The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

The Hydra Oath, as it appeared for the first time in Marvel Comics’ Strange Tales #135, August 1965.

For the longest time, only a comic book geek (such as myself) would’ve recognized the catchphrase “Hail Hydra!”.

It’s the battle cry of Hydra, the secret “world-wide subversive organization dedicated to global domination” headed by former Nazi Baron Wolfgang von Strucker and supported by the Red Skull. With the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the catchphrase has become mainstream, thanks to its use in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Captain America, and other movies:

Hydra comes off as pretty cartoonish in the comic books (especially the ones from the ’60s and ’70s), and while they’ve been updated to be a little less goofy in Marvel’s TV shows and movies, I always thought they were written was pretty silly and unrealistic. After all, who in the real world would be dim-witted or sociopathic enough to use “Hail [insert person or cause here]” as their battle cry?

Apparently, these guys. And the person or cause they’re hailing is the president-elect:

The photo above is a still from an excerpt from the closing speech on Saturday made by Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who coined the euphemism “alt-right” (which really means “neo-Nazi”) and who runs the deceptively benign-sounding National Policy Institute (NPI):

This speech included these quotes that wouldn’t be terribly out of place at Hydra:

• “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
• “No one will honor us for losing gracefully. No one mourns the great crimes committed against us. For us, it is conquer or die.”
• “The mainstream media — or perhaps we should refer to them in the original German — lügenpresse.”
• “It’s not just that they are leftists and cucks. It’s not that many are genuinely stupid. One wonders if these people are people are all…or instead soulless golems animated by some dark power to repeat whatever talking point John Oliver stated the night before.”
• “To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer, and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize the central lie of American race relations. We don’t exploit other groups. We don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.”
• “We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace. We are not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet. We were meant to overcome — overcome all of this, because that is natural and normal for us!”
• “America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation. It is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

I haven’t seen any commentary on the very last parts of the video, so let me be the first: in my (admittedly and thankfully) very limited experience with neo-Nazis, I have never seen two guys as eager to make their trademark salute as these two yobs:

The problem is that unlike Hydra, these guys aren’t comic book villains, but real ones.

Mind you, the comic book villains have also evolved, from trying to take over the world with superweapons like the Cosmic Cube (which is called the Tesseract in the movies)…

…to even more frightening ones, namely rhetoric and propaganda. Here’s a Red Skull speech from the new Captain America comic book series. This issue was released in May, and although it was released a good six months before Spencer made his speech (and written before that), a lot of it sounds Spencer’s speech and some of the messaging during the election:

The Red Skull makes a familiar-sounding speech in Captain America #1 (2016 series), released in May 2016. Click the comic to see the hate at full size.

Seeing this speech, the installation of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist, and many other signs, I’m reminded of this quote by Professor Halford E. Luccock, Professor at Yale University’s Divinity School from September 1938:

“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.”

I’ll close with this very apt comic from Chainsawsuit:

Click the comic to see the source.

The scene: St. John is writing the book of Revelation.

John: Lord, the End of Days is signaled by trumpets?

God: No, that’s Trump/Pence.

John: Got it. Trumpets.

God: Fine. They’ll know.

Thanks to God for the joke!

The sign’s punctuation could stand a little improvement, but it’s still funny. You can order it online for $16 from Riffraff.

 

Imagine what would happen if $10 and $20 bills in the U.S. or Canada were suddenly made invalid. That’s pretty much what happened in India on November 8th.

Nearly 90% of the available paper money in India was rendered worthless a week ago when Prime Minister Narendra Modi made all 500- and 1000-rupee bills illegal in an attempt to reduce corruption, tax evasion, and counterfeiting and money laundering often associated with financing terror. Unfortunately, it means that nearly 90% of Indian cash in circulation can’t be used, creating a crisis for just about anyone in India trying to get through their day.

The Economist writes:

The government justified the move in part due to concerns over a proliferation of counterfeit notes (not unusually, it pointed the finger at neighbouring Pakistan), which it claims is fuelling the drug trade and funding terrorism. But its main impact will be on “black money”, cash from undeclared sources which sits outside the financial system. Perhaps 20% of India’s economy is informal. Some of that is poor farmers, who are largely exempt from tax anyway. But the rich are perceived to be sitting on a vast illicit loot. Though a large part of that sits in bank accounts in predictable foreign jurisdictions, a chunk of it is held in high-value Indian notes. Purchases of gold or high-end real estate have long been made at least in part with bundles (or suitcases) of illicit cash.

These most often-used rupee notes — in U.S. terms, they’re analogous to the $10 and $20 bills — were made immediately invalid on November 8th and people have until December 30th to get these old bills replaced with new 500- and 2,000-rupee ones. The result has been long-even-by-Asian-standards lines at banks and ATMs, and confusion among that part of the population that lives in poverty, doesn’t have a bank account, and doesn’t know what to do with what little suddenly worthless money they have.

In case you were curious, here’s a “Cost of living in India” page showing the prices of everyday things.

For more, see:

• Forbes: India Demonetizes Banknotes To Combat Tax Cheating, The Poor Suffer As A Result
• The Economist: Why India scrapped its two biggest bank notes
• BBC: Tourists struggling to find cash in India
• Quartz: One week of demonetisation in India: The good, the bad, and the ugly
• The Indian Express: Demonetisation: 11 deaths reported so far as India queues up outside banks
• Of course this event has its own Wikipedia page!

You could point your coworkers to any number of articles about how many meetings are a waste of time, or you can simply say it with these socks. You can order them online from Absolute Ties for $12, and they’ll make a great present for that special white-collar someone in your life.