Roaming charges: More pricks than kicks

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

+ People seem excited about the debates on Monday. I find the anticipation inexplicable. The much-hyped standoff at Hofstra shows all the hallmarks of being a great dud on the order of the Pacquiao/Mayweather fight/tap dance. Trump will endeavor, probably with the aid an ample dosing of Prozac administered by the amicable Dr. Bornstein, to be on his best behavior and Hillary, her head stuffed to the brim with briefing books, will come off like a prolix Ph.D. student defending her dissertation on the subversive role of milkmaids in the agrarian novels of Thomas Hardy. A defanged Trump isn’t worth watching. And no one needs to endure another pedantic lecture on Smarty-Pants Power from Hillary Clinton.

+ Most presidential and vice-presidential debates are about the unexpected moments: Nixon’s face sweating like Niagara Falls, Gerald Ford’s bizarre blurt that there was “no Soviet domination of eastern Europe,” Reagan’s aphasia moment, Poppy Bush glancing repeatedly at his watch, Admiral Stockdale asking rhetorically why he was there, Al Gore stalking George W. around the stage like Freddy Krueger, and a punch-drunk Obama staggering through his first debate with Romney. In the end, none of these moments altered the course of the elections, as much as the media might want us to believe. Elections, of course, are decided by deep structural issues (and hackable voting machines).

+ Of course, there’s always a chance that Hillary, having rejected Charlie Crist’s genteel offer to loan her his podium fan, might over-heat again and collapse onstage. But do we really need to watch that live in the Age of YouTube?

+ This year with the two major parties in free-fall, it might have been different if Gary Johnson and/or Jill Stein had been permitted access to the stage by the so-called Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD is not a commission, of course, but a corporation created and run by-and-for the Democratic and Republican Parties in order to preserve their increasingly fragile stranglehold on the electoral franchise. The League of Women Voters, which used to run the debates, apparently proved too demanding for either party.

+ Without Johnson or Stein on the stage, we are left with the unappetizing prospect of Donald Trump as the lone sorta-kinda-maybe-anti-trade-anti-war candidate. Deplorable. These non-debates are bound to deliver more pricks than kicks. They should be boycotted by anyone committed to real democracy or looking for true comedy.

+ That said, I went to see a glorious new print of Dr. Strangelove this week and it strikes me that with all the current national anxiety about the Russians, the Mine Shaft Gap must have widened. Perhaps we will get some new intelligence on this vital matter in the debate on Monday night.

+ It’s been 52 years since the premier of Dr. Strangelove, but the Russia Scare thrives. Earlier this week General Sir Richard Barrons, a former NATO chief, ominously warned that Russia could invade Europe in a mere 48 hours. Get ready for the remake of The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, the Euro 2016 version, filmed in PanicVision.

(No one stopped to ask the generals, if the Russians could storm across Europe in less than two days, why then do we still need those 150 US nuclear missiles scattered across Belgium, Germany and Italy. Or have those all been re-targeted at France?)

+ In the 1950s, at the peak of a previous Red Panic, the editorial page of the Washington Post helped strap the Rosenbergs to their electric chairs for allegedly violating the (unconstitutional) Espionage Act. Now the Post’s editorial page wants to do the same to their own source, the man who helped them win a Pulitzer Prize, Edward Snowden. Can you spell: D-e-p-l-o-r-a-b-l-e?

+ The call to prosecute Snowden is predictable. As Alexander Cockburn and I reported in Whiteout, the Washington Post’s reputation as a fierce and unflinching journalistic enterprise is over-inflated, an aberration based on a few years at the end of the Nixon administration. But the fall of Nixon frightened the Post’s publisher Katherine Graham, who feared the paper had over-reached. It’s been in retreat ever since.

Here’s what we wrote:

In late 1974, after Nixon had been tumbled, Mrs Graham addressed the Magazine Publishers’ Association and issued a warning: “The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.” She called for a return to basics. Journalists should “stop trying to be sleuths.” In other words: The party’s over, boys and girls! It’s not our business to rock the boat.

She repeated the message in 1988 in a speech to CIA recruits titled “Secrecy and the Press”: “We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

+ The more furiously the DC political and media elites try to gag, jail and bury Edward Snowden, the more emphatically they prove his point.

+ Oliver Stone’s movie, Snowden, is worth paying the extortionate ticket price to view on a large screen in the company of a live audience. Kimberly and I went to see it at the theater in our little mill town of Oregon City, once a stronghold of the Klan in Oregon. It’s still a city of blue-collar people, featuring regular sightings of pick-up trucks with big American flags jammed into the tailgates and Trump lawn signs. This is Tanya Harding country, where people buy their beer at 7/11 and bitch about the craft brew Hipsters up in Portland. The Hilltop theater was about half-full, a bigger crowd than showed up for opening night of the deplorable “Ben-Hur” remake. (I was there for that one, too. I’m a sucker for all films featuring ancient Rome.)

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