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.