Letter from a Shithole Country

“A rotten system must be treated from within.” John LeCarre, A Legacy of Spies

What’s it going to take, America?

How much more of this carnival sideshow that is Trump and the Kleptocrats can we stomach? It has been blatantly obvious for some time now that Donald Trump has no love for anyone not of light pigment. Trump doesn’t just dog whistle, he plays an entire orchestra and the determined faithful who buy what the conman’s selling sway and swoon. The Trump Show’s not working for them on a material level, and never will because Trump is just using them as props in his show, but the faithful never fail to respond when he stokes their grievance and fear. Revving them up, yanking their chain about murderous Muslims and uppity blacks and dangerous Salvadorans, attributing their social and economic decline to brown people from the other side of the border, gets Trump off better than a two-handed handjob.

Donald Trump is a lazy, moronic, idiotic man of meager intelligence who is also an unrepentant racist and white supremacist. This was clear even before his recent comments about people who emigrate to the US from “shithole countries,” comments that have offended most of the civilized world. Deep down, way down, even Trump’s most ardent supporters must at least recognize that Trump is unhinged and dangerous. More aware citizens know that Trump must be chased, hounded and driven from office, not only for the aforementioned reasons, but because every day he remains in the White House he diminishes and embarasses our country.

I can’t imagine that any self-respecting Norwegian would abandon his or her country, a working democratic-socialist nation with a wide social safety net, in order to emigrate to the United States, a cruel, mean, murderous, racist, and grotesquely unequal country.

But what we must understand if we are going to survive, as a country, and quite possibly as a species, is this: even if Trump were to leave office -- through impeachment for money laundering, profiting from his office, or by dropping dead of heart failure after a lunch of Big Macs and fries -- the US will remain a nation in decline and decay because the current power structure will still be firmly in place, run by and for corporate interests and wealthy individuals; bought politicians will still be bought, pay to play will still be the unspoken law of the land; the War on Terror will go on because it’s a dependable revenue stream for the war industry and because there’s no domestic price to pay for the politicians who keep authorizing more and more money for the Pentagon. Yes, absent Trump the tone and tenor and language coming from Washington would undoubtedly change, but the same neoliberal (pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades), pro-market, pro-monopoly, pro-corporate policies will still be in place, just as they were under Barack Obama and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Same basic policies,less obnoxious packaging.

Our country, far from perfect, laden with contradictions, is thrashing around like an epileptic, foaming at the mouth, unable to understand that what’s tearing us to shreds is unregulated capitalism, imperialism, and resurgent racism; we grasp at fantasy saviors like Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey; working people fight one another while the oligarchs strip the nation bare, blaming the poor, the infirm, the elderly, Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Iran and North Korea, for our ills when in fact we are the agents of our own demise. Too passive, too gullible, too willing to believe in myths and Hollywood, too easily manipulated by corporate propaganda.

The only way to retake our country is to break the oligarchy that runs it, not an easy task. Opposing Trump isn’t enough -- the Orange Menace is only a symptom of a malignant ailment. Forget the Democratic Party -- it’s too compromised and inept to be of any help. Even after a year of Trump’s policy mayhem and gross incompetence, the Democrats have yet to advance a coherent, compelling, alternative vision for the nation; they are waiting for Robert Mueller to bail them out, another fantasy that is doomed to fail.