Bully in the Pulpit

“Plenty people even in the middle of sufferation going pick the bad they know over the good they can only dream about, because who dream but madman and fool?” Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

The bloated bag of wind plays by his own rules, always has, because craven people let him. Like a school yard bully, the obnoxious, loud, and petulant kid who somehow commands the respect of others like him, who never walks alone, who acts brave even if he’s shitting himself, boasting and preening, craving everybody’s attention, the kid who figures out that in America presentation rules over substance; it doesn’t have to be good, it only has to look good, smell good for awhile, and be sold like the most valuable object on the planet. Sell the name, the mystique. Go gaudy or go home. Even his failures aren’t failures, they are great successes. The man makes magic, you have to admit, like an alchemist, dog shit to silver, black to white, up to down, he flips it all on its head then flips it again, just to keep us guessing. We can’t help but watch the show, read the Tweets, get pissed or laugh our asses off at what has become of America. TV and the Internet and social media, and non-stop, everywhere-you-turn advertising, has made us fearful and stupid.

Bat’s in the belfry, mule in the stall, bully in the pulpit, damage done, how much more to come? You think it will be easy to scrub Trump’s excrement from the walls? Gonna’ need Captain America and the Ghostbusters, a Navajo shaman, a battalion of shrinks and the largest sage bonfire in the history of the world. Can an entire nation have PTSD? Trump trauma? How are we going to behave once this fool falls off, drops dead on, or gets pushed off the stage for the final time? Are we just going to return to peace and love and goodwill for all, civility on Fox News, maybe even a smattering of truth now and then? Like the Obama years? Back to business as usual? What about Trump’s people, the potent (heavily-armed?) base we are always hearing about, what will they do when the clock runs out on their man? Will the evangelicals lay down their bibles and their crucifixes, their fascination with female reproductive functions? Will Republicans lose their blinders and find their balls and their backbones, maybe reform their party into an actual, recognizable political party again, rather than a criminal cult? Yeah, let’s drift back to the good old days, follow this neoliberal, corporate-friendly, Anita Hill-shaming fossil named Biden back to normal times, forget that Trump and the GOP ever happened. Forget that Mitch McConnell ever disgraced the US Senate. Forget how a broken political system gave us Trump in the first place.

Part of our problem is that we forget too soon. We let the wrong people off the hook. We get caught up in the fruit, never get to the roots.  

Been thinking: How far will they let the bully go? What’s the bridge-too-far for Donald J. Trump? Rape, incest, murder? Video of him and Putin getting it on? Or Trump Daddy smacking Jarod’s bare ass with a riding crop? Or the both of them with a bobcat? C’mon, Nancy Pelosi. Give us a sense of the threshold that only you can see. Just want to know what to expect.   

Pelosi’s brain is working overtime, she’s a woman with as many problems as Medusa had heads. She’s got nervous people in her party, not sure of the best strategic move, today, and for 2020, but they are wavering as Trump tears at the Constitution and spits on the notion of the rule of law. She’s got a posse of younger, female, progressive, and insistent voices telling her to get the I-Train warmed up and ready to roll. These folks are fighting for the principle, not only the politics, but it’s not an easy fight. On a good day, the Dems are weak, feckless and incoherent. Turning advantage into defeat is second nature, ingrained. They want the cake, and they want to eat it too, as the saying goes, so they compromise or capitulate here, shave a bit of principle there, bargain with various devils, and wind up looking like they stand for nothing.  

Pelosi’s got to play this one like Lionel Messi making calculations in his head before his foot strikes the ball that skims across the turf with the perfect shape and pace -- a pass only Messi can make -- into the path of Luis Suarez who easily one-touches past the keeper and into the back of the net. Inch perfect. Does Pelosi have that in her locker? The corporate media says she’s smart. The more important thing to know is, is she also cunning? She’s got to understand she’s up against a wounded animal who is steadily backing himself into a corner of the shed. He’s coming out fighting, blowing smoke out of his mouth and his ass, holding an olive branch in one hand and a metal pipe behind his back. She knows this, right? The question she’s mulling is when to do what, when to commit numbers to the attack. Her play has got to be inch perfect, like Messi, neither too soon -- before the chance fully develops -- or too late, when the chance is past. Takes genius.  

Playing With Borrowed Time

“Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts.” Italo Calvino

It’s the hypocrisy that crawls under the skin and burns like acid. If you or I receive a subpoena, we don’t have the option of ignoring it or rejecting it out of hand, nor do we have much latitude to question its legitimacy. We are compelled to comply or face the consequences. Not so the powerful. They have ways, they have means, they can hire brilliantly educated men and women to advance the most absurd arguments and spurious legal theories, to delay, distort, and dilute.

Purportedly, America is a nation of laws, not men; a long time ago we rejected a capricious, tyrannical monarch, then set up a form of government to prevent one from ever rising again. It’s an imperfect system, to be sure, but it has proved durable, serving us through expansion, war, depression, and social upheaval.

Until now. Until the Orange Menace.

Pay attention, America, please. Put your iPhone down, turn the TV off, the latest video from your favorite YouTube influencer can wait, your hot yoga class can wait, your grande Americano can wait.  

Our house, once divided then repaired, is again divided, but now it’s also old, weathered, the foundation is cracked and the floor creaks, the window frames and doors swell when it rains, and the stench of rot is present in every room. Out of the gloom steps one Donald J. Trump, loser businessman, liar, con artist, grifter, philanderer, bigot, and general, all-around, morally-bankrupt asshole, to proclaim that the laws of our land apply to everyone but him, he is untouchable, even by the co-equal legislative branch, explicitly charged in the Constitution with checking his powers. In normal times, maybe. But these aren’t normal times. For Trump, ignorance is like a coat of arms. He hasn’t read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Bible. To every subpoena or demand that a member of his administration testify before Congress, Trump says, fuck you. To every request that he respect the norms of his office and republican government, Trump says, fuck you. Then he winds up his ill-informed followers by claiming that anyone who investigates him is committing treason.

Nobody is allowed to question the king.

This is how a republic dies.

With few exceptions, members of Trump’s party remain resolutely silent. All but a handful have forgotten the oath of office they swore, hand upon a bible; loyalty to party, to rich donors, to ideology is more important to them than upholding the Constitution or serving the people they claim to represent. Like mindless sycophants they line up to prostrate themselves before their lawless leader, betraying the principles of our democracy in exchange for money, power, fame and favor. There’s a fire in the attic, another in the basement, but they could care less because the leader says there is no fire, and he knows what no one else knows, sees what no one else sees, ever omnipotent and infallible. If he says the smoke is really mist, or a heavy cloud of fairy dust, it must be so.

Americans treat democracy like it’s a spectator sport, an event that comes around every few years, like the World Cup or the Olympic games. Into the vacuum step the powerful who ignore our will with ease. If they cut off our access to TV, millions might flood the streets in protest. But about wars that drag on for decades, a tax policy that shifts wealth to the already wealthy, a health insurance system that kills people through indifference, an economy that is blatantly unfair and injurious to working people, women, children, and the elderly, and an accelerator of catastrophic climate change, about epidemic gun violence and a host of other social injustices, we are silent, mute, too busy to pay attention, to care, to get angry, to rise up and say, enough!

It’s so much later than we think. All the time we have left is borrowed.

Goodbye, Lady Liberty

“For the monster on the move, or on the watch, lurking in his lair, there is no mercy.” Samuel Beckett

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the people of the United States, has now outlived its usefulness as a symbol of our country. Since we are no longer about welcoming the world’s huddled and tired masses yearning to be free, and our liberties have suffered sharp curtailment in the age of mass surveillance, Lady Liberty should be dynamited and replaced with a massive tower at the top of which will sit a colossal bust of Donald J. Trump’s head, in full Trumpian snarl. An inscription below shall read: Turn back, murderers and rapists, unless you be white and Christian.

The literal rape of our country by Trump and his associates continues, gathers speed, like an enormous ball-bearing rolling down Lombard Street in San Francisco, unstoppable, whether by tradition, norms, the legislative branch, the Constitution, or an instinct for self-preservation. We are rat-fucked.

It’s likely that very soon John Bolton will achieve his long cherished wet dream of attacking Iran. That the US can apply economic sanctions against Iran, and financially punish sovereign nations that want to continue their business relations with Iran, and at the same time threaten Iran with militarily force, is the height of imperialism. The US is, hands down, the world’s paramount thug. It lashes out with all its might at any country that refuses to bow to it, like Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran.

The notion that Iran would invite an American military response by attacking American allies or “interests” is ridiculous. Iran is suffering from crippling economic sanctions, a form of collective punishment. I have no doubt that Iran will fight back if attacked, but I do not believe Iran seeks a military conflict with the US. Only the leaders of the US think the Iranians are stupid.

Oh, Dr. King, so long ago you warned against the dangers of militarism, how militarism abroad sooner or later manifested at home. Well, here we stand, a country that has become cruel, uncaring, mean-spirited, exclusionary, crass, and corrupt, one that sees brute force as the solution to every problem. We lead the world in incarceration. Police routinely murder unarmed citizens of color and rarely pay a price. Our economy punishes working-class and poor people and then on top of that we criminalize them. White-collar criminals run the house. We accept homelessness as normal rather than an aberration. We don’t care if people die because they cannot afford medical care or prescription medications. We gleefully saddle young people with staggering student loan debt.

Every day that our political leaders -- and the corporate and wealthy interests that own them -- ignore climate change in favor of business as usual, we tempt fate.

Fate will win, humanity will lose.

The will of the governed no longer matters, if it ever did. We have normalized a tyranny of the minority, led by human toads like Mitch McConnell, who will without doubt burn in the furnaces of hell. Do you have any doubt that Roe v. Wade is on death row, soon to be executed by our radical Supreme Court?

Tyrannical monarchs and dictators of the past were toppled when the people had had enough, when too many starved to death or were fed like fodder to foreign wars or were imprisoned on false charges or had their land confiscated. Things are different now. Humanity faces two grave threats, catastrophic climate change and nuclear annihilation.

Time isn’t on our side. As Tom Waits once sang, “the Earth died screaming.”

The Coup is Proceeding Quite Well

“America when will we end the human war?/Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” Allen Ginsberg

Of course the Democrats are dragging their feet on launching impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump. Although, as Ralph Nadar wrote recently, Trump is probably the most impeachable president in American history, the Democrats, as always, play it cautious, like an old woman with poor eyesight who is afraid to cross a busy street. Trump is a walking, talking, breathing, farting, belching epitome of a corrupt president, the sort of debased, deluded, and debauched man our white founding fathers worried about and why they wrote into the Constitution a method for his removal. But the spineless Dems can’t pull the trigger. No, they first have to disassemble their weapon, oil the barrel, check the magazine, reassemble, fire some practice rounds, collect the shell casings, hold an inquest.

Only Democrats in the House can defend the principle that no one is above the law. But don’t tell Nancy Pelosi, she won’t listen, too busy is she with electoral considerations. What, Pelosi asks her Magic 8 Ball, might an impeachment proceeding do to the Democrats chances of defeating Trump in 2020? If it means shutting out the left-leaning wing of the Party (the wing whose ideas might actually energize voters) and nominating a neoliberal relic like Joe Biden to carry their standard into the fray, the Democrats will do it, just as they did in 2016. Biden, like Hillary Clinton, is tone-deaf and out of touch, a man who should be ushered off the stage and carted far, far away, never to be seen or heard from again.   

I’m reading Truthteller by Stephen Davis, a journalist, producer, and investigative reporter who notes that when corporations and governments want to deep six the truth they inevitably dip into the same tool bag. If the message isn’t to their liking, they attack the messenger. If that doesn’t make the story go away, they delay, delay, delay until the public loses interest and chases after a newer shiny object. If the story somehow remains afloat, they hatch conspiracy theories, tapping any convenient bogeyman, from Vladimir Putin, to Iran, to the left-leaning media to eco-terrorists. And finally, they can always use their money and media power to create an alternate reality, one in which facts are irrelevant.

Make-believe reality includes Trump’s “booming economy,” which is far less his than it is Barack Obama’s. Yes, people at or near the top rung of the economic ladder are doing fine, as they have been for years, but the true measure of the economy is, or should be, two-fold: how are folks at or below the middle -- the people for whom healthcare, housing, education, and retirement are steep hills to scale -- doing, and how much is our current economic arrangement contributing to catastrophic climate change? 

Trump, and, to be frank, Wall Street friendly Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, could give a rat’s ass about either working people or the climate, having jettisoned the former and dragged their heels on the latter for decades. To hear Trump crow, you’d think every American is rolling around on a bed of crisp $100 bills.  

Trump attacks people and institutions who refuse to bow to him, sues at the drop of a dime, urges high officials to refuse to cooperate with Congress, and spins conspiratorial tales. He claims a coup is being staged against him when the exact opposite is the case. Trump and his henchmen in the GOP are running a coup against our Constitution; Mitch McConnell and William Barr are Trump’s point men. At this moment, the coup is proceeding quite well.

What’s an average citizen to do? Write more letters to his or her congressperson and senators? As if that has any value. “I appreciate hearing your views on this important issue,” is the usual response, and then the electeds do whatever they want. Theoretically, we should be able to take feckless legislators out at the ballot box, but that game is rigged in most states and districts, and our choice is usually a lesser evil, someone odious, just not as odious as Donald J. Trump or Marco Rubio or Charles Schumer or Lindsey Graham or Steve King or Devin Nunes.