Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Photo credit: Library of Congress
Now and Then: What We Focus On
There’s a market and a following of salacious behavior in the US. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but we especially like or love to follow salacious behavior on the part of our leaders and so-called leaders. This fact has to be seen in the face of the mass murder going on daily in the Gaza Strip, expanding into the West Bank, by the genocidal forces of Israel with full support and munitions from the US. We’re talking multiples of tens of thousands of Palestinians killed while some of Trump’s base (Who knows how many in the “Make America Great Again” band of crazies?) either support or rebel against their fearless leader, the führer himself.
Israel, again with full US backing, just killed 26 people at an aid center and wounded about 100. Most people yawn here because many, but not all, have lost their moral compasses and allowed the gross violation of human rights to continue on and on and on.
Long ago, power, and especially political power in the US, went along with the manipulation and abuse of women and some boys, and especially the young and vulnerable among that cohort. Trump, whose personal history of sexual wrongdoing is well known and has been litigated, was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, if friendship is the right word. Now Trump wants his supporters to believe it was all smoke and mirrors and he didn’t have much to do with the sleaze and the pedophile Epstein, and Trump is suing to prove that. In other words, according to the fearless leader, it was all a “hoax.” These folks love to rewrite history.
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo made the Pentagon Papers available to the media for publication, which they did. The Papers contained about 25 years of lies the US government told about US involvement in the Vietnam War and the larger war in Southeast Asia. Today, the contemporary setting in the US would rather pay close attention to the salacious behavior of the powerful rather than their support for war, and in particular, genocide. Times have certainly changed!