Press The Flesh

The Blurst of Times
Nov 6 · 4 min read

CRAYONS! I found this old short I remember from ‘Mr. Rogers’ where they showed how crayons are made. There is something soothing about it. There are many different kinds of crayons.

When I was a child there was a crayon called “flesh,” which they later
renamed ‘Peach” because of liberal efforts to mainstream White Genocide.

BACK ON THE HOBBY HORSE! I had an entire update that was erased, taking the backup with it. Hence the delay. So sorry. Still answering frenemies and critics.

WATCHED FRONTLINE EPISODE about Saudi Arabia’s brutal Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS). I learned that the Saudi journalist/commentator/PR man Jamal Khashoggi was actually a big booster of the old Saudi regime, and was rather vocal in his support of the (US-backed) Saudi war against the (Iran-backed) Houthi rebels in Yemen. When asked by the esteemed journalist Martin Smith if he was concerned about potential civilian deaths, Khashoggi shrugged this off. He claimed that Saudi Arabia was facing an existential moment- a “1939 moment”- I guess making the Houthi rebels the Nazis? Even thought the Saudis are the ones with the vastly larger army that is doing the actual invading. Anyway, he didn’t seem to care very much when people he didn’t know were being brutally murdered.

KHASHOGGI’S LIFE got more complicated when he criticized MBS for his newfound friendship with “Dangerous” Donald Trump. Having long been a mouthpiece Saudi policy, it must have come as a surprise to Khashoggi that it took so little for him to end up on MBS’ blacklist, banning him from work. It was part of MBS’s larger movement to get the old financial and media elites in line, while appealing directly to a younger (fashy-theocrat) generation. Khashoggi quickly learned that maybe absolute monarchy isn’t so absolutely awesome when you’re on the outside looking in.

Despite this, or probably because of this, Khashoggi grew more vocal against MBS, writing a series of editorials in the Washington Post. His message was clear: Things used to be better when he was a contented, city-dwelling member of the media elite (instead of being a dissident, or a woman, or a Shiite, or an atheist, etc.

Then one day Khashoggi visited the Saudi embassy in Turkey. It was there that something like a dozen guys- who flew in on one of the royal family’s private jets- killed the lone over-weight, middle-aged reporter and butcher his corpse into pieces. Pure BlackOps stuff. A man of a similar build to Khashoggi’s put on his clothes and left the embassy in broad daylight, the better to fool cameras and witnesses that the journalist had left alive. Besides them not really looking alike (and him passing Khashoggi’s wife, who was waiting outside and noticed a man dressed exactly like her husband) this Saudi Ethan Hunt was wearing different shoes. So close!

Trump would forever be a friend to the Saudi family after binding his soul to The Orb.

DWIGHT EISENHOWER was the five-star General of WW2’s European theater, working with FDR (and later Truman) to defeat the Nazis and save the Western world. He was General MacArthur’s foil of the European theater, save that he wasn’t a completely insane man who seemed physically incapable of sweating. He was also the only Republican of the 20th or 21st century to win a war. He beat the Nazis, he oversaw (mainly from the golf course) the establishment of the US-dominated global post-war order, built an interstate highway system and national infrastructure that will be around long after America is gone, and lent his callused white hands to the patriarchy which guided all of the women and non-whites back to their proper place in American society — near the bottom.

Although Reagan once lied to Moshe Dayan about having liberated Auschwitz,
he DID successfully win the “War on the ‘War on Poverty’.”

AND YET! How strange it is that the modern GOP are more eager to tie themselves to an evil, senile actor; an evil, psychopathic gameshow host; and (increasingly) an evil, ignoramus war criminal/amateur painter. Sometimes they even seem more likely to embrace that long line of smudged white faces that never seem to get much airplay during the RNC (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush I).

One explanation is that by today’s standards, Eisenhower would be a centrist-left neoliberal (at least economically, although his views on gays and women would probably still be on par with today’s GOP). His massive public works projects of the post-war era would be decried as “wasteful spending” by demon-owls like Mitch McConnell, who would argue that the nation’s money would be better left to our billionaire owners and their Panamanian bank accounts.

BUT THE REAL THING that Eisenhower did which probably alienated him from both parties, Right AND Left, is that final speech he made where he discussed the growing “military-industrial-complex” that was creeping into every aspect of modern life. The aged, former 5-Star General warned that we might soon become a nation that knew only the grinding, constant violence of war.

Then the hook came and pulled him offstage.

Don’t do what Donny Don’t Does.

Sign-up your friends for updates. They will thank you and will never know what hit them. And what WILL hit them?
Knowledge!

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade