Who Runs America and How
I am sorry to hear that Damien Walter, the original Morlock for whom all Morlocks are named, had apparently lost his post at the Guardian earlier this year. (The Guardian is the branch of Pravda newspaper operating in Anglostan, a Muslim nation once known as England, except with policy of less adherence to truth in reporting that its late Soviet predecessor.)
I am sorry not for his sake, but for mine.
The temptation to giggle unmanfully, while dancing with satanic schadenfreude an undignified jig, with elbows and knees jerking energetically, tongue lolling, had overwhelmed me in front of my family, and I lost face, not to mention my reputation for stoical reserve and dignified magnanimity.
I laughed long, loud and heartily with jovial abandon, and should visit the confessional booth if I knew what was good for me.
After all, Tom o’ Bedlam may not have lost his job because he is a mewling and ineffective poof with delusions of adequacy who cannot do in years and on the coin the Queen exacts from her cowering subjects what any pro SFF writer can do in six months for a wage freely offered from free men, that is, write a novel.
He may have lost his gig due to the economics. Who am I to dance odd jigs, when my own gig at the girly website EveryJoe collapsed? He might have lost his job for some unrelated reason. But he is still a mewling and ineffective poof.
Now, having said that, I will not abjure the Guardian when it prints an article worth reading.
This is one of the more insightful takes on the whole Podesta WikiLeaks scandal and email scandal surrounding the Clintons. The English, who live and breathe a class structure, notice what most Americans miss. What Podesta emails show was a rare glimpse of what our ruling elite actually act and think like.
These are your rulers, you poor souls. These are the enlightened. The Gnostics, the Illuminati, the Self-Anointed.
This column is by Tom Frank. Below is his opening paragraphs. Read the whole thing here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/31/the-podesta-emails-show-who-runs-america-and-how-they-do-it
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades.
… I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.
Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to namePresident Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery).
The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg. He makes plans to visit Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to “learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action”). Podesta exchanges emails with an entrepreneur about an ugly race now unfolding for Silicon Valley’s seat in Congress; this man, in turn, appears to forward to Podesta the remarks of yet another Silicon Valley grandee, who complains that one of the Democratic combatants in that fight was criticizing billionaires who give to Democrats. Specifically, the miscreant Dem in question was said to be:
“… spinning (and attacking) donors who have supported Democrats. John Arnold and Marc Leder have both given to Cory Booker, Joe Kennedy, and others. He is also attacking every billionaire that donates to [Congressional candidate] Ro [Khanna], many whom support other Democrats as well.”
Attacking billionaires! In the year 2015! It was, one of the correspondents appears to write, “madness and political malpractice of the party to allow this to continue”.
There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
