The All-New, Improved Age of Irony

 

On September  24 , 2001, TIME essayist Roger Rosenblatt declared that the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. had marked “the end of the age of irony.”

For too long, Rosenblatt said, “the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” He continued:

With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes–our columnists and pop culture makers–declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life.

Such glibness will have to stop, he said, because:

The planes that plowed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were real. The flames, smoke, sirens–-real. The chalky landscape, the silence of the streets–all real. 

Unfortunately, Rosenblatt never quite nails down what he means by irony. Is it a trivial, wise-aleck attitude toward life, or is it a fatal denying of reality? Those are two different things.

In either case, Rosenblatt was wrong. The best ironists may seem glib, but they don’t deny reality. They expose reality by pointing out the disconnect between what is real and what we like to pretend is real. Or what we are told is real by our “leaders” and their stenographers at outlets like TIME.

Moreover, the events of 9/11 failed to end irony. They jump-started a whole new Golden Age of it, government-approved and highly destructive.

 Government Approved Irony Pre 9/11

There was, of course, plenty of government -sponsored irony before 9/11. My own favorite example involves the following events, all happening within a fourteen-month period:

1.     In November 1989, the Berlin Wall falls.  This is said to mark the end of the Cold War. It promises a “Peace Dividend” – defined by Oxford as “a sum of public money which becomes available for other purposes when spending on defense is reduced.”

 

 

2.     One month later, the U.S. sends 26,000 troops into Panama, a neighboring sovereign nation. The Peace Dividend is forgotten. The Panama operation includes such intense firebombing of one barrio, El Chorrio, that locals nickname the event “Little Hiroshima.” In that neighborhood alone, many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilian die in fires. Two thousand homes are destroyed and between 10 and 20 thousand people are made homeless.

The invasion itself is a major breech of international law –indeed, the Nuremberg trials have identified “aggression against a sovereign nation” as “the supreme international crime.” Also illegal is the failure to warn civilians of the attack and the “disproportionality” of it.

 But, as one U.S. general explains, “We have all these new gadgets, laser-guided missiles and stealth fighters, and we are just dying to use that stuff.”

And this is all – officially, at least – to capture one single guy, Panama’s president Noriega, who, ironically enough, had long been a U.S. intelligence asset.

 

3.     Just over one year after that – January 1991 – the U.S. decides Iraq needs invading. The reason: Iraq had invaded Kuwait, a sovereign nation. In other words, it was okay for the U.S, to invade a much weaker sovereign nation but it was a crime for Iraq to do so.

 

The Golden Age Emerges

Thus the roots of the New Age of Irony were already well sunk when the planes hit New York and the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania that Friday in September of 2001 and the end of irony promptly declared by Roger Rosenblatt.

Since then, the Ironies of US actions have multiplied and must rival that of any empire in human history (such things being difficult to measure).

Here, then, is a small sample (ten) of U.S. government-sponsored ironies that illustrate the age in which we now live -- the “post 9/11 world,” as they say:

1.     It was ironic that, in response to 9/11, Afghanistan and then Iraq were invaded and violently occupied when, according to the official 9/11 story, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian citizens and none were Afghan or Iraqi. And that Saudi Arabians were “the primary source of al-Qaeda funding.”

 

2.     It was ironic when, in the name of fighting terrorism, President Obama approved the drone-strike murder of U.S.-born citizen Anwar Al Mawlaki in December of 2011 – -making Malaki  the first-ever American citizen killed by the State without trial or judicial procedure.

 

3.     It was ironic that in 2011 –- in the name of curbing the violence of a civil war in Libya -- the U.S.,  led a bombing campaign there that featured the firing of 110 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles on Day One; lasted over eight months; included 26,500 bombing sorties;   and resulted in a dystopian state whose civil war worsened for several more years, is a center of human trafficking, and allows some 47,000 people to live in conditions that meet the definition of slavery .

 

It was further ironic that the corporate U.S. media, while employing taglines like “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” trumpeted the bogus cause of the Libyan “intervention” but highly underreported its destructiveness. Writing for a much less powerful outlet, journalist Joe Lauria said it well:

 

How then could The New York Times and The Washington Post, the most influential American newspapers, either refuse to adequately cover or not cover at all a story of such magnitude, a story that should have been front page news for days? It was a story that undermined the U.S. government’s entire rationale for an unjustified attack that devastated a sovereign nation.

 

4.     It is ironic that the U.S. – under both Biden and Trump – has gifted Israel some 21.7 billion dollars’ worth of weapons to conduct their genocide in Gaza and their ethnic cleansing in the West Bank when the Leahy Laws prohibit “the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights (GVHR).”

 

5.     It’s ironic that while Israel receives the huge amount of aid in military weaponry from the U.S. mentioned above, its own arms exports to other countries recent broke record sales four years in a row.

 

 

6.     It’s ironic that in a supposed constitutional republic, the Supreme Court would decare the president “presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for any official act they undertake.”

 

7.     It’s ironic that a Gestapo-like agency called I.C.E. – that did not exist when Rosenblatt declared the End of Irony – now feels entitled to batter down doors and violently enter homes  without probable cause or a warrant when the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly prohibits this.

 

 

8.     It’s ironic that in a recent six month period, there would be “at least 2,300 cases in which … immigration officials illegally detained people without bond or due process. This despite the Fourteenth Amendment stating that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

 

9.     It’s ironic that in a country where “free and fair elections” are considered fundamental to sustaining democracy, the Supreme Court, in 1910, “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.”

 

10.   Add your own irony here.  Having trouble finding one? Try Googling of the following:  Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, economic sanctions, ICE murders in Minnesota, Pentagon budget, ICE budget, social security, or income inequality, to name a few.

 

In summary, Irony has not ended, as Roger Roseblatt wishfully wrote in 2001. Like the common cold and Grateful Dead cover bands, it will always be with us. As the sports announcers like to say, you can’t stop it; you can only hope to contain it.

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MLK, Poverty, and War

 

Another Martin Luther King Day has gone by with no mention in any of our corporate outlets -- including NPR and PBS – of the speech in which King pointed out that his own country was the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. Specifically, he observed this:  

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

That speech was titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” It was delivered in April of 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City. Many believe it to be the speech that got King killed almost exactly a year later.

The response in the New York Times was typical and telling. The Times is, after all, an enormous business corporation and thus a key part of the U.S. based empire. The Times advised King, in so many words, to stay in his own lane, or to use an old racist expression, to know his place. The two problems King tried to link – poverty and war – were “distinct and separate,” the Times pronounced. And further:

the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.

Fast-forward nearly sixty years, and little has changed.

In the past year alone, U.S.-made bombs have exploded over Venezuela, Syrai, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine, and Somalia. We are the major arms supplier to three of the most brutal suppressors of human rights in the world: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel.

Meanwhile, in the words of researchers at the Urban Institute, “Wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country and has risen for much of the past 60 years.”

And corporate media continue to shamelessly ignore the obvious connection between war and poverty.

It’s a common mistake among empires past to ignore the welfare of their own citizens in order to maintain power in faraway places. Or, as Christopher Hedges recently observed: “All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war.”  

end

 

 

"Our Rulers are not Good People"

 

I recently stumbled across this observation by one of my favorite writers, Caitlin Johnstone. She said:

 

Our rulers are not good people. They are not wise. They are not compassionate. They aren’t even particularly intelligent. They just happen to be good at winning the capitalism game by moving the circumstances of our society around in such a way that the numbers in their bank accounts grow very large.

 

 

 Johnstone’s observation was in a post mostly about the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame  who, she notes, “exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy.”

This is apt, as Bezos is one of the all-star entrepreneurs and corporations generously ponying up for Donald Trump’s grotesque “ballroom.”

Bezos’s and others’ contributions to this cause, as everyone knows, are not motivated by any love of elegant ballroom dancing.  They are business investments, or, stated more honestly, a form of legalized bribery, a down payment on influence in the affairs of the state.

As Johnstone says, they are not good people.

Another writer I like, Chris Hedges, very recently posted an essay relevant to this topic. It is titled “America is a Banana Republic.”

The opening paragraph reads as follows:

El Presidente Trump is cast in the mold of all tinpot Latin American despots who terrorize their populations, surround themselves with sycophants, goons and crooks, and enrich themselves — Trump and his family have amassed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts from leveraging the presidency — while erecting tawdry monuments to themselves.

 

 

Hedges goes on to point out similarities between Trump and some of the most notorious Latin American dictators of the not-too-distant past.

There was, for instance, Haiti’s “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who eventually spent a full half of the country’s budget on his ICE-like private militia, which violently disposed of 30 to 60 thousand of Baby Doc’s political opponents.

Another Trump prototype was Juan Vicente Gomez, who ruled Venezuela from 1908 to 1935. Gomez, Hedges writes, “looted the nation to make himself the wealthiest man in the country” and fought any efforts to educate the citizens, knowing their ignorance would ensure his continued place in power.

I thought of all this when Trump recently hosted, and fawned over, the Saudi Arabian ruler, Mohammed bin Salman. Bin Salman has been nicknamed “Bone Saw” in honor of his order to murder journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2019, then saw him into pieces for proper disposal.

When a U.S. reporter asked Bone Saw about this, Trump excoriated the reporter for her bad manners. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” he told the reporter. And besides, Trump added, “things happen” and “a lot of people didn’t like [Khashoggi] anyway.

Bone Saw was later honored with a state dinner attended by an all-star cast of U.S. rulers who, it seems, couldn’t afford NOT to attend a tribute to one of the world’s most psychopathic despots.

The list of conscience-less bigwigs at the dinner was headlined by – you guessed it – Jeff Bezos. Also attending were various ruling elite worth a total of $719 billion, according to Forbes. They included Elon Musk, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, and the CEOs of Citigroup, Pfizer, Chevron, and General Motors.

Numerous A.I. and cybercurrency bigwigs made the scene. Also David Ellison, head of Paramount Skydance “ amid reports the Saudi sovereign fund could partly fund his company’s bid to acquire rival Warner Bros. Discovery.” (The company has denied this, so maybe Ellison was there out of pure admiration for Bone Saw’s work.)

Noticeably absent from the Bone Saw Bash were any representative of Human Rights Watch, the Climate Action Network, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

 

Israel’s Harshest Critics

 

Israel and its supporters have gone to enormous expense to promote the idea that if you criticize Israel, you are an antisemite. They recently persuaded the U.S. House of Representatives to declare “that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” 

 Numerous U.S. universities, to cite another example, have been extorted into suppressing pro-Palestinian views on their campuses under the threat of being charged with antisemitism.

There is no other country in the world whose government you can’t criticize without being accused of the vilest kind of cultural/religious hatred. You are free to criticize Saudi Arabi without being labelled anti-Muslem. You can question the government of India and nobody will say you must hate Hindus. You can disagree with Spain without being ostracized as an ignorant Catholic-hater.

Only Israel has succeeded in conflating honest criticism with irrational hatred.

 

But Israel’s harshest and most articulate critics have always been Jewish. Most of what I know about Israel and its criminal mistreatment of indigenous Palestinians is from Jewish writers. I have great admiration for many of them.

Here are five in particular, though many more could be named:

Amy Goodman is the host of the best widely available current events show, Democracy Now. That show, unlike any of the corporate news outlets, has consistently included the Palestinian point of view regarding the 75-year takeover of their lands.

Goodman’s maternal grandmother was an orthodox rabbi, and a paternal great grandfather was also a rabbi.  Goodman herself identifies as a “secular Jew” who was influenced by Jewish ethical, moral, and cultural principles. In an online profile, journalist Philip Eil wrote of Goodman:

For her, being Jewish means “a deep belief that ‘Never again’ means never should any group of people be oppressed like we saw in the Holocaust,” she said. Her Judaism also imbues her with “deep respect for everyone and everyone’s traditions… Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish.” A third Jewish principle? “Question everything.”

 

Norman Finkelstein is an extremely serious scholar who has devoted most of his life to examining the documentary history of the Israel-Palestine “conflict.” His mother survived both the Warsaw ghetto and the Majdenek Concentration Camp. His father survived the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz.

His books are not easy reads, but they rather relentlessly expose the many lies upon which the mythology of Israel depends. They are meticulously researched and documented. They include Beyond Hutzpah: On the Misuse of Antisemitism and the Abuse of History; Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict; and Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.

Here is a typical observation of Finkelstein’s, from Beyond Hutzpah, which, bear in mind, appeared in 2005, nearly twenty years before the most recent so-called war:

“The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. 

Finkelstein is greatly despised by the Israel lobby. In 2007, Alan Dershowitz (of Epstein files fame), led a campaign to get Finkelstein fired from his faculty position at Depaul University. (Finkelstein’s Beyond Hutzpah had systematically pointed out numerous problems in Dershowitz’s book, The Case for Israel, resulting in a kind of feud between the two.)

Finkelstein’s tenure had been approved by The College of Humanities Personnel Committee by a vote of 5-0, and his department approved him by a 9-3 count. But the university president and board of trustees, under great pressure from Dershowitz and friends, decided he had to go.

Finkelstein, however, continues to be one of the great debunker's of Israel's victimhood narrative.

 

 Max Blumenthal is the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (more on which in a minute.) He is also the editor and a primary founder of the website “Grayzone,” which, according to Wikipedia, has been “described by many as fringe.” Which means, in other words, that he shares with Amy Goodman the “Question Everything” principle -- especially as that principle applies to the narratives of the U.S.-based Empire.

 Blumenthal’s book, Goliath, is a report from several extended visits he made to Israel over a four-year period starting in 2009. He cites dozens of ways, maybe hundreds, large and small, that Arabs living in Israel or in the Israeli occupied territories are dispossessed, humiliated, jailed, detained, tortured, and otherwise denied basic rights every day.

The result is a portrait of a country reminiscent of the American south during segregation or South Africa during Apartheid.

Note that Blumenthal’s book, like the above quote from Finkelstein, was published more than a decade before the Hamas attacks of October 2023.

For his effort, Blumenthal was roundly excoriated by Israel supporters. Writing in Observer.com, Rabbi Shmealy Boteach got right to it:

“Max is quite simply one of the most biased, anti-Semitic, terrorist-defending, Israel-has-no-right-to-exist haters out there.”

On a visit to Germany, Blumenthal was similarly labeled antisemitic by German parliamentarian Volker Beck. Blumenthal’s response speaks directly to the point that apologizing for Israel should not be required for membership in the Jewish religion.

As long as Judaism is conflated with Zionism, a pro-Israel gentile like Volker Beck can declare himself in so many words more Jewish than I am, and I can be essentially de-Judaized; my Jewish identity can be negated, simply because I’ve defined it outside the frontiers of Israeli nationalism and to some extent, against Zionism.

 

Amy Kaplan was a highly respected scholar of American Studies at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. Her 2018 book, Our Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, examines certain mythologies common to both the U.S. and Israel. Among them are the following:

 (1) the myth of a mostly empty wilderness whose indigenous savages need to be removed to make way for a far more superior race and civilization.

 (2) the myth of what Kaplan calls “the invincible victim,” by which a group  envisions itself as a plucky underdog even as it violently rolls over weaker enemies and becomes enormously powerful.

(3) the mythology of the Christian Zionist movement built around selected passages from the Old Testament and Book of Revelation. Kaplan asserts that evangelical Christianity played an important role in shaping American culture, starting with the puritanical teachings of the leaders of the New England colonies. It helped justify, among other things, the removal of indigenous people.

Similarly, today, says Kaplan:

evangelical Christians have become fervent political supporters of Israel, and many of them have looked to Israel both as the setting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and as the primary actor in hastening that event.

As one of her cases in point, Kaplan examines the 1958 novel Exodus, by Leon Uris, and the film version of the same title starring Paul Newman. Both were hugely popular and, Kaplan argues, contributed greatly to the mythologies mentioned above.

She points out that the Palestinians in Exodus are portrayed much like American “Indians” were once portrayed as they were being displaced. Savage and ignorant, they stand in the way of human progress.  Kaplan cites one example, where a character in Exodus, named Kitty, ruminates on some Palestinian children:

How pathetic [Kitty thought] the dirty little Arab children were beside the robust [Israeli] youngsters of Gan Dafna. How futile their lives seemed in contrast…. There seemed to be no laughter or songs or games or purpose among the Arab children. It was a static existence – a new generation born on an eternal caravan in an endless desert.

In other words, as Kaplan says, the Arabs in Exodus are “the antithesis of enlightenment.” They “bear the major responsibility for their own destruction, as though their backwardness inevitably caused them to give way before progress.”

Ilan Pappe is best known for his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he shows that, contrary to popular Israeli mythology, the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was a deliberate, carefully planned project by Israeli leaders and militias.

Pappe was born and grew up in Israel. His parents had fled there from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. "My mother had seven sisters, and only three survived [the Holocaust]" Pappe once said. "There were similar stories on my father's side.” And his parents, Pappe continued,

 “… saw Palestine and, later, the state of Israel as a safe haven. And that's the part of me that can't totally condemn Zionism. Had it not been for the Zionist movement, my parents and many like them would not have escaped.”

"I've never underestimated those achievements, Pappe said. However:

…my parents could never see that setting up a Jewish state was done by dispossessing Palestinians. They turned a blind eye, in the same way that many Germans did in the 30s and 40s.

 

Like other Israeli critics, Pappe has been vilified by Israel supporters. In one typical review, conservative writer David Pryce-Jones called Pappe “"an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for".

Others

The five people described above are just a small sample of Israel’s Jewish critics. For anyone interested, here are a few others, with links to an example of their work:

Medea Benjamin

Gideon Levy

Peter Beinert

Ariel Gold

Naomi Klein

Katie Halper

Albert Einstein           

Gabor Mate

Primo Levi

Noam Chomsky

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This is Us

 

The U.S. recently commemorated the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon of September 11, 2001.

The three-minute video linked below shows how U.S. – sponsored destruction of Gaza makes the 9/11 attacks against the U.S. seem tiny by comparison.

You don’t even have to watch it for three minutes to get a feeling for the immensity of this crime.

Both of our major parties continue to support this. This is the country we are supposed to be proud of. This is us.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DCQmayWbeY0

 The Insane Clown Plan for Gaza

Actual Surreal image from the insane Gaza plan re-posted by The Guardian

The Trump crime syndicate has leaked a plan for postwar Gaza that is so absurd it ought to be published in “The Onion” or “The Borowitz Report.”

But apparently it is serious.

Here are a few of the plan’s more surrealistic proposals:

 

1. --- It proposes a “temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population.” 

 That might sound harsh, but Gazans would be given “generous voluntary relocation packages.”

(Oh, and they would only be displaced temporarily? I mean, that is just so nice!)

 

2.   --- It proposes an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.”

(A fitting tribute to a great grifter.)

 

3.    ---   It includes a “Gaza Trump Riviera and Islands.” : “World-class resorts along the coastline and on small artificial islands (similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai).”

(An even greater tribute to an even greater grifter.)

 

4. ---  It includes “6-8 dynamic, modern and AI-powered, smart planned cities on the inner side of the Gaza Ring.” And all services provided  will be done “through ID-based digital system.”

(Wow!  Smart planned cities! And an ID based digital system! Those alone make it worth the ethnic cleansing of two million people!)

 

And a Tribute to Mister Bone Saw!

As if paying tribute to Trump and Musk was not cynical enough, the plan proposes a highway named after the psychopathic prime minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salmon. He is most famous for ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. As you may recall, Khashoggi went into the Saudi consulate in Turkey to get a marriage license and was never seen again. He seems to have been murdered inside the building and smuggled out in parts, thus earning Bin Salmon the “Mr. Bone Saw” monicker (M.B.S., get it?)

 

No Donations Necessary!

The project will be expensive but don’t worry.  The plan contemplates “$70B-$100B in public investment.” Notice the word “public” there, as in government subsidized.                                                             

Which is to say it will be financed by the same people who spent tens of billions to destroy Gaza and wipe out its indigenous people: the U.S. Israeli, and other European taxpayers.

With this boost from the public sector, corporations and multibillionaires such as those already mentioned will be able to profit hugely. How hugely? Well, the plan estimates a ten-year “total [of] $385B return on a $100B investment.” Nice.

 

Oh, and Strategic Benefits for the U.S.!

Also tucked away in the plan is a statement that maybe explains what it’s really all about, besides, of course, the pure greed of the thing. The project would, “strengthen [the U.S.’s] hold in the east Mediterranean, and secure US-industry access to $1.3T of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf.”

In other words, it’s for the good of The Empire, so let’s get those inconvenient Palestinians out of there and get to work!

The bizarre plan has, naturally, been roundly criticized for the obvious cynical fraud that it is. One paragraph, from a group called the Edinburgh Action for Palestine, sums it up well:

“Behind the glossy language of “economic acceleration” lies the same imperial arrogance: stripping Palestinians of sovereignty, relocating the population, and offering “digital tokens” in place of their confiscated land. This is not reconstruction-it is dispossession wrapped in Silicon Valley jargon.”

End