Lambert has been reading again and the themes he has been confronted with remind me of Gary Oldman's character in The Fifth Element, the rather evil Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg--he's a comic book cousin to Joe Turkel's Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner who in turn is a sci-fi descendant of William Randolph Hearst. Both Zorg and Tyrell inhabit a future world of shadows and profit, violence and attempts to harness that violence for their own ends, past the gray areas into the heart of the last endless void. Sounds like a great place for a time-share, doncha' think?

But back to the salient neocon et al plot explored in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: destruction as opportunity for control and profit. This memorable scene (posted below the fold) from The Fifth Element has never ceased to amuse and disturb me, no less so when I discovered Mr. Zorg's philosophy is the cornerstone of what passes rather casually for Neocon/Conservative/GOP dogma. In the following scene Gary Oldman's Mr. Zorg seeks information from Ian Holm's Priest Vito Cornelius as to the whereabouts of certain vital stones...

++++ Read more…

poor old dickish cheney
never got to serve
and pity poor young georgie bush
who sort of lost his nerve

so many of our neocons
are history’s neo-can’ts
what they need is endless war
it is their second chance Read more…

The January/February 2007 issue of The Atlantic offers an article by Niall Fergusson titled “A War to Start All Wars” which begins:

The United States invaded Iraq in April 2003 for multiple reasons, but the most ambitious was a desire to remake a whole region. The Middle East, it was argued, was full of political and economic underachievers, driven to violence by a Muslim/Arab inferiority complex. Replacing Saddam Hussein with an exemplary democracy would begin a domino effect, spreading American values to Iraq’s most undemocratic neighbors. Read more…

An editorial in today's Haaretz has a brief history of "Clean Break", the Neocon plan for the Middle East, and it's implications now.

Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon "creative destruction" in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. Read more…