Red Meat Schizophrenia

“Hitler issued an endless stream of slogans to win potential supporters over. He would make Germany great again. He would give Germans work once more. He would put Germany first. He would revive the nation’s rusting industries, laid to waste by the economic depression. He would crush the alien ideologies—­socialism, liberalism, communism—­that were undermining the nation’s will to survive and destroying its core values.” Richard J. Evans

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, better known by its acronym CPAC, Donald Trump tossed chunks of raw meat to the mostly white audience. America first! Check. More money for our “beloved military.” Check. Winning. Check. Tax cuts for all! Check.

Listening to Trump’s scattershot remarks, one wonders if his people brief him beforehand or if Trump simply gets a feel for the crowd and the occasion and shoots from the hip.

One thing is certain: Donald Trump is lousy at basic math. His pledge to pour even more of our national treasure into the Pentagon is ridiculous on a number of levels, but first and foremost, the only way Trump can slash taxes and increase military spending is to gut other federal agencies, like the EPA and the State Department, and maybe make a backdoor run at Social Security and Medicare. Perhaps Trump doesn’t realize that big tax cuts and increased military spending have been tried before, and all they have produced is massive budget deficits that sooner or later are closed on the backs of the most vulnerable. It’s called austerity, and it’s cruel and stupid and a form of class warfare.

Trump proposes hiking the Pentagon budget by some $54 billion. I wonder if anyone has mentioned to Trump that the US now devotes about 54% of its budget to the military, a figure that dwarfs the military spending of any other nation. What the US spends on the military makes Russia and China look minor league by comparison.

And what, exactly, is the point of Trump’s military build-up? Prosecuting the never-ending War on Terror doesn’t require more fighter jets, aircraft carriers, ships or tanks, so who is Trump preparing to fight? China? Russia, if the generals and Neocons around Trump have their way? Iran? Mexico? And will all this increased spending bring our 16- year-old war in Afghanistan to an end?

The most hilarious moment, for me anyway, came when Trump announced that the GOP would from now on be the party of working Americans. Forget the fact that the GOP has for decades been the party of capital, not labor; ignore the fact that the GOP has been hostile to labor unions, in both the private and public sectors; forget that many of the GOP’s leading oligarchs made their fortunes by exporting jobs to low-wage countries, leaving American workers to fend for themselves; forget that the GOP is hostile to minimum wage increases and sneers at the idea of living wages.

This is America! Workers are not entitled to living wages!

I’m sorry to say that my pointy-headed west coast liberal bias is emerging, but honestly, how misinformed does one have to be to believe this nonsense? Donald Trump is never going to place the interests of working people ahead of the interests of capital. Never. Trump is many things, but he’s not a traitor to the ruling class -- his class. Trump has surrounded himself with wealthy people who don’t give a damn about working people.

Almost as chilling as the fascist overtones -- protect the borders, build the military, America first -- were the all-white overtones. When Steve Bannon speaks about the American “culture” his meaning is very clear. He’s talking about racial purity, some mythical Ozzie & Harriet, Doris Day time in America when Negroes knew their place, Mexicans mowed lawns and cleaned homes and picked vegetables and kept their mouths shut, and women were grateful for a self-cleaning oven and a new washing machine, and to bake cookies for little Johnny and Jane when they came home from their safe, orderly, all-white school.

People like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon don’t rise spontaneously, they are always present, lurking on the fringes, other times out in plain site. Our soil has been waiting for a seed. America has from the beginning had a racist strain, and we added nativism and nationalism along our path to empire.  At times we move away from these evils, other times we move toward them, as if doing so will solve our problems. They won’t. Our root problems are unregulated capitalism which enriches the few at the expense of the many and devalues anything that cannot be priced as a commodity, aligned with militarism and imperialism. Trump and his gang will only exacerbate our root problems.

Trump loyalists may find out how easy it can be to choke on a chunk of red meat.

The Deep End of the Pool

“But you cannot have freedom without the risk of its abuse.” I.F. Stone

In December, Lake Cachuma, the main water source of Santa Barbara, was at 7% capacity. Three days ago, Cachuma reached 40% capacity and water was flowing in the Santa Ynez River for the first time in years. On Anapamu Street, near where we live, a trio of century old Italian stone pines, weakened by the long drought, toppled over, downing telephone poles and lifting concrete sidewalks; one poor fellow’s pickup truck was caved in. For the better part of three days the whine of chainsaws was constant.

The heavy rain was a welcome distraction from the latest outrages perpetrated by the Trump regime. It’s unsettling to realize that the President is a man who is proud of his disdain for books and knowledge, and who seems to believe damn near anything he watches on Fox News. What to think about a man who says, “Nuclear holocaust will be like no other”?

Trump is a fool floating on a leaky raft in the deep end of the pool. He represents the psychosis of our celebrity-obsessed consumer culture. He is a member -- albeit one who until now has roamed the fringes -- of the oligarchy that owns this country and seems determined to rob it blind and run it into the ground. Neoliberal capitalism, supported and nurtured by Republicans and Democrats alike for decades now, has corroded and corrupted human values and priorities and we are living through the predictable results; the situation is likely to become much worse for many people before it improves.

Echoes of another dark time, when Americans saw communists around every corner and under every bed, in the halls of our universities, in the State Department, and in Hollywood; the lives of many innocent people were destroyed, not for what they had done, but merely based on suspicion of what they might do. Guilt by circumstance, by association, by rumor and innuendo. Now we fear Muslims, Mexicans, and anyone else deemed an “other.”

According to Trump, hordes of evil people are streaming across our borders intent on mayhem. The fury emanating from Washington about illegal immigration is bizarre. It’s as if we are under attack every day -- as if innocent children are being yanked from their beds in the middle of the night and sold into slavery -- or murdered.

The psychotic Trumpian worldview oscillates between fear and belligerence.

Trump is compelled to hold a “rally” to feed his need for adulation. When was the last time you saw a new American president hold a campaign-style rally within the first month of assuming office? I can’t remember, and I’ve lived through a fair number of administrations, including that of Richard M. Nixon. Nixon, it should be noted, was insecure and paranoid but he was, for the most part, a rational actor. The same can’t be said of King Donald. Trump is not only insecure, paranoid, narcissistic, misogynistic, crude, and vindictive, but appears to be mentally unstable. While I don’t perceive him as a puppet, I do worry about the influence upon him from advisors such as Steve Bannon. Many odious people surround Trump, but to my mind Bannon is the most dangerous of the lot.

For the record: I continue to read, watch and listen with dismay to the hysteria about Russia’s alleged theft or manipulation of our presidential election. As historian Peter Kuznick said at a recent lecture sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Hillary Clinton lost because she was a lousy, over-confident candidate.

What I’m reading: The Master and Margarita and The Best of I.F. Stone.

Incredible Progress

“The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line.” Matt Taibbi

Life goes on in Trumpland. Babies are born, elderly people die, children have birthday parties, people get married, divorced, kids go to school. One can almost forget that a con artist slipped through the barriers erected by the oligarchy and became president. Forgetting is easier if one maintains a total media blackout.

But if one is any kind of citizen, a media blackout is next to impossible. My inbox is jammed every day with appeals for action and money to block this and fight that; I’ve given money to Truthout, Truthdig, the ACLU, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Common Cause. I remind myself that there are more good-hearted people than bigoted people. Trump and his band of kleptocrats and Christian zealots, I also remind myself, are symptoms of a diseased system. Even if Trump goes, forced out by scandal or because he is clearly unfit to be president, the system remains; another servant of the oligarchy will either step or be pushed forward. At the moment, Mike Pence is next in line.

It took a long time to get to this place. A lot of dominoes had to fall to make Donald Trump possible. If you watched Trump’s press conference on February 16 you know the man is insane, not within a country mile of contact with reality. “Incredible progress,” said Trump about his first month in office, and all the assembled reporters could do was gasp or text “WTF” to their colleagues. Trump resides in his own hermetically sealed universe, where he is the all-knowing, virile, and infallible leader.

If Trump is still in office a year from now I will be shocked. Another batshit performance like he turned in on the 16th and it’s likely the GOP will turn on him with the ferocity of a cornered wolverine. Trump is ill-mannered and ill-tempered, and so stupid that he makes George W. Bush look intelligent.  

The impact of the Trump regime hasn’t plopped on my doorstep yet, but these are early days and Trump’s fine-tuned machine (try not to burst out laughing) of an administration isn’t firing on all its diabolical cylinders yet. Once the Trump gang figures out how to turn the lights in the White House on, order a sandwich and a glass of milk, and get an extra blanket from the housekeeping staff, the insane ideas and stupid policy proposals will really start to flow, and the ugliness will begin in earnest.

I haven’t seen any evidence that the Democratic Party learned anything from its humiliation on November 8, 2016. As yet no mea culpa for abandoning working people 40-odd years ago in favor of corporate and professional class interests; no public rejection of Clintonism; no honest appraisal of how badly the DNC fucked up. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are still in positions of authority, which isn’t saying much in a party that only operates on the margins. What this shows me is how out of touch Democrats are with the needs, fears, and concerns of ordinary citizens. They don’t listen to us and they sure as hell don’t speak a language we understand.

Compromised Equilibrium

“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.” Frederick Douglass

Subtlety isn’t part of the Trump toolbox. First the White House issues a cruel and ridiculous travel ban targeting people from seven predominantly muslim nations, and then they begin to attack the corporate media for not fully covering all the acts of terror (committed by deranged muslims, of course) that occur around the world. The media quickly and easily proves that most of the attacks were reported, some of them extensively, but facts hardly matter in this sad new world.

Trump and Co. whip up FEAR of muslims by design, thus justifying, after the imperial decree, the ban and at the same time further casting the corporate media as lazy, biased, incompetent, and so on. Common tactic of totalitarian regimes: debase the press, make the people look to the strong man for answers. Trust Trump and only Trump.

To justify its existence and share of the federal purse, the US military-security-surveillance apparatus must always have an enemy at the ready, and that enemy must be painted as implacable, lethal, and omnipresent. At the moment the Trumpsters are fixated on ISIS, but when that interest fades (or is no longer useful) there is Iran (always a target) and perhaps, now that making war on Russia appears less likely, China will emerge as our Enemy No. 1.  

Who knows?

The learning curve for Trump’s is steep; he lacks even rudimentary understanding of the Constitution and the system of checks and balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. Trump is accustomed to issuing orders and having them obeyed; he views any dissent -- from the press, the courts, or state governments -- as affronts to both his office and his person. How dare underlings question the CEO of America, Incorporated! Trump has even less respect for democracy or the will of the governed. He is an oligarch who sincerely believes, at his cellular level, that having come from money, or having earned money (no matter by what means), makes one smarter and more deserving than someone of lesser means. In an unmoored, exploitative, and predatory system of capitalism this sort of thinking, however warped and narrow, makes a perverse kind of sense. When every human activity is judged and measured by a dollar sign, having money equals nobility.

I worry about protest fatigue. I also worry that sooner or later a protest will turn violent or destructive and play into the hands of the security state, kept on edge and high alert by Trump’s authoritarian logic, leading to a smothering of all dissent. When a country’s equilibrium is already compromised, it takes relatively little to tip it over. I worry that people will focus so much on Trump that we lose sight of the desperate need to advocate for radical systemic changes that promote the general welfare, shrink the footprint of the US empire by drastically cutting the Pentagon budget, reduce poverty and income inequality, and protect the environment from further degradation.

The early actions of the Trump gang are ominous. As Andrew Levine wrote for Counterpunch recently, “Nearly everyone who is not filthy rich is going to suffer.”

The Smash & Grab Presidency

“The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.” Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

The Trump blitzkrieg of cruelty and stupidity makes my head swim and, like many of my fellow citizens, it’s difficult to keep track of every outrage committed by the junta. These are not normal times. Part of me thinks that the flurry of activity by Trump and his minions is designed to keep people on the back foot, off guard, and confused. This would suggest a measure of planning and forethought. I don’t think Trump is capable of such mental feats, but the people in his inner circle might be.

One thing is for certain: like all demagogues, Trump employs fear to justify his actions. The US has not been attacked or threatened by Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia or the other nations Trump singled out in his racist ban, but they are predominantly muslim nations and in Trump’s twisted universe that automatically makes them suspect.

Let me state here that I am not afraid of muslims or Islam. I don’t feel any need to be “protected” from muslims by the US Government. Yes, there are muslims in the world who harbor grievances and carry out violent and barbaric acts; many adherents to radical Islam seem to want to restore a golden age of faith and obedience that never was, and in this they are not that much different from Trump and his gang, who want to restore the America that existed before civil rights, women’s rights, LGTBQ rights, labor unions, and environmental protections. Trump and his minions use fear and radical Christianity as cover for the kleptocracy they have planned.

Make no mistake, it’s vital for citizens to flood the streets in protest, but it’s equally vital for citizens to articulate an alternative vision to the Trump coup. Trump’s methods are more direct, harsh and callous than those offered during the Obama Administration, and what would have been offered if Hillary Clinton had prevailed in the Electoral College, but the common theme that unites Trump and Obama/Clinton is neoliberalism, meaning a permanent war economy, imperial adventures abroad, American exceptionalism, austerity for the poor and socialism for the wealthy, privatization of everything not anchored down, including Social Security and Medicare, and absolute fealty to Wall Street. Think of Obama/Clinton as a kinder, gentler, machine-gun hand, as Neil Young sang many years ago. Trump will ram an extreme form of neoliberalism down our throats; Obama/Clinton did, and would do the same, but with softer, more urbane rhetoric. Here’s another way to think of it: Trump will cut off your head with a single chop, Obama/Clinton kill you by a thousand little nicks, and they smile while they wield the blade.

I have been calling my senators non-stop though I rarely get through; most times the lines are busy and the voice mailbox is full.

Precarious times. My sense is that Trump and his band of miscreants are making a last ditch stand to hold onto white privilege. They know that demography and history are against them, and that the American brand of exploitative capitalism and crass commercialism is not sustainable, but they are determined to loot the country to the maximum extent they can before it all implodes.  

We interrupt this post to bring you the latest from the White House Press room:

Sean Spicer: I never said the Muslim ban was a ‘ban.’

Reporter 1: Uh, yes you did. So did President Trump.

Sean Spicer: No, that’s just the same old mainstream media bias. I never called it a ban and neither did President Trump. Extreme vetting, yes, ban, no. I never said ban; I called it what it is -- extreme vetting of people who threaten the safety of the American people.

Reporter 2: You said ban during an appearance at American University, and President Trump used the word on Twitter.

Sean Spicer: This is another example of you awful people creating fake news. President Trump has been very, very clear, hugely clear, that extreme vetting is our goal, not a ban. We are not banning anyone from any country and for the media to say we are is very, very unfair. You have no right to hold this administration to any reasonable standards of truth.

Reporter 1 to Reporter 2: Does your head hurt?

Reporter 2 to Reporter 1: All the time. Do these people realize there is video evidence of them saying ban?

Reporter 1: I can’t take 4 years of this shit. Are you reading 1984?

Reporter 2: Oh yeah, every night before bed. It’s the new Bible.