In his truly strange and illogical piece on Edward Snowden in The New Yorker, Jeffery Toobin calls the whistleblower a narcissist. A narcissist who gave up an easy life and a cute girlfriend in Hawaii, where he was earning $200,000 a year, for a life of exile and fear? Who the hell does Snowden think he is, anyway? Always looking out for number one!
I suggest that all Americans get together on July 4th and create millions of e-mails, texts and Facebook posts all reading “Happy 4th of July, Mr. President! (NSA please forward.)”
The great fallacy of the attempt to demonize Edward Snowden — coming these days primarily from hardcore Obama cultists — is the argument that in a democracy we have other means of combating an overreaching government. But how can we complain to our elected representatives about government actions that we have no knowledge of, that even our elected representatives are not allowed to talk about — that we can only learn about from people who will go to jail if they tell us about them?
Obama says he “welcomes” a national debate on this subject — a subject he has marshaled the awesome machinery of the American state to keep secret from the American people.
This is getting Orwellian to a degree that even Orwell might have found it hard to imagine.
The White House talking points on the surveillance scandal are pretty lame — when they’re parroted by Obama’s zombie apologists, who have no vested interest in Obama’s police state beyond the fact that it’s Obama’s, they’re disgraceful, to a really shocking degree.
What we are witnessing is the moral death of the American left. It will have to be replaced by something else, lock, stock and barrel.
Written by a friend who is a man of the cloth:
Dear Boys,
Please pray for Edward Snowden.
Let me say why I am asking you to.
He is of your generation (i.e., age) within a year or two, and has blown a “profile” — the perception some of us have had that many in that age group have seemed more interested in chimaeras of professional success and “i-banking” and nice restaurants than in idealistic self-sacrifice. Edward Snowden, at age 29, and with no college degree to his name (and not even a successful high school diploma) and yet with an annual salary of roughly $200,000 as of three weeks ago, was willing to renounce it all for the good of his fellow citizens. This is a miracle for anyone to consider. He has done it. In his mind, something is worth dying for.
They asked Gautama — who was in his early 30s when they asked him this — why he, a young man, should give up everything in the service of renunciation. His answer: “I am young now and have the energy to do something. If I were older, I wouldn’t have the strength to give myself fully to it.”
I think that was a noble answer. I think it is parallel to what Edward Snowden has done for his fellow countrymen. I think of Nathan Hale. It is also the spirit in which Our Lord “set his face to Jerusalem.”
I thought of Helmuth James von Moltke and Adam von Trott zu Solz and Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenberg, all of whom were cruelly and arbitrarily murdered by judicial execution in 1944/45 for just thinking! (One of you has actually held in your hand some of the original letters and “Berichte” that they, and others like them, wrote during their dark hour.) Yet they are national heroes today in the land for the true values of which they were actually standing. Without men like them, there would have been nothing left upon which to build in that country after the “Zusammenbruch”, the kind of collapse which our country, by the way, is bound to have to face at some point for its war crimes and pervasive, willful complacency.
Is it a stretch to compare Edward Snowden with those men of extreme courage and faith?
Well, our country is in a militarist and authoritarian phase that brings their sacrifice to mind, though, yes, things here aren’t that bad. (Your mother and I never thought they could get this bad!)
I have little hope that there will be a happy ending for Edward Snowden. But I know his cause can’t ultimately lose.
Love ever,
and always your
Dad
. . . TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Every American citizen needs to ask himself or herself this question — “Did Barack Obama really have probable cause to seize and search my phone records, and if so, what was it?”
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
― James Madison, The Federalist Papers
The painting of James Madison is by Gilbert Stuart.
Click on the image to enlarge.
At their recent meeting in Palm Springs, Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, leaders of the world’s two largest police states, exchanged jocular remarks about keeping citizens in line when they complain about massive surveillance procedures. “Like unruly teenagers,” said Xi Jinping. “Sometimes they just have to be grounded,” said Obama, to which Xi Jinping replied, “Drone ground them fast!” The two leaders chuckled and then walked off out of the hearing of reporters and photographers.
. . . heroes arise.
. . . says, “I am not Big Brother.” Whew! Glad we got that cleared up!
. . . is on the march — time to light the beacon fires.
I’ll light one if you will.
Liberace was one of the most important cultural figures in American history. In a time of vicious and legally enforced homophobia, Liberace stood up in front of America and said, in every way but words, “I’m gay, I love being gay — isn’t being gay wonderful?” And America, in its curious, genial voice of denial said, “Yes — being gay is wonderful!”
This is less odd than it seems. I would venture that almost every family in America in the 1950s had a gay member somewhere in the flock, or a gay friend of the family — the effeminate uncle or cousin who never married because he “never found the right girl”, the two spinster librarians who lived together their whole lives as domestic partners because they “never found the right guy”.
One could deal with such people by denying, as they denied, who they really were, but the situation created tension all the same. What a relief it would have been to be able to say, “Yes, Uncle Ted is queer as a three-dollar bill, but he’s a good old boy, all the same.”
Liberace was everybody’s queer Uncle Ted — he allowed us to love and celebrate Uncle Ted’s queerness by proxy. Indeed, Liberace’s effeminacy made Uncle Ted look almost macho — as macho as a Hollywood leading man.
Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Beyond the Candelabra doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of how important and anomalous Liberace was. The real Liberace was way more effeminate in style than Michael Douglas’s impersonation suggests. He was so effeminate that he could seriously unsettle straight men — yet so charming and unapologetic about his persona that the most uptight of straight men could still find a way to love him.
At the same time, the real Liberace had balls, in his furious presentation of a gay persona that might well have gotten him lynched, and certainly run out of show business, if that persona had ever turned sour in the public mind. Douglas’s Liberace doesn’t convey the steely self-confidence, the irrational courage — or perhaps just the sheer reckless madness — of the real Liberace.
By concentrating on his later years, Soderbergh can’t really convey just how big Liberace was, once upon a time. Until the advent of Elvis Presley, Liberace was the most successful performer in America when it came to filling large arenas. He was an entertainment phenomenon, a genuine superstar.
Soderbergh reduces Liberace’s story to a melodrama about an aging queen who finds and loses something like true love, amidst a life of gaudy consumption that doesn’t nourish the soul. Yawn. Douglas and Matt Damon give fine performances in the film, and its heart is the right place — but it misses what was really interesting about Liberace.
What you will not find in Beyond the Candelabra is the man who had a great intuition and bet his life on it — the intuition that America was tired of denying its homosexual uncles and aunts and cousins, looking for a way to just stop worrying about homos.
The switch in attitudes in this country about same-sex marriage has come with astonishing speed — it’s as though we had just been looking for an opportunity not to worry about it anymore. Liberace, in his way, offered that same sort of relief from worry. “Do I seem like a nice person?” he asked. “Do I have a little talent as a piano player? Do my vulgar outfits make you gasp and laugh? Then relax — don’t worry about who I’m going to be fucking tonight. It’s not important and it’s none of of your business anyway.”
There are times when I’m ready to give up on America, but then I remember Robert Johnson and think, man, there must be some way to turn things around . . .