ED CURTIN—It is hard, I know, to hear an unbearable possibility: But suppose it were a performance, not just in the sense that Trump and Vance set Zelensky up, but as a coordinated reality TV show in which all the principal actors were performing from a script whose goal was the opposite of all the subsequent interpretations. A script that allowed for some improvisation, as comedians like Zelensky and reality TV stars like Trump are adept at.
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ED CURTIN—Today, the Little Tramp, has been replaced by big Trump and his sidekick, Elon Musk, owners and operators of the new AI Digital factory Internet system, posing as saviors of the Little Tramp.
Just the other day, Musk, with an imagined twinkle in his eye and little boy grin, tweeted out on his bullhorn X (Twitter): “We are on the event horizon of the singularity.”
By the “Singularity” is meant the time when the machines – computers and artificial intelligence – exceed human control and dominate society. For technologists like Musk and his ilk in and out of government and in Silicon Valley, the idea of a machine run world is heaven on earth.
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EDITOR —Palestine Hijacked (2022) is a book of deeply documented historical research (686 detailed endnotes) that tears the mask off the narrative that paints Zionism as a benign force. Through assiduous archival research in poorly accessed and newly declassified archives of the Central Intelligence Agency, the British National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, etc., Suárez uses original source documents to hoist the well-known Zionist leaders with their own petards, often in their own words, words never meant to see the light of day.
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ED CURTIN—Then this proclivity of mine toward philosophical thought and dark humor flipped in my mind as the pictures of dead and weeping Palestinian children swept in and tortured me in dreams. I had seen the photos and videos of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and felt sick and outraged afterwards. I have written against it many times. Yet as I wrote about this issue of nostalgia, I felt like a speculator in abstractions, and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experience when on January 14, 1967 he was at an airport restaurant thumbing through a Ramparts magazine and saw an article by the journalist William Pepper, “The Children of Vietnam” that featured photos of Vietnamese mothers holding dead and napalmed children.
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ED CURTIN—I have lived since birth in the United States during a period of time when it has been the world’s number one butcher, starting with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then continuing waging non-stop wars, assassinating foreign and domestic leaders, including President Kennedy, executing coup d’états, supporting and arming ruthless dictators and terrorists, and creating an economy dependent on war.
All this has been sustained by lies and propaganda that most Americans have swallowed. It is a deeply ingrained Yankee doodle-dandy ethos joined with American exceptionalism and a self-induced false innocence.
