“They were that new kind of Democrat who didn’t seem to know any working people.” Jim Harrison
Crooked is straight. Wrong is right. Cruelty is kindness. Corruption is virtue. Lies are truth. War is peace. Ignorance is intelligence. Chaos is order.
Orwell’s nightmare vision coming to life.
Life in Trump-World is disorienting. The chaos and confusion is unrelenting. A rational person can only take so much before cognitive dissonance sets in. When you think the bar cannot be lowered any further, it drops another notch. When you think Trump can’t say anything more ridiculous than his last statement, bang, the Orange Menace pulls another whopper out of his ass.
It gets me every time we drive to the theater in Los Angeles. Tents pitched on the sidewalks. Makeshift shelters built from discarded cardboard boxes. Blue tarps stretched over a few possessions. One of the wealthiest cities in the US. Gleaming office towers boasting the names of major American banks. Luxury condominiums that sell for sums beyond the reach of mere toilers. And down on the street, a stone’s throw away, the sidewalk dwellers collide with LA’s upscale types.
Every time I see the tents I wonder where I am, how this came to be, and why it’s acceptable in a rich city, a rich state, and a rich nation.
How many souls live on LA’s streets? 50,000? 60,000? Are we devolving, back to the world of Charles Dickens or Jack London’s Iron Heel? Goes to show that human progress isn’t inevitable, that reason and logic can be rolled back to the Dark Ages, to the time of superstition and serfs. The great neoliberal project, launched by Uncle Ronnie Reagan in 1981 and going strong ever since, has placed the majority of the planet’s wealth in very few hands. Better to have 50,000 homeless people on the streets than to tax corporate profits. Better to despoil the soil, water and air than to regulate fossil fuel extractors and make the shift to renewable energy. Better to guarantee the profits of pharmaceutical manufacturers than to make life-saving medicines affordable for the masses. Better to pour billions of dollars into an insatiable war machine than to make higher education affordable or retirement secure or medical care universal. Better to let the Market God dictate the price of human necessities like housing.
Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic front runner, isn’t Donald J. Trump, but Biden and others like him, including Bill and Hillary and Barack, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck “Citibank” Schumer, were, or still are, integral parts of the machinery that made Trump possible. Without help from Democrats, there is no Trump. Trump is a feral, media-savvy opportunist who tapped into the anger of millions of working people left behind by 35 years of neoliberal economic, monetary and trade policies; by the outsourcing of millions of jobs to lower wage nations; by the privatization of public goods and the decimation of labor unions. Trump, incompetent con artist and serial failure, has no answers for what ails, other than to blame everything on immigrants, Iran, and the Chinese. As Thom Hartmann pointed out recently, Trump is holding an economic house of cards together with the same materials his predecessors used: tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity for the poor, increases in military spending. This will fail as it always does, and when it happens, the poor and what remains of the middle-class will get hurt the worst.
No, I will never get used to seeing tents pitched on city sidewalks, just as I will never get used to the cruel and incompetent con man who currently sits in the Oval Office. We cannot normalize these abominations. We must resist them in every way we can.
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