Corruption. Acceptable or not?

A recent HBO Documentary reprised the career of Herb Block, editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post for the major portion of 72 years spent toiling amidst the ink pots and sketch pads on his way to achieving legendary status as a media giant.

Herbloc, as he signed his pieces, was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes and shared a fourth, along with numerous cartoon industry awards, honorary degrees from Colby College and Harvard, plus the Presidential  Freedom  Medal.

In a career that extended from the Crash to the Millennium, he covered presidents from Hoover to the onset of Bush 43, plus all the political newsmakers and some of the celebrities of his time.  He never saw himself as anything other than a journalistic satirist, someone who “kicked the big boys, who kicked the underdogs.”

 The takeaway from the Documentary was this Herbloc quote:  “The worst part about corruption is the acceptance of corruption.”

If he were alive, Herbloc’s response to today’s corruption would be easy to predict.  He would scorn the hideous pederasts of the Catholic Church.  He would flay the Department of Homeland Security for its continuous violations of the Constitution.  Likewise, the CIA; never accountable, and nefarious at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and only-they-know-where else.  He would ridicule the NRA for its ludicrous distortion of the Second Amendment.  He would revisit the vainglorious allegiance of the Bush Supreme Court to the right wing in the State of Florida’s fix of the 2000 presidential election.  And its weird interpretations  in the Citizens’ United case.  Herbloc would expose the manifest danger of Big Business’ hold on Congress, the endemic rape of women in the Armed Forces, the fraud of enlistment bounties perpetrated by general officers, commissioned officers, non-coms and

enlisted men of the Armed Forces, the uncontained greed of banking and the rest of the tentacles comprising the financial industry, the hypocrisy of Sun Belt farmers and food processors who have for generations illegally smuggled aliens for use as cheap labor only to discard them when they were no longer useful, leaving them to fend for themselves, old and broken and still alien.

Or would Herbloc, if he were alive today, be permitted to do any of this? 

The late Gore Vidal, author, playwright, and essayist, took to referring to this country as the National Security State, its government enmeshed in a military-industrial complex, its media muted by corporate ownership which is heavily invested in the industrial component of the military-industrial complex.  Vidal, who revered the Constitution, and the historic role of the media in safe-guarding its principles, said this:  “No first world country has ever eliminated so entirely from its media all objectivity…much less dissent.”

Without Herbloc and Gore Vidal, the lone dissenter of note is Edward Snowden, a twenty-something former employee of a government contractor, who revealed world-wide spying practices of the U.S. National Security Agency, including unconstitutional spying on the American public.

Snowden, of course, is a fugitive in exile.