Back to Black
A sequel to All the President’s Men is sure to be coming to a cinema near you.
With movie studios usually keen to follow a proven formula, it seems only a matter of time before there’s a sequel to the 1976 film All the President’s Men, perhaps called All the Other President’s Men or simply All the President’s Men II.
In both plots, the central characters are the kind of guys who have significantly contributed to maligning the image of politics – as though the Presidents they served, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, needed any help with that. But come to think of it, perhaps it’s unfair to single out individuals, or even the US. There is, after all, such an extensive international range of candidates from which to choose.
One by one, the inner circle who surrounded presidential hopeful Donald Trump while he was campaigning for office are having their 15 minutes of fame. None has gloried in the attention quite as much as the latest to be charged, Roger (“when I hear the word ‘ culture’, I reach for my revolver”) Stone. As a young man, Stone worked for President Nixon, who made such an impression on his aide that Stone later had Nixon’s face tattooed on his back. As you do.
There is no law against having someone else’s face tattooed anywhere on your body, of course. To the contrary, the constitutional right to freedom of speech probably includes tats. The question is how the public should interpret a tattoo of Nixon, who remains the only President to have resigned from office (as he was about to be impeached over the Watergate scandal). It is an interesting choice of hero. Stone, after once showing his tattoo to a journalist, reportedly said, “You’ll never meet another man with a dick in the front and a Dick in the back.”
The public can only be grateful that if Stone has added Trump to his corporeal gallery, the freezing cold in DC is keeping him well covered.
The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) is required by law to make announcements of potential arms deals with other countries.
The latest was notice of a possible sale to Japan of a guided-missile system costing US$2.1 billion. Others last year included harpoon missiles to Finland (US$622 million), 162 tanks to Morocco ($1.2 billion), 10 Apache attack helicopters to Egypt ($1 billion), a guided multiple-launch rocket system to Bahrain ($3 million), military radar to Australia ($185 million), $1.3 billion worth of Howitzer technology to Saudi Arabia, and 34 joint strike fighter aircraft to Belgium for a cool $6.5 billion.
The list goes on and on, but you get the picture: the endless inventiveness of humans displayed via an apparently limitless array of American-made technology designed, for the most part, to kill people.
Most of the announcements contain a line saying something like, “This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of a major ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in the [insert name] region.”
But do they really contribute to the national security of the US, let alone to the countries buying them? Is it not possible that they sometimes do the opposite?
In a press release last year, the DSCA said the US had “inked” US$55.6 billion in potential foreign military sales during the 2018 fiscal year, “easily smashing past the previous year’s total”. The agency added, “The Trump Administration has made pushing foreign weapon sales a key part of its economic growth strategy, pushing out a new conventional arms transfer policy to make it easier to sell defence articles abroad.”
Most countries are complicit in this madness, and its communist equivalent, except those too poor to take part.
“You’ll never meet another man with a dick in the front and a Dick in the back.”