Kiss the Blood off My Hands [1947]

Perhaps you have caught the film noir classic of this title free on You Tube. Burt Lancaster falls in love with Joan Fontaine, but it is too late to redeem him. This was the Post War Era before they recognized post traumatic stress disorders.
Eleven millions in uniform infected the rest of the population.
The film noir genre acted with the semblance of memory of pre-war fairness and justice. This gradually faded into the time in which Presidents can order torture and fabricate justifications for war.
This charade clouds the public senses and dulls the wit. The public loses the capacity to determine right from wrong.

A Look into Your Future

This may be presumptuous of me, but living in the Middle East for 26 years has given me a head start on most of you. There have been 26 violations of my 30 human rights defined by the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Due process is a dim memory. I appeared before 29 corrupt judges while I lost 35 cases.Beginning in the High Court I worked my way down to the Small Claims Courts and then all the way back up with equal frustration. What the civil judges did to my family rivaled what the religious ones did as they finished us off.
The individual confronts a system so inured to evil nobody within it is able to consider an alternative. The citizen surrenders his soul and the hard cases flee into exile. The state employs thousands of spooks to list them and their whereabouts.
Freedom and justice are minority poses.

The Steep Climb Upwards

Night and day we hear about the glories of the US for-profit medical system. Somehow, it sustains the virtues of democracy, thrift and competition. It is a bulwark to protect us from the contamination by European Socialism, Fascism and Communism. Furthermore, it shields us from the tentacles of the ever-expanding government bureaucratic monster.
This line of defense has delayed progress for over 100 years. It took a Great Depression to inspire the passage of Social Security. The assassination of JFK tweaked enough emotion to get Civil Rights and Medicare.
A proper single payer system is years away. Financial reform will take more time and the military/industrial Complex will probably outlast the country. Decline and decay are more comfortable than reform.

Glenn Beck Attacks Social Justice

When Glenn Beck vilifies “social justice” as a “perversion of the Gospel” and slanders churches and pastors as “Nazis” for pursuing it, he too is trespassing a bright line. The Fox News personality—who rants and weeps like the late Joseph McCarthy, a fellow alcoholic—urges his listeners to run away from any congregation where social justice is preached. He instructs them to denounce any pastor who even mentions the term. He even held up pictures of a swastika and a hammer and sickle to somehow demonstrate that “social justice” is a code phrase whose hidden meaning is identical to Nazism and communism.
Poor Beck evidently does not realize that his own Mormon church is deeply committed to the social justice teachings of the Gospels—or that the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and adherents of other faiths in this country all share similar values on that question. By attacking them, in his megalomania and ignorance, he has ripped into an ethical tradition that unites our country.
The best historical parallel to these extremist trespasses can be found back in the 1950s, when McCarthy, the John Birch Society and other elements of the far right were riding high. What brought them down were their excesses: in McCarthy’s case, when he and his staff sought to implicate the United States Army in the communist conspiracy; and in the case of the Birchers, when they proclaimed that President Dwight Eisenhower and the Supreme Court, among other august persons and institutions, were wittingly aiding the communists.
Our current crop of crazies is approaching that point of no return—and if we are fortunate, they will keep going.
Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer