What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

When the warden doesn’t like the way the Paul Newman character talks to him, he beats him, then proceeds to project his own weakness and insecurity in the famous ‘failure to communicate” speech. Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 anthem to the resistance of prisoners to the moral inferiors who hold near complete power over their lives.

Americans today are living this movie – we are prisoners and Washington, DC is “led” by a lecturing “Captain” and, behind him, the men with no eyes. It’s not just Tom Woods’ Rule #3 that “no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.” It’s that the US empire has a new down-home warden telling the story, backed by tall men in mirrored sunglasses who monitor obedience and create constant fear, at home and abroad. That’s the plot, anyway.

Instead of the anti-establishment films of the 60s and 70s like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we have slick propaganda films like Top Gun: Maverick. The latter generated Western expectation and applause for exactly what happened on June 22, an unlawful, unwarranted, and extremely destabilizing attack on the nuclear energy capabilities of a country simply because of “our ally.” Mike Benz gives a great summary of the movie plot, and how it worked to suppress criticism and generate Pavlovian applause on a national scale.

In that movie, it all worked out great. The Tom Cruise character appears “anti-establishment.” Literally call-sign Maverick, he channels our instinctive and well-warranted distrust of senior flag officers, politicians and bureaucrats – while actually serving a militaristic unipolar global vision. It ventures into state sacrilege only in illustrating the speed and apparent maintainability of the Iranian F-14 Tomcats, a side-eye to what we get today from the MIC, the disastrously precious F-35 being a prime example. We are talking about the F-14s the US sold to the Shah after the CIA emplaced him in Tehran during the last Washington-driven Iranian regime change in 1953. But the movie didn’t go into those details, and was not intended to explore those consequences. CIA-pedia provides extensive information on what would be the first major foreign policy/CIA decision of the Eisenhower presidency.

In light of the recent Tucker Carlson interview with once and future presidential aspirant Ted Cruz, one imagines that few in the current Executive or Legislative branches know much about Iran, other than “knowing” it’s a country with oil that they wish to control, to leverage, to order around and put in leg-irons.

Just like Mossad exploding pagers, and MI-6/CIA/Ukrainian/Mossad truck borne drones laying in wait to attack Russia’s nuclear triad, we see after the US performative attack on the nuclear capability at Fordow, the perpetrators cannot help bragging after the fact on how sly and devious they were, and for this we should be grateful. Lying heads of state, who boast about their terror tactics serve two key purposes: First, they instruct foe and friend alike in the ease and usefulness of terrorism, ensuring both defensive preparation and creative emulation against the state; and second they reveal intrinsic command weakness and treachery of the state vis a vis its own population. In an era where almost all commercial technology is heavily state-subsidized, we hold in our hands and homes and vehicles a little piece of the untrustworthy and fundamentally evil state. How many people looked at their cell phones differently after the Israel pager attack? How many began to wonder what is actually inside the trucks and cargo containers scattered in every part of our country? The use of US submarines to fire nuclear capable Tomahawk missiles suddenly and silently on the “Captain”’s command is a reminder of our own vulnerability to attack by our own state, its allies or its adversaries, if those states deem it “necessary.”

It’s always good to see the true nature of the state, and while it isn’t filled with lizard people, it is indeed and undeniably morally alien to humanity. One current example is Gaza, demonstrating the law of state paralysis, and the lack of state purpose, and most importantly, the lack of desire, to stop the nuclear-level destruction of the Gaza Strip, or to even ameliorate the Western starvation of two million Gazans.

Many already know this, and many more sense it. Turns out Brian Berletic was always right – it’s not ideologies or religions, -isms or schisms, it is that the state operates not only openly, but solely on the plane of power and profit.

It’s is important to note that the boomers watched Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in their formative years. They also benefitted from an array of novels and movies written and made about the evil of imperial warfare in the aftermath of Vietnam. They have benefitted from the revisionist history of our American way of war, and the US federal state. They celebrated the power of individuals to act morally and courageously in the face of the concentrated power. Sadly, it seems that many of them only absorbed one lesson: In the end, it didn’t turn out well for Lucas Jackson and Randall McMurphy.

Those same boomers, and subsequent American generations, clap and whoop for Maverick, as the independent and moral daredevil complies and subsumes his extraordinary skillset for the state, with the obligatory sarcasm or throwaway dry comebacks to the men without eyes. To be fair, the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible series increasingly and correctly conflates the “power and profit” state with great evil, gangs writ large, and men without eyes or morals. But state backed infotainment – even if it feels like it is opposed to tyranny and tyrants – is no substitute for simple reflection on our own moral sensibility, our own perspectives on how we can, and must, increase and expand human liberty.

You can’t fix stupid. And yet, we don’t have to consume it, cheer it, accept it, tolerate it, obey it, worship it, support it, fund it, or justify it. We ought only to study it, scientifically and when we do, we may find ourselves in agreement with former Russian President Medvedev, who frequently observes that state leaders – and the states they protect – are fundamentally similar to parasitic worms, blood-sucking ticks, and vermin. Let there be no failure to communicate this truth, in every way to everyone. Thank you for your attention to this matter!