beijing could offer was to pressure North Vietnam to accept some sort of peace deal that Nixon could use to pacify antiwar public opinion and (hopefully) avoid an openly catastrophic defeat in a shooting war. Of course, little they cared that, as Che Guevara had explained, from a revolutionary perspective, Vietnam's fight was more important right then than either country's advancement of their economic and diplomatic goals, even if quite legitimate in and of themselves.

When politicians, gasbags and scribblers recall 1970s ping-pong diplomacy as the model for the rapidly escalating rapprochement between North and South, there's more than surface amity.

The United States has put itself in a no-win situation in the Korean peninsula. Since the end of World War II Washington has relied on its military superiority. Trump thought he could use bluff and bluster to score another "win" (I don't believe he cares about the outcome beyond "proving" the incompetence --or worse-- of previous administrations). He thought with America's "military might" he would succeed.

He is acting the same way he did in business, where it led  his projects to multiple bankruptcies, forcing him eventually to become a reality TV star and "luxury brand" to (mostly foreign) suckers. Another Kardashian, but without the name or looks.

On the other hand Kim Jong-un played Trump like a violin in the hands of a concertmaster. He understood that Trump's posturing, bluffing and bluster would disrupt the united front against North Korea, and took advantage of it with a very public mad dash to obtain a nuclear deterrent, or at least a credible appearance of having one.

He understood there was nothing Trump could do about it without at least seeming to put South Korea and Japan on the brink of annihilation, as well as possibly provoking a response from China or Russia, both of which have land  borders with North Korea.

And Kim had an ace up his sleeve: the victory in South Korean elections of a party that has promoted better relations and mutual economic entanglement with the North. Not because this party is composed of angels, but its leaders reckon that given the South's overwhelming economic superiority, it had everything to gain by bringing North Korea under its wing and reducing American influence over the peninsula..

Having established --or at least convinced everyone-- of his capacity for nuclear retaliation, Kim now plays the "can't we all just get along card" with exquisite precision: on the eve of the Olympics and with a moving gesture --Koreans of the North and South marching together under the same banner-- that will bring a tear to the eye of everyone save the most hardened cynic.

--José G. Pérez

Late Season's Greetings: No Merry Christmas, no Happy New Year

[I wrote this on December 25. I didn't post it then, but after shithole and Hawaii ... ]

There was no Christmas in my house this year: nor in my heart.

I've spent hours and hours meditating on how I felt thirty years ago, and how I feel today.

Because then I was on the verge of despair. As I am today.

As 1987 came to a close, I was still in Managua, absorbing the collapse of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. Few on the left then even saw it, but somehow, pretty much as long as I'd been in Nicaragua I'd not been able to close my eyes to countless problems even though I trusted --more than that, I was convinced as a matter of religious faith-- that no matter how battered and bloodied, the Revolution would win through.

But by the end of 1987, I'd finally admitted to myself that it wasn't true. The essence of a people's revolution from below [not "regime change" from above] is the organized movement of masses of regular people trying to take control of society to forge a better future. In Nicaragua, by the end of 1987, that movement was dead. The militias, unions, associations of farmers and women and students were all hollowed-out shells rapidly being transformed into nests of bureaucratic privilege. I was losing my religion,.

After the truth became undeniable a couple of years later, many on the left blamed the Sandinistas. I did not. The poorest country on America mainland with an adult population about 1% that of the United States was unable to withstand Washington's onslaught, especially after the Soviets stabbed them in the back, refusing to provide the promised planes and choppers that the Sandinistas needed to fight the contras, and Western Europe provided only token, symbolic help.

The Nicaraguan revolution was drowned in the blood of the war, asphyxiated by the economic crisis it produced. But worse, its heart was ripped out by the way it was condemned to solitude, left twisting in the wind. There were many things that the Sandinistas did that people considered mistaken and debilitating. And there was an overriding question of the growing indications of the demoralization of the revolution's leadership, the FSLN.

And I don't mean just or mainly fighting spirit, although there was that too. I mean a loss of integrity and honesty, the taking of privileges that, minuscule as they may have seemed, simply devastated the trust of the population in the Sandinista Front given the desperate economic situation most people faced.

I left Nicaragua having made two interconnected decisions: that I would abandon politics and journalism.  I did then, at least for a little while but I went back to both, thinking the Cold War is over, we are living in a new world.

What has that to do with today?

The feeling of dread, that what we feared might come to pass has already become inevitable, that the ghost of Christmas future is here not to give us warning and a chance of redemption, but to mock our stupidity, especially the idea that we are "the resistance."

It's been more than a year since Trump achieved a majority in the slaveocracy's electoral college even though he lost the election by three million votes.

It is time to stop pretending that he doesn't know what he is doing, that he is alienating "our" allies or that he isn't accomplishing much on account of Congress.

It may all be an act or he may quite sincerely be delusional and even psychopathic. But you are what you pretend to be.

He acts as if he actually believes the United States is in a war of all against all, and "we" have been betrayed by "our" leaders who were trying to get along with many other countries instead of insulting them, threatening them militarily and confronting them economically.

I don't think there's a concept in current political discourse more wrong headed than that Trump is just playing to his base, throwing them a little red meat, protecting his narrow slice of the electorate and similar drivel.

What Trump is doing is to cohere a mass movement that is unconditionally loyal to him. He is doing so by constantly projecting himself as the sole embodiment of "America First," and saying the problems "regular" Americans face are due to betrayal, to treason.

He is not running for re-election, he is campaigning to become America's Putin -- actually, worse.

--José G. Pérez