HEY! WE CAN'T FIND THE FOREST BECAUSE ALL THESE TREES ARE IN THE WAY!

Ever since Luigi Mangione was arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonald's in connection with the murder of CEO Brian Thompson reporters in all media have been shocked - shocked terribly - by two aspects of this suspected murderer's case. First is the popular public perception that Mangione is both a hero and handsome. The second universal reaction of print and electronic media in amazed disbelief that this scion of wealth, privilege and exceptional education could be a cold-blooded murderer.

Let me address the first perception now. Mangione is no hero. UnitedHealth Care is, by all accounts,.the heartless, cold-blooded killer of many.people whose medical care might reduce UnitedHealth Care's profits by a few pennies. That is vile. That is wrong. That is capitalism. Unless we are ready to stringently enforce an humane moral code on medical insurers, the heartless capitalism of UnitedHealth Care will continue to be the norm. Killing is inherently wrong. Killing one CEO blindly intent on increased profits only makes room for another of his ilk with better personal security to take his place. Not only is the Thompson murder inherently wrong, it was entirely pointless.

As for Luigi Mangione's attractiveness, that's undeniable. The men and women attracted to him must answer for their own compromised morals and their lack of decency and clear thinking.

What concerns me most is the second matter, theaà media's comprehensive inability to understand how Mangione could become a murderer. The first mistake lies in that word "become". How, they ask, does a young man of wealth, privilege and superior education become a murderer? The media ask this as if wealth, privilege and education inoculated one against illegality, crime and sociopathy. The answer is in the question. We have examples of great sociopathy from the educated and rich all the time though we choose to reward the sociopaths with wealth, privilege and educate them to be more antisocial than they already are.

Take as current examples both Donald John Trump and his bosom buddy, Elon Musk. Neither man has the least scintilla of decency, sense of shame or feeling for humanity at large. Trump can vilify destitute people who come to our borders in the hope of earning an infinitesimal piece of what we call "The American Dream". For their temerity in begging for a crust from the great American feast, Trump.would separate them from their children, send them to vile, for profit camps and then deport them to countries that they fled in fear of their lives  Musk would minutely examine government with an object of slashing the largely mythical "waste, fraud and abuse" in all areas excepting the military where actual "waste, fraud and abuse" is truly rampant and also excepting the billions of taxpayer dollars that have massively enriched.him. Musk would ravage USAID (U. S. Agency for International Developmen) because some branches found that his SkyLink was involved in some shady practices while, in Trumpean fashion, calling the Agency investigating Musk's criminal organization a "criminal organization".

We have had examples aplenty of Luigi Mangiones/Elon Musks over more than a century, at least since Harry K. Thaw shot Sanford White in Madison Square's Roof Garden in 1906 and probably as far back as when, during our Civil War, wealthy people could hire a substitute when drafted for military service. Money and social standing always trump (a term from games of cards though apt in our political context too) duty and justice with money trumping all.

What is remarkable is that there aren't more handsome sociopaths committing crimes out on our streets. But then again, they have corporate boardrooms in which.their crimes are muffled by actuarial tables and defended by highly paid.attornies adept at making the law conform to the desires of the highest bidder. One might think that Lady Justice often peeks beneath her blindfold to be enchanted by a pretty face while collecting cash in some fulsome fold of her flowing skirts. We shall see what peeking and profiting will make of Luigi Mangione's case as this dreadful year drags on.

The ultimate point here is that plenty of people are brought up in famous and toney private schools, ivy League colleges and business schools to believe in their blackest of black hearts that they are a perversion of the Nietschean Superman. Their every whim and act are above reproach because they are handsome, well connected, monied and privileged regardless of any crime they commit, regardless of the number of ugly, friendless, poor or underprivileged who die or are afflicted with the hell of unremitting poverty. 

Are we truly so jaded, unfeeling and selfish that we will follow in the footsteps of Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk and Luigi Mangione? Can those amongst us charged with speaking truth to power truly not see the dense forest of criminals hiding behind the pretty face of a Luigi Mangione?

Reinhard Heydrich and Josef Goebbles, Israelis

Today the Israelis and Hamas have entered an uneasy truce in the Gaza Strip with an Israeli invasion force inside Gaza allegedly to keep the peace. In fact, the Israelis are there for no such purpose. Rockets from Gaza are simply the excuse for continuing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian population but let's put that aside for a moment to consider a couple of points relative to the most recent three weeks of murderous Israeli attacks on Palestinians.

Let me first address the myth that opposing Israeli government policy and being anti-Semetic are the same thing. That farago is the same crap dealt out by the Bush Administration when they have claimed that opposition to their odious policies is un-patriotic and "gives aid and comfort to the terrorists." It is manifest nonsense. Personally, I support the existence of a nation of Israel living in peace with its neighbors. It is because I support Israel that I oppose Israeli government policies toward the Palestinians. Israel's governments, in a nearly unbroken line for the past 62 years have engaged in policies that seal its doom rather than promote its survival.

Israel, from its inception in 1947, has engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide to displace and/or kill the indiginous Palestinian population in the name of a mythological grant by a non-existant god to the probably mythical Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Even Israeli scholars have demonstrated that much of the official history of the founding of Israel is, like most founding histories, largely myth covering a much more noisome reality. Palestinians did not voluntarily surrender their homes because of their bias toward Jews. They were forced out of their homes and into "ghettos" more than passingly reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto by an ethnic cleansing that makes the acts of Slobodan Milosovic and Radovan Karadzic look amateurish by comparison.

Israel owes its existence to a deft and even sometimes justified application of both lies and guilt. Almost all of us who are not Jews bear some guilt for the anti-Semitism that had its hellish apotheosis in the Holocaust. I would be lying to myself if I said that that guilt does not inform my support for Israel. My father and paternal grandmother were casually and at the same time vehemently anti-Semetic, an aspect of their characters that I despise even as I loved them for their other qualities. Yet it is this very guilt that I feel that has been outrageously exploited by Israel. Successive Israeli governments and Israel boosters have used that guilt to equate anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli policies, stifling reasonable debate on Israeli government actions and policies.

The sibling of that exploitation of guilt is the farago that Israel is the weak, beset and persecuted orphan of the Middle East. That may have been true in 1947-48. It may well have been true through 1956 and even a bit later. It has been utter nonsense since 1967. Jews have been persecuted world-wide for centuries but that does not mean that Israel has not become the persecutor of Palestinians over the last 40 years. While there is certainly bitter irony in that fact, those are most definitely not mutually exclusive notions.

Israel is and has been, largely with unquestioning American support, the dominant power and even the bully of the Middle East since 1967, the Yom Kippur War not withstanding. It is a nuclear power. Its military dominates its competing and fragmented neighbors. Israel is not persecuted. It is not in danger of being wiped from the map yet the constant selling and reselling of the notion of Jews as a defenseless, persecuted minority has colored all discourse about Israel making that discouse irrational and, frequently, impossible. The Jewish people have been and often are a persecuted minority even today but Israel is not so simply by extension.

Nor is Israel a democracy in any sense intelligible to Americans. An enourmous portion of the population that falls within any version of the borders of Israel is prevented from voting in Israeli elections. There are persistent efforts within Israel to disenfranchise Palestinians, even those who support Israel as a nation. Israel is regularly referred to as "the Jewish state" without any thought to the parallels that exist in that very phrase to the 1994 attempt to turn Rwanda into "the Hutu state" or the on-going efforts to turn Tibet into a "Chinese state". In fact the very use of the word "state" is Orwellian. When not calling Israel aptly "the Jewish state", we regularly refer to Israel as "the state of Israel." Is there another nation on earth referred to in that construction? We do not refer to "the state of France" or "the state of Ukraine." We do, however, refer to "the state of Connecticut" and "the state of Idaho". Words have power to direct our conversations and the construction "the state of Israel" reinforces the idea of an intimate connection between the United States and Israel that does not really exist. The disconnect between the propaganda that would have Americans see Israel as a part of our own nation and reality is made manifest when we recall the bombing of the USS Liberty or the spying of Jonathan Pollard. America may have an interest in an Israel that lives in peace with its neighbors but we have no interest whatever in supporting at murderous Israeli government and its currently dysfunctional attitude toward its American benefactor.

Now to deal with the title of this entry.

Reinhard Heydrich was the odious, murderous Nazi Gestapo chief who chaired the Wannsee Conference that set the Nazi agenda for the extermination of the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other "decadent" people that fell under the Nazi hobnail boot heel. He was assassinated in Prague in 1942 though the world would have been a far better place if he'd been killed in 1912 or 1922. Among the many horrific punishments that Heydrich pioneered were the the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree adopted by the George W. Bush Administration in it's alleged "War On Terror" and the murder of an escalating number of civilians for each Nazi killed by resistance fighters. The even more horrible Reichs Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbles, "honored" Heydrich's policy by decreeing that 150 Jews would die to requite the "terrorism" that resulted in Heydrich's death. Goebbles also had the Czech town of Lidice wiped out in the memorial Operation Reinhard.

In December, 2008, Israel, having lost 4 citizens to Qassam rockets fired from Gaza attacked the population of Gaza and killed, by the time of today's truce, about 1,100 Palestinians. Please forgive me if I see an Israeli adoption of the Heydrich and Goebbels policies in this current attack on Gaza. A lot of people will, no doubt, express deep indignation at a comparison of Israeli government actions to the actions of a pair of notorious anti-Semites. Go ahead, express your indignation. All the indignation in the world does not make the comparison any less apt. Indignation is not an argument against the manifest similarity of Israeli government and Nazi policies. In fact, I am indignant that any Israeli government should adopt any policies that so much at hint at a comparison with Nazi policies. And, further, I would equate indignant Israeli government apologists denying that obvious parallel with Holocaust deniers. Even as I love my own country while hating the criminals and frauds of the Bush Administration or love my late father and babci while hating their anti-Semitism it is past time for those who love Israel to hate its wrongs to the Palestinian population.

For Israel to disingenuously claim that it did nothing to provoke Hamas even as it blockaded Gaza for years and forced disease, darkness and starvation on the population of the Gaza Strip is as obscene as murdering Polish soldiers and dressing them in Nazi uniforms to justify the 1939 invasion of Poland or doctoring the evidence of an Iraqi weapons program to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Shelling and bombing United Nations schools and aid warehouses or Red Crescent hospitals is as much a war crime as hacking up defenseless Tutsis seeking sanctuary in a church.

My four grandsons, my oldest daughter and beloved son-in-law are Jews. So are, at the risk of cliche, friends to whom I owe much and love more as were teachers who gave me the tools to think independently and deeply. I hope for the survival and well-being of all the good people of Israel. Yet I have the same hope for all the good people of Gaza and the other Palestinian lands. I do not see those hopes as mutually exclusive. And simultaneously, I damn the current Israeli government and power hungry fanatics like Bebe Netanyahu. I would hope further that all those, Jew and gentile, Palestinian and Israeli, Islamist and unbeliever alike would share that hope and condemn, not Israel, but Israeli government policies.