The Worst And The Dimmest

Nope, I did not bother you on Flag Day, or the Fourth. I did not speak up as the dumbass war in Afghanistan surges into more poor people's homes. I am writing a book about a Tarot deck, about a person who exploited and felt affirmed by martial chaos around the world. Why should I note mere motes of affirmation, when I am exploring the glory of the cosmic scheme which commands all these motes to goosestep?

But, sometimes a particular mote or moter shines so remarkably, I am drawn away from my great work, and must comment on the lesser efforts of mere motels. No, look, stop trying to understand that sentence. It's a joke. HAHAHAHA! Anyway...

Robert McNamara has died. So has the Wicked Witch of the West.

A house did not fall upon Robert McNamara. Rather, he fell upon the house of the nation and people he was supposed to be defending, like a ton of anthrax.

This is one of the most horrible, and yet revealing, photographs ever taken. All these poor terrified people, rounded up like cattle by US military personnel at My Lai, Vietnam on March 16, 1968, are about to be marched to a ditch and murdered. In the case of the older girl (reportedly thirteen years old) holding the child, she was about to be gang-raped by the American animals, but after the photographer came up, they decided to murder her and everyone else in the picture—yes, including the small children. Altogether, the US Army admits to having murdered 347 people at My Lai. It is not unreasonable to think the total was a lot higher. While this incident took place shortly after Robert McNamara left office (Bloody Bob was braving the slopes at Aspen about the time these people died), it was certainly in line with the ghastly policies he perpetrated. If there is a ring of hell for the worthless feces, known as the soul of Robert McNamara, one would think it correct that he be eternally forced to listen to the screams of his victims.

Who was Robert McNamara? Name sound familiar, but you can't place it? Well, Robert was the Donald Rumsfeld of the 1960s. If you don't know who Donald Rumsfeld is, then just go back to sleep. McNamara is often described as the "architect" of the Vietnam War. That's the war that used to be the biggest military fuckup in the history of the United States, until that honor went to the Bush-Obama catastrophe of the ongoing wars on "terror"—and common sense and decency.

The Vietnam War was one of those proxy wars fought between the forces of the West, chiefly the United States, and nameless, faceless hordes of commies, in the greater global madness called the "Cold War". It was called this because all the people who died in it at the least didn't end up glowing in the dark. In other words, it was a sacrifice to Mars made by the opponents to keep themselves from pushing little black or red plastic buttons that would have incinerated the world. That would have been the "Hot War" and the last war, between humans anyway.

Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense (euphemism for "War Chief") under first John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson. It was his job to provide the civilian leadership of whatever military ventures were launched by the USA. And it was consequently his job to run the war in Vietnam for seven years (1961-1968). It was also his job to keep the presidents he served informed about the progress, or lack of same, being made in the war.

What has become evidently clear was that his job was certainly not to serve the interests of the American people, and in no case was the interest of US military personnel even remotely on his radar—save that they were pawns in a geo-political chess match and nothing more.

If you would like some indication of the truth of that assessment, then just watch this (it is from a PBS Newshour interview with McNamara back in 1995, shortly after the publication of his memoir):



Now, what you we should take from these comments, I think the pertinent point, is that McNamara admits he was incompetent, and a liar.

He admits that he couldn't "reconcile" what he described as "two fears", both of which he asserts as reasonable points of view, and so this antinomy in admitting that the US had no realistic chance of winning in Vietnam, while at the same time believing that if Vietnam should fall to the communists, so would all of Asia (the "domino" theory), caused McNamara to perpetrate a continuation and escalation of the hopeless war.

And by so doing, he murdered thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. He, and his presidents, were war criminals.

But hey, who isn't these days, right?

Naturally, much criticism has come to the people in the White House responsible for recommending and ordering an escalation of American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war, and in an effort to find out what went wrong, one famous examination by David Halberstam summed up the problem in its ironic title—"The Best and The Brightest"—referring to the choices made by John Kennedy (mirrored in style by Barack Obama) of getting the allegedly most intelligent, best-educated, people to come to work at his White House. Robert McNamara was one of those people.

What we got from that crowd with respect to their service to the USA was instead something more like the murderous bumbling (masquerading as arrogant elitism) of the Worst and the Dimmest.

Now, as you may know, I live in the USA. Thus I criticize it mainly, though there is more than sufficient blame to go around to pretty much every country on the face of the earth—and the "leading" nations in particular—for the hateful relationship governments maintain with their peoples.

I have made this point repeatedly, but it seems pretty clear to me that the peoples of the Earth have far more in common with each other, in opposition to the general malfeasance and pure criminality (in many cases) of their (or the) governments. The Worst and the Dimmest continue to lead us all into wars, economic disasters and a general economic injustice, global ecological catastrophe, religious strife, and cultural divisiveness.

Of course, we all continue to follow that deadly lead.

And yes, I hear you—dude, what do you suggest we do about it?

Stop acting like everything is OK.

Start acting like we are on a precipice, about to be pushed over it by the people allegedly trying to make things better for us.

What does that mean in principle and practice?

That should be the subject of another post, and a global conversation.

Unfortunately, at the end of that conversation, what is likely is that yet again the "Best and the Brightest" will be appointed as our representatives to patch up the broken old assumptions that the peoples need to be led about like sheep. I am not even sure the latter is an incorrect inference. But I am sure that if it isn't, and the peoples shall always require their masters, it is a death warrant to humanity.

Because the Best and the Brightest aren't good enough.

(jk)