If you're worried about the two million Palestinians starving to death in Gaza as bombs rain down on their heads, maybe you shouldn't be.
Because to hear first lady Jill Biden tell it, our most pressing concern should be that our ruling capitalist predators get enough comfort food to eat. Stuffing their faces with gourmet treats posing as plain country fare eases their stress and strain. Their need for sustenance should prove to us mere mortals that these demi-gods are, in fact, as human as you and me. The poor beleaguered things not only are tasked with waging, marketing and profiting from ongoing multiple wars, they're also busily plotting the total global conflagrations of the future. And it takes a lot of caloric fat for the fat cats to survive and thrive for purposes of your security.
So there was no possible way, genocide in Palestine notwithstanding, that the Biden administration would ever have cancelled the state gala for the prime minister of Australia, which is now the main US base of operations for their hoped-for war with China.
"Nurturing our partnerships and relationships with our allies is critically important, especially in these tumultuous times," Jill Biden euphemistically explained as her rationale for going ahead with the dinner. "Food is comforting, reassuring and healing, and we hope that this dinner provides a little of that as well."
Given that the 300 honored guests at the state dinner included the bloodthirsty likes of Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin III and Victoria Nuland, one can only imagine the gusto with which they gnawed into such delicacies as spareribs slathered with gobs of sarsparilla sauce.
Jill Biden came off sounding a lot like the clueless hostess in the classic Katherine Mansfield short story, "The Garden Party." The matriarch scoffs at her conscience-stricken daughter's plea to cancel the festivities because a man had just suffered a fatal accident in the slum neighborhood located just outside the gates of their fancy estate. Putting the feelings of her poor, mourning neighbors ahead of her wealthy guests enjoying her food, her flower arrangements, and her hired musicians would have been just too "extravagant."
"You are being very absurd, Laura," she said coldly. "People like that don't expect sacrifices from us. And it's not very sympathetic to spoil everyone's enjoyment as you're doing now."
But to show that for her own part, Jill Biden is not completely insensitive to what either the Palestinians or the growing number of critics of her husband's embrace of genocide might think, she did cancel the hired entertainment part - dance music by the B-52s. It might have looked unseemly for the gentry and proxy genocidaires to be seen rocking and rolling to a band sharing a name with an aircraft that's been used for decades to drop US bombs all over the world, including in the Middle East to this very day.
Instead, Jill opted for the soothing jingoistic sounds of military bands from the Army, Air Force and Marines. The corporate media dutifully downplayed the party as "sedate" and "low-key" and even family-centered, given that the Bidens' grandchildren were there.
(Even as they were playing their appropriate tunes, an Army reservist in Maine - trained as a state-sanctioned weapons instructor - was shooting up a bowling alley full of kids with his own instrument of choice: the iconic AR-15. Any upcoming sympathy visit by Joe Biden to yet another grieving community might be a little more awkward than usual, given his recent glib remark that dead Palestinian children are inevitable - because war. Also, there's the inconvenience of his own son being under criminal indictment for an illegal gun purchase.)
But enough of all this angst and unpleasantness. Let's get back to Jill Biden's mission of comforting the comfortable. A few days before the state dinner, she was dining by candlelight with fashion industry donors at former Vogue editor Anna Wintour's multimillion-dollar townhouse in New York City's Greenwich Village.
She told the group that, given these "fraught times" she wouldn't trust anybody but Joe Biden to be sitting in the Situation Room for another four years. And why wouldn't she, given that the Situation Room is really a 5000-square foot a mansion within a mansion?
With its recent $50 million renovation, the Biden sitting room is many rooms, including many nooks and crannies and multiple conference rooms and even so-called "breakout rooms." The padded walls are adorned with multiple high-def video screens especially designed for the comfort of aging eyes. Even the presidential seals for the podiums have been supersized and specified to be larger than a human head. The massive main conference table is crafted from the finest fine-grained mahogany. imported from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Far East with a military base. The chairs for the armchair warriors are crafted from the finest leather, flayed from the finest American cows.
But where would comfort food and furniture be without fashion? Jill Biden is also all about the couture to take wealthy minds off all that global "tumult" and other unpleasantness. She told her fashionista donors that couture is "not only the clothes we pull out of our closets each morning, they are statements of our identity. They're our armor."
There is no word yet about "who" Jill will wear as body armor when (in our imagination) she brings baskets full of state dinner leftovers to the UN trucks parked at the Egypt-Palestine border.. It would be a happy ending to ur story. It would be just like the young girl in "The Garden Party" bringing her basket of party food to the bereaved family of the accident victim. She thought she could just leave the offering at the cottage door. But then those sly underclass victims of capitalistic predation actually make her view the dead body.
It's nurturing comfort food for the hoi polloi, on those rare gala occasions when the comfortable actually get afflicted for a change.
Who would ever dream of canceling such a tumultuous event?
To think there was a time (Jimmy Carter's Administration) when the Democratic Party was NOT out of touch with ordinary people. I think Jimmy Carter was the last president of the U.S. to care about the Middle East and to try to broker peace.
ReplyDeleteAnthony Albanese, the leader of the Labor Party, isn't demanding the release of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, as a condition for U.S. weapons systems being set up in Australia. Like in the U.S., it is hard to tell the difference in foreign policy between the conservatives and the "liberals."
I would have served them blood sausage.
ReplyDeleteWhile the elites are sitting on the deck of the Titanic feasting, 'The Economist' is boasting that 'Israel's war on Gaza is the chance for the US to show it's power'. I think they meant 'USRAEL's war on Palestinians.'
ReplyDeleteHow many fronts can the Empire fight on when defending 800 military bases in over a hundred countries when they come under attack by insurgents? The ROW (Rest Of the World) has a golden opportunity to take the US Empire down a few notches providing they take an economic tack instead of playing our favorite game - war.
Just off the top of my head, these are a few of our economic weaknesses:
We're 33 trillion in debt and growing daily, paying out 1 trillion/year in debt service to foreign countries that we've borrowed from to wage wars. Many of those countries have begun settling trades with other countries in their own currencies, in effect de-dollarizing, and taking other measures to break free from US economic tyranny.
Then there's our GDP which is a mirage. Interest paid on any kind of debt is considered a 'product' so the more interest paid on debt the higher the GDP, whether the debt be cars, credit cards, student loans, Biden's IRA boondoggle, health care, etc. Then there's the inflation index which is deliberately eliminates the cost of our essentials including food, housing, energy, from their calculation, just more financial trickery to make inflation look lower than it is. Our whole country is a house of (marked) cards.
Potential military recruits are so overweight they can't pass muster so they don't have enough of them. Our weapons supplies are depleted due to sending our old inventory to Ukraine, then printing/borrowing more money to pay defense contractors to replace them with new, more expensive weapons. But it's all good because it's JOBS! said Genocide Joe.
And speaking of depletion, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is more than half gone due to Joe's politically motivated manipulation and now petroleum costs more to refill it and may become subject to blockades or other obstructions and further price increases. Diesel is vital to the military for jet fuel and heavy equipment and very little is refined domestically so must be imported and that's another weakness. Russia has been the primary source of the heavy, sour crude.
The open border is obviously a huge vulnerability and has been for a long time so terrorists have had decades to slip in. They're not stupid. And neither are Americans who see our Govt caring more about 'protecting' and 'investing' in other country's safety and security than our own. Americans will never give up their guns because they aren't stupid.
Our former industrial economy that gave Americans a middle class lifestyle has been replaced by a financialized economy serving Wall St. investors who have permanently ruined the housing opportunities for many Americans, particularly the young. Precarity all around the center of Empire.
"Housing is for living, not for speculation" said NO American politician. That was announced by Xi Jinping as he cracks down on speculators in China's housing industry. Frankly, I'm looking forward to China providing us with free health care, education, and housing, fixing our dilapidated infrastructure, and generally bringing us up to the 21st century. They managed to raise billions of people out of poverty in record time because they valued the welfare of their people over money. And they're beating us economically too. But we're supposed to fear them.
Finally, the greatest weakness is not that the US Empire is bankrupt financially but that it's morally, ethically, and spiritually bankrupt. The genocide of Palestinians by USRAEL is making that clear to the entire world.
My heart aches and my soul is sick because I feel powerless to help the poor Palestinians who are paying the ultimate price. May their sacrifice be worth it. Inshallah.
I'm listening to Glenn Greewald's show. His coverage of the Israeli Hamas War has been well-balanced, thorough and excellent. Greenwald just reported that amid all the bombing, Palestinian parents are writing their children's names on their legs so that they can be identified in case the parents are killed or they are separated and the children have to be taken to the hospital or the morgue.
ReplyDeleteI feel like throwing-up.
Why don't we just put Netanyahu and all those who want to kill Palestinians, Biden and his administration, members of Congress who are so keen for a war and the leaders and supporters of Hamas in a giant pit and let them fight it out themselves rather than waste soldiers and innocent citizens in this horrific holocaust.
Woman, YOU ARE KILLIN' IT!! Your posts are so relevant, so spot on and just so RIGHT -- I HAVE to read you every week! Thanks for the truth-tellin', Darlin'
ReplyDeleteNetanyahu and his family have moved to a mansion with a bunker and are bringing along their personal chef. Sounds a little bit like the Biden White House dinner. Hey, party on while so many others suffer because of decisions you have made!
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the ordinary Israeli folk, many of whom are furious at Netanyahu, are left to face any repercussions Hamas might dish out in response to the terror caused by the Israeli government.
So, Netanyahu gets both Israelis and Palestinians killed and then gets to retreat to safety while his country burns around (above) him. If that isn't evil and injustice, I don't know what is.