Less Sense Than A Norway Rat

“Revolutions have a habit of succeeding when the time comes for them.” Eugene V. Debs

I skipped Trump’s falsehood laden speech on the make-believe southern border crisis. I can’t stomach listening to that fool spew for one minute let alone nine or ten. Every time Trump opens his mug, especially on the subject of immigration, he demonstrates his stupidity, incompetence, and manifest unfitness for the office he holds. After Trump won the electoral college I remember pundits wondering if the office would change the man. I scoffed. The office hasn’t changed Trump one iota, but he has changed the office, trashing it like a rock star amped on Cutty Sark and cocaine trashes a hotel room. The deliberate mendacity, cruelty, corruption and ineptitude of Trump and his administration has been astonishing. Never have I seen anything close, not from Nixon or the murderous Bushes. Trump occupies a league all his own.

That the major commercial broadcast networks aired Trump’s nonsense bothers me. None of them had to grant Trump time to disseminate lies and pretend that he cares about the fate of women and children. (I’m fairly certain that were Trump adrift with his family in a leaky lifeboat he would kick the lot of them over the side to save his own skin. Trump doesn’t have a humanitarian molecule in his bloated white body; the man thrives on cruelty.) The networks would do America a huge public service if they would immediately stop covering every Trump bellow, belch, bleat, fart and Tweet. Give Trump any kind of platform and the damage is done.

For the record: no national emergency exists at the southern border.

The crisis is wholly manufactured inside Trump’s mushy brain, with some assistance from Stephen Miller and other far-right trolls. The Big Speech was the latest Trump stunt, yet another diversionary feint, no different than his ordering regular military troops to “guard” the border against a caravan of a few thousand unarmed migrants ahead of the midterm elections. Didn’t work then, won’t work now. By boasting -- on television no less -- that he would own a government shutdown unless Congress coughed up money for his wall, Trump backed his ample butt into a corner and now he can’t extricate himself without appearing weak and foolish, which is, of course, precisely what he is. Trump claimed he wouldn’t blame Democrats for the shutdown, but of course that was just another lie as he is now blaming them every chance he gets.

Some dealmaker, huh?

Donald Trump is ignorant and weak. What blows my mind is that Republicans continue to follow this meathead as he leads them toward the abyss. Can’t any of them straighten their backs and think for themselves? By now, after every lame thing Trump has done, you’d think some impulse for self-preservation would kick in. Norway rats have more sense.

Compared to climate disruption, income inequality, and undeclared wars that drag on for nearly two decades with no end in sight, the security of the southern border doesn’t keep me awake at night. What disturbs my slumber, in addition to things aforementioned, is the near certainty of another financial crash, the lack of affordable housing, education and medical care for working people, and the insidious size and reach of Amazon. America is insane, a country that no longer has even the dimmest notion of itself. Cruel, racist, war-mongering, unequal, undemocratic, this is us.

Great? Exceptional? Indispensable? Not by any measurement that really matters.

Fated to Hope

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” Eugene V. Debs

It’s never easy to confront the naked truth. It’s takes a big pair of balls because the truth isn’t pleasant. For instance, to confront the fact that climate change is more serious than even most scientists are willing to admit; that the United States is an immoral and murderous empire; that capitalism is a system of death and destruction. The American corporate media hide the truth behind a solid wall of bullshit and myth, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the reality anyone can see if they but choose to open their eyes.

This is the thought that haunts me: my children are in for a dark and terrible ride and I can’t do much to help them because we don’t have money, stocks, bonds, real estate -- we’re working class -- living on wages, and my son is already in student loan debt, no fault of his own, he just wanted a shot at an education, and sure, he went about it all wrong, but should this doom him to a life of penury? In America, yes, it should, because this is a cruel and heartless nation ruled by oligarchs who live only to acquire more and more and more. There are 101 ways to make the working poor take it in the shorts: fees, usurious interest rates, penalties, rents, co-pays, all described in fine print written by corporate lawyers for the benefit of their masters. No one fights for the working class anymore. The working class -- white, black, brown, queer, trans -- is the carcass the rich feed on.

Pay attention to the intersection of capitalism, endless war, and environmental deterioration. Connect the dots.

Why do Americans accept that our country is engaged in an endless, futile, stupid war on a global scale? Why? Is it because there are no graphic images on our screens of bodies riddled with bullets or without limbs? Or because we don’t see flag-draped coffins being offloaded from aircraft? Or is it because there isn’t a draft? War is now, by design, out of sight and out of mind, happening elsewhere, far away, nothing at all for us to get worked up about. This isn’t the Vietnam era, college campuses are not seething with outrage; it’s as if our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and Somalia and Syria are not happening at all. And of course we don’t see the innocent victims.

I never voted for endless war.

I never voted for merciless, predatory capitalism to invade every corner and crevice of American life.

I never voted for a government overflowing with cretins.

This American nightmare doesn’t end with the rising sun. American vampires defy all the rules and hunt when the sun is at its apex, suck the blood of innocents in broad daylight, at the base of the Washington Monument, on the battlefield at Gettysburg, and in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. At night the moon over America turns crimson and the stars look like molten tears.

How many can draw a sword and stand before the Truth, willing to fight to the death for the downtrodden, the infirm, the elderly and the feeble? How many will engage in a battle that they know is foreordained to end in their own demise?

The point of no return is far behind us. The Joker and the Jack of Hearts fuck with us for sport. And through the acrid smoke and the screams of the dying, we, the living, are fated to hope.