“Hamilton” versus PUTIN-Trump-(pence)

“Hamilton” is the crowning American cultural creation of the 2010s, thus far.* The School House Rock + 90s Rap + Showtunes mashup leaves about a dozen songs stuck in the head and posits new discoveries upon multiple listens. Reimagining the Founding Fathers as Hip Hop Dandies contemporarizes their philosophy, writing, and arguments. The Hamilton Mix Tape lacks the emotional throughfare of the cast album, but its meshing of hip hop and powder wigs is stronger. “I picked up the pen like Hamilton” Nas intones in ‘Wrote My Way Out”. “We’re America’s ghost writers” K’naan shouts in “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)”.

One iconic Broadway show and one increasingly tasty album does not, a definitive quantitative analysis of cultural or attitudes. Still, it does indicate at least some championing of the ideals and big personas of the founders (in spite of their ugly and hypocritical record on slavery) amongst the broader hip hop community, along with a celebration of the immigrant working hard, thinking harder, making it and becoming American.

Meanwhile, in “Real America”™, following, at best, the seediest election in American history (yes worse than 2000) the Right is suddenly largely embracing the mutual hand jobs exchanged between Team Trump and the Potato Jefe Putin. Strong circumstantial evidence that we have literally elected a Manchurian President and lost the Cold War in the postgame interviews is met with a smile and a shrug. I mean, hHey, he’s our Manchurian President, amiright?

Urban, hip hop America embraces the Founders and the ethos of the Immigrant Striver. Reactionary, conservative America embraces Bolshevism and KGB rat fucking and is just fine, thanks, with playing footsie with overjoyed like, actual, Nazis.

It’s enough of a switcheroo to boggle the mind. That is, until one applies my oldest hypothesis: In America Everything Always Comes Back to Race. Then it makes perfect sense. The machinery the founders, however imperfectly built, is applying itself to a multi-ethnic plural society. Putin and Nazis preserve white christian nationalism without any fussy dog whistles. Oh yeah… Duh!

 

* The best movie of the 2010s is “Melancholia,” even more so now. Rogue One even stole its ending!

New Rule

You can’t invoke “threats to democracy” or “undermining democracy” in criticizing investigations into Russian threats to our democracy and when this serves the interests of the man who lost by 3 million votes in an undemocratic system.

It does delegitimize our system but our system is not directly democratic. So, for those so concerned about democracy, they ought to worry about the electoral college first.

 

Did the FBI Assist Kremlin Sponsored Coup?

Never written a more tinfoil line in my life. But, there’s this and this. So am I crazy or is this real?

Did the FBI obtain a warrant using false information from Trump aides to get e-mail issue live again which objectively tanked Clinton in the polls 10 days before the election—and was it part of a Russian plot? Intelligent people are saying so. I’m hearing this. Sad!

After all, the CIA says the Russians wanted to help Trump and no one can explain the second warrant they got on the e-mails.

Sounds like treason to me.

Palestine is a failed state

Generally, a state is that entity that has a monopoly on legal violence within its borders. A failed state has lost this ability, along with other features of a collective action body to provide services to the public.

The International community in the post-WWII world has focused on “self-determination” and the basic preservation of state boundaries. After the war, under pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union, the world rapidly decolonized and many new states came into existence. It was either presumed or ignored whether these states actually had the features of states in many cases, especially in Africa.

The case of Africa is interesting because especially in the case of the former British colonies, independence was conditioned on universal suffrage and states that resisted the occurring even over a rapid amount of time were made into international pariahs—though arguably not for that alone. Yet almost without exception, the new states that were given the vote became kleptocratic dictatorships almost immediately.

The situation is mostly similar throughout the Middle East with the exceptions of the Gulf emirates and Saudi Arabia that were given independence not on a western parliamentary model, but on traditional leadership structures. It is no mistake that these states are stable and Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and virtually all of Sub-Saharan Africa are not. Better understandings of how liberal democracies emerge show that it is rare that they emerge from illiberal democracies and common that they emerge from more centralized but stable states. The frequent slaughter, genocide, and famine in these areas seriously undercuts the policies undertaken in decolonization. At the very least, the assumption that these people want to “live free or die”—in this case, having one and only one fair election is “living free.”

The Oslo Accords provided space and time to see if some of these mistakes could be avoided in Palestine. They were not. In the first open elections (Doe-eyedly insisted upon by the second Bush administration) resulted in the last elections in over 10 years, the loss of control of Gaza from the recognized Palestinian authority and the failure of either the Hamas government in Gaza or the PA government in the West Bank to provide routine services—which in the international sphere is always blamed on Israel. But this really shouldn’t matter because a sovereign state should, at least in those parts that are unoccupied, be able to do this even with hostile neighbors. Cuba did it.

Of course the situation of white settlers and colonists cannot be in good faith compared to Jews in their ancestral homeland.

Despite this, the international community persists, just as it did after World War II, in either a case of malevolent neglect or being blinded by Kumbaya optimism some toxic mix of both in pushing the two-state agenda. At the very least, consideration of giving Gaza a separate independence should be considered. It also seems more likely that a confederation of the West Bank and Jordan is more likely to be a viable state and ironing out the ramifications of that easier than of a separate Palestine or a single-state solution with Israel.

In reality, the fate of the “settlers” left in an Arab state will likely be the fate of Jews left in every other Arab state. They will be cleansed out of it at best and slaughtered at worst.

A one-state solution in all of Mandatory Palestine would almost certainly result in the same one-man-one-vote but only once result seen elsewhere in the hemisphere under such circumstances. Since this enables the great powers and the UN to wash their hands of the situation it is often chosen.