{"id":391247,"date":"2019-01-01T16:35:46","date_gmt":"2019-01-01T15:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/year-of-the-rats-and-the-sinking-ships\/"},"modified":"2019-01-01T16:35:46","modified_gmt":"2019-01-01T15:35:46","slug":"year-of-the-rats-and-the-sinking-ships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/year-of-the-rats-and-the-sinking-ships\/","title":{"rendered":"Year of the Rats and the Sinking Ships"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p><strong>January 12<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I am listening to Trump\u2019s incendiary speech in Seoul. He is standing at the dais in Proceeding Hall, the National Assembly building in South Korea. Perhaps it\u2019s the color saturation level on our old monitor, but on this night Trump looks like a grotesque figure from a George Gr\u00f6sz painting. His face is glazed an acidic orange as if slathered in mortician\u2019s makeup. Even though he is reading from a prepared text written by one of his sycophants and projected for him on a teleprompter, he speaks in a switchbacking syntax that I\u2019ve come to call Trumponics. He looks and sounds like the dictator of bad taste.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, it\u2019s useless to probe Trump\u2019s ramblings for their symbolic content. He strikes right for the spleen. Still, I continue to hunt for some logic to what he\u2019s saying, knowing it\u2019s futile. Except, perhaps, for the logic of the suicide pact. But a pact implies a deal, and most of us haven\u2019t signed away our consent, except, I suppose, through our passive acquiescence to his resurrection of the old nuclear demons.<\/p>\n<p>Each Trump speech should come with a risk assessment of its potential fallout. Yet none of Trump\u2019s military-grade handlers\u2014McMaster, Mattis or Kelly\u2014seem up to the calculus. Tillerson may have some idea, but Rexxon\u2019s been locked out in the cold for months, as the State Department, though alas not the state, withers away. The State Department, which, since World War II, at least, has been responsible for far more deaths&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2019\/01\/01\/2018-year-of-the-rats-and-the-sinking-ships\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>January 12 I am listening to Trump\u2019s incendiary speech in Seoul. He is standing at the dais in Proceeding Hall, the National Assembly building in South Korea. Perhaps it\u2019s the color saturation level on our old monitor, but on this night Trump looks like a grotesque figure from a George Gr\u00f6sz painting. His face is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-391247","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}