Sunday, February 05, 2017

An outfit for Bannon for the next Mercer costume party.

Make jackasses of themselves? Yes they can.

And for Bannon, his newer higher station in life, this outfit:

image credit

On the left. On the left.

There is a limit even to Bannon's presumptiveness.

Wouldn't he look dashing, as a senior Knight of Malta? Perhaps he already has the mood as well as the uniform. With his own set of decorations. A Templar? Perhaps. He'd know. We would not.

_____________UPDATE_____________
Guardian analyzes the mood of the Bannon of the United States, close perhaps to the Pence of the United States, in yet another online item besides the one already cited. Neither gives credit or criticism well. Bannon is simplistic, a caricature of having an encompassing worldview.

As is Trump. The dueling two culture scenario fails in that it ignores Asia and histories there, as well as ignoring wars of the Reformation.

Le Pen also has a narrow lens, if the niece's quote in an earlier post applies to the standard bearer. Greek thought. Yes. Including Alexander's education before and by his warfare/wanderings. Never forget, he established a library.

But Le Pen and Bannon crutch-up with Judeo-Christian and Roman props too, and that gets us to Constantine and his "If you can't beat them, join them," takeover of a cultish segment under Roman control, saying to himself how fit it would be, sacrifice on the Cross, as a state religion.

He convened a conference to set actual vs apocryphal dogma, including render to Caesar that which is Caesar's and a hierarchical structure resembling secular Rome. A boss, atop, and blessed as special. Rome fell, so-called Dark Ages followed, but the Roman Church persisted to today, not monolithic but with its own history, including secular power seeking and exercise well beyond matters of faith and soundness of the alleged afterlife.

Bannon is alleged to look to the Eisenhower years as his gold standard of government responsibility. Those years were engineered by a post-war elite that had WW I as an example of how not to handle things, the Bonus Army being a significant part of things. The woman workforce that kept the motors of war humming on the US homefront while conscription took men from "their jobs" was, in the US, reengineered to mom at home and Walt taking care of working and being the key moral teacher in the evenings for Wally and the Beaver. Other black and white TV channel, Father Knows Best. Put the men to work building automobiles and roads for them, as well as for quick deployment of troops on the homefront should that become needed, and add in the Marshall Plan to try to tamp down Marxism in Europe. It succeeded. Even though the bonding between auto makers and auto workers in the US to produce inferior merchandise at high labor compensation rates did not serve the rest of us that well.

But to say that time, Red Scares and all, was a Nirvana is to be highly shortsighted; leading to a view of what the Bannon-Trump problem truly is. And then, there are the Mercers, who are a fright. Wealth out of line with vision. Barbarian cunning is not insight on any higher level.

The Enlightrnment had secular underpinnings. After Constantinople fell in 1453, other trade routes were needed, navigation by the stars led to Newton and Liebnitz, with the notion of centrally managed faith yielding to better things being encapsulated in heliocentrism's success.

Galileo recanting, and being allowed to continue living had at least one foot in the merchants liking help from science. Perhaps more legend than truth, one story is that Galileo's telescope was renowned as a breakthrough because at a distance it could discern the flagging of a returning vessel so that those seeing it could rush out and use such insider information to market advantage in the then existing capitalistic coastal city states. Again, even if that is legend without factual grounding, it is a fine explanation reaching to modern times where Goldman Sachs backed the Clintons' effort, while Bannon we know served his due time at Goldman. He brags of it. It's call a hedge.

Four years of Trump will be interesting, and if there's a Frexit, Europe will have its own tempting times where protectionism will be given another shot on both sides of the Atlantic. If the Chinese have overcapitalized, and if there is truth to the notion some advance that the Great Depression resulted from overcapacity making capital a non-scarce commodity, we face interesting near-term history in the making.

Fun, eh? On the bright side, it could have been Hillary and Podesta instead of Trump and Bannon, while on the dark side, is there any difference?

FURTHER: Tune time for our recent election, and for those in Europe with elections on the near horizon. Not necessarily true, but entertaining as a tune. Studio musicians earning a paycheck is not a bad analogy. Songs as merchandise. This time, never mind next time.

If you want punditry it's on all of the networks so focus on one of the networks. Idiocy analyzes idiocy? So where is Crabgrass in the formula? On the metaphorical level, you water the lawn, you are watering the crabgrass. So: Turf teaches? As does punditry? In that segment on PBS, there seems truth in "there is no opposition party." There's an answer to that, but the inner party of the opposition now has its power brokers with comfort for those still holding a seat and with that inner party still having entrenched biases related to money flows with little real promise of reform, despite Bernie and Ellison and an end to superdelegate stuff being a more promising direction than more of the same.

Expect more of the same, with the watchword being after four years of Trump . . . anything will sell, so make it the same old; change be damned as unnecessary because old stuff WILL WORK, we know it is so. Tottering onward Democrats, as they've grown to find comfort in familiarity; so Bannon being a loose cannon has its promise of kicking out the props of the Third Way Republican-lite Koolaid being viewed as still so tasty?

The inner party's voting on DNC leadership - you know they will never waver on superdelegate status - will be of interest as a sole basis of hope; and it appears likely that once done, with each inner party vote of 447 total votes counted, there will be a basis for continuing disappointment. Flat learning curves with comfort in continuing to have a "safe" district will mean no opposition party of consequence, absent what Obama promised but declined to deliver; CHANGE.

Not to be expected in my remaining lifetime, but perhaps, social consciences, in some unforeseen fashion at some unforeseen time, might show up. However, there is the play-on-words old saying, "Wait broke the wagon."

FURTHER: Sometimes musicians seem to enjoy doing music, which is alright.