The Circulation of Arms

The schema of Risk type board games is as follows: armies seize territory, territory yields money, money buys armies, A → M → A₁. Following, no doubt, beliefs long held on the American right Trump is not straying far from just such a scheme for his interpretation of imperial status. American military dominance, as expressed in the worldwide system of American military bases, is the result, in this view, of conquest. Trump has connected this with American nagging for increased military spending by NATO countries and arrived at what amounts to a 2% tributum capitis payable, retroactively, to the imperial treasury.

Properly certified experts on the affairs of empire can scarcely find the words for their astonishment. There are such experts within the Trump entourage and, we are told, the President was fully briefed on the standard expression of policy in NATO forums. Trump wasn't having it. Our allies, preoccupied with the strategic maneuvering that they certainly recognize by now as necessary in light of the new American "condition", were, by turns, bemused and publicly cautious. As Blessed Reagan would say, "there he goes again".

In our modern world imperialism is neither expressed nor conducted so nakedly outside of private clubs and gun shows. There are ways to do these things which are effective, or were effective, and deniable. But Trump is only comfortable in private clubs that he owns. Occasionally convinced of the necessity of addressing a proper audience in a proper manner his rhetoric never, at those times, really escapes the gun show.

Toot as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

Shake it, CJ

Some uplifting wax

Hands in the Sea

Nice looking game of the First Punic War. Two player.

Inside Looking Out

Roman City Wall

Trump has decided that he cannot proceed without obtaining political control of the FBI. He may have left himself thin cover by pretending to have fired Comey for his election campaign antics but he has certainly complicated the second, and most crucial, phase of his strategy, installing a compliant replacement.

Had he consulted his inner Roy Cohn he might have tried a different approach and admitted that he wouldn't tolerate an independent director and his investigation. His more recent confession of his real motives shows that he knows he let Roy down but the damage is done. The political risk would have been far greater but, if he were able to withstand it, he would be in a much stronger position. Instead he is in a tangle that he will probably survive but which he will never escape. By dissembling he has shown weakness, confessed, in effect, that his political support is draining away.

Why? The slippage is no secret even if the numbers, among his base, are still small. But what has made him aware? Stay with me here as I follow a hunch. Trump is an actor. His true stage is not the White House but the rally. Over the course of the campaign he mastered a one-man performance which, unlike his previous career as a television actor, required a rapport with a live audience. In his last rally in Harrisburg Pa. he, for the first time, made a significant alteration to one of his themes. He explained that the Chinese were no longer guilty of currency manipulation to the detriment of the American worker but had, instead, rallied to our side in the containment of North Korea.

Now he presented this as evidence of his mastery of the diplomatic deal. He was trading his economic offensive against the Chinese for their acquiescence on Korea. And, inserted into his usual litany of applause lines, it did draw a favorable cheer. But I found myself asking, "really?". Is his base buying into this or are they just responding to his cues for applause? I suspect the later and, furthermore, I suspect he knows it.

In one of my "6 theses for the early days of the Trump administration" I said:

Everything points to the absence of any new information behind Trump's actions so far. Decisions are based on strategies that appear to date from before the election and, some, long before that. Events will, soon I think, sharpen the contradictions between those strategies and the real world and it seems that the White House will be very slow to adapt its response if it does at all.

I believe this is the first new information that Trump has felt compelled to bring into his rally performance. President Xi Jinping should be recognized as the first with the skill to bring new information into this White House. In his interview with Time Trump seemed to be very impressed with his recent lessons on Chinese and Korean history. But he would not be the performer he has shown himself to be if he did not sense some reluctance by his audience to follow him in this new path of enlightenment. While his stump shows moved easily between right-wing commonplaces on topics foreign and domestic his actions in office have fallen into quite separate categories.

Early in is tenure he was willing to sacrifice control of the exterior empire to the Pentagon. His interest in foreign affairs has never been deep, never exceeded the nursery rhymes of reaction and the necessities of business deals. And so he was willing to jettison Flynn and downgrade Bannon. Neither had provided a pennyworth of strategy beyond that of the generally agreed upon generals once the real imperial dispatches began to arrive.

There are, in any event, no victories to be found in the trans-alpine empire. American resources are over extended. Our military is highly efficient in destruction but incapable of political assembly. Among subject populations every dime of loyalty costs several dollars. Trump's attention span  for the far flung theaters of imperial grind likely is shorter than that of his audience. Again, Xi Jinping must have won him over with a well crafted five minute Introduction to Chinese History.

But the interior empire is another affair. Here is where he has allies and here is where he wants to build a power base. He holds the support of the Republican Party since its only other option is to collapse. He also relies on a cold alliance with the military and Wall Street. They do as they will and he lets them be. But the support he truly identifies with are the simmering forces of resentment and repression. Those on the front lines of the crackdown, like the rank and file of ICE, and those who dream of the redemption of their insignificance in action against the alien and the subversive. And right in the middle of this social formation is the FBI.

As the interview process opens for Comey's replacement there can be no doubt whose resume is being conjured during the midnight black mass in the White House residence. It is the putrid specter of J. Edgar Hoover. I suspect the spell requires DNA from the shriveled remains of Henry Kissinger which explains his silent presence in the Oval Office on Thursday.

sun ra - nuclear war

kiss your ass
goodbye

Goldfinger - James Bond Theme - Munetaka Inoue And His Sharp Five

Delia Derbyshire/Air

Hi, Hi, HI....Cluck, Cluck, Cluck!

           THE COLONEL & HIS DROOGIES

The Colonel on a camel

Sub Iisdem Trabibus

The only men who, as I opine, ought to be allowed the use of Clubs, are married men without a profession. The continual presence of these in a house cannot be thought, even by the most uxorious of wives, desirable. Say the girls are beginning to practise their music, which in an honourable English family, ought to occupy every young gentlewoman three hours ; it would be rather hard to call upon poor papa to sit in the drawing-room all that time, and listen to the interminable discords and shrieks which are elicited from the miserable piano during the above necessary operation. A man, with a good ear especially, would go mad, if compelled daily to submit to this horror. 

With love and simplicity and natural kindness Snobbishness is perpetually at war. People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old-bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all.

I have seen Snobs, in pink coats and hunting boots, scouring over the Campagna of Rome: and have heard their oaths and their well-known slang in the galleries of the Vatican, and under the shadowy arches of the Colosseum. I have met a Snob on a dromedary in the desert, and picknicking under the pyramid of Cheops. 

Stinginess is snobbish. Ostentation is snobbish. Too great profusion is snobbish. Tuft-hunting is snobbish. But I own there are people more snobbish than all those whose defects are above mentioned: viz., those individuals who can, and don’t give dinners at all. The man without hospitality shall never sit SUB IISDEM TRABIBUS* with ME. Let the sordid wretch go mumble his bone alone!
* the sacred enclosure of private walls

All quotes from The Book of Snobs  (by One of their Own) - W. M. Thackeray