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The Meal That Stared Back

The Meal That Stared Back

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I know what you’re thinking.“Cary, that sounds like it was named by a second-grader who ate a full bag of Halloween candy, found his dad’s old war movies, and drew a strategy on a Denny’s placemat with a broken crayon.”You’d be exactly right. Except this particular second-grader has a nuclear football, a military budget that makes the next ten countries look like they’re fundraising with a bake sale, and a pathological, diaper-filling terror of one specific four-letter word that rhymes with “loser.” He can’t say it. Won’t say it. It’s the Voldemort of his entire existence. Mention it and his whole face does a thing.That’s Our Leadership. That’s Washington. That’s the magnificently-turd-polished diplomatic apparatus currently blockading the Strait of Hormuz like it’s a gas station bathroom with one working lock and a “be right back” sign that’s been there since February.The StrategyI need you to really bend down for this one. Get your expectations on the floor. Below the floor. Get them in the crawlspace where the possum lives.Operation Madman is an actual, grown-adult, Iranian, now Pentagon-codeworded, someone-got-paid-a-salary-to-name-this strategy.The plan — in its full, official, classified-document glory — is to appear completely out of your gourd. Not be out of your gourd. That part apparently takes care of itself. Just appear that way.The official warfighting doctrine for the biggest energy catastrophe on the planet was coined from a word a kindergartner uses when his juice box leaks.And it worked.If by “worked” you mean the Strait of Hormuz — that oiled-up little maritime chokepoint through which twenty percent of the world’s petroleum gets its groove on every single day — is now sealed tighter than a pickle jar that’s been in the back of the fridge since the Obama administration. Closed. Shut. Done. Nighty-night, global energy supply. Don’t let the geopolitical bedbugs bite.The oil markets go up. The oil markets go down. Nobody tells you anything true. Everybody’s winning. Nobody’s winning. The Strait is open. The Strait is a cork in a bottle. And the bottle is on fire. But fine.The Cary Harrison Files airs on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Radio Network. Subscribe here on Substack for the full transcript, extended commentary, and the occasional history lesson that will ruin your day in the most productive way possible.Find us at caryharrison.com — and for the love of the Founders, tell a friend.Membership here sustains public radioThe Intellectual Ancestor of All This DumbasseryThe lineage runs through a man named Daniel Ellsberg — yes, that Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers guy, a former friend of this show — the man who marched into Washington with a briefcase stuffed with inconvenient truths and handed the entire national security apparatus a suppository it had not consented to.Back in 1959 — when your parents were still cheerful, cars had fins for absolutely no aerodynamic reason whatsoever, and the apocalypse at least had the decency to feel distant — Ellsberg delivered a lecture called:“The Political Uses of Madness.”He was studying Hitler’s trick of performing irrationality to make other countries wet themselves and hand over whatever he wanted. The logic was simple and stomach-turning:If you act crazy enough, people give you what you want just to get you to sit back down and stop making that face.The StalemateAnd here we are — waddling around in a full, pants-soiled stalemate.You know what a stalemate is in nuclear-age geopolitics? It’s two overgrown toddlers playing chicken in a stolen golf cart on a one-lane road, both of them absolutely positive the other one will swerve, neither willing to admit they blew past the exit forty miles ago and are now technically in a different country.Washington can’t back down — because he’d be, say it with me — a loser.Iran won’t negotiate because the last time they showed up to the table, they got bombed as a thank-you gift.So here we sit, you and I, while the planet’s entire energy supply is being monetized, weaponized, propagandized, and monetized again — and you are personally funding every drop of it at the pump, the grocery store, and wherever else the invisible hand of the market has found a new orifice to invoice.Order NowLet’s Be FairFairness is what separates us from the animals — and from certain cable networks whose names rhyme with “Rocks Gnus.”Because beneath all this spectacular theater, beneath the madman cosplay and the Hormuz puppet show, there is a sixty-year illegal military occupation.Sixty years.That’s not a conflict. That’s not even a “situation.” That’s a lifestyle. That’s a timeshare you can never get out of and nobody will buy. And yet here we are — still acting surprised, still calling it breaking news, still scheduling the panel discussion — as if sixty years of the same thing is anything other than ...
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