So this old lady staggers out of her nice warm bed in her housecoat because the cats are hungry, and opens up Twitter to see whether Trump has died yet. (So far just demented.) And I scroll along until I come to “Lincoln’s Bible” who is another much younger woman in her own bathrobe, actually seated by a fire for a “fireside talk”, who is newly awake and tells me the key to several things. It took an hour to hear it through, but it was an hour as well spent as if it had been used to watch a Rachel Maddow show.
Most obviously it is the answer to the puzzle of why Justice Kennedy suddenly resigned as well as why his young relative worked for a bank that loaned Trump millions. If the US were a small town, we’d already know that Anthony Kennedy Senior was the lawyer for the heroin trade mafia on the Pacific Coast and that his son, also named Kennedy, would succeed him when he died relatively young. (A story there.)
So K. Sr was roughly equivalent to “Trumpf” — Trump’s father — who ran crime along the US/Canada border where vestiges still linger in the “bordertown” along the “medicine line.” No doubt they knew each other, even though Kennedy Sr was a bit more removed, technical white collar like his son who — like Barrett — was pushed into judgeship and onto the Supremes early with not much experience. Others are implied, but not named. The point at present is preventing labor unions and their demands. They’ve been succeeding pretty well until the pandemic.
This discussion comes from Lincoln’s Bible’s expertise on the Mafia plus Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s brilliant exposé of the dark money that controls the Supreme Court. Partly it’s a matter of controlling individual judges and partly it’s a matter of supplying plaintiff’s and money for amicus (friends) that will create precedents for the future.
It takes time, but these are long-game guys, which is why they so value family generations — sons and daughters — who will follow the plan on pain of death, though that’s not usually necessary. This creates a “boot”?— a word I can’t get right from only hearing it, but it means “precedent.” I’ll read this and other things until I find it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent
I need to devote a LOT of time to reading Whitehouse’s writing. I’ve been reading “Lincoln’s Bible” tweets all along and agreeing with the words. In the meantime I’m powered by watching a Canadian two-year serial on Netflix. It’s called “Bad Blood” and is about the Mafia on the Back East borderlands, particularly the big rez that’s like the Blackfeet because it is on both sides of the nation’s boundaries which established some privileges for tribes in order to get treaties agreed upon. (There is only one judge on the Supreme Court, we are told, who has ever read any tribal law, a specialized category that comes to this court more and more.)
The first year of “Bad Blood” is a fictionalization of a real Mafia boss, the empire he built, how he did it, and what brought it down. The actors are the best of the Canadian “repertory company” which overlaps with BBC actors. I came to know some of them through “Flashpoint” an excellent series about people who respond to all sorts of emergencies, many including madness. What would they make of the state of the US right now? (Canada is not that different.)
Simon Berry is the show runner, very much like David Simon. The name “Vito Rizzoto” is kept and the plot generally follows his real life in the first year of the series, but in the second year, the plot is “written” around a remarkable actor named Kim Coates. He has a memorable face, usually with pupils contracted to show his very blue eyes. His character is like that of “Omar Little” who is deadly but has his own code of who and when to kill. He’s not random. He is the narrator. It is questionable whether there are people like him in real life, but it makes a great show. Coates has Shakespearean dimensions that demand exceptional script writers.
The theme I’m pursuing here is that our lives are very much controlled by undercurrents, international and based on profit, not so much a mob as a family. The fact that much of it is criminal only demonstrates that more of it is unseen and uncontrolled. It’s what Trump tries to do with his own family but can’t because he’s a maniacal narcissist. He doesn’t relate to anyone.
“Lincoln’s Bible” suggests that it accelerated because of the 2008 crash of the stock market and the collapse of the USSR, which dropped the disguises of some things. I would add the internet to a cause of both deepening criminal practices like laundering money through real estate on a global basis and the possibility of disguising money records and moving them around. As both “Lincoln’s Bible” and “Bad Blood” tell us, this level of crime depends upon logistics, which is moving illegal substances, moving people illegally, exploiting resources by moving them.
This is why Mitch McConnell’s wife is the Secretary of Transportation. Think ships at sea. Think a parallel to the invention of the tall-masted sailing ships that built the Euro-empires by moving precious substances. (I can’t help wondering whether he wakes in the night and makes his maniacal laughter.)
What power do old ladies staggering out of sleep in their housecoats, furiously thinking, have to do that saves this country. Voting. Persuading others to vote. Using the privilege of being anonymous and beneath the contempt of the big movers and shakers to accumulate a growing understanding of how it works. Finding and learning from a Senator Whitehouse who has guts and eloquence. Also, sadly, sharing contempt for the teenaged woman with the crackling little voice who pretends to be the Madonna. Not the singer.
A system is building itself out of new awareness that will be ready when the pendulum swings the other way. The Mafia is predicated on the children following the ways of the old men, but if they lose control of the young, their system is broken. The old people, even the president, are being removed by the pandemic. Watching a frail old man boogie like a bear on a cat walk in front of a crowd there for the spectacle, even if it’s potentially suicidal, is to make it plain that they are not the past nor the future. They’re a sideshow.
Follow the money.
No comments:
Post a Comment