The Rarest Commodity

“This was my mother’s task, to sow and and hoe and grow us up with a Mexican heart in an AngloAmerica that had already occupied the village.” Cherrie Moraga.

Nothing new under the sun. What came before comes again, sooner or later. Joe Biden believes his is relevant today, thirty years after his first unsuccessful bid for the presidency, and after a long, well-documented career of supporting corporate power, war, mass incarceration, and, let’s not forget, his leading role in subjecting Anita Hill to a searing public humiliation that landed Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. This is the savior of the Democratic Party in 2020?

Might as well draft Hillary Clinton for another go at the crown. Biden’s time has passed, there is no third act, nor should there be. Wisdom is knowing when it’s time to go home and sit under your own vine, leave the battle to the next generation. But wisdom is the rarest commodity in Washington D.C.

Joe Biden. I feel bile rise in my throat.

The Democrats seem hellbent on once again offering voters little to vote for, only an opponent to vote against, which is hardly enough to inspire the massive turnout that will be needed to unseat Trump, and if Trump wins a second term, it might be game over.

I think of millions of gallons of water collecting behind the walls of a dam, but the walls are cracked and as the pressure builds it’s only a matter of time before they collapse and everything downstream is washed away. This is what it feels like, at least to me, to live in America in this moment. Our institutions are like my imaginary dam, under pressure, under assault, under siege, by a president who is not only spectacularly corrupt, but dangerously stupid. Trump’s contempt for the rule of law is as staggering as his venality and cruelty.

Here’s a chilling thought: it can get worse, and likely will. America isn’t immune to the curse of empire. A reckoning cannot be avoided forever, and no where is it written that the United States is destined to rule in perpetuity.

I turned 60 this week. Only a number as some say, but it means I’ve lived long enough to see old become new, the same mistakes made again, the same lies and justifications trotted out by the powerful. Trump raises the bar on mendacity and stupidity; the man is a carnival barker with access to nuclear weapons, the most dangerous fool on the planet. The man who was always a joke has become a predictable nightmare. I think of Lyndon Johnson lying to the American people about Vietnam, how the US was turning the tide when in fact we were losing; Nixon insisting he wasn’t a crook; Jimmy Carter commiting the cardinal sin of telling the truth about limits and sacrifice; Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra; Bill Clinton lying about a dalliance with an intern and the Republican hysteria that ensued (all forgotten now, right Lindsey Graham?); and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Lies stacked like cordwood at the side of a sagging barn. The truth is buried in a shallow unmarked grave where the land slopes to the river.   

Is America a Nation of Laws?

“Volume II of the Mueller report is nothing less than a categorical astonishment. A majority of the evidence regarding Trump’s serial obstructions of justice has been in the public sphere for a while now, but because of the avalanche of scandal that has become our daily gruel, much of it has fallen down the memory hole.” William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

It’s dizzying. From William Barr’s performance piece as Trump’s personal attorney on Thursday, to the risible Sarah Huckabee Sanders attributing her lies to a slip of her famously forked tongue, to Trump’s braying about how a report he’s not read -- and could not comprehend even if he did -- completely exonerates him. This is how a once reasonably competent nation fractures. I read somewhere recently that a failed state is one where all the criminals operate from inside the government.

If Trump isn’t impeached, then the United States is a failed state.

I am trying to understand why William Barr would willingly smear himself with Trump’s excrement? Was he offered a condo in Trump Tower, a bag of cash, a lifetime membership at Mar-A-Lago, what? When this mockery of a presidency finally ends, William Barr will be remembered as a partisan hack who lied to the American public to protect Donald J. Trump, the most corrupt, venal person ever to sit in the Oval Office. Why would Barr want to be remembered this way?

It always amuses me when important people in positions of power testify before Congress or in a court of law, and respond to simple, direct questions with, “I can’t recall,” or “I have no recollection.” How do you think that would go over if a 19 or 20 year old African-American male told a judge he couldn’t recall or remember? We have always had multiple legal standards in this country, one for the poor, one for African-Americans and Mexicans and native people, and one for the wealthy and connected. The rule of law in America is as flexible as Gumby, imperfect, as is our ongoing experiment with representative democracy.

At the moment, the American democratic experiment looks like something that stumbled  from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Protecting the rule of law as it applies to the government is now in the hands of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Are you as scared as I am that Pelosi will sit on her hands while she makes endless political calculations about the 2020 elections? That she will sputter about the need for unity and the futility of impeachment given that the GOP owns the Senate? That she will claim the Mueller report isn’t damning enough? Pelosi is busy keeping down the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and assuring Wall Street, pharmaceutical, insurance, fossil fuel, and military-security-surveillance industry donors that the Dems are still faithful servants of the neoliberal project.

In other words, I fear Democrats will fuck this up, let Trump spin and spew his exoneration fairy tale, let this moment pass without any attempt to hold Trump accountable, and still wind up losing the White House to the Orange Menace in 2020, most likely because they will field a Clintonite-retread like Joe Biden or some other cipher who steadfastly clings to the magical, but losing, moderate middle.

What, who, will Democrats blame when they lose the Electoral College again in 2020?

What’s it going to be, politics or the rule of law? Regardless of whether an impeachment proceeding removes Trump from office, protecting the rule of law is worth the effort. The question  is, does Article II, Section 4 of the hallowed US Constitution have meaning or not? The framers obviously understood the danger of the abuse of power and the corrupt use of authority. It’s as if the framers had peered into the future and saw the ugly spectre of a man like Donald J. Trump.

A Crime to Tell the Truth

“Fantasizing limitlessness is a bipartisan practice, almost a constitutional norm, and if there is one consistent lesson from American political history, it is that those who point to limits usually lose.” Jedediah Britton Purdy

Julian Assange has finally been dislodged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he lived in exile, and increasing isolation, for seven years. A lot can be said about Assange, good and not-so-good, but one thing is certain: Assange and WikiLeaks pissed off some of the world’s ruling elite with the publication of documents they wanted kept secret, and we all know how much the elites depend on secrecy and controlling the narrative. It didn’t help the US cause in Iraq, for instance, when we learned from WikiLeaks that American helicopter pilots fired on unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. That distracted from the feel-good, every-soldier-is-a-warrior/hero story the Pentagon sold us through every means possible. Noble, democracy-loving American soldiers would never indiscriminately shoot unarmed non-combatants.

But of course they would, and do, just like American military personnel participate in torture, extrajudicial killings, and other forms of barbarism. In this regard, Americans are not different or special. Americans believe we run the world because our country is the richest, freest, and most militarily powerful, our system of government the best, and our technological prowess second-to-none.

We love our foundational myths. The rugged individualist who relies only on himself. The “self-made” man. The risk-taking entrepreneur. The benevolent capitalist. The beacon of hope for the world’s tired and poor. Though the myths are tattered and worn, laughably so, and so clearly a pile of BS, many cling to them because accepting limits is difficult, if not impossible, for the American character. Limits? America doesn’t recognize limits. Donald Trump, his fans and congressional enablers, the hacks he has surrounded himself with, think they are in the process of re-creating a great American age, one without limits to American hegemony. An age where the US answers to no other country (except Israel, of course). Where we reserve the right to extradite an Australian citizen for publishing material we didn’t want published. We apply laws that favor us, ignore all that don’t.

Trump and his henchmen are trampling the rule of law; they dance in the gray zone and do their shady deals in plain sight, confident nobody can stop them. Congress can’t, the courts won’t, at least not yet, and the corporate media are incapable of anything except propaganda and celebrity gossip. How much more blatant must the corruption become? Or is there no longer a ceiling? We know the floor is gone, dynamited by Trump the minute he set foot in the White House. President of some of the people, some of the time, and a majority of them white, scared of losing their privilege, their place in line, and their mythology of being better than others based on skin tone alone.

In this age of robust and incessant lies we need truth-tellers more than ever. Journalists and whistleblowers are targeted because they write and publish and leak information that contradicts the Big Lie narrative. Julian Assange. Edward Snowden. Chelsea Manning. If Assange is extradited, indicted, and imprisoned, there will be more names added. Even the mildest forms of democracy perish when it becomes a crime to tell the truth.

Ally Of The Poor

“The Europeans had managed to dirty up the good land and good water around the world in less than five hundred years. Now the despoilers wanted the last bits of living earth for themselves alone.” Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

What outrage against the human family has the Trump Junta committed today? What laws has the Orange Menace broken or flouted, or demanded others break or flout? How much longer will the failed War on Terror continue? These questions, and many others, dance across my mind as this strange nightmare goes on; it’s like a river of toxic sludge, there’s no waking up from it, no respite or relief. I write to make myself feel better, to bleed my system of anger, despair, and disgust. My country is becoming a full-fledged banana republic, albeit one armed to the teeth and always ready to bomb an enemy real, perceived or contrived. It’s not difficult to see a total collapse, a descent into chaos. The foundation isn’t solid anymore, if it ever was. The edifice might look formidable, but under pressure it will collapse in a cloud of dust. Empires rise, empires fall.

I’m still reading Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, published in 1991. The book is eerily prophetic. Silko imagined a militarized southern border, streams of refugees from Central American countries ruined by US policy and the brutality of the narco trade. European colonizers were masters of destruction and death and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of their plunder. Slavery, racism, genocide. Millions of expendable indigenous people died. They were god-less, ignorant, superstitious, inferior to the colonizers, so who cared how many were killed? Red, black, brown, yellow, leave the vultures to rip the rotting flesh from their bones, and leave the bones to bleach in the sun. Turn the survivors against one another, distract them, entertain them, bedazzle them with spectacle and make the simple complex, convince them that tyranny is freedom.  

The catalog of horrors grows. Like mold, Stephen Miller’s dark shadow grows longer on the wall of the White House. The Department of Homeland Security -- always creepy and suggestive of a nation under endless siege -- is in disarray, not sufficiently cruel enough for Trump and Miller’s tastes. If you’re not prepared to rip a newborn baby from its mother’s desperate grasp, you’re not made of the right stuff. On his recent trip to the border, Trump apparently encouraged government officials to ignore the law, which is what all dictators do eventually. Yet, Republicans still won’t turn on Trump, as if their instinct for self-preservation has mutated into a desire for a glorious, flaming end under the tattered banners of Christianity and white supremacy and Capitalism.

Everything in America is based on winners and losers, profits and losses. The will of the people is ignored now as it always has been, shunted aside by corrupt judges and crafty politicians, muted by clergy, ridiculed by the corporate media. The precise point at which the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice is very hard to find. Was Dr. King wrong? Is the notion of a moral universe just another fairy tale, like American exceptionalism? The oppressed must always be patient, must always wait, must always accept incremental progress. But as they wait, the plunder continues, day and night, winter and spring, under the rule of Republicans and Democrats, through boom and bust, the greedy hand never stops reaching for what it covets, be it precious stones, oil, gas, young flesh, land, water, gold,  cocaine or the thoughts inside our heads.

I ask again: what outrage against the human family has the Trump Junta committed today? What perversity has Trump normalized?

Give the last word to Leslie Marmon Silko: “All across earth there were those listening and waiting, isolated and lonely, despised outcasts of the earth. First the lights would go out -- dynamite or earthquake, it did not matter. All sources of electrical power generation would be destroyed. Darkness was the ally of the poor.”