His grey-black eminence

 Every so often, they get caught out in the light, and every so often, I get a twinge of what it feels like to believe in the Illumnati.

For a lot of people, myself included, the story isn't that Max Mosley was caught in an underground Nazi S&M sex orgy (although you can just feel the journalist's fingers trembling with ecstasy as he or she types those words)--as the fact that Max Mosley is where he is at all. Max is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, who was the founder of the British Union of Fascists. He was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, was virulently anti-Semitic and had his Black Shirts march through Jewish areas of London. He was married to his second wife, Diana, in Josef Goebbels' drawing room with Hitler himself in attendance. He is widely considered among World War II obsessives and  alt-history geeks (of which I am ex officio a member) as the Prime candidate for puppet ruler of Great Britain if Hitler had conquered it. 

So why is his son head of the International Formula 1 racing commission?

My mind immediately flashes back to Juan Antonio Samaranch, the corrupt Spanish Fascist  (officially!) who ran the International Olympic Committee for twenty years until he retired in 200o, having left behind a scandal of bribery, arrogance and privilege. 

Back when I found out about Samaranch, I started to wonder: how doe one get on the IOC? I had previously thought (when I thought at all) that being involved in sports would have something to do with it. Except insofar as people tend to move to the IOC from the national OC's that was pretty stupid. The answer is: there's no process. There's no oversight to the overseers. These are benefices, and bestowed on the privileged by the privileged. It's a ways away from running the world, but it certainly is Plunder Because They Can.

Oswald Mosley certainly embodied the contradictions, if not the outright hypocrisy, in the English Nobility in World War II. He was out of Winchester College (a 625-year old public school whose motto is  ‘Manners Makyth Man’) and Sandhurst, he was married to the daughter of the former Viceroy of India, whom he cheated on with the daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale. (who was married to the Irish Baron of Moyne). He was deep in the embrace of the British upper nobility (not just the Sir Somebodys but those who don't seem to have a name: the 5th Duke of Wellington and the Duke of Winchester were part of Lord Redesdale's 'Right Club'.) That Lion of opposition to Nazism, Winston Churchill, did have him arrested (without trial) in 1940 and the Black Shirts broken up, but he also personally intervened to allow Mosley and his wife to live together in a little cottage inside Hollowell Prison--a women's prison--and allowed to hire other prisoners as servants.

(excuse me while I beat my head against a wall for a second.)

They were released while the war was still going on, and after the war formed a right-wing publishing house and a magazine and worked to ban non-white immigration into Britain. They moved to avery nice house in France to be near their dear friends, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, (the former King, who'd been known to give a Nazi salute now and then.) 

And their son administers the formula 1 circuit, and does S&M in his own bunker--and that's the only way anybody was going to mention it. Just like Samaranch was able to swagger like a princeling and rip off the system for 20 years.

Now the Republicans are not so smart: instead of making him something like Commissioner of baseball, they take the questionable scion of the Nobility with Nazi connections and shove him into an elected position where he loses two wars and sets off two recessions. And in that context we begin to notice the children and spouses of the Washington Press Corps waltzing in to top positions in--wow--the Washington Press Corps. They do damage, not only to their political party but the very principal of showering the children of the rich with the confiscations from the children of the poor.

The Europeans gave it right: slot them into strange but well-paid positions in non-crucial and ungoverned boards and commissions. Who cares about governing commissions on sports or culture? You can park both your Nazis and your rich degenerates there. Not the Presidency.

And this is because it really bothers the rich Republicans that they don't have an actual aristocracy, and they want to have wealth power and cultural eminence. Therefore they have ended up not only stealing from the middle class, but destroying its cultural dominance, and, therefore, it. They may realize what they're doing or they may not, but the result is that they have been, more or less overtly, smashing the lives of the basis of the economy. Add to that delusions of empire and you have a naked and besmeared aristocracy caught in the spotlight.

The european aristocracy already have the cachet, and have know that if peopleare happy with their lives, they won't care hat there are others vastly richer and more powerful than they are. They will also sit still for an awful lot of privilege and theft as long as it's out of that spotlight. They can take off the black shirt and retire either to their nice house in France or their underground S&M bunker, and everything's fine.

Everything's not fine, as long as the beautiful, the brilliant, the talented and the courageous find themselves trapped, ignored, scared and dying in this world. It matters less that there are stupid, petulant and complacent rich people dipping into the revenue stream with both hands, but I still don't like it.

And Nazis? Big buzzkill. Not a big fan of nice houses OR presidencies for them.