We always knew that capitalism kills. But this is getting downright ridiculous.
Three events-cum-scandals in the space of little over a week are cause for renewed despair. But they also provide a paradoxical glimmer of hope. Despair, because the levels of depravity to which the Lords of Capital have sunk are almost beyond the realm of imagination. Hope, because whenever the mask is so regularly ripped off the visage of capital, not even all the plastic surgery propaganda in the world can prevent the gobbets of rotting flesh from peeling away and exposing, for all the world to see, the hollow skull beneath the skin.
If this imagery is too hyperbolically grotesque for you, then just take a look at the first Gross Event/Scandal on my list. Harvard University, America's oldest and most prestigious institute of higher learning, has been caught selling body parts right out of its medical school morgue. Granted, the morgue's director at least had the decency to bring human eyeballs, brains, flayed skin, and other organs home before he and his wife actually sold them over the Internet in the apparently booming necrophilia marketplace.
But coming as it does so closely on the heels of shocking revelations that Harvard was actually founded and funded by wealthy human slave-traffickers, and has directly profited from colonialism and slavery ever since, the selling of body parts news puts a real damper on its ability to profit from both the living and the dead. Whether Morgue-Mart is more disgusting than its long-running public exhibition of the corpses of enslaved Africans and murdered indigenous people is open to question. But its more recent human remains scandal must be causing prospects to think twice about donating their own corpses to this elite institution for "scientific" study.
But true believer in the evolving capabilities of capitalism that it is, Harvard will no doubt move on. Perhaps the trustees can start a body buyback scheme in much the same way that oligarchs and CEOs do stock buybacks as a way to both avoid paying income taxes and to keep prices for the barely living teeming masses of the world artificially high. Body-part laundering and sales are already a reality in much of the world. For all we know, there's even a thriving hedge fund where the obscenely rich can bet on and profit from any sudden body-part shortages. Or maybe they can go full Steampunk and hire gig workers as body-snatchers who sneak into cemeteries at night and dig up graves. The fresher the better.
The second gross event-scandal was, of course, the implosion of the Titanic submersible during a jaunt which allows billionaires to indulge their own necrophilia habit. Sadly, since their jerry-rigged death tourism capsule met its own demise a mere 1,600 feet from the original shipwreck, those on board probably never even got their $250,000 money's worth. They never had the chance to gawk at death before they themselves died. Also sadly, their bodies are probably not recoverable and therefore not fodder for a shrine or museum of their own. Harvard must be so disappointed. (Meanwhile, media coverage of the hundreds of money-less refugees believed drowned when their ship capsized off the Greece coastline this week was minimal at best.)
And speaking of disappointment, the third event-scandal I've chosen to discuss might seem, on the surface, to lack the requisite grisliness for all of you horror fans out there. But nonetheless, the pompous state visit, the gluttonous dinner, and the congressional fete for Indian president Nerendra Modi fits well into the genre of the slow-burn, shadowy, evocative horror. The blood-splatter and torture are left to the imagination. The pod-people starring in this show looked like normal overdressed rich people - on the surface anyway. They didn't leave the audience vomiting in their seats or fleeing the theater or (horror of horrors) demanding a ticket refund.
You are no doubt already familiar with the respectable political horror genre. Knowing that people get tired of constant blood and gore and monsters, the showrunners of political pomp have to lighten things up once in awhile. Just as Americans forgot the original horror of Frankenstein's body-part monster by falling in love with TV's Herman Munster, so too is Modi transformed into a benign character for purposes of profits over people, capitalism over humanism, and of most immediate importance, the bolstering of Joe Biden's "decent" avuncular image as he runs for re-election. Dark Brandon is now (mis)cast as a shrewd diplomatic salesman.
The New York Times performed its own traditional role of transforming monsters into pragmatic, even heroic, guys who join forces to do battle with whatever Greater Evil has been designated. If the United States and India can play Godzilla and Mothra, teaming up to make a ton of money for a select few by pretending to do battle with Ghidorah the Three-Headed (say, Russia, China nd maybe Iran) monster, while a few hundred thousand toy bystanders (collateral damage extras) are crushed in the process then it will have been worth it. It's simply the price of doing necro-business.
The Times-speak translation of the above:
Two and a half years into his administration, the democracy-versus-autocracy framework has, therefore, become something of a geopolitical straitjacket for Mr. Biden, one that conveys little of the subtleties his foreign policy actually envisions yet virtually guarantees criticism every time he shakes hands with a counterpart who does not pass the George Washington test. Even some of his top advisers privately view the construct as too black-and-white in a world of grays.
This rationalization is nothing new. It is baked into the very fabric of capitalism, dating in the American version right back to colonial-era Harvard, where President Increase Mather's nepo-baby Cotton went on to become a Salem Witch Trials inquisitor. It's not surprising therefore, that more than three centuries later it turns out that one of the top purchasers of the Harvard morgue's body shop runs a "doll" store right near Salem.
Lately there's been a lot of talk about fascism, The New York Times most recently sugarcoated the inclusion of neo-Nazis in Ukraine's fighting forces by euphemizing it as a "thorny" issue whose main danger is not its far-right fascist ideology but in the prospect that Russia would use the reality of modern-day Nazis as a propaganda tool.
Speaking of fascism, the mainstream corporate media are still busily pretending that Donald Trump is the sole progenitor and operator of the American version.
Even if you don't agree with the premise that fascism has always been an integral feature - not a bug- of United States leadership, just look back to how the American ruling class made common cause with its German counterparts during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Even when the US government became aware of the Holocaust, it made a point to artificially separate the financial backers and profiteers of the Nazi atrocities from the inner circle of Hitler and his uniformed henchmen.
Under the direction of future CIA founder and director Allen Dulles, the US made up a "White List" of German oligarchs who supposedly were anti-Nazi, but who had profited mightily from forced labor and money and property looted from the millions of Holocaust victims.
As Christopher Simpson wrote in "The Splendid Blond Beast,"
Although they were not Nazi ideologues, most of them had made their peace with the Nazi party and served in trusted positions throughout the Hitler years."
He added that one such White Lister, Hitler-era, oil magnate Karl Blessing, was later falsely puffed up in the New York Times as an anti-Nazi resistance fighter who spent years hiding out from the Gestapo.
Simpson observed that powerful people like Dulles believed that "competent governmental authorities, operating within a moral framework,,(were)motivated by a sincere sense of U.S. national security, and national interest - themselves, for example'
He and his cohort "repeatedly reached secret verdicts they believed necessary to to construct a postwar order that fit their idea of progress, and they reached them with a clear conscience.
I'd make one quibbling correction. They reached them with no conscience whatsoever. The lack of conscience is the definition of sociopathy. It's also the main feature of capitalism itself.
The horror.
