Archives for October 2018

Like interest earned on an investment, so too does incompetence have a tendency to compound. In the case of the former, the happy, idle coin finds itself put to work in the whirlwind of the market. There, it will respond to the strange menagerie of the financial zoo—to humans, bulls, and bears. Such an adventurous little investment, bursting at its outset with honest cupidity and boundless hope, it will inject itself into the excited tide of stock and trade and bond and gain. The expectation is that its profits will accumulate to ever greater heights, if only given the time.

Yet the passage of time serves not only to increase financial boons and enticing returns, but to augment government follies as well. What can be said of the market, then, can be said of the state. As interest, with any luck, is compounded for an investor over the course of days and weeks, so too can be the incompetence of the administration of a state.

Saudi Arabia, much to the capitalist’s and the humanitarian’s shared concern, has revealed itself to be such an incompetent state—and the incompetence (and oddly, the investments) continue their increase by the day. It’s proven to be a government under whose unimaginably wealthy, albeit ineluctably bungling leadership not only investments, but incompetence compounds before our eyes. More than that, the two (affluence and ineptness) openly co-exist and perhaps even complement each other as well.

The latest, and most egregious evidence of this compounding incompetence and its painful effects came yesterday, a good three weeks after reports were first leaked about Jamal Khashoggi’s death.

A recent American resident and constant Saudi dissident, Khashoggi was an opinion columnist for the Washington Post. Rarely genial toward, often polemical against, and always critical of his native land, the sixty-year-old Khashoggi was one of few Arabian writers who dared shine a light on the dark and inveterate shortcomings of the Saudi regime.

To call them “shortcomings”, though, would be to put too lightly this government’s innumerable and inhumane flaws. In the past few years, it has proceeded, seldom with subtlety, to transgress liberty and modernity in the following ways: it has repressed the rights of female activists in its streets, imprisoned political adversaries in its cities, misallocated essential funds for the wretched people in its hamlets, and exacerbated a senseless war in Yemen. Indeed, in the mind of an American, its only redeeming quality is its hostility toward Iran (yet one must ask if truly Saudi Arabia is redeemed by the simple fact that it shares an enemy with us).

Khashoggi, unlike any other writer this side of Medina, has been a lone and intrepid voice in making known these blatant failures and crimes. Risking his name and eventually his life in the state in which he was born, Khashoggi sallied forth in an attempt to criticize his nation, his prince, his king. He spoke at length about their endless peculations, their brazen affronts, their ugly repressions, their specious progress, their ill-gotten gains, their ill-distributed wealth, their myopia, their kleptomania, and everything else they’ve done accomplished to do wrong. Only so many sins can be buried in a ground where petroleum swims, and Khashoggi realized that his home was drowning.

For his efforts or rather his effrontery, Khashoggi was killed by order of the Crown Prince Mohamad bin Salman. To do his royal bidding, the now playfully, now frighteningly named Notorious “MBS” sent to Istanbul a cadre of his Medieval hitmen and thugs. Once there, numbering fifteen, they posed as administrative officials, as if to receive Khashoggi and deliver to him the marriage license he sought.

By the time the day was through, neither a wedding bell nor a funeral dirge was to be heard. Silence, rather, and a cover-up was tuned to pitch. Once in their grasp, Khashoggi was gruesomely murdered by the dedicated troop. Probably, so that they might avoid detection, they proceeded to suffocate, murder, dismember, and perhaps even eviscerate their former countryman right there in the consulate room. Remarkably, it seems to be the case that they left nary a drop of blood that might’ve stained them with the imprint of their sanguinary crime.

The execution—of both plan and man—was successful (if not horrifyingly sinister) and, at least at first glance, was done competently so. The men and the Prince appeared ready to wash themselves of their crime and move on to the next. However, the sweet scent of a bloody and long-sought victory lasted only a brief while. Not long after his pre-mature death, when it was realized by the world that Khashoggi had been forcibly extinguished of life, the Saudis’ competence was exhausted as well.

Tarrying to acknowledge his disappearance, the regime dragged its feet before claiming that Khashoggi had in fact left the consulate unharmed. No video evidence could corroborate this unimaginative claim, so the regime had to try another. It attempted next to say that Khashoggi, upon entering the consulate, provoked a fight with those who were present. Not sensing the disproportion of his odds (being one man against fifteen), Khashoggi wasn’t likely to prevail. Nor did he—that much is that which we can all agree on. Lamentably, it claimed, in the brawl that ensued, Khashoggi had been inadvertently killed. Alas, in a tussle of self-defense, the nettling journalist had been accidentally, fortuitously killed.

Credulity was, at this point, beginning to be stretched rather far, but still it had a way to go. A few days after this remark, a video emerged of a “Khashoggi-clad” body double exiting the consulate and traipsing about the Turkish streets. This slightly disheveled, lightly bearded, audaciously morbid middle-aged man (since identified by Turkish officials as Mustafa al-Madani) wore the same blazer and slacks that Khashoggi donned but a few hours ago. He, not the original but the subsequent Khashoggi, made certain upon leaving the consulate to have himself captured on the street cameras above in full view. To add to the conspicuity, he engaged various passers-by in conversation and did a bit of shopping as well. The only problem was that he didn’t outfit himself in Khashoggi’s garb from head to heel: inconsistent with the dead man’s dress, al-Madani kept on his own pair of shoes—white on their bottoms, rather than the dead man’s darkened leather soles. Is this waddling henchman really to blame for such a small, sartorial blunder? I think not. A cover-up, after all, can only bear so much weight before it begins straining the arches of the feet upon which it rests.

Discovered to have flimsy doppelgangers and empty alibis and pressured by the onslaught of the truth, the regime was made to admit that indeed, Khashoggi was dead. Worse still, his was not a natural end. His murder was pre-mediated from the start. Yet even after having admitted so much, the regime refused to take that final and obvious next step; it maintained with an obstinacy that only a monarchy can enjoy that the planning and the execution didn’t come from on high. It was, the Saudi regime claimed, the lurid work of a rogue and murderous group unaffiliated with the crown. This was MBS’s (and his publicists’) last attempt to exculpate themselves from a world of disrepute. (The American president, no enemy of conspiracy himself, saw in this explanation a potential, if not fully credible glimmer of truth).

This, however, has also been debunked. The fiasco was a combination of ghoulish pre-mediation and monarchical decree—a marriage of malice aforethought and palace intrigue.

But the incompetence didn’t stop there. Sensing the ripened moment for a coerced photo-op, the Saudi Crown Prince MBS invited to his home the now fatherless son of Jamal Khashoggi. Under visible duress, the adult-aged Salah Khashoggi was captured on camera hesitantly shaking the dear leader’s hand. Clearly this was no voluntary act; Salah has been on Saudi Arabian “house arrest” for the better part of a year. Fettered by his father’s sins, the younger Khashoggi was considered by the government to be a potential threat, if not an outright enemy of the state. As a consequence, Salah was barred from taking his leave from the country and seeking shelter somewhere, anywhere far afield. After another round of international backlash to this disgusting sight, he was given permission at last to depart from that repressive state and seek pastures and, in them, protection abroad. He’s since arrived, physically unscathed but surely emotionally bruised in the America where his late father once lived.

And this leads us back to the confluence of investment and incompetence, as the two can’t help but be intertwined. Saudi Arabia is the epitome of both; its investments are delicious and enticing, its incompetence nauseating and gross. Its sovereign wealth fund is prodigious—its scruples, exiguous. Even as it has bungled every step in the aftermath of Khashoggi’s death, the Saudis expect to push forward with their many and valuable business contracts (which reach, quite literally, from one edge of the globe to the next). In the final tally, on the yearly prospectus, their incompetence and their murders continue to compound, but so too does their and our money. Sure, the morals and the man may die, but the coin will forever live. So goes the investment, so follows the incompetence.

Biology, rationality, decency—all of these words have been rendered politically useless by the left. Yet claiming them merely useless would be for them too merciful a fate. More appropriately, the three have been anathematized and replaced in the leftist’s vocabulary full scale. Placed in their stead are three different terms of a discomfiting type. The new lexicon of the left, such as it reads, will include the following words: pugnacity, mendacity, and—most important or all—intersectionality.

Of the three, Senator Elizabeth Warren of the state of Massachusetts has clung to but two. Known not to be a fighter in the literal sense, one wouldn’t deem her pugnacious—a bespectacled congresswoman and sometime brawler. What she’s become, however, is mendacious and an adherent to an all-devouring intersectional creed. Picture her now, a liar and an identity politician of the worst and most desperate sort.

In pursuing her increasingly tenuous claim to intersectionality, Warren has employed the very worst and the most galling form of mendacity. For years, the Democratic Party’s best-hope to defeat President Trump has celebrated her ancestral and putatively tribal past. Flanked by sepia toned photographs of her gaunt father and her stoic mother and the chaste subtlety of their embrace, Warren has never thought a situation ill-fit for the re-telling of their tale. Continuously, if not always sentimentally, she’s repeated the story of her parents’ unusual union to anyone whose hearing might advantage her in the short or long term. Such audiences have been varied yet reliably captivated by her evocative tale. They’ve included colleagues, constituents, voters, and employers everywhere from the hallowed towers of Harvard, to the banks of the city of Boston, to the lofty steps of Capitol Hill.

Told in her words, Warren’s father was an Oklahoman of a purely, and by extension and by assumption, a privileged Caucasian ilk. Her mother, on the other hand, though seemingly as Anglican as he, was actually of a native stock. As Warren has proclaimed time and again, her mother was of legitimate Native American extraction and so affiliated with the Cherokee tribe. Thus, by that matrilineal logic, so too is she.

The Cherokee, you’ll recall, were one of the five so-called “civilized tribes” who lived in the American Southeast. The tribe’s four distinguished, though now essentially extinguished neighbors included the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Creek. Of the five, none had quite absorbed the Protestant Ethic of the American east (a sure mark of civility if ever there was one to be had), but they did embrace agriculture beyond a hunter-gatherer’s passing idea. By this metric alone were they unwillingly designated a rather “civilized” than barbarous race.

Yet for all of civility’s worth, these “Americanized” tribes were treated with the most arrant barbarity and disrespect of whose heights we still struggle to conceive. Excepting a small cadre of furtive, resourceful, sub-tropical Floridian Seminoles (of whom a resilient fraction still lives as legendary ghosts in the Everglades), the others were pushed toward their death. They were forcibly moved to Georgia, then to Mississippi, then to Oklahoma, and finally to obscurity. Civilization, in this way, summoned not only their discontent, but their eventual disappearance as well. We have to thank for this shameful atrocity the acquisitiveness and disregard of a new nation beginning fully to stretch its limbs.

It was because of this government-imposed plight that Warren’s mother’s ancestors arrived where they did. It was also for this reason that her mother and father would later be in a place where they could meet, fall in love, and stir up an age-old though now uniquely American romantic controversy.

Like Dustbowl Montagues and Capulets, their illicit, culture-crossing love was from the outset forbidden. Her father’s family harbored no qualms nor mysteries about its endorsement of bigotry. It objected fiercely and openly to their engagement, as the family was white and she was incompatibly red. Such was the benighted attitude of the day, when miscegenation posed not only a mortal, but a spiritual threat. Red and white, all were covered in the ugly darkness of ignorance.

Yet those Shakespearean-American youths cared not. Undeterred by his family’s admonitions and biases, they went ahead and broke the customs and the rules governing the day. Choosing the unifying beauty of happiness through mutual and soon-to-be matrimonial love, they were betrothed while their families were torn apart. Their eventual marriage aroused a familial discord the likes of which only racism and the theater can produce.

Nevertheless, they persisted, as only the strength of love allows a besieged couple to do. Chastened by the assaults from without, the young family’s strength in its identity grew from within. Upon raising young Elizabeth, they made certain to recount to her this romantic and inspiring tale. Ostensibly, they hammered into the psyche of this precocious future Harvard Law professor and U.S. senator to-be the idea that she was of recent Native extraction. It proved a useful origin story for a woman who knew precisely where it was she wanted to end up in a society, as composed by the left, that’s become incapable of looking more deeply than skin-deep.

It was upon this story’s wings she flew to the uppermost heights of the national political scene. After all, her claim to Native American ancestry was the only thing that afforded her intersectional legitimacy—so vital in today’s political life. Otherwise, had it not been for that, she wouldn’t have been considered sufficiently interesting, curiously ethnic, and thus politically unappetizing for the left’s base. If not an Indian-American woman, as ostensibly she claimed to be, what was she in the mind of the anti-hierarchical and multi-colored left? An elite, white, Ivy-League professor of law and epitome of the kind of privilege so roundly loathed? In the increasingly identitarian Democratic Party of today, that combination simply wouldn’t do. A tincture of a tribal past in her blood would be vital if she hoped to succeed.

Yet not even that was to be found; nary a drop was to be discovered dancing in her bones. Senator Warren, at perhaps the most disadvantageous time of the year, announced in a mawkish video reminiscent of a sentimental campaign stump the results of a recent DNA test. Entrusting her saliva to a friendly and ubiquitously renowned geneticist at Stanford University, it was revealed that hardly an electron of a Native atom existed in her all-Euro-American blood. At the very best, she contains within her genetic imprint 1/1024^th of Indian-American DNA, but surely no more. But even that is a bit ambiguous.

Being understandably leery of governmental archives in matters biologic, Natives of the North American continent have very little genetic material on offer. The cataloged specimens to which the ambitious geneticist might refer are therefore quite scant. It’s for this reason that the genetic-reference to which Warren’s was compared came from a combination of Meso-American peoples all the way from Mexico to the top of the South American continent. This broad swath of reference should’ve worked in her favor, increasing her odds of familial relations over a larger population. One would think it would spread the net and widen the possibility for a shared inheritance to make itself known. Surprisingly, it did not. Even with such a generous reach, her closest Indian relative may have existed a whole ten generations ago. Long before the Indian Removal Act, this would situate her closest ancestor prior to the Revolutionary War.

Once simply audacious, now clearly spurious, this claim of her Native American past should be brought to rest. On that vein, so too should she be brought into disrepute. Whether or not this will be the case, only time and political expediency will tell. What’s certain is this: in the final tally, biology—that study of life and sometimes man—has won out over mendacity, as well it should. Science, after all, should never fall prey to deceit. So too has rationality conquered intersectionality. The former is ancient and wise, the latter newfangled and dull. We must now judge the good senator rather on her ideas than her identity.

That with which we’re left, then, is decency and pugnacity. We can hope that Warren doesn’t go down swinging with this lie. To do so would be to injure not only herself, but the tribe to which she so fantastically claims a lineage. As far as decency goes, out of this mess, we might return to respecting the Native Americans of this land—an historically exploited and pillaged people, whose assault and expropriation continues to this day.

A still novel, if not yet wholly newfangled term, intersectionality requires of us our attention. More than that, though, I think it demands from us an explanation. It has, after all and over the course of the past few years, made a quiet transition from the rear to the fore. It’s gone from ill-studied university theory, one largely confined to the spaces hollowed out between the sociologist’s and the feminist’s ears, to being an actual, redoubtable, and pervasive political idea. We turn to its meaning, so far as it can be grasped, here.

So conceived, intersectionality—an especially Democratic word du jour—is the notion that the individual is indistinguishable from his or her group and that these groups are valued in different and measurable and hierarchical ways. No longer does a person exist as anything more than the sheer amalgam of her constituent, socially-defined parts. Gone are the days of the sanctity of the individual; arrived are those of the primacy of the group.

A person’s parts, accidentally endowed by dint of birth, have become in this intersectional world the ultimate determinants of her life. Be they gender, color, incapacity, disability, sexual predilection, socioeconomic status, religious allegiance, intelligence, or age, these facets meet, converge, and determine one’s victimhood and fate.

If we’re to take seriously such a deterministic way of thinking, the whole bit of it has a way of subverting agency. Not only that, it restrains liberty and dampens personal responsibility. All of these were once uniquely and staunchly American ideals. It makes one beholden to her parts, embedded in them, and incapable of achieving their transcendence. In varied hues, these socially-constructed parts bleed one into the next and create the image upon which our oppressive society turns its gaze. They also enclose the subject within a certain frame from which she can’t, without reclaiming her non-intersectional sovereignty, escape. The final product on display is a victim—of society, of our patriarchy, of our country.

Intersectionality intends for the person in question to be regarded in toto with other victimized groups, rather than individually and piece by piece. Thus, a person is restrained from being more than the sum total of her parts. She’s nothing grander than that which those constitutive pieces allow her to be. She’s perceived not as an autonomous agent in and of herself, unfettered by the environment from which she came, but as a pre-determined tangle of her interwoven social fibers. Sown into her every thread, each strand of her physical, emotional, and societal being become the highlights that will stratify her in the world’s eye. And, so positioned on Earth, this stratification will lead to inequality, and this inequality to oppression, and this oppression to a fundamentally immoral society that must be improved.

But what becomes of individuality in a world so radically obsessed with intersectionality? So far as I can tell, the former appears well-neigh incompatible with the latter. The individualist will argue that her essence, her je ne sais quoi, is indeed more than the sum of her parts. She’s not to be received and hence judged as—in order from the least important trait to the most—a woman; a woman of color; a woman of color and of homoerotic tastes; a woman of color and of homoerotic tastes and of a Mohammedan creed; nor a woman of color and of homoerotic tastes and of a Mohammedan creed and of a transitory inclination from one gender to the next. She’s to be received as a singular being. She’s to be considered, valued, and heard as a member not of some mélange of victim groups striving toward  a redress of imaginary sins, but as a member of American society, unique and empowered in her own right.

Her identity—be it indelible or adopted, granted by biology or grafted by philosophy—should have no bearing on the value of her opinion. In that regard, conversation and evaluation ought to be blind. The polychromatic woman described above shouldn’t be privileged because of her affiliations to those groups—nor should the white male because of his sole, increasingly embarrassing attachment to his. Their respective ideas, rather than their identities, should be the only manner by which they as citizens are ranked. The many and eclectic victim groups to which they belong should be nugatory things. One may have encountered on the basis of his color or her creed a plight with which I can sympathize, but that doesn’t mean, for the mere fact of having suffered, his or her position should be regarded as the best.

Intersectionality mustn’t trample individuality—the latter mustn’t be smothered beneath the former’s heel. Only when the second lives can society breathe and it feels as though our gasp has been rendered desperately short.

How better to censor a critic than to ensure his inability to speak? And if you’re willing to go to that far, you may as well go one step further. Having achieved the cessation of his speaking, of his thinking, of his criticizing in the public square, you might as well make certain that he no longer can breathe. Assassination, then, is the most extreme, yes, but doubtless the most effective form of censorship known to man.

Not only to men is this macabre sort of censorship known and—from time to time—put to use, but to monarchs (or those with presumptions to be) as well. Prince Mohammed bin Salman is such a monarch to have given assassination a try. That he most certainly did, but his results, as so often those of government programs tend to be, were mixed; the killing was successful, the death final, but the controversy and the resulting backlash unanimous, reverberative, and severe. By that metric, assassination (as orchestrated by a bumbling royal prince) seems not to have been the most effective form of censorship that he might’ve employed; the critic at whom his efforts were targeted and the man in whom his knives were thrust has refused the posthumous silence that the young prince so desperately sought.

The thirty-three-year-old Salman, or “MBS” as colloquially and notoriously he’s been dubbed, is a great many things without being a great, nor even a good single thing. The swarthy and imposing Salman, a man royal by lineage, progressive by nature, evil by inclination, and inept by evidence of his every other move, has become something of a paradox in the geo-political quagmire of the Middle East.

His liberalizing reforms are everywhere celebrated—at least in all places outside of the fundamentalist and Sharia-obsessed mosques. They’re seen as being noble and genuine steps in a direction facing West. He’s made the streets of Saudi Arabia unprecedentedly coed—allowing for the first time in the nation’s history females to enjoy as drivers rather than as passengers the asphalt beneath their feet. Improving the condition of one half of the population is no bad way to garner a sizable, if not a wholly feminine appeal. For this act alone, MBS deserves our applause. He appears to be the only Islamist prince in the region with so much as a penchant toward basic egalitarianism—the type every man and woman in this century ought to enjoy.

But if that wasn’t enough, he’s also introduced into that arid peninsula the more edifying parts of our American culture. Continuing this first step of sexual equality, he’s brought to his home our cinema, art, movies, and our uniquely American wrestling theater known as WWE. He’s also begun sedulously and promiscuously promoting his nation as one that’s “open for business” and quite willing and eager to invest wherever coffers are dry. Saddled with a purse and an ambition whose depth and weight are the types of which only a petro-state autocrat can conceive, MBS has spread his wealth as if it knew no constraint. Sure, from time to time some of this dissemination may seem venal or prodigal (in the past few years, he’s purchased with “his” money a $300 million chateau once inhabited by King Louis XIV and a $500 million yacht) but on the whole, his investments have been varied and sound. Within and without his own region, from the valley of the Euphrates to that of Silicon, Salman’s financial fingerprints can be seen.

So too can all his blemishes, of which there have been many. Rather conspicuously and shamelessly, for that matter, he’s helped to perpetuate a humanitarian crisis in Saudi Arabia’s neighboring country of Yemen. Besieged from above, Yemeni civilians in particular have been in large part the recipients of his often misplaced, always gratuitous military strength. Already, thousands have died, including students in buses and women in schools. And about those women he now permits to be behind the wheel? Before this twentieth-century liberty could be gained in the twenty-first, several women’s rights activists championing and hastening its implementation had to be jailed.

Most infamously, upon acceding to his position as Saudi Arabia’s de facto king, MBS had incarcerated in the capital city’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel a few dozen of his political enemies. Among them were business tycoons, cronies of the ancien régime, Saudi elites, and—for good measure—a few of his own family members. Two cousins, Turki bin Abdullah and Alwaleed bin Talal, who had the misfortune of being simultaneously princes and rivals, were captured as hostages in that opulent Alcatraz of the Middle East. It’s not known if or when these and possibly other men were freed or whither they’ve gone since. If nothing else, MBS’s move assured a world leery of his seemingly too drastically “progressive” agenda that nepotism would have no place. Can one call this progress, if it’s to be had at the price of fraternal blood?

But if not for nepotism, there must be some kind of government-sanctioned vice from which the crown prince can’t escape. His immunity can only be so strong. We find filling this void MBS’s newfound tendency toward assassination.

And thus we return to that most useful, and dare I say, final form of censorship. The voice in need of censoring, you well know by now, was that of Jamal Khashoggi. Arabian by extraction, American by necessity, Khashoggi had lived under the rank corruption of earlier Saudi regimes for the better part, or perhaps the worse part of his adult life. So situated, he was in the unusual position to be able to unearth the very corruption under which he and his fellow countrymen lived. For decades, that’s precisely what he strove to do.

But an inveterate critic, especially one who points out uncomfortable truths, won’t always be encouraged to speak his piece. The Saudi regime, it seems, would sooner have him rest in peace. Sensing a disquieting vulnerability in the country he called home, Khashoggi thought it best to remove himself from the view of MBS’s increasingly sanguinary eye. Embracing an exile perpetrated by and of himself, Khashoggi fled to the United States, where once he’d studied business at Indiana State University. Having lived a Hoosier in his college days, he opted to give the life of an imported patriot a try. He settled in none other than Washington D.C., that most opinionated of all places on Earth. It was there he worked as a columnist for that city’s namesake post.

Censorship, of course, is not something of which we glib Americans can easily conceive. Few of us even know that at one or two times in our nation’s history, proscriptions on language (the seditious and libelous kind as the government declared them to be) ever existed in this freest of countries. Joining the happy ignorance of a people steeped in a Constitutional tradition of unfettered speech, Khashoggi began publishing anti-MBS columns with a noticeable, if not an urgent frequency. Most of his columns (of whose bulk I’ve read, and of whose contents I have a fairly sound grasp) were surprisingly tame. He spoke as any classical liberal would. He yearned for greater personal freedom and better enumerated rights in the home he’d only recently and painfully forsook. He called attention to the government’s inveterate mismanagement of funds, whose bulk found their way not to the civil engineering projects for which they were intended, but to friends’ and allies’ pockets. More than anything, though, he enlightened the world of the darker, and the potentially more sinister side of MBS. We were to realize through his insight and his work that the name “MBS” wasn’t to be made into some kind of a rhyme for “innocuous” or a hopeful synonym for “progress”. It was a name to be watched with reservation and with scrutiny.

But, as it turned out, MBS wasn’t the only one doing a bit of scrutinizing from afar. As Khashoggi profiled him, MBS followed  Khashoggi’s whereabouts and plotted his demise. Fortuitously for the prince who longs to be a king, the latter arrived at the Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul. There, in that once Roman, now Islamic town named for a quasi-Christian king, MBS sent a detachment of fifteen henchmen to intervene on his behalf.

Upon entering the consulate, Khashoggi (who was there attempting to obtain a marriage license so that he might tie the knot with his Turkish fiancée) was swiftly apprehended by the group. The rest of the details are murky, and, as of yet, unforthcoming, but undoubtedly they’ll prove macabre. Suffice it to say, this most penetrating and audacious critic could be censored in but one way. At the direction of MBS, the group of fifteen did all but eviscerate the critic who dared to speak the truth. If the rumors are to be believed, it bludgeoned, amputated, flayed, and dismembered the now breathing, now limp Khashoggi and concerned itself with his nettlesome scribblings no more.

But did this assassination, so barbarically conceived and shoddily carried out, ultimately succeed in censoring him? The headlines for the past three weeks affirm, unequivocally, it has not. Assassination, we must in consolation agree, has not kept quiet this intrepid critic, this martyr for the unmasking of corruption and deceit. Perhaps, then, assassination isn’t the most effective means if silence is your end. Perhaps a great voice never really can be silenced.

When discussing his personal, international relationships on television with Bill O’Reilly a few years ago, President Trump shocked us in a way that we were only just then beginning to realize he could. Broadcast live before the Super Bowl was scheduled to begin, he made explicit, however uncomfortably for those of us abridged of the times, the respect he held and—as time has proven—continues to hold for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I do respect him” said the president, as his eyes met those of the rarely incredulous though always acerbic O’Reilly. Perplexed, if only slightly and momentarily so, that veteran, virile Fox News host replied with the terseness and bluntness that was his trademark. “Putin is a killer”, O’Reilly responded, as if the comment didn’t require his saying. No matter, responded the president—so are we. Making morals equivalent before the big game and before our eyes, Trump expounded on his point to say that we, America, “got a lot of killers” ourselves. “What…?” he explained to O’Reilly, as if sallying ahead in a fit of friendly fire, “You think our country is so innocent”?

Surely, it’s not. Though this exchange between a now-ousted O’Reilly and a still-unimpeached President Trump is somewhat aged, a recent event has brought it back to mind. That event is, of course, the unlawful detention, the lurid murder, and the gratuitous dismemberment of the Saudi-American columnist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Killed within the confines of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the circumstances of Khashoggi’s death haven’t yet loosened their infamy nor weakened their intrigue. In fact, they’ve grown stronger with the slow passage of another ambiguous week. Seeking but not discovering a credible narrative of what actually occurred, the international “community” has been roiled in a vortex of suspicion whose end feels not near. So too has it been stuck in a mire of harrowing, Medieval, torturous deaths (some reports claim that Khashoggi’s fingers were lopped off, his generative piece removed, and his skin flayed). So far as world leaders are concerned, most want answers to explain precisely what happened in Turkey in the middle of an otherwise routine October day. Others, on the contrary, are willing to content themselves with hazy explanations and unconvincing, if not expedient, machinated “truths”.

President Trump and the Saudi king and prince are those of whom this second faction is composed. Following Khashoggi’s death (so far as we can assume that the journalist is indeed dead; that certainty hasn’t yet been confirmed) has been a week of prevarication on both sides—be they Arabian or American. Prevarication, I might add, with the end game being preservation—by which I mean preservation of the status quo.

You see, our relationship with the Saudi monarchy is complex, but, ultimately, immensely lucrative. In the absence of what is now, as before, sanctioned Iranian oil, it’s upon Saudi barrels we rely for continually cheap prices at the pump. In addition, the Saudi “sovereign wealth fund” is a rather undiscriminating investor in all things American and Silicon. From IT to VR to electric and autonomous vehicles to financial houses and hedge funds, the Saudis have emptied their purses in hopes of western and compounded returns. Focusing on things domestic, they’ve also paid lip service to modernity, allowing—with some restrictions but for the first time under the Wahhabist regime—various films to play in its theaters and women to drive on its streets.

Disfavoring the mere thought of a deficit in trade, we consumptive Americans export to these now equally avaricious Saudis a great many things. Aside from our films and our Hollywood dreams, U.S. companies in the past few years have begun sending to that arid peninsula billions of dollars-worth of goods. Chiefly, our chief export has been an endless cache of military supplies. We’ve sent to them missile systems and logistics, ordnances and tanks. All of these purchases on the Saudi’s part have amounted to literally billions of dollars coming America’s way. As it’s been, so shall it remain, this relationship has been a veritable windfall for that much-bemoaned military-political-industrial complex. What more could an industry, built upon the perpetuation of war and the profits of death, want during the course of this relatively peaceful time in which we live?

More than just a commercial partner of an extravagant sort with an expensive and expansive taste, Saudi Arabia has blossomed into a geo-political ally of which we have in that region very few. Unlike the bulk of Middle Eastern and Arabian countries, the Saudis have cast what looks to be a sympathetic eye toward our adamantine ally—that oft-besieged little Mediterranean state of Israel. It’s less a consequence of a shared ideology (after all, Islamic fundamentalists and Zionist Jews aren’t known for their compatible doctrines and views), and more one of a shared animosity.

Explaining their unusual relationship, the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” might best apply. That “enemy”, by whose presence other enemies transmogrify into friends is of course Iran. The Saudis see in Iran a possibly hegemonic Middle Eastern force; the Iranians, for their part, see in their own reflections a similar image—and while the Saudis may shudder at the thought, the Iranians like what they see. The former would like nothing more than to shatter that mirage, or at least cloud it for some time longer until their own power can consolidate in full. In this want to stifle Iranian prospects, America, Israel, and—however surprisingly—Saudi Arabia are all faithfully aligned.

In hoping to preserve the fabric of this triumvirate against the danger of a clear-sighted Tehran, and to preserve an extraordinary list of business deals, the president of the United States has been bending over sideways and contorting himself to believe in a fantastic Arabian tale. As repeatedly he’s done when attempting to rationalize Vladimir Putin’s actions (or, for that matter, those actions of any number of morally dubious autocrats from Turkey to China, the Philippines to North Korea) Trump is of the mind that he should give foreign despots the benefit of the doubt. The problem is, however, that in this case, that doubt is wearing increasingly thin.

Yet still, Trump hasn’t yet explicitly questioned, let alone denounced the Saudi regime. He’s taken as robust evidence against the Saudi government’s involvement in Khashoggi’s killing old King Salman’s “strong denial”, voiced to him over the phone. Trump has also floated his own conjecture as to what might’ve taken place at the consulate on that day. In a fabricated plot line that would absolve Saudi Arabia of its criminality and fault, Trump has suggested that “rogue killers” rather than government officials, were responsible for the botched and now publicized coup.

I fear that President Trump’s next step will be one toward his earlier “Putin position”, where he sinks America’s standing if only to keep Saudi Arabia’s respectability afloat. I hope that he doesn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to witness him venture off into the land of moral equivalence, where he’s known to become lost. There, he’ll cloud the difference between a blatant Saudi-directed assassination, and a lesser sin perpetrated by the U.S. at some earlier time. All this he’s willing to sacrifice on the altar of big, profitable, crude, business. Lest he not forget, moral equivalence does not pay.