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Pompeo is pulling all U.S. diplomats out of Venezuela

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that all remaining staff at the U.S. embassy in Venezuela would be withdrawn, as the country’s political and economic crisis deepens.

The move comes as Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, suffered a fifth day without electricity — a power outage President Nicolas Maduro has blamed on “sabotage” by opposition leader Juan Guaido, who he’s accused of acting at the behest of the U.S.

Outages have also hit other regions in the country, impacting communications. Water shortages have also been reported amid widening protests. The cause of the blackout remains unclear.

“This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in #Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy,” Pompeo said via Twitter late Monday. He added that U.S. personnel would be out of the country by the weekend.

Washington is part of an international push to remove Maduro and install Guaido as interim president pending fresh elections. Much of the international community backs the move, however Maduro retains the support of China, Cuba and Russia.

Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with the U.S. in late January after Trump declared his backing for Guiado. Trump subsequently said “all options” were open to remove Maduro — including military intervention.

READ: Venezuela suffered a blackout and the regime thinks Marco Rubio is to blame.

The State Department removed all non-essential staff from the embassy in Caracas in January.

Earlier Monday, Pompeo attacked Maduro’s claim that the U.S. was to blame for the blackout.

“Nicolas Maduro promised Venezuelans a better life and a socialist paradise,” he said. “He delivered on the socialism part, which has proved, time and time again, is a recipe for economic ruin. The paradise part? Not so much.”

Guaido launched a similar attack on Maduro over the weekend, saying the blackout was a result of corruption and mismanagement.

“We are in the middle of a catastrophe that is not the result of a hurricane, that is not the result of a tsunami,” he told CNN. “It’s the product of the inefficiency, the incapability, the corruption of a regime that doesn’t care about the lives of Venezuelans.”

Maduro hit back in a televised address Monday, blaming Trump for unleashing a “demonic” plot to oust him from power with an “electromagnetic attack.”

Cover image: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo holds a news conference to talk about the dire economic and political situation in Venezuela at the Harry S. Truman State Department headquarters March 11, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Trudeau Scandal Happens All the Time in America

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The most acute political scandal in North America—the one with
the greatest chance of toppling a head of state anytime soon—is occurring not
in the United States, but Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is barely hanging on to power after being accused
last month of pressuring his attorney general to abandon the criminal prosecution
of an influential company that hails from Quebec, his political
stronghold.

Political media in the U.S. can’t comprehend how this can be
so damaging. “There’s no money, no sex and nothing
illegal happened,” wrote
Rob Gillies of the Associated Press. “This is what passes for a scandal in
Canada.” 

It should also pass for a scandal in
America, but selective prosecution—which spares the powerful while punishing
those without connections—has become all too common in this country, and
notably so under President Obama. As Democratic candidates seek to save America
from President Trump’s kleptocracy, they ought to acknowledge that this era of unaccountability
long predates him, and be as indignant about it as our Canadian neighbors.

SNC-Lavalin is a Montreal-based engineering
firm that employs roughly 9,000 Canadians on numerous construction projects
inside the country. It also does substantial business abroad, where it’s been
accused for years of corruption
and fraud. This specific case alleges that the company paid 48
million Canadian dollars (around 36 million USD) to Libyan government officials
to secure construction contracts from 2001-2011, then defrauded the Libyans for
about 130 million Canadian dollars. 

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police submitted
these charges in 2015, before Trudeau entered office. A successful
criminal prosecution would bar SNC-Lavalin from bidding on any federal
government contracts for 10 years. But the Globe and Mail broke
the news in early February
that Trudeau’s office had asked Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to
abandon the criminal charges. Wilson-Raybould, who also sat in Trudeau’s
cabinet as justice minister, later confirmed
a “barrage” of pressure from senior officials, including Trudeau himself, who
asked her to “help out” with the case and “find a solution.” She rebuffed their
campaign, was demoted, then resigned.

Trudeau’s team sought a deferred
prosecution agreement (DPA), which would impose a financial penalty and some
greater oversight of SNC-Lavalin, but no criminal sanctions, enabling it to
continue to bid on government contracts. Prosecutors in Canada didn’t have the
option of deferring criminal prosecution until a change
in the law last year, one that SNC-Lavalin lobbied for.

While deferred prosecution agreements are
new to Canada, they’ve been used
in corporate settlements in the U.S. for more than two decades,
particularly during and after the last financial crisis, when hundreds of
DPAs were executed. In other words, the major difference between the
scandal engulfing Canada’s government and what happens routinely here is that
nobody in our Justice Department needs to be pressured to issue a deferred
prosecution agreement.

The Justice Department’s most notorious
DPA of the past decade was in 2012 with
HSBC, the bank that facilitated money laundering for drug cartels
and terrorist groups. Drug lords even designed specially shaped boxes
filled with money that slid easily through HSBC Mexico’s teller windows. Neither
HSBC nor its executives were criminally prosecuted, and the bank was merely
fined $1.9 billion—around
five weeks’ profit.

Justice Department officials had cautioned
that criminal charges would destroy HSBC and put thousands of innocent bank
tellers out of work. Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general at the time, expressed
concern that banks like HSBC have become so sprawling that “it does
become difficult for us to prosecute.” The phrase “Too Big to
Jail” was coined out of the HSBC mess.  But Holder had been warning of “collateral
consequences” for prosecuting corporations since a memo
he wrote while deputy attorney general in 1999.

Trudeau echoed this reasoning in remarks
last week about the SNC-Lavalin scandal. Referring to a meeting with
Wilson-Raybould, he said, “I stressed the importance
of protecting Canadian jobs and re-iterated that this issue was one of
significant national importance.” 

This justification
for neglecting serious crimes is sometimes known as the Arthur Andersen defense,
named after the accounting firm that destroyed documents as Enron’s auditor.
The 28,000-employee company went out of business amid a successful prosecution,
which the Supreme Court overturned years later on a technicality
over jury instructions.
(The firm had already split up by then.) 

Law enforcers and
business lobbyists alike have agreed that the Arthur Andersen case was a
mistake that sent thousands of low-level accountants to
the unemployment line. Few mentioned that Andersen employees simply got jobs with other accounting
firms. Similarly, if SNC-Lavalin couldn’t
bid on government contracts, somebody else would, and the same number of
Canadians would fill those jobs.

Trudeau also made clear his real
rationale for pressuring his attorney general: as a member of Parliament, he represents
Quebec, home to SNC-Lavalin. Politicians are inclined to defend the
interests of their constituents, but as prime minister, Trudeau’s actions
affect the whole country. He sought to pervert the justice system so a
favorite-son company could evade punishment and continue to profit from the Canadian
government.

From his firing of FBI Director James
Comey to reportedly trying to prevent the
AT&T–Time Warner merger because he doesn’t like CNN (a Time Warner
subsidiary), Trump has perverted the law in ways that tower over the relatively
gentle nudges of Trudeau’s government. But the pre-Trump status quo, of
perfunctory deferred prosecutions and no jail terms for financial fraudsters,
was itself a scandal. That’s why jettisoning Trump won’t, on its own, restore
the rule of law in America. The Democrats competing for president also must lay
out a plan for treating every American equally under the law, no matter how
rich or connected. Because the party’s last president failed this test.

The Dogs of War Sniff Out Mission in Central Africa

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As if the United States wasn’t already pursuing enough murky and dubious military missions in such places as Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen, a push appears to be underway to expand Washington’s involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa.

U.S. troops are more deeply engaged in “anti-terror” in Niger, Somalia, and other countries than most Americans realize. When four American Special Forces personnel died in Niger in 2017, even members of Congress were surprised.

A lobbying effort now seems to be taking place for U.S. intervention to alleviate suffering in the Central African Republic (CAR), because of that country’s ongoing civil war. NBC News took the lead with a story on the March 6 Today show and followed it up with a more detailed segment on the Nightly News that same evening. Cynthia McFadden was the lead journalist for the report that included searing footage of suffering in one UN-run refugee camp.

The media treatment would be familiar to anyone who recalls the preludes to U.S. military interventions in such places as Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria. There is extensive video of starving, disease-afflicted children and their anguished parents. International aid workers emphasize that the suffering was certain to get worse unless the “international community” (led, of course, by the United States) took immediate action. A U.S. diplomat on the scene or in Washington proceeds to echo that argument. The armed conflict causing the suffering is mentioned, but the treatment is brief and superficial, or it becomes a simplistic melodrama in which a designated villain is causing all the trouble: Think Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Qaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad.

The NBC report followed that template to perfection—including the focus on child victims. In an on-camera interview, Caryl Stern, the CEO of UNICEF USA, stated flatly: “This is the most dangerous place in the world for children.” As with earlier media accounts that sought to generate public support for U.S. intervention in the Balkans, Libya, and other chaotic arenas, the report also highlighted the sense of urgency and the assertion that the United States has both a moral obligation and a strategic interest in taking action. One passage asserted that the situation already in the CAR was dire and becoming more so:

The Central African Republic has descended into chaos in recent years. A sectarian civil war pitting Muslim rebels against Christian militias has ravaged large swaths of the country, displaced more than 1 million people and claimed the lives of tens of thousands.

Adding to its woes, this landlocked nation of 4.6 million people is now teetering on the brink of famine. An estimated 1.5 million children are at risk of starvation, aid groups say. And the lack of government institutions coupled with the tangled mass of warring factions have prompted fears that extremist organizations aligned with the Islamic State group could gain a foothold.

The last point aimed at making the case that the situation in the CAR was not just a humanitarian crisis but also a matter of U.S. national security. David Brownstein, the U.S. chargé d’affairs in the Central African Republic, did not hesitate to invoke the specter of ISIS. He stated that “the United States is particularly concerned about the potential of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, capitalizing on the instability to establish a presence in the region.” Brownstein emphasized that “ISIS takes advantage of vacuums. Literal vacuums, security vacuums, governance vacuums, perceived moral vacuums.”

If the ISIS menace was not enough to alarm viewers, NBC cited two other bogeymen: the Russians and the Chinese. “Other nations have developed an interest in the resource-rich African country, including Russia and China. The soil underneath the razed villages and scorched fields holds a wealth of gold, diamonds, uranium and oil. Close observers of the region say Russia in particular has gained a stunning level of clout inside the former French colony in just the past 13 months—supplying arms and soldiers, and seeing one of its own nationals installed as a special security adviser to President Faustin-Archange Touadéra.” Other media outlets have warned about Russian arms sales as well.

Habitual hawks likewise are stressing that the Kremlin is exploiting the situation in the CAR for geopolitical advantage. Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former deputy secretary of defense Peter Brookes argues that Moscow is forging worrisome security ties with numerous African countries, including possibly seeking bases in both Sudan and Eritrea. The CAR is definitely on that list as well, Brookes contends. “Russia has sold arms to, and trained, the security services of African states for many years, perhaps most notably of late in the Central African Republic.”

Americans need to resist the siren call for U.S. intervention in the CAR or any other country where vital American interests are not at stake. Financial aid to help alleviate human suffering is appropriate, and the U.S. government already is the largest donor for that cause in the CAR, sending $120 million in 2018. If reports like the NBC story generate a surge in private donations, that outcome is even better. No one denies that there is great humanitarian suffering in the CAR, but America cannot take action in every arena where such a tragedy occurs.

Moreover, previous U.S.-led humanitarian interventions have not turned out well. Especially where there are complex, multi-sided civil wars, Washington’s meddling typically makes matters worse. The Obama administration’s campaign to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi to prevent a supposed impending genocide instead brought unprecedented chaos to that country. The suffering in Syria today was exacerbated by the agenda that the United States and its allies pursued to unseat Bashar al-Assad. Even in cases where Washington’s motive seemed genuinely humanitarian and not just a façade for geopolitical advantage, as in Somalia during George H.W. Bush’s administration, the outcome was bruising. American troops arrived to distribute aid and restore some semblance of order. They ended up battling one of the Somali armed factions, culminating in the Black Hawk down fiasco.

In light of that dismal track record, the United States should stay aloof from the tragic situation in the Central African Republic. U.S. foreign policy over the past several decades has confirmed the point that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions. Hyped, simplistic, and one-sided media accounts have helped push America into unwise interventions, and a similar campaign may be underway regarding the CAR. We must not let that siren call succeed again.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor to The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 750 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support for Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements (2019).

Give ‘Em Hell, Tucker

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Because of my travel schedule, I was offline for virtually all of Monday. I got back to the hotel room in Miami and saw that the Interwebs had blown sky high with errbody trying to burn Tucker Carlson at the stake for some gross and stupid things he said on a shock jock’s radio show over a decade ago.

Except Tucker isn’t having it. At all. Watch what he said here. Excerpts:

Do I like what he said in a conversation with a shock jock? No. Do I think he should apologize or in any way acknowledge what those prisspots at Media Matters pulled up from ages ago? Not no, but hell no. A world in which political activists and operatives do deep dives into the past comments of public figures to try to ruin them today is a world none of us should want. What actual adult person cares what obnoxious things Tucker Carlson, or any other TV personality, said over ten years ago? Really, who? Freddy Gray is good on this.

What is it about the left today that they try to get people fired for saying things they don’t like? Look at these whiny, malicious girls who are too fragile to be in college:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Here’s the whole list of demands. You don’t like what a professor wrote? Write a letter to the editor. Go visit with him to share your views. Don’t try to shut him down and force him to beg for mercy, children. The president of Sarah Lawrence ought to send in the police to drag every one of those privileged brats out of her office, then suspend them for the rest of the semester. If they get away with this, that will tell you everything you need to know about that school.

 

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The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Oh NATO They Didn’t

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What We’re Following Today

It’s Monday, March 11.

The White House released its 2020 budget proposal, which calls for budget cuts and work requirements across social-safety-net programs as well as $8.6 billion in funding for a wall across the southern border. Through invoking a national emergency last month, President Donald Trump has already moved to divert another several billion toward building the wall.

Meanwhile, congressional leaders sent a bipartisan invitation to NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, to address a joint session of Congress in April. The president has vocally criticized NATO in the past.

Beto Late Than Never: It’s looking like Beto O’Rourke might be one of the last Democratic candidates to hop into the 2020 presidential campaign, and some Democratic strategists worry that he missed his moment. “Even some friends have struggled to explain what his delay has been about and how, if he’s had to agonize so long over whether to run, he could actually be ready for the campaign ahead, let alone the presidency,” reports Edward-Isaac Dovere. But with powerful new hires such as Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, and viral name recognition, O’Rourke shouldn’t be written off too quickly. “None of the candidates who have announced has been able to match the virtuosity as a social-media storyteller that made him a star.”

Still confused about who’s in, who’s out, and who’s still flirting with a presidential run? Bookmark our constantly updated 2020 candidates guide.

The Cost of Impeachment: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she’s not in favor of impeaching Trump, in a recent interview with The Washington Post Magazine, arguing that the president is “not worth” the national divisions an impeachment trial would cause. A counterpoint: In The Atlantic’s March cover story, Yoni Appelbaum made the case for launching impeachment proceedings, arguing that Congress has a duty to bring the debate over Trump’s fitness for office “out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.”

It’s Tax Season: Most Americans won’t cheat on their income taxes; they’ll pay exactly what they owe. Why are Americans such sticklers for tax law? Rene Chun explains in the forthcoming April issue of The Atlantic.

Inherited Circumstances: The effects of teenage motherhood span generations, according to a new study: Children whose grandmothers had teen pregnancies are more likely to underperform in school, even if their own mothers gave birth as adults. That probably has to do with the persistent effects of intergenerational poverty, reports Alia Wong.

Immigration: David Frum argues in The Atlantic’s April issue that “if liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.” He writes: “The question before the United States and other advanced countries is not: Immigration, yes or no? … The questions to ask are: How much? What kind?”

As always, we want to hear from you. Write to us at letters@theatlantic.com or reply directly to this newsletter with your thoughts on Frum’s argument. We might feature your response on our website and in future editions of the Politics and Policy Daily.

— Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal

Snapshot

Senator Bernie Sanders meets with Sarah Bass of Boone, Iowa, after a campaign rally in Des Moines. (Matthew Putney / AP)

Ideas From The Atlantic

The Western Erasure of African Tragedy (Hannah Giorgis)
“Western publications engaged in selective reporting about the deceased. The Washington Post, for example, led its homepage coverage Sunday with a headline that informed readers only that ‘Eight Americans among 157 people killed in Ethiopian Airlines crash.’ (The Washington metropolitan area has the largest population of Ethiopian descent outside the country itself.)” → Read on.

Is It Time to Worry About the Boeing 737 Max 8? (James Fallows)
“Modern accidents almost always involve some strange, improbable, edge-case conditions, precisely because so many of the “normal” risks have been studied and prevented with redundant safety features. So no one knows, yet, what happened in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, and anyone who feigns certainty now should be viewed with wariness.” → Read on.

How Not to Lose to Donald Trump (Rahm Emanuel)
“Earth to Democrats: Republicans are telling you something when they gleefully schedule votes on proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and a 70 percent marginal tax rate. When they’re more eager to vote on the Democratic agenda than we are, we should take a step back and ask ourselves whether we’re inadvertently letting the political battle play out on their turf rather than our own.” → Read on.

What Else We’re Reading

‣ Meet the Group Trying to Change Evangelical Minds About Israel (Adam Wren, Politico Magazine)
‣ Hell and High Water: How Flooding and Buyouts Threaten Black History (Laura Thompson, Scalawag)
‣ Did You Really Think Trump Was Going to Help End the Carceral State? (Marie Gottschalk, Jacobin)
‣ How Violent American Vigilantes at the Border Led to Trump’s Wall (Greg Grandin, The Guardian)
‣ The Case for Immigration (The Economist) (? Paywall)

We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Comments, questions, typos, grievances and groans related to our puns? Let us know anytime here.

Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up for our daily politics email here. We have many other free email newsletters on a variety of other topics. Find the full list here.

Killing a Mockingbird

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Image Source Front cover art for the book To Kill a Mockingbird

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’”That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.”‘Your father’s right,’ she said. ‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

—Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

“Take me to a place without no name.”

– Michael Jackson, “A Place With No Name”

Harper Lee’s book To Kill A Mockingbird continues to get reproduced. It is read across the country in school. Now the book is going to Broadway. We should all breathe a sigh of relief that Hamilton no longer center stage. What was with that play anyways? Could anyone figure that out? Wasn’t American history class nauseating and unbelievable for more people? If there was a national poll on Hamilton one would guess it would do no better than the 1% who actually saw it.

Hamilton and To Kill A Mockingbird are the same story, more or less. It’s a fairy type of heroic rich white men in a history that produced none of these characters. To dull the sins of the present moment these stories are repeated. History is told inaccurately not for history’s sake, but for the sake of the present. If there were heroes in the past, why couldn’t there be heroes now?

To Kill A Mockingbird isn’t about a black guy (Tom Robinson) getting accused of rape. Tom isn’t even real. He’s not a character, he’s just a plot structure. Could anyone say anything about Tom besides his race? To be fair, none of the characters are complex, well-developed or interesting in any way, shape or form. And yet the book is clearly about one person: Atticus Finch. Unlike the helpless but angelic prisoner, Mr. Finch is a real person. And he’s annoying as hell.

It’s not unusual for a rich guy to have platitudes. It’s unusual for them all to come true. And Finch works for the book because he has strict rules. He is law and order. He is meant to civilize the white trash whose racism makes them subhuman to rich whites like Finch. It is here that the racism of the audience is displaced. What generally happens when the bourgeois make these very ‘black and white’ stories is that prejudice is only confirmed. Once prejudice is accepted it can never be controlled. Once humanity looses its complexity, all we can see is complexion.

It is dangerous to teach children this fairy tale of good and evil. What we teach them is that justice comes from the top. Now power no longer corrupts. Power does not oppress. Power, when in the right hands, saves. To those in power, power is always in the right hands.

And in a story like this the black guy is subhuman not by his actions, but by definition. He is a cripple. And his story runs parallel to a freakish subhuman boy (Boo Radley) down the street who is accepted by Finch. The lesson is that “the others” are not as they appear, whether they be black or deranged—without any distinction between the two.

Maybe Harper Lee is smarter than she appears. Maybe she was writing this book from the perspective of a 6 year old to prove just how fantastical such a story was. At the very least, it’s an ageist book, and one that doesn’t age well. Except for on Broadway apparently, where the audience is just as rich, old and white as they ever have been.

On a seemingly unrelated note a new documentary is out. “Leaving Neverland” documents pop star Michael Jackson’s sexual abusive relationships with two young boys. From Donald Trump to Harper Lee to HBO, America remains fascinated by the construct of rape by people of color.

Why not make a remake of To Kill A Mockingbird involving Michael? Have this play still told from the perspective of a young child. Would Michael still be defended? Would his admirers be any less problematic than his detractors? Could anything beyond fame or criminality be considered? How would Atticus’ children react to Michael? Would the children be relieved to find a father figure who wasn’t so condescending? Or would the idea of treating these young children ‘as adults’ go too far and stunt the real merits of childhood that Michael himself supposedly lost along the way?

If Michael couldn’t sing, would anyone take his case? And if Michael couldn’t sing, would anyone hear from those children? How quickly would the Finch children turn on Finch’s hackneyed advice and run into the arms of the magical Mr. Jackson? How would Jackson’s relationship with Mr. Finch’s children test Finch’s “anti-racist” crusade?

How would such a book effect the reader? Most of the readers of To Kill A Mockingbird are young children, young enough to be influenced by a figure like Jackson, or even by a figure like Finch. How would the children benefit from hearing “both sides” of the story? Both from the hallow and sanctimonious Finch and from the deep and morally ambiguous Jackson? Could this book have a “happy” ending, where Mr. Finch goes to jail? Or would even the idea of “happy” be too corrupted by Jackson’s own dishonesty in dealing with real happiness in his fantasy land.

And yet, was Jackson’s fantasy any more far-fetched than Finch’s? Weren’t both men buying into the world of innocence where the always guilty black man is merely used as a way to prove that even he can be innocent? Circa bizarro O.J. Simpson, who killed two people and is publicized not as a symbol of innocence, but as a symbol of fear of the black mob for White America.

O.J. still gets play for three reasons: 1. To prove that the criminal justice system is not racist. 2. To normalize, or even celebrate violence and murder, specifically the murder of a woman. 3. To get White America frightened of black people dancing on the streets in their supposed celebration of Mr. Simpson. Remember when Donald Trump said that Muslims danced for joy after 9/11? It’s like that. It’s actually not that original of a story if we think about why it is repeated.

Could Jackson’s own transition to whiter skin be linked with his own quest for innocence and nostalgia? Because black children are not allowed to be children he had to become a white person to become a child. Black children cannot be innocent in America. Jackson is always seen as magical, and therefore harmless. He becomes a problem only when he tries to be real through the very magic that was supposedly who he really was.

Finch becomes a fictional hero for the ruling class and a pain in the rear for children. Finch becomes the hero because he is fair, he is civilized. He does not see race. He does not see prejudice. All you people need to do is walk in someone else’s shoes and you will know too.

But Finch won’t walk in anyone else’s shoes. He walks in his own. And his fans do too. For they are him. They are not at fault. They watch and watch. They are smarter than the story. They watch just to prove their fantasy that nothing is wrong. As long as there are fair-minded old white guys running the show (same as it ever was). Jackson has fans because no one can walk in those shoes. It’s called the moon walk. And it can’t be done, not in the same way.

Jackson is the mockingbird, so many years later. He sings. It’s sad when he dies because he was a pretty bird. But was he? And was that all he was? Who knew this man besides those who really knew him? And by God Atticus Finch does not understand mockingbirds. He sees them as a case. He’s a sociologist. Who does all that looking and still has no prejudice?

What use is Finch if he looks all day, runs the whole town, and comes up with nothing at all to be prejudiced about? Keep the world the same? How is that going, Mr. Finch? And give this to Jackson, he wanted to change the world, and he did. Rock is dead. Pop rules the world. It has critics. But no one really cares about them. So Jackson runs the world, Finch has his town. Jackson is a story, Finch is just bored. And maybe the great shakers only make things worse, after all. But they have a story at least. And it is a real story.

It is different sides of production. Finch decides. He decides who is guilty, who is innocent. Finch chooses innocent this time. Because this is fiction. And because no one at the top is scared of more Atticus Finchs. The same people from the same families and the same neighborhoods cycle in and out of the criminal justice system.

We can call these people on trial guilty and we can call them innocent, but is either true? For isn’t Finch really running the show? Not in the sense of declaring who is guilty, who is innocent. But in the fact that he is choosing either. And the fact that those on trial are always the same. They may have done it. They may have not done it. But who cares? Crime is a social problem. We get lost in the details and motives of each criminal. As a group there will always be a certain percentage of each class that did a crime, and this percentage will vary among the classes in questions.

So each time one of the underclass is saved it’s a story but never more than that, and therefore not a story worth telling. And Jackson sings. And we debate. If he did it. And why not believe the victims? But why should that be the story, or even really a debate? With some good people and bad people in each class, everyone has the same choices. And a good choice in one situation is like a bad choice in another.

Now the world sings Michael Jackson anyways. And no one really cares about these stories, as long as his song pops, which it does. And this kills Atticus Finch. Finch needs to control the world. He needs heroes and he needs villains.

Finch has more power than he thinks. He controls all parts of the world. Not just the trial. Finch controls before and Finch controls after. No one is guilty, and certainly no one has clean hands. And so Michael, let’s skip the public trial. They could ruin anybody if they wanted, why you? Robert Kraft made the news too. But everyone knew he was a predator already. Was this news? The only news is that it was covered up for so long. This is all of ICE too. Where was Donald Trump when The New York Times broke the story about migrant women being held hostage and raped repeatedly?

It happens in message parlors. It happens in the Church. MeToo’s most lasting accomplishment has been democratizing the role of Atticus Finch. Now it is less shameful to be the one who shames. Now it is not only Finch who can say what is right and wrong. Now an immigrant in detention can say so too. Occasionally only though. And only when approved by the corporate press. Which is why we are yet to come to terms with the military’s role in all of these dynamics. Finch is an imperialist just as much as Jackson may be a product of it—in both good ways and bad.

So it’s not random. It’s not captivating. It’s pervasive and sad and cruel. Jackson can’t and shouldn’t escape that evil. Still, pop rules the world. Micheal built that. That cannot be taken away.

There’s power in pop too. For everyone, if they want. It’s pop after all. And it’s not that trivial. It’s just life. And if pop is trivial, so is life. Golf needs a set of clubs, soccer only needs a ball. Rock needs a guitar, pop only needs a microphone, This is life.

Atticus wants power. Michael wants something else. And maybe power too. Atticus get off from hearing the sound of his own voice. Michael looked at the man in the mirror. Not for pleasure. But to really look.

To the contrary, the entire point of To Kill A Mockingbird is to congratulate the reader. It is not to make the reader think. It’s CNN. You decide. You make it fair. You make it right. None of it is true. And maybe even the reader is doing the best they can. If that’s the case why congratulate one’s self?

Jackson was pop before pop. You didn’t have to feel anything. You were here, he was here. And that was enough. And then Madonna. And then Rihanna. And then Drake. The top star now always projects less feeling. Finch drives the wedge of ambition. His children admire it but would they rather have a father? Finch wants you to feel. He strikes the right chords but doesn’t know what music is. Jackson just is. And that gives more than Finch ever could.

The larger quibble is that this book is still read very widely in school and is seen as the way to explain morality to children. To Kill A Mockingbird can only do so much damage to the Broadway crowd because there is only so much damage left to be done. As for our young people who continue to get more and more progressive, let’s give them better reading material.

Finch treated adults like children because his heart was too small. Jackson treated children like adults because his heart was too big. And in both cases power corrupts, while consequences are evasive. And justice has nothing to do with what these men could get away and with what their victims couldn’t. It was only class. Both will be seen as heroes and now almost by accident both will have to face the spotlight. Jackson entraps because he makes you feel alive. Finch entraps because he makes you feel powerless.

Wesley Morris of The New York Times argues that we haven’t been able to see the truth about Jackson before the new documentary because he was too magical for us to see through him. And yet, wasn’t it just the opposite? Jackson was so real that no one cared. No matter how convincing the documentary may be there are a lot of people who simply won’t care because Jackson gave so much to them in a real way. Jackson himself may have lived in a fantasy land but the star is always more distant from reality than their fans are. The star is the star because they can act as the link between the reality we all feel and the fantasy the star lives in. This fantasy is no more the star’s than it is ours. It is a fantasy that is both false because of its corporate distribution and true because of no one can truly exit the expectations of the bourgeois besides the bourgeois themselves.

The shift from rock to pop as the dominant music medium is in line with Karl Marx’s technological determinism. The shift from communal instrumentation to individual electronic sound expresses both the technological advances of capitalism and its alienating effects. Michael Jackson and Prince thriving at similar times points to a split, and perhaps the reason people always ask which one you prefer: Prince or MJ? What that question might be asking is do you prefer music before these two musicians or music after?

Prince was an instrumental pop artist, and maybe even closer to rock, if not closest to funk. Instrumentally speaking, Prince and the music that preceded him were quite material. They relied on material instruments for sound. The contradiction is that lyrically the focus was largely immaterial. Art that precedes the present age asked about broad immaterial concepts: love, God, purpose, etc.

Fast forward to Michael Jackson and modern day pop. No instruments in sight. Many of the pop stars can’t even sing. This isn’t meant as a diss. They are every bit as talented—they just use different skillsets which shouldn’t just be limited to the arena of music. Music itself is more or less a mathematical equation and in many ways the pop stars today have mastered the equation in ways older musicians never did. It’s like playing chess. A beginner will see the game as full of endless possibilities and will improvise at every turn. And yet as they improve they will find that the best move is both mathematical and formulaic.

As a result, pop music today is less about music than it ever has been. The formula of making a catchy song with a trendy character behind it has been mastered. Dominant singular stars then distinguish themselves in much the same way Jackson did. Lyrically the focus is material. There is no way to make any sort of formula out of the material world as a whole. The ridiculous skill of recognizing and remembering faces should prove this before we even get to the other material focuses of today’s music: sex, money and work. What pop stars now aim to do is capture the material reality of today’s precarious world which has lost the philosophical depth of pre-Prince precisely because we have transcended it materially as a whole and remain too insecure materially on an individual level to even contemplate these broader questions. Jackson’s focus on dance, fashion and vocal play all set the stage for the modern artist to branch out from a sound that no longer relies on instruments in the same way.

To Kill A Mockingbird is bad in part because it isn’t funny. There’s no room for laughter. You are suffocated the entire time. As far as racist classics go, at least give Heart of Darkness this: it’s supposed to be a comedy. Granted, there are no moments at which you would actually laugh. The Oscar winner Green Book is the same way. It’s supposed to be funny at least. Even though it isn’t. The Oscars have worse taste than the Russians when it comes to picking American winners (kidding, lefties).

Why would a movie like Green Book which is completely reductive and uninteresting beat out another Spike Lee classic, a legit good Hollywood  movie like A Star Is Born and an artistic success in Roma? Because Green Book makes the audience feel good. Because it tells the audience not that racism is dead, but that the bourgeois audience is part of the solution, not the problem.

A side note on A Star Is Born, which is a very good film. The film is more serious than it claims to be. However, the total takedown of pop music is so pretentious. Bradley Cooper kills himself because pop music is supposedly so “meaningless” that he just can’t take it. Lady Gaga still made one of the best pop albums of all time (The Fame) no matter what she thinks. The reason the movie holds up is because the real Gaga is still there, even if she tries to become more conceited than she’s capable of.

Art only means as much as the enjoyment it can provide the viewer. The liberal entertainment complex is highly linked with the military industrial complex and cultural imperialism in general. The purpose of this structure is to tell the viewer how to feel, not for the viewer to enjoy the product. While most art only practically functions as relief from the mechanisms of capitalist labor and alienation, critics like to judge art on whether the art means anything. This is interesting to be sure. Although it’s a very meta approach that implies that art has no value in and of itself.

This is the criticism of pop music and popular culture in general. The greatest philosopher ever may have been Karl Marx. This was not because he found anything that had meaning, truth, or enjoyment but because he was able to identify exactly what was preventing people from becoming the very philosophers that had enough time, money and relief from stress that could identify such philosophical implications in a way that was more than simply a product of their present condition. Hence, there is more truth in the anti-philosophy materialism of today’s pop than most any philosophy simply because now more than ever it is the material, not the natural world, that is present in our lives. There also must be truth that if there is such thing as a ‘natural’ state for humans (slowly adjusted by evolution), then the present times that are so overtaken by technology and individualism and so distant from nature and community that these times must be inherently alienating. The irony of pop music then is that it can speak to alienation precisely because it is the popular expression of it.

So, America, Michael Jackson should not be our mockingbird. He does not need us to save him. He is not a bird, he is a man. He is not a singer, he is a human. He is real precisely for the reasons To Kill A Mockingbird is not. He wanted to feel, he wanted to change, he wanted to inspire, and sometimes, he wanted to hurt. To Kill A Mockingbird should never go near a child again because it means nothing beyond a reproduction of its own mythos.

Jumping to Michael Jackson’s defense seems misplaced. Proving him to be innocent means nothing. Just as proving Tom Robinson innocent means nothing. Nor should the innocence be so certain. Jackson was many things. Not just a mockingbird. Pop can save lives and pop can ruin lives. It never has been the powerless cripple that Harper Lee imagines seeing in Tom Robinson, Boo Radley and the mockingbird itself.

Michael Jackson is not Tom Robinson with a voice, he is Atticus Finch with a soul. He, like Finch, can weave a fantasy tale and evade the consequences. Anyone with power and money can. What separates Jackson is that he actually had a story to tell. When most kids listen to Michael Jackson, it’s not required reading. For a few children though, Jackson was required.

If the layered world Michael Jackson created meant more than the sentimental magical world of Atticus Finch, we should avoid the sentimentality of seeing Jackson as a helpless mockingbird. Instead let us assert that he was a full human. An accurate depiction of humanity’s history would tell us that while this isn’t a compliment, it is the truth. Jackson will outlast Finch simply because there was some truth there. Truth is not found in the books that rich people require children to read, nor it is in the verdicts of rich lawyers who decide who is good and bad. Truth lies in pop. It lies in the music that captivates the masses, whether that be to our promise, or to our peril.

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