we've discussed the "deep state" in the List....Brilliant understanding of "deep-state" here.....i say..

[Mark Kohut]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 23, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Subject: I think this is one of the most brilliant pieces on Epstein and
America I've seen.I am reading it again within seconds.
To: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>


I have spoken of wishing I was good enough to use LOLITA as a framework
--'symbolic object" per Ken Burke
for some piercing understanding of the *new* awful crime of the powerful:
shared pedophilia, the whole elite subculure
of it. Violent rape of the innocent young. Nabokov was somehow prescient as
his excoriating look at America of the time and
of Humbert as Old World decadence---decky-dance-- as Pynchon played with.
He had stolen her childhood* HH understands, too late.
 (pynchon fingered this abstractly in Gravity's Rainbow, I say)

A comparison with Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT has been made revealingly I also
think.

I had a glimmer of this NY scene once while I lived there. Not enough
experience or imagination to project it wide. ( I could not believe that a
daisy-chain had ever really happened the first time I read of it, parochial
puritan that I am)   But I believe Lee here. Imagine.


https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us/2025/11/donald-trump-in-jeffrey-epsteins-kingdom?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1763896668

from some Lolita criticism:
*Humbert realizes that the real tragedy is not that he has lost Lolita, but
that Lolita has been robbed of her childhood. From jail, Humbert writes
that he opposes capital punishment but would sentence himself to
thirty-five years for rape and dismiss the rest of the charges.