A Perfect Metaphor

“Is capitalism any longer compatible with democracy? Was it ever?” Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence

The accursed farce is almost at an end. If America isn’t the laughing stock of the world, we should be.

The presidential election spectacle has revealed Americans at our very worst: trivial, narcissistic, bombastic, conniving, hypocritical, crass, arrogant, and mendacious.

After I cast my ballot on November 8 I’m going to take a long shower and fill a large tumbler with single malt scotch.

Something is fundamentally wrong with my country -- we are afflicted with a disease and I think it may be terminal. The journalist Chris Hedges might be right: perhaps we are well along the road to fascism. I don’t want to believe that, but when I look around, the idea isn’t that farfetched.

Look at the ongoing protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Unarmed protestors, men, women, kids, being blasted with beanbag rounds, sprayed with mace and pepper spray, beaten with batons, and confronted with militarized police and goons.

Whenever Capital is challenged by the people, it always gets a helping hand from the state, and the go ahead to use an iron fist.

Look at how we treat dissenters and those that attempt to expose the misdeeds of the powerful. Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and others, speak out and have their lives destroyed. Even Amy Goodman, a journalist supposedly protected by the Constitution, is charged with bogus crimes for doing her job.

Speak out against the empire and you will be labeled unpatriotic. Ask why we must wage war every day for fifteen years somewhere in the world and you will be accused of aiding and abetting the terrorists.

Christopher Hitchens once said that the connection between stupidity and cruelty is a close one. Given the evidence of this election season, the mud and muck and slime that has been thrown in our faces by the political duopoly, there is little doubt -- at least in my mind -- that we are a stupid nation, and our behavior at home and abroad is more often than not cruel as well as deadly. It’s as if we have run dry of ideas and the only tool in our bag is violence.

The state’s response to endemic racism and inequality at home is violence, the vilification and murder of unarmed black citizens; we incarcerate more of our citizens than any other nation, and we punish those citizens brutally, while they are caged and again when, if, they get out.

We blame the poor for their poverty and then strip away any assistance that might help the poor to lift themselves up. Our compassion won’t fit in a thimble.

The president claims an inalienable right to order the murder of someone -- even an American citizen -- without a whiff of due process. This scale of hubris is mind boggling.

Our government has waged war against a tactic for fifteen years; we are not winning, but we cannot stop losing.

One half of the political duopoly pledges to obstruct the other, for no reason than because they can. As citizens we pay these “representatives” while they play roulette with our present and future.

The American brand of capitalism -- said to be the envy of the world -- monetizes almost every aspect of our lives and brutally separates winners from losers. We are reduced to what we own and what we can buy. When the wealthy overextend themselves, the poor pick up the tab.

None of this will change on November 9 or next January. Driving back to Santa Barbara from Monterey the other day, on the 101 freeway alongside the ocean, I saw a Southern Pacific railroad maintenance truck rolling along the track, fixed on the rails, unable to change course, able to go only where the rails take it, even if that means straight to the edge of the abyss.

Perfect metaphor for America in November of 2016.  

NSA: Our Hero in a White Hat

Big news, breaking news. The NSA has intercepted or overheard Al-Qaeda terrorists “chattering” about an imminent major strike on American or European targets. High alert is ordered, and as many as nineteen embassies or American outposts in the Mideast or North Africa are shut down as a precaution. Among other claims, the major news media says the threats are specific enough for caution, yet still somewhat vague and nebulous. Hmmm, that’s crack reporting – specific yet vague. 

A new, younger generation of Al-Qaeda terrorists are said to be even more diabolical and fanatical than their forebears, going so far as to surgically implant explosives in the bodies of suicide bombers.

(This new generation may have a chip on its shoulder because the U.S. has killed or murdered so many of its fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, mothers, sisters, and so on. You kill us, we kill you, forever and ever, amen.)

Yemen is the epicenter of this Al-Qaeda upsurge. The U.S. has a long history of intervention in Yemen, with clandestine boots on the ground, CIA agents skulking around the capitol, and drones soaring through the sky. We’ve killed so-called militants in Yemen, as well as a fair number of innocents, plus one very well known American named Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son. Boom, dead: father and son. The Americans went to great lengths to make it appear as if the kid was a budding terrorist, though as Jeremy Scahill reported in his recent book, Dirty Wars, the younger al-Awlaki wasn’t a terrorist at all – he was just a teenaged boy who wanted to spend time with his father.

Is it my growing paranoia or is the timing of this heightened security threat unbearably convenient? The political class and the public have responded to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures with anger directed against the Obama Administration and the national security state.

Suddenly, people are talking about the NSA’s domestic spying program, the agency’s insatiable appetite for trivial information, and how government officials have been forced to admit – grudgingly, of course -- that they have been lying to the American people. The U.S. government is pissed off, and making threats against countries from China to Bolivia, and the spying program is under intense scrutiny. The NSA is in dire need of some positive press – and what do you know -- just like that the NSA has used its awesome technological powers to foil a devious plot by the evil terrorists.

You don’t think, nah, no way, that the heightened alert is a pile of steaming horseshit cooked up by our best and brightest in the corridors of power…our government wouldn’t lie to us, would it? They wouldn’t use their powers to concoct some phony-baloney terrorist threat and make the NSA look like a cowboy in a white hat, riding in to protect us from the bad guys, would they? Our honorable government wouldn’t exaggerate the threat from a ragtag force that the Obama Administration has repeatedly told us has been decimated by JSOC raids, assassinations, and “surgical” drone strikes, right? 

Right?

What’s that fishy smell hanging over Washington D.C?