A concise, powerful explanation why ‘Auschwitz’ is an inadequate symbol for European genocide here in the West. We concur.

During the Soviet period we stood on the ridge line outside Kiev at Babi Yar. 60 years later the Western mind has yet to grasp fully the magnitude of it all. Tears fail even to touch the surface of grief.

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People are asking.

FSJ does underscore how American artificially inflated lifestyles even post collapse are contingent upon human squalor elsewhere. It’s not just a Nike shop gone rogue or some clothes chain in Thailand.

Funny how American media of all stripes can’t see the explicit contradiction therein to almost every tenet of major political belief across the (embarrassingly narrow) U.S. political spectrum. The Libertarians get a pass because they know who John Locke is. The Ann Rand-types, too.

It was the summer of 1984. Morning in America and all that. Driving across America in a convertible with no real agenda for once. Just a vacation. With me a now ultra famous ‘Republican pollster’ frequently discussed even in our modest comments section here.

We were somewhere near Iowa or perhaps Missouri. The stars were so bright we didn’t need headlights. Cool night time wind flowing and the radio blaring. And ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ were on heavy rotation. We were so happy that America could embrace Michael Jackson as simply an astounding superstar, transcending race. He was on another plane of superstardom uniting people. If you were around then, this was also the time the Right Wing Nuts thought ‘Born In The USA’ was effin’ A jingoism. But what mattered was white FM radio and MTV were finally playing (initially grudingly) a Black American genius.

That achievement alone would be a lifetime’s work. But then he and America in the late 1980s and 1990s made the journey together into the soup of disconnected memes and dada-ist commercialized narratives. Voyage to the Bottom of the Jello Bowl. Still, through all the ensuing hype and then 24 hour televised scandal, we always remembered that summer. When Michael Jackson showed that even in Reagan’s America, racial progress could be a reality.

Now we watch tonight and wonder how a rudderless society drunk on promiscuous meme generation and over consumption will deal with this ‘event’. In one sense, one could ask was he alive? Commoditized as a youngster ruthlessly, he lived his life as a brand, was manipulated by coporations as a brand, and pioneered a form of loneliness and emotional distortion just as he trail blazed his moon walk.

Tonight MSNBC has some vapid young woman on their payroll for her ‘entertainment expertise’ admonishing demos that the masses should never forget Michael Jackson’s contribution to ‘culture.’ If one could bottle the irony, it would fuel Jon Stewart’s writers’ room for a year. And if he was the first astronaut into the endless void of commercialized American meta-narratives, it’s also true then that he is not truly dead.

We are also saddened by the passing of Farah Fawcett. The Poster aside, Farah reminds us of the 1970s. True, there was Saigon, Nixon, the Khmer Rouge, the Peanut Farmer and Pet Rocks. But we prefer in many ways the values of the nation during that period aside from lack of racial justice. America had not yet begun its disintegration into mindless goo, consumers at the thrall of business models not even understood by their corporate progenitors.

Still stunned by it and the past weekend’s long conversations with Fox News and Bush Administration personnel on their views of responsibility for public rhetoric. In the interim, as a placeholder, what Michelle Kraus says. And God’s peace and love be with you, Officer Johns.

Enough. Cheney. Wilkerson. Olbermann. Maddow. Oh, did I mention Wilkerson? The entire Duma hiding from responsibility on closing Gitmo? All sound and fury signifying nothing. All of them off to SuperMax. Maddow with extra punishment details for glib vapidity.

Obama’s speech was good on principles but again lacking specifics. Contrary to ignorant Leftist hysteria there was no ‘American GULAG’ in it. But enough. The Administration should get down to work, kick Congress in the ass, ignore Cheney and the rest just shut up.

P.S. Some one hand Turley the sanctimonious medal and be done with it.