Back Where We Began

“But the truth is that no one is exempt -- the system that crushes one will crush all.” Emily Temple, review of Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.”

Disturbing days in TrumpLand. My anger isn’t burning as hot as it was a few days back when I wrote and posted “Poet in a Bad Mood,” but I am plenty mad about all the shit going down in this failing nation. The cop who killed Philando Castile will stroll, free, as if he had gunned down a coyote or a rabid dog. Castile, like all the other unarmed black men murdered by state agents, doesn’t matter enough to warrant the prosecution of his killer. What does it take for a police officer to be held accountable for killing a black person in America? Video evidence brings the crime into the light but rarely seems helpful in securing an indictment, let alone a conviction. As Ronnie Dunn noted on Counterspin, all a cop has to do to walk away unscathed from one of these fatal shootings is claim he feared for his life. For a cop who guns down a black man, them’s the magic words.

I was reminded of the racist reality of America by a segment Bill Moyers did on the Big Lie that got Donald Trump on the national stage and then into the White House: the Birther Lie. The birther lie, in case you’ve forgotten, was the proposition put forth in 2009 by right-wing cranks, and then Trump, that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Trump was all over the corporate media back then, spouting this bullshit that our first African-American president was not actually an American, that he was born in Kenya, educated in a madrassa, raised a Muslim, in other words, foreign, suspect, illegitimate. On and on this went. It was a minor story that should have flashed across our TV screens and vanished, but Trump and his ilk kept it alive for several years. Bill Moyers interviewed four distinguished historians, three of them African-American, one white, about how the Big Lie placed Donald Trump in a perfect position to benefit from the white electorate’s pent up hatred of our African-American president. If not for Obama, it’s unlikely Trump would today be in the White House doing everything in his power to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, from undermining the nuclear agreement with Iran, to sabotaging the Paris Climate Accord, to replacing the Affordable Care Act with an even less effective, and far crueler, alternative. Trump is in many things ignorant, lazy, unhinged, idiotic, and bigoted, but, like every demagogue, he senses what a particular group of people want to hear, need to hear, either to give them hope that their power and privilege isn’t waning, or to give them a scapegoat for their own failure. The problem isn’t you, white America, it’s the liberals, it’s political correctness, it’s multicultural studies, it’s Affirmative Action, it’s feminism, it’s the LGBT people, it’s Muslims, it’s Mexicans. It’s the destruction from within of “American Values” by all these other, non-white undesirables.

It’s all the fault of the black man in the White House who doesn’t deserve to sit at the apex of power in White America.  

Racism is the stain on the American soul that cannot be erased, whitewashed, painted over or scrubbed away. It was present at the beginning of our history, present during and after Reconstruction and during the long struggle for civil rights, through lynchings, beatings, fire-bombings, terror campaigns, sit-ins and marches and boycotts. Every time we get to thinking of how far we have come, we turn around to find we are back where we began.

Poet in a Bad Mood

Fuck Donald Trump.

Fuck the wealthy.

Fuck all real estate peddlers.

Fuck Amazon, you deadly behemoth.

Fuck every last Clinton Democrat.

Fuck the US system of pathological capitalism.

Fuck the greedy.

Fuck Scott Pruitt.

Fuck Jeff Sessions.

Fuck the Koch brothers and all their issue.

Fuck all the neoliberal assholes who deny America’s class war.

Fuck those who measure others by net worth.

Fuck National Review and the ghost of William F. Buckley.

Fuck Henry Kissinger.

Fuck Jamie Dimon.

Fuck Predator drones.

Fuck racism.

Fuck Nancy Pelosi and her pal Chuck Schumer.

I’m too angry for my own good, another middle-aged white man beating his fists against the high wall that divides winners and losers in the rancid American wasteland;

sold out, written off, deemed disposable, redundant, surplus to requirements;

and I’ve got it easy compared to my darker-skinned brothers and sisters, nothing much to complain about, really, but I still do;

Standing by as the country is pillaged, its soul sucked dry, its treasure poured into war and death by blind hypocrites;

Knowing only too well that no savior will rise from the ashes;

Camelot is a vagrant lot, full of weeds, old tires and broken glass;

Which way will it go, how’s it going to end, a mushroom cloud, or a rising tide under a malevolent sun?

Chevy to the Levee

“Republicans believe that the rich need more money and the poor need less help. They support tax cuts for corporations and cuts in services for the vulnerable.” Editorial in The Nation, June 19/26, 2017.

Madness loose in the land, spurred on by capitalism’s death rattle, the endless drive for more profit, higher rates of return, growth, expansion. The super wealthy stash their coin in offshore accounts, away from taxing authorities and other prying eyes. Some of the wealthy build fortified bunkers for protection against the day when the entire crooked system implodes and the mass of impoverished people rise up, as people once did in France and Russia, and begin searching for those that caused their torment. Chris Hedges, journalist and prophet, calls America a tinderbox and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. It takes little imagination to imagine a full-scale government crackdown on protesters and dissenters, most police forces are already militarized to play this role, and if they aren’t, there are private goons for hire, well-equipped and eager to cash in on domestic upheaval.

America is morally bankrupt, a clear and present danger to its traditional allies, a danger to the planet itself. All the hoary mythology used to cloak America as a beacon of freedom, truth and justice, is being stripped away to reveal our true nature, who we really are, and the portrait isn’t flattering. The face of a true hypocrite rarely is.

The propaganda organs work overtime to control the narrative in order to maintain the status quo. There is no economic alternative to capitalism. Tax cuts produce jobs. The minimum wage cannot be raised or the world will end. Social Security is nearly bankrupt. We cannot afford Medicare for All. Greed is good, compassion is for wimps. And on the foreign front -- Russia, bad. Iran, bad. Qatar, bad (but they can buy our beautiful weapons). North Korea, bad. Saudi Arabia, good. Black or white, nuance abandoned and left to perish by the wayside. Enemies, threats. The nation must be ever vigilant, alert, ready to defend itself from the bad guys who hate our freedoms. We must bomb them before they bomb us. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. All problems can be solved by our beautiful military. Our cruise missiles. Our drones. Scour the kill list for new targets. We can see through the fog of war.

Orwell shakes his head. Told you so. Down the memory hole. War is peace. Truth is what the leader says it is. Slavery is freedom. You didn’t listen then, you won’t listen now.

Reign of terror. Reign of error. Reign of fools. Reign of greed. Reign of lies. Reign of bluster.

Hipsters sip $4 coffee and $15 craft cocktails, oblivious to the impending collapse. They tap their screens and keyboards, all synergy and branding and can’t miss business propositions. Self as commodity, substance buried under a layer of style. Acquire happiness in the marketplace. Enlightenment overnight from Amazon. Wisdom from Google.

Do you remember where you were when the American Dream died, when the party ended and the last note of music faded away?

Bye bye miss American pie.  

The Rise of Ideological Monsters

“A country that stops taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, breeds dark ideological monsters that will inevitably rise to devour the body politic.” Chris Hedges

What day is it, and what has King Donald done to make America regret ever allowing him within a hundred miles of the White House? Has he launched another crazed Twitter war, insulted our European allies again, kissed up to any strongmen, or proposed giving away more of the commons to his corporate pals? It’s hard to keep up with every Trumpian outrage because they come hard and fast every day. I’m still digesting all the lies Trump spewed to justify pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord.

I wrote in my last blog that Trump is an aberration that we must not normalize, but in thinking about that further, the truth is that Trump is less an aberration than the logical product of a rotten and corrupt political system. I’ve made this observation several times before. The American electorate was given two horrible choices in November 2016 -- a grotesque egomaniacal buffoon with zero understanding about how our government or foreign policy works, and the undisputed queen of neoliberalism. This was a Hobson’s Choice. Although differing vastly in style, intelligence, experience and judgment, both Trump and Clinton are adherents of the neoliberal policies that are destroying our country.

What are those neoliberal policies? Well, speaking in broad but in no way comprehensive terms, neoliberalism starts with a fervent belief in the “Market.” The Market knows all and always acts fairly in its distribution of wealth and other booty; the Market is infallible; the Market is just and trustworthy, and clearly the best way to meet human needs like healthcare and housing.

Second, an undying belief that private companies do everything better than any government ever could, so the way to a better society, and a better world, is to privatize everything from water systems to public education to air traffic control to the electric grid to interstate highways to hospitals to military logistics. Because, you see, fine corporations like Enron, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Haliburton, AIG, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil, and Countrywide Mortgage, just to name a few, are great and wonderful, and always act in the best interests of the general public. Rip us off to enrich their CEO’s? Never! Commit blatant acts of fraud? No way! Pollute the environment just to make a few more bucks for shareholders? C’mon, that never happens!

Third, a belief in trade policies that encourage the offshoring of labor to countries where wages are as low as dirt and where workers are unlikely to gripe about working conditions, pay, or health and safety concerns. The more silent and pliable workers are, the better. And if a few perish now and then, well, business is inherently risky, right?

Oh, and at home on the fruited plain, allow corporations and their allies in government to beat labor unions into submission and then extinction. Unions are bad! Democracy in the workplace is a hindrance to innovation, efficiency, and is blatantly un-American. What workers really want is insecurity! They want lower wages, fewer benefits, longer hours!

Fourth, a belief in monetary and tax policies (and low taxes on the wealthy are necessary because this produces jobs for the poor!) that favor capital and investors over labor and wage earners. And tied up with this general line of thought is the idea that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous, one cannot exist without the other.

Fifth, and we must not forget this one, because it’s important, is undying devotion to the military-security-surveillance complex. We really can’t get along without 17 intelligence agencies or our archipelago of military bases that ring the world, and continuous warfare is just good business. An exceptional nation like the United States only employs its vast military might in the ongoing war of Good vs. Evil, to bring democracy and freedom to the oppressed and downtrodden, never to eliminate rivals or secure natural resources like oil and gas. We kill and destroy to advance peace!

The bloody hands of ideological monsters have my country by the throat.