“Illusions were given credibility by a superpower moral overdrive. Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project.” Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation
Divorced from my normal routine, with work at certain hours of the day, the starting and ending hours pretty well set in stone, I get a little lost. The only reason I knew today was Tuesday was because yesterday was a dojo day, for me the final class of this year. Not that I mind getting head and body away from the job, who doesn’t like slipping the yoke for a run of days, when the most important thing on the agenda is the time the soccer match starts? Off the clock the rhythm of the day changes, slows down and comes into better focus. I see how I jam through my days without much awareness, without seeing things as I should. I guess this is why travel is so wonderful, a real luxury that many in this world can only dream of. Opens your eyes, makes you more aware of where you are, seeing new patterns, shapes, rooflines and rivers and birds and clouds over a new place. One thing I really appreciate is our trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Red-brick buildings, mid-19th century porticos and columns, houses with enormous front porches, the history. My son took more than a thousand photographs, but I haven’t seen them yet. He has an artistic eye and I’m excited to see what he saw. (Gabriel just launched a website showing his photographs.)
It just hit me today that we are ending one decade and beginning another. End of the 2010’s. Start of the 2020’s. What’s going to happen to us all in the next ten years? Where will we venture next, as individuals and as a world? Our steps are all mixed up now, we’re tripping over one another, out of synch with the music, and a confusion of angry voices constantly argues over who deserves to own, divvy up, and distribute the world’s bounty. This is the foundation story, I think, of human history. Who rules and how do they rule? We’re wrecking the dance hall right now, breaking every stitch of furniture, tearing the curtains from the windows, rolling up the carpets. Up on a small stage stands Donald Trump, with Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and, finally, behind him, William Barr. Put different clothes or uniforms on these characters and they could be in ancient Egypt or Rome, and quite possibly more than we want to admit, Nazi Germany. Talk about power over our lives. I don’t want to be a paranoid person, but when you rationally consider how much government and corporate entities know about us, or can find out fairly easily, it’s unsettling. Think about what power the government has right now: the ability to watch, to intrude, to monitor, to censor, to imprison, to kill. There are seventeen different intelligence agencies in the United States. It’s boggling to think of all the data stored on all the servers these people own or administer. The margins seem much finer to me now that I’m older. That America has functioned without exploding since the Civil War is kind of astonishing. History makes old arguments new again, though it all comes back to the same fundamentals, who rules and why?
Very heavy material for the end of the decade. Hope tinged with fear. Our current American Emperor, mad King Donald I, loses more of his mind every day, and yet he’s protected and insulated by Rupert Murdoch’s giant FOX megaphone and the Senate majority led by Mitch McConnell, one of the wickedest devils America has produced. I don’t know if Mitch is worse than Murdoch or the other way around, but one feeds the other. Mitch ranks way up there with some of our history’s most illustrious Obstructionists, men who clung to their ideology all the way to the grave. Like Horatio Seymour, twice Governor of New York, who said, “This is a white man’s country. Let white men rule.” Next up: Theodore Bilbo, Governor, then Senator from Mississippi, who said, of a bill being debated in Congress, that it would “open the floodgates of hell in the South,” meaning white women by the droves would be raped by violent brute Negroes. The old sexual scare tactics. Strangely, it was quite acceptable in many places if a white man had sexual concourse with a female Negro. This was typically by coercion or force or just because the white owner felt like he could do whatever he wanted with his lawful property. Yeah, Bilbo was a big star. And one more: Jim Clark, Sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, who was known to go after civil rights activists with an electric cattle prod. These are McConnell’s soulmates, he is their heir.
Part of me rebels against the idea that a man like Mitch McConnell has the power to stymie or suffocate any proposal he deems unacceptable. On the other hand, ours is a government of men, (mostly men in any case), and this is the way it goes. Political systems get corrupted, whether Soviet Communism or American neoliberal capitalism or ancient Rome.
What the global climate may look like in ten years makes me uneasy. It will look much different than it does today, that we know. Again, the margins are fine and the balance point treacherously small. I know there is more happening around the world than I can see or read about. It’s tumultuous in so many places, because inequality is so wide, and people are full of want and fear, and fed up with struggling for the bare essentials. The rulers have done what rulers always do: take too much for themselves and their families, friends, and cronies, while the masses build up more grievances and justifications for their overthrow. The polity in America seems really dumb to me, I’m sorry to say. Give most a compelling spectacle to watch on a screen, and they will stand transfixed while their house burns. I don’t know what insane event, what calamity, will trigger millions of Americans to go out in the streets, as people have done in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Colombia, France and India, or whether or not it will be peaceful or violent when they do. Could go either way, obviously. We’re tromping backwards on history’s cobblestone path.
I worry about stuff, I can’t help it; sometimes I brood too much. As the year ends I’m reading two books I brought home from the Equal Justice Initiative book store. Segregation in America, a title published by the EJI, and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist. 2020 is almost here. Ready or not, here it comes.
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