Smiling to Extinction

It’s a normal morning. My son is wrapped in his blankets, dead to the world. My daughter, the pre-teen alien, is stirring in her bed but has not yet swung her feet to the floor. In the living room, ABC’s Good Morning America is on the flat screen, and George Stephanopoulos is running down the morning’s “breaking news.” I generally tune George and Robin Roberts and the rest of the GMA crew (the GMA website calls them a “cast”) out in favor of going about the business of getting ready for the day. After a report about the hot water the White House is in over the NSA’s reckless spying on foreign governments whom the US counts among its allies, and an interview with New Jersey governor Chris Christie (potential presidential candidate, mind you!) on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, GMA moved to its bread and butter -- a report (several minutes in length and complete with CGI graphics) about a foiled kidnapping in some god-forsaken American hamlet, followed by a report about a daring and brazen escape from an Oklahoma prison. Four devious and dangerous inmates on the loose! How can we protect ourselves?

Generally it’s just white noise while I nag my daughter to get into the bathroom, or beg my son to wake up, but on this late fall morning, as the GMA drivel droned on, I began to think about all the important stories that go unreported every day, or that get reported and are quickly forgotten, and all the voices we never hear on the networks. It wasn’t that long ago when North Korea posed a threat to the civilized world; for a few days the US media was on that story like white on rice, with dire predictions and plenty of saber rattling, but when North Korea failed to launch its missiles, the story fizzled and then disappeared.

The condition of the Fukushima nuclear site is another disappearing story. How can GMA spend four or five minutes on a ridiculous piece about a kidnapping, and devote no time whatsoever to a real, ongoing catastrophe? I have no doubt that the world is woefully ignorant of how grave the Fukushima situation really is, or how severe the consequences will be in the years ahead. The truth isn’t being told, but let’s not worry our pretty little heads about radiation; just keep eating at Taco Bell, buying the latest Apple gadgets, and believing in the righteousness of American style capitalism. Keep a smile on your face while you consume your way to personal fulfillment. 

Put another way: ignore reality and it might go away. Or: believe not in what you see, but in magic, fairy tales, myths, and legends.

Remember when more than a dozen US consulates and embassies in the Middle East closed down because of a “vague yet specific” terrorist threat? ABC News and its cousins were in full throat then, fanning our fears of evil Muslim terrorists and a repeat of Benghazi. Like North Korea, this threat never bore fruit, and quickly disappeared from our consciousness.

When my anti-bullshit force field fails and I actually tune in to GMA the word that comes to mind is infantile. While I understand that a network morning show is a banal mixture of news, celebrity trivia, fads, and pop culture, does the viewing audience need to be treated like morons, as if we are incapable of handling the truth about our economy, our environment, and our government? The “anchors” or “cast” members smile through human-made and natural disasters; they read their lines and laugh on cue, and never, ever, question the status quo.

As Neil Postman said many years ago, we are amusing ourselves to death. 

Saved by the Blues

“Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion.” Hunter S. Thompson

The feckless mob that calls itself the United States Congress has kicked the battered debt ceiling/budget can down the road. Round Two of fiscal roulette won’t happen until after the holiday “season.” Republicans may be mildly chastened by their recent debacle and plummeting poll numbers, but the Tea Party nut-bags will return in force to tilt once more at the windmill. Come January, the same bogus arguments will ring out in the halls of the capitol. We must live within our means! Solution: slash Medicare and build another aircraft carrier. Entitlements are bleeding the federal treasury! Solution: reduce benefits and expand our military footprint in Africa. America is a welfare state! Solution: lower taxes on the wealthy.

It’s madness, pure and simple, lifted straight from the pages of George Orwell: black is white, war is peace, destruction is progress. Our government has divorced itself from the people in favor of political elites and wealthy interests, defense contractors and resource extractors, pharmaceutical companies, lobbying firms, and corporate-controlled media. Though we are called to the polls every couple of years, more and more our votes are meaningless; outcomes are decided in advance, by money and access to the apparatus of one of our corrupt parties.

No political leader will level with us about how bad things really are; we’re far down the road to third world status.

President Obama and the party he heads are faithful servants of the status quo. Even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress they behaved timidly, like a minority party, ever deferential to Tea Party kooks and neo-Nazis like Eric Cantor. Don’t look to the Democrats for bold ideas or a cogent, passionate explanation of what and who the party stands for. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do their best, but crackpots like Ted Cruz control the big megaphone and the headlines.  

Near the end of his life Hunter S. Thompson called the US the Kingdom of Fear. That moniker may have been true in the aftermath of 9/11, but a dozen years on the Kingdom of Fear has become the Kingdom of Stupidity. We play the same cards again and again and expect a different outcome: cut taxes on the rich and expect jobs for the poor; do nothing about climate change and act bewildered when the floodwaters rise; murder innocents with drone strikes and wonder why we are despised in the Muslim world; offshore US manufacturing to China and wonder why our tax base has eroded and the dollar is looked upon with suspicion on world currency markets.   

What is to be done to halt this insanity? The next financial meltdown isn’t far off, and I fear it will be even worse than the 2008 version. Our leaders engage in magical thinking, rely on myths and the pronouncements of false prophets, while spasms wrack the body of the American empire. The gulf between rich and everyone else inexorably widens, ho hum, and our leaders shrug, as if to say, it’s just the way it is.

It’s not the way it is; it is the way corrupt Money has made it. The American people have been played, duped, and robbed.

I was feeling low about all this, pessimistic about my children’s future, losing hope, until bluesman Kelly Joe Phelps came to town with two guitars and his voice; that voice and the way Kelly Joe worked those guitars for an hour and a half restored some of my faith in the human species.

For the time being, I’ve been saved by the blues.

Clowns and Zealots

“The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems.”  Tony Judt

The circus is in town, settled in tents and trailers on the low road at the edge of the swamp. At night fires burn in oil drums, and shadowy figures come and go through clouds of smoke. An unseen violinist plays a mournful tune on an out of tune instrument, hour after hour, the same tune. Sometimes the crack of a whip can be heard, or the shriek of an animal. Bad tidings. Local kids and feral cats avoid the encampment. The bearded lady bears a strong resemblance to John Boehner; the human cannonball might be Paul Ryan’s twin; and the sadistic ringmaster, torch in one hand and Bible in the other, looks like Ted Cruz.

Just a bad dream, right? Maybe not. Look around.

Zealots and nut-bags whose only goal is to stick it to the black guy in the White House hold the federal government hostage. With the exception of the armed forces, the national security apparatus, and the courts that uphold the sanctity of property rights, these zealots claim to hate everything about government. Every ill faced by the nation will be remediated if we return to the

moral clarity of the 18^th century, when women, laborers, children, slaves and indigenous people knew their place. 

Ironic that people so rabidly opposed to government raise and spend millions of dollars to run for office, and once in office invest an inordinate amount of their time begging money from donors so they can win re-election. After seeing that government works for their patrons – tax breaks, direct subsidies, exemptions from law -- the zealots take every benefit government has to offer: pensions, healthcare, paid vacation, sick leave, goodies that lie miles beyond the reach of most Americans. Food stamps for the poor we can’t afford, gold-plated benefits for lazy legislators we can. Like the hypocrites they are, the zealots hate the golden goose but covet its eggs.

Who was it that said, “The last American president who feared the people was Richard Nixon.” Chris Hedges? A large part of the problem in this country is the absence of mass opposition. Unlike France or Greece or even Italy, Americans fear the government, not the other way around. Look what happened to the Occupy Movement. It didn’t take the State long to stamp it out, shut it down, and shut it up.

Is the Affordable Care Act really the cause of all this angst? Have the zealots forgotten that the ACA is a law concocted by right wing, corporate-friendly think tanks and written by lobbyists for insurance and pharmaceutical companies? Have they forgotten that the sanest and most cost-effective medical insurance option for our nation, the “public” option, or Medicare for All, was murdered in the womb?

The debt ceiling and the shutdown, the national debt and the frothing over the ACA is a sideshow to keep the people distracted from the real problems facing the country: jobs, income inequality and the environment. Our corporate masters don’t speak about these subjects because the status quo is working just fine for executives and shareholders, investment bankers and hedge fund managers. A week into the shutdown ABC News is focused right where you’d expect a propaganda organ to be: on how the shutdown is affecting the stock market. As if the market is any indicator of the economic health of our nation, as if the market can alleviate the woes of working people whose wages have been flat or declining for years. 

Tax, trade, and monetary policies enacted and followed over the past four decades have jammed a fork between the shoulder blades of the working class. Venal, sociopathic dimwits abducted the soul of the Republican Party, and the Democrats –from Barack Obama down – are pussies. Both parties are owned and operated by corporate donors and plutocrats who don’t give a rat’s ass for the people. Everyone forgets that Bill Clinton jumped into bed with every corporate titan who offered the Democratic Party campaign cash.

The corporate coup has been ruthless and breathtaking; almost every facet of American life has been transformed into a commodity and judged by the price it can fetch in the marketplace: public education, health care, criminal justice, you name it. Our brand of capitalism is out of control, devouring itself, and we keep on extolling its virtues.