Analysis | | Page 6

Hard Truths

Posted on June 21, 2018 by newpoplitnews

NOT A WRAP-UP OF THE JUNOT DIAZ CONTROVERSY

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Some truths for both sides of the issue to ponder:

A.) For the Anti-Junot Crowd:

While Junot Diaz was cleared of charges of harassment by Boston Review and MIT (the same animal), in large part for institutional reasons, it’d be naive to think they didn’t do “due diligence” beyond that stated. The scope of their investigation no doubt did extend beyond the narrow and stuffy walls of MIT. One has to believe they did look thoroughly into those making the accusations. They’re not speaking about this for their own (decipherable) reasons.

B.) For the Pro-Junot Crowd:

Don’t think for a moment that Junot Diaz is not entirely a creature of that same elitist institution. And others like it such as his literary agent, Aragi; his publisher, Penguin Random House; and the Pulitzer Board, safely placed at the center of east coast institutional power at Columbia University.

Junot Diaz is not a free agent– and can’t be. These forces made him, and so he’s had little say on how any of this game has been played. (Though he’s likely maneuvered behind the scenes.) I’d wager others have dictated what he’s said– always making the proper statements, because he’s always made the proper statements.

I take responsibility for my past . . . This conversation is important and must continue. I am listening to and learning from women’s stories in this essential and overdue cultural movement. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.

Perfectly the right thing (via a statement from his literary agent).

Instead of telling all concerned to go f— themselves and walking away. But that’s not how the game is played.

There are huge benefits but also costs to being a cog in the established literary system, part of its never-ending manipulations.

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THE ONE QUESTION no one is asking: Why is so much sexual harassment happening, from the very progressive men who declaim loudest against it?

Answers? Does anyone have answers?

-K.W.

(Be sure to follow this blog to not miss any updates.)

Unlocking the Junot Diaz Puzzle

Posted on June 18, 2018 by newpoplitnews

SEVENTH IN A SERIES

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Abuser or non-abuser? Who, in the end, is telling the truth about this puzzling lit-world affair? Is there or will there ever be a way to tell?

THE CASE against famed author Junot Diaz is fairly well presented here, where you’ll find the statements– the charges, if you will– against him.

THE STORY is in the descriptions of these encounters– the crux of the matter in this passage taken from Monica Byrne’s narrative:

The table struck up a light conversation about the significance of statistics in publishing. I made a point emphasizing how personal narrative is important in empowering the marginalized. He said (and this is my memory, so I’m not including quotation marks), Well, I don’t know if you know how statistics work, but that’s like saying, Oh, I haven’t been RAPED, so RAPE must not exist.

Monica Byrne mentions the importance of personal narrative. Junot Diaz disagrees with her. Ironically, the accusations against him are three examples of personal narrative and the question is to what extent we should trust them.

Three intense narratives. Three brief encounters with Junot Diaz which occurred four-to-seven years ago. Are the narratives strictly accurate?

The three women were aspiring young writers meeting one of their idols. Could anyone in that situation not treat it as an important encounter? Would (just asking) the impact of any dismissive or abrupt gesture, a raising of his voice– any formidable disagreement from him– be multiplied several times over?

One of the encounters has already been unlocked. Read the Carmen Maria Machado description– of her encounter with Diaz– linked to above. Then listen to the recorded audio of the same event (their exchange begins at the 33 minute mark):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Oc-g4-jx-jlCQG_cuWsJa3IFrET1-3uV/view

A window into history. A disputed event six years ago is history.

A PARALLEL?

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When I was a kid my dad kept around the house a collection of boxing magazines. He wasn’t much of a reader– never read a book in his life– but he’d boxed a little in his youth and did like boxing magazines. One of the mags detailed the changes in perception wrought by film archivist Jim Jacobs, who restored footage of many of the classic fights of the late 19th century and beyond, including the Jim Corbett versus Bob Fitzsimmons heavyweight contest of 1897.

BY the 1960’s and 70’s, when these magazines were published, the old-time fights had gained the gravity of myth, due to hyperbolic descriptions in publications like The Police Gazette— which after all needed to sell copies and had to have something exciting to present.

In print, these were terribly contentious, blood-drenched battles. When grizzled boxing writers who’d been raised on the legends saw the long-lost footage, their jaws dropped. Cigars fell from their mouths. Action on the screen was minimal. Being no-limit fights in the hot sun, the boxers paced themselves. The men were merely human beings, not superheroes. (Fitzsimmons knocked-out Corbett in the thirteenth round.)

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DRAMATIC LANGUAGE

The reporters in 1897 used dramatic language which colored their descriptions, adding intensity to the event. “Fitzsimmons face was pouring blood–“ Pouring? He had a cut.

Does Machado, a creative writer, color her description?

–he became freshly enraged when I refused to capitulate . . . all (“all”) I got was a blast of misogynist rage and public humiliation–

IS this in the audio?

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IN THE DESCRIPTION of her encounter with Junot Diaz, author Monica Byrne– who I covered in this blog’s previous two posts– writes with similar intensity.

His response was completely bizarre, disproportionate, and violent. I was speechless and felt sick.

Understandable, if Junot Diaz was indeed shouting at her. The question– was he?

UNLOCKING HISTORY

The past gives us innumerable examples of historical events or periods which have been colored in some way– intensified, romanticized, or toned-down– overstated or understated– by later narratives.

A ready example from the world of letters would be Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind. Mitchell was raised on descriptions of antebellum times in the Old South. She learned the romance of those days, not the horrors.

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THE FLIPSIDE to this is today’s accepted narrative about the 1950’s. Perhaps due to Eisenhower’s low-key presidency (Gore Vidal: “The Great Golfer”), and that it preceded the tumultuous 60’s, it’s considered a bland decade.

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Part of this perception was intentionally created by the polemicists of cultural rebellion. They needed a punching bag to knock around. In truth, in the aftermath of the nightmare of the Second World War, America embraced its traditions of country, home, church, and family. Much of the decade was indeed conformist– though hardly as machine-conformist as now.

YET when vintage 50’s cars parade on avenues in display in summer “dream cruises”– a tradition in the Detroit area– perception changes. One can only remark, “Wow!” at the colors and outrageousness on display.

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Another example is the sumptuous wide-screen Technicolor movies of the era. No restrained tones or muted emotions in that era. Actors declaimed, music scores blasted and garish color bled from the screen.

DEMETRIUS-AND-THE-GLADIATORS_

ABUSIVE LANGUAGE

HOW do we classify speech as abusive? Where are the lines drawn? Who draws them?

Should we begin regulating not only what a writer says, but how he says it?

Fortunate for Junot Diaz that he publicly speaks in the low-key tones of an academic. He has circulated long enough in the homogenized land of the gentry, and seems to know their codes.

But what of those whose voices are naturally loud and aggressive? Whose personas in public performance and discussion go beyond the acceptable bounds? Can this be allowed?

Questions, questions. Never-ending questions. . . .

-Karl Wenclas

The Cult of Junot Diaz

Posted on June 14, 2018 by newpoplitnews

FOURTH IN A SERIES ON THE JUNOT DIAZ-BOSTON REVIEW CONTROVERSY

RARE INDEED is it for a writer in this day and age to create an obsessive fan base– but by all appearances Junot Diaz has done it, as I’m discovering while covering the ongoing controversy over whether he should or should not resign as Boston Review‘s fiction editor. His defenders guard twitter night and day, obsessively noting every hashtag related to the issue and commenting instantaneously. As someone who worries about the health of literature in this country, this is good to see.

THE QUESTION I’ve raised is to what extent the Junot Diaz persona matches the actual person beneath?

It’s unquestionable that he’s an intelligent person– by all indications a fairly complex one. It’d be naive to think he’s not to some extent in his public appearances playing to the needs of his audience. Would this be unusual? Not at all– not even in the pristine land of today’s literary scene, which some want to believe is all sunshine and cotton candy.

(Does anyone truly believe that the public good-guy persona of author-publisher Dave Eggers, for instance, is the actual person? Is anyone that naive?)

THERE’S ALSO the question implied by Carmen Maria Machado in her infamous recorded exchange with Junot Diaz. Namely, to what extent does the character Yunior in his book of stories match himself? A little? A lot? Does Diaz’s actual life match in any way the incidents described in the book? Is Junior in any way an aspect of Junot Diaz’s own personality?

These are questions which his defenders believe aren’t supposed to be asked about him– even though they’ve been asked about nearly every famous author who’s ever existed. (Did Hemingway’s characters resemble himself? Scott Fitzgerald’s? Naw! No way!)

ANOTHER PROBLEM the Cult of Junot has is with anyone who thinks his revelatory memoir in The New Yorker magazine was a mistake. Significantly, most who think it wasn’t are women. But I bring to the question the perspective of a man, taking the stance of the aforementioned Hemingway in regard to a confessional memoir called “The Crack-Up” penned by the aforementioned F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway felt the publication of such material was a mistake; that it was better dealt with obliquely in a novel. Ernest Hemingway followed a stoic code forgotten or dismissed in this day and age.

The New Yorker wants its male writers to reveal– if not revel in– their vulnerability. For example we need go only as far as one of the stories in their current fiction issue, “Fungus” by David Gilbert, which has the weepy male lead character searching at the end of the overwritten tale for a “pregnant tree.”

(We’re doing a feature on “Hamlet” at our main site in a day or two. I’m reminded of one of that character’s lines: “–wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.”)

WHAT’S HAPPENING

VULNERABILITY. That word is the secret for Junot Diaz’s fanatical defenders and opponents, not a one who’s able to view the recent accusations against him dispassionately. They’re emotionally invested in the guy– likely because he exudes a sense of vulnerability. Women are attracted to this quality in a public personality– as could be proven by a long list of movie stars and pop music idols.

Are Junot Diaz’s accusers in fact (has been charged by his fanatic defenders) themselves frustrated fans? Ex-members of the Cult of Junot Diaz? (One anyway had an affair with him.)

There’s some logic to the idea. And as I said, if people are getting worked up over a writer, pro or con, that’s good to see. (David Gilbert no doubt wistfully wishes he could create that level of hysteria. . . .)

MORE TO COME?

-Karl Wenclas on the New Pop Lit news beat.

Will Junot Diaz Survive?

Posted on June 11, 2018 by newpoplitnews

THE BOSTON REVIEW CONTROVERSY CONTINUES

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ART like the world is three-dimensional and should be approached three-dimensionally. A great novel then, ideally, should use multiple viewpoints. To understand an issue– as we’re trying to understand this issue– the critic or commentator should look at it from multiple angles.

Popova_Air_Man_Space

(“Air, Man, Space” by Lyubov Popova.)

YET on this issue of whether Junot Diaz is an abusive misogynist and whether he’s assaulted women and been insulting and patronizing and whether or not he should resign or be fired from the Boston Review, everyone is taking a side. Everyone wants a fast decision (even though there’s a lot of gray in the issue). “Yes! No! Guilty! Innocent!” Dueling mobs, only in this case it’s one mob, with a few deputies standing outside the jailhouse door with shotguns, guarding it like out of an old western movie.

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The mentality is binary. Which is curious, because Boston Review and its opponents stress their support of non-binary persons, but in no sense do they engage in non-binary thinking.

We’re conditioned to think in terms of two choices– Column A or Column B. The court system– protagonist versus antagonist; defense attorney against prosecutor, with no middle ground between them. Politics: red state or blue state. Either-or. Two choices at the ballot box. Which is your party? All-in either way, with no give-and-take. Black-white. Good guys or bad guys. The world as soccer field: choose your side.

IRONICALLY enough, the Boston Review plays this game as strongly as anybody. They present a one-track mindset.

The Boston Review editors know. They have the truth on every issue and are out advocating it– only this time the perceived truth is blowing up in their faces.
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I LISTENED to the recorded exchange (starts 33:00) between Carmen Maria Machado– one of the main accusers– and Junot Diaz. It’s not an argument, not even a debate. Is Diaz condescending and arrogant? Possibly. The recording is like a modernist painting that the listener sees what he or she wants to see in it.

More interesting is the way Junot Diaz reaffirms his politically-correct stance throughout the talk– even before Machado enters into it. He takes the requisite swing against white supremacy. He mentions “masculine privilege” and “toxic misogyny.” “Sexism,” he says about a book, “is going to be implicit on every fuckin’ page.” He’s saying, “I’m on your side.” Shocked he must be that he’s on women’s side– so he proclaims– but they’re not necessarily on his.

The same holds true many times over for the chief editors at Boston Review, Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen. Every article takes a political stand, in the most progressive fashion. It might be the most progressive and politically-correct journal you will ever read. They’re against the cakeshop ruling, neoliberal market police, wealthy whites, and Elon Musk (that chic billionaire– boo!), and pro- California, Afrofuturism, and Planet Earth. Every base covered.

None of this surprising when you realize Joshua Cohen has taught political science at Stanford and MIT, or that his stated mission when taking over as editor in 1991 was to have the journal become more politically oriented, while retaining a profile in fiction and poetry.

The impression given when listening to the recorded Junot Diaz lecture, and studying the Boston Review website, is that literature has become thoroughly politicized. Politics is a major part of the Diaz recording– every question asked and answered comes through a political lens. The audience and Junot Diaz are presumed to be on the same side– indeed, everyone there is. That room for disagreement was found despite this becomes fascinating.

WHAT’S HAPPENING

Revolutions tend to eat their own, whether Danton and Robespierre in one instance, Zinoviev and Bukharin in another.

Stalin-Bukharin

Joshua Cohen and men like him spearheaded a cultural revolution in America. It began in the 1960’s and never stopped. At some point the original grass roots revolutionary impulse became co-opted and since it’s been stage-managed from above. Cohen himself is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard. Elite of the elite. Select of the select. His periodical Boston Review has the superstructure of MIT behind it, as well as this list of powerful individual and institutional donors. Joshua Cohen defines the term white patriarch. Now he finds the forces he helped unleash don’t always behave as he wants.

Arrogance? Of a sort, in that Joshua Cohen doesn’t seem to understand the rules of the game even though he helped create them. In other words, at some level, or many levels, the dispute is about power. Who’ll hold it within the tottering structure of established literature? Who should hold it?

(The lynch mob marches down the street with rope and torches– “Where is he?”– Joshua Cohen at the front of it. “This way!” he shouts. A culprit is found and taken to the scaffold, rope put around his neck– he turns to face the crowd and Joshua Cohen finds to his shock and horror that the figure about to be lynched is him.)

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MORE TO COME

-Karl Wenclas

Are Comic Books Propaganda?

Posted on May 31, 2018 by newpoplitnews

COMICSGATE EXAMINED

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HOW FAR should one take politics in art?

The question arises with the ongoing “comicsgate” controversy which has split the comic book publishing world. (Background on the issue is available here and here. Debate has raged across the internet, especially on twitter, for weeks.

A point made by those on the social justice side of the issue is that superhero comics have always been political. Nazis in particular have been socked by superheroes for decades.

They’re right. Superhero comics have been political almost from the start. The kicker is they’ve been more than political. From World War II through the Cold War they were outright propaganda. Cheerleaders for American empire.

WORLD WAR II

WWIIposter

The Second World War was a battle for civilization– a no-holds-barred fight to the death, during which all rules of civilized behavior were broken, by all sides. This was reflected in the propaganda.

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Comic books were a big part of this– including “Superman,” fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way.

supermanwwII

STAN LEE AND JACK KIRBY

The two great creators of Marvel characters and storylines during its formative years were both New York City natives who fought in World War II. Both firmly bought into Franklin Roosevelt’s ethos of America saving the world. Given the nightmarish regimes on the other side of the oceans, this was an understandable, even necessary viewpoint.

Kirby and Lee retained this ethos after the war. (Evidence suggests that Stan Lee retains it now.) In the 1960’s they launched “Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos,” refighting the same battles.

Sgt_Fury_Vol_1_78

NOT that this was unusual– Germans continued as cartoonish villains across the culture, from movies to television shows to professional wrestling, which featured arrogant Nazi bad guys such as the nasty “Baron Von Raschke.”

ALL’S FAIR in love and war, as they say, even when the war’s long over. Or even when it’s a Cold War. So, while Sylvester Stallone fought cartoonish Russian movie monsters like Ivan Drago–

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— Marvel’s Captain America battled his Soviet nemesis, Red Guardian.

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The question can legitimately be asked: When were superhero comic books not outright propaganda for Pax Americana– usually of the most jingoistic variety?

MANY of Marvel’s recent superhero movies– the “Captain America” and “Iron Man” series come quickly to mind– have continued this mindset. Always with a global, America-running-the-world mindset. One “Iron Man” flick had the character outdoing drone missiles in blowing up bad guys in Afghanistan. (See this Noah Berlatsky review of it.)

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THE SURPRISE is that today’s social justice warriors in the comic book realm, ostensibly on the left, use these precedents as justification for their political aesthetic now.

(It could just be that “left” and “right” are obsolete concepts for truly understanding today’s world.)

CONTRADICTIONS

When dealing with issues like fascism and anti-fascism, one will always run into a host of contradictions. A good example is recently deceased award-winning novelist Philip Roth. Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, depicts a world in which Charles Lindbergh has become U.S. President and imposed a fascist-like regime, with Franklin D. Roosevelt offstage as ostensible good guy. Kind of a misguided slant on history, in that Lindbergh was politically inept and non-interventionist. The contradiction is that FDR himself came closer to being a dictator than any President before or since. Elected for four terms; hyper-devious and charismatic; a popular demagogue; knew how to use media, particularly radio; built America’s military-industrial complex and empowered giant corporations in order to do so; put an unpopular ethnic group into concentration camps; tried many maneuvers to get around the U.S. Constitution; etc. etc.

THIS was the offstage ideologue and ideology which comics creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby explicitly followed– a worldwide American interventionist viewpoint.

TODAY

The big comic book companies today have a different agenda– or are pandering to a different agenda. As before, the goal is some level of social engineering– real life masters of the universe deciding from above what the brave new world should look like. Art usually gets lost in the process, and always has.

ART AND PROPAGANDA

CAN art be polemical and at the same time, important art?

THAT Frank Norris’s populist novel The Octopus, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead— the first from the left, the other from the right– are both polemical, yet two of the best American novels ever written, says the answer to the question is “Yes.” But there are lines to be crossed. (Rand crossed them herself in her next major work.)

In this critic’s opinion, two major comic book superhero series have crossed into the realm of important, even mythic, art: “Batman” and “Spiderman.” Most of the rest have either been harmless entertainment or indoctrination pamphlets.

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-Karl Wenclas

Marxism Inc. Part Two

Posted on May 10, 2018 by newpoplitnews

HOW KARL MARX GOT IT WRONG

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THE REAL CONFLICT in societies is tops-down monopolies versus upstart insurgencies pushing new ideas or better ways of doing things. If you will, Big Business versus small. Communism in practice is another style of monopoly– a particularly pernicious one, ultimately run by status quo control freaks. The idea for them is always to grab power. Once it’s achieved, it’s difficult (once thought impossible) to get them out.

(The difference was exemplified in the Soviet Union in the conflict between Mikhail Sholokhov, a system apparatchik, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who brought his ideas and writings from below– from the gulag!– intending to change the system Sholokhov defended and from which he was its conforming product.)

One can see why closet totalitarians, and conformist writers, as well as global capitalists, are attracted to Communist ideology.

In this Olivia Goldhill article at Quartz magazine we see typical establishment-intellectual infatuation with Marxism. Goldhill can barely restrain her gushing. For her, Karl Marx predicted “exactly” how capitalism would turn out.

Well, Marx did, in unpublished journal entries in a notebook, speculate about automation eliminating jobs. Certainly not a unique thought throughout the first stages of the industrial revolution. (We have the example of the chess-playing automaton known as “The Turk,” created way back in 1770!)

It’s those notebook entries themselves which should concern Ms. Goldhill and other Marxist acolytes. Seems more to be evidence of dawning concerns in Marx’s mind that his labor value theory might be a crock. If there’s no “living” labor, where’s the oppression? From where comes the value?

Olivia Goldhill discusses the seeming “contradiction” within capitalism when it eliminates human labor– but the contradiction is within Marx’s ideas. There appears to be contradiction only because the labor value theory is wrong.

(There are other reasons for capitalism appearing to be in continual crisis– chiefly that it’s like a living organism, one continually self-adjusting, always remaking itself.)

Actual value comes not from labor– from exertion whether human or machine based– but from ideas behind the labor. Value comes from the creators– which can be shown throughout the history of capitalism. How much value did the mind of Thomas Edison add to economies throughout the world? Henry Ford? Steven Jobs?

From where came the value in a Vincent van Gogh painting? From his paintbrush??!

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Do we calculate the value in how much time he spent at the canvas? In how much energy he expended upon the brush??

For the artist– the writer included– Marx’s theory is ludicrous.
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Karl Marx can be applauded within his historical context. For being the first to create an all-encompassing examination of economies during the capitalist era– an era we continue to live in. But it was a primitive examination. Classify Marx with a D.W. Griffith, who pioneered the art of the film– yet who has to be put within context, not treated as a gospel writer relevant to how things operate now.

-Karl Wenclas

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Marxism Incorporated

Posted on May 7, 2018 by newpoplitnews

HOW MARXISM TODAY IS A WHOLLY-OWNED SUBSIDIARY OF BIG MONEY

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First of Two Parts

MUCH CELEBRATION has taken place in recent days of the May 5th, 2018 200th birthday of Communism advocate and theorist Karl Marx. Typical of the press this occasion has received is this article by Olivia Goldhill at Quartz magazine.

WHO owns Quartz?

Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the richest capitalists on the planet. In July 2017 her curiously-named Emerson Collective bought The Atlantic and its digital properties, one of which is Quartz. Ms. Jobs apparently doesn’t see Marxism as any kind of threat to her well-sheltered wealth, or to herself. (Quartz in fact recently published another Goldhill-penned tome joking about Marx’s co-optation by capitalists.)

In 2018 the espousal of Marxism comes chiefly from plutocrats– and from hugely-rich centers of power and influence like Harvard. I previously examined here Marxist intellectual journals The Baffler and Current Affairs, the former owned by a billionaire; the latter founded by Harvard student Nathan J. Robinson, son of an international corporate trainer. Olivia Goldhill, coincidentally, is herself a Harvard grad.

So what’s actually happening?

WHAT MIGHT BE HAPPENING is that Monopoly Capitalism seeks to set the current hierarchy rigidly in place. This would explain much, as I’ll discuss in a future post.

WHAT MIGHT BE HAPPENING is a Shigalovian strategy, as outlined in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed. A Ten Percent class of enlightened socialist overlords (Harvard grads?) managing the rest of the human herd for the good of all.

WHAT MIGHT BE HAPPENING is that Laurene Powell Jobs and Company see Marxism as a way to channel dissent, directing it toward ideas and programs amenable to the maintenance of Global Capitalism.

Or: Marxism today is a scam.
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NEXT: The Goldhill Essay Itself.

-Karl Wenclas

Classic Incel

Posted on May 3, 2018 by newpoplitnews

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CURIOUSLY, the best movie about the incel (involuntarily celibate) phenomenon is sixty years old– Alfred Hitchcock‘s classic, Vertigo. The lead character, Scottie Ferguson, played by James Stewart, is obsessed with the wife (Kim Novak) of industrialist Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore). I don’t want to give away a complex plot. I’ll just say that Gavin is the successful alpha male juggling women, while Scottie is a troubled loner on the outside, searching for unattainable perfection which he can never have.

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Director Alfred Hitchcock himself was something of an incel, though married– continually crushing on impossibly unreachable actresses like Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. Living vicariously through his films– Vertigo revealing much.

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Emma Gonzalez’s Curious Connections

Posted on April 4, 2018 by newpoplitnews

THE MOTHER LODE OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES?

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EVERYONE KNOWS Parkland student David Hogg is the son of a former FBI agent. One can figure Dad has advised young David each step of the way during the remarkable movement which has sprung from the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

But what about the other face of the student movement, Emma Gonzalez? Does her father have ties, past or present, to the U.S. intelligence community?

He does.

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Emma’s father, Jose E. Gonzalez, is the CEO of Trapezoid Inc., a Miami-based digital security firm. One of Trapezoid’s chief partners is DigitalEra Inc. Mr. Gonzalez was recently named to DigitalEra’s board of directors, along with James Cason. See this:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/digitalera-group-appoints-james-cason-jose-gonzalez-to-its-board-300494494.html

James Cason has an interesting biography:

“Cason spent 38 years as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department, serving in 12 countries. He’s been the Ambassador to Paraguay and Chief of Mission in Havana, Cuba. Cason has received numerous awards from State, Defense, the White House and the intelligence community.”

Before founding Trapezoid, Jose E. Gonzalez worked for DigitalEra, helping them expand into “managed information security services.”

Among its other tasks, DigitalEra tracks “key security events,” including hacker conventions like DEF CON in Las Vegas– an event, according to DigitalEra, regularly attended by Federal law enforcement agents.

Another major investor in Trapezoid is CoVant Management Inc., based in McLean, Virginia. CoVant invests in the federal government technology services industry. Meaning, in firms which do business with the federal government.

TERREMARK

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Jose E. Gonzalez’s most interesting employment was from 2000 to 2007 with the now-defunct Terremark Inc., where he worked as its Chief Legal Officer, then as Senior Vice-President.

Founder, and CEO when Gonzalez worked there, was Manuel D. Medina. Born in Cuba, Medina left that country with his parents in 1965, at age 13, “because of the extensive political changes in the country” per wikipedia.

JAMIE DOS SANTOS

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In 2001, Medina hired Jamie Dos Santos to oversee the transition of Terremark from a real estate firm to a security firm. She became CEO and President of subsidiary Terremark Federal Group, which was based not in Miami but in Herndon, Virginia. Its objective was to secure government security contracts– which were in abundance following 9-11.

Ms. Dos Santos has been involved in a number of similar corporations, during her time at Terremark and afterward. One example is the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, incorporated in 2003 with Dos Santos as Director. It’s currently inactive.

A noteworthy incorporation which took place after her Terremark time was the curiously-named Isis Defense Corporation in McLean, Virginia (less than a mile away from the Department of Homeland Security), created in 2013 with Jamie Dos Santos as President and CEO, and still active.

In 2014 Jamie Dos Santos was appointed as a Member of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Currently Dos Santos is the CEO of Cybraics Inc., which uses Artificial Intelligence to enhance security– presumably for business and government.

It’s not known how close a business or personal relationship Jose E. Gonzalez has with Jamie Dos Santos– other than they’re both prominent in the government-business security field and both worked in important positions at the same time for the same company.

MORE TERREMARK

Exactly how big and powerful Terremark was in the government-security field is evidenced by this analysis of why Verizon purchased Terremark Worldwide Inc. in 2011.

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Verizon-Terremark was given the enormous government contract to run the healthcare.gov website, which infamously crashed late 2013. This fiasco led to the end of Terremark, whose data centers were sold to Equinix Inc. for $3.6 billion.

ARTHUR L. MONEY

Another past Terremark employee of note is Arthur L. Money, on its board and a strategic advisor to Terremark on homeland security affairs from 2003 to 2011. Money has played huge roles in the government-business security relationship, including as the Assistant Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, and later as first chairman of the FBI‘s Science and Technology Advisory Board under George W. Bush.

Arthur L. Money has been on the board of too many security firms to count. One example is the Paladin Capital Group, set up three months after 9-11 specifically to capitalize on federal investments in security after the terrorist attacks.

CONCLUSIONS

Jose E. Gonzalez, father of Parkland survivor student activist Emma Gonzalez, is an expert on security, and has direct connections to several of the most important players in the government security field. It’s highly ironic that the two most important Parkland activists have fathers who were or are in that field. When the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took place, all their expertise went for naught– despite numerous warnings about the shooter given to police agencies and the FBI.

THIS commentator doesn’t believe there was any advance conspiracy to stage the shooting, or even to allow it to take place. It’d be absurd to think parents would purposely allow their children in the vicinity of that kind of danger. However, it’s logical to believe the parents would do everything they could after the tragedy to transfer focus away from the failure of police agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to act on the many advance warnings.

What some see as conspiracy, NPL News sees (despite the many observed connections) as simple government incompetence.

-K.W.

(Be sure to read the other interesting posts on this blog– and check out our main site, New Pop Lit.)

Contradictions of the Left

Posted on March 3, 2018 by newpoplitnews

OR, ABSENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC

WE’VE ALREADY examined some of those contradictions, in our analysis of n+1 magazine and of The Baffler. Today we look at another “hard left” publication, Current Affairs, founded and edited by Nathan J. Robinson.

WHAT readers of his magazine and Robinson himself don’t seem to realize is that any revolution which springs from Harvard University– where Robinson is a Phd candidate– is co-opted from birth. Sold out at the start. It wouldn’t matter what label they put on themselves or their system: “Marxist.” “Communist.” “Democratic Socialist.” It’d be packaging. Labels like the kind slapped on soup cans. At the core of things nothing will have changed. The same people will be in charge. The same careerist technocrat mindset would dominate.

Why else does someone attend Harvard or Yale (Nathan Robinson has been enrolled in both places) other than to be at the top of the pyramid? After the revolution it’d be the same hierarchy, with a twist in messaging. (Robinson is said to be good at messaging.) Nathan J. Robinson and his Ivy League editorial colleagues carry that stratified hierarchy within them. It’s embedded in them.

Doubt this? Who runs the civilization now? Two of the richest men on the planet, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both attended Harvard. The founders of Google went to Stanford University, which is almost as elite. Jeff Bezos of Amazon went to Princeton.

Politics? Every President of the United States from 1988 on before the present one was a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Or in George W. Bush’s case, both. Donald Trump went to the Wharton School, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university.

Do we see a pattern?

Oh, but Nathan J. Robinson, like his peers at other leftist magazines, is different. His ideas are different. He’s a socialist. Probably, a Marxist. He cares. He really does.

I suspect that in their New Socialist World they’d be part of Shigalov’s Ten Percent– still at the top of the pyramid, controlling the people– for their own good of course.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Just as in every person there’s a conscious and subconscious, so also there’s the role the person plays– the face shown to the world– and the authentic individual sitting behind the John Keegan “Mask.” They’re not always the same. If ever the same.

Who’s the real Nathan J. Robinson?

Is it leftist radical at the forefront of a neo-Marxist intellectual movement? Or the son of a man who worked in international corporate training? (And no doubt taught young Nathan J. many corporate world tricks.) Scion of money and achievement– is that Nathan’s core reality? At crunch time, would Robinson throw his advantages away? Really?

*******

THE FLIP SIDE is the person from hardship and poverty passing as an exemplar of class and refinement. This was not only a plotline of many plays (see Pygmalion) and Hollywood movies– it was much of Hollywood reality. Witness the careers of Cary Grant and Clark Gable, who transformed their very beings– their voices, gestures, dress, speech, teeth– to fit the role they wanted to play.

A BETTER EXAMPLE is the career of Elvis Presley. Dirt poor. Born in a shack. The embodiment of “white trash.” When he became massively successful he suddenly found himself playing doctors or suave playboys in Hollywood movies. In “Blue Hawaii,” the slumming son of big money.

Did he fool anybody?

That Elvis was out of place was part of the appeal. It was fantasy. He was living the dream. His audiences knew it and loved it.

Elite intellectuals of the Harvard/Stanford variety (except for a few rock n roll fanboy writers) never accepted Elvis as legitimate and to this day haven’t accepted him. Rock music itself was not taken seriously as an art form until middle-class pseudo-intellectual troubadour Bob Dylan began playing it. That’s reality.

-K.W.