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.