A Bottomless Bout of Vertigo

“This is one of those nights where there is nothing. Imagine being always like this. Scooped-out. Listless. No light. No dance. Not even any disgust.” Charles Bukowski

It’s hard to keep one’s wits in the looney bin that is America in the time of Trump. Truth is optional, public relations and perception are everything, and every damn day is like suffering a bottomless bout of vertigo.

The detestable Mike Pence, our wax figure veep and one of the preeminent ass-lickers in recent American history, compares Trump, an immoral, ignorant, racist blowhard, to Martin Luther King, Jr. Contemptible. Trump and Pence aren’t fit to clean Dr. King’s toilet.

The Los Angeles public teachers strike is over, but it appears that many rank-and-file teachers are none too pleased with their union leaders and Democratic Party pols. While the teachers will receive some salary increases, they didn’t do as well on reducing class sizes, adding nurses and librarians, or getting binding agreement to slow the expansion of charter schools. One wonders how much time the leaders of the UTLA spent breaking bread with LAUSD officials and local Democratic politicians during the six day strike. Doesn’t smell right.

Despite the rather anticlimactic outcome of the LA strike it does appear that working people are finally regaining consciousness, and not just in the US. The Yellow Vest protesters in France, the thousands of workers in India who rose up to express their collective displeasure with Modi’s policies, made the billionaires meeting in Davos set down their champagne glasses and plates of caviar and pay attention. In the neoliberal world order, workers are supposed to remain silent. This is why the action in India received barely a mention in the US corporate media. The proletariat can’t be allowed to get ideas, can they? Ideas are dangerous things, more dangerous than an unarmed migrant from Guatemala. Average workers might wake from their slumber and realize that much of their suffering isn’t of their own making, that they have been made to suffer by design, which in turn might compel them to turn their ire on the oligarchs as the peasants once went after feudal lords.

Torches and pitchforks on a moonless night.

Despite claims of total victory by Trump and Pence, the ISIS faction in Syria isn’t dead just yet. It’s damn hard to annihilate a tactic…

I don’t know what to make of those Catholic high school kids who taunted a native American man armed only with a drum and a traditional song. Some call them little angels, others call them sniveling, entitled devils, like Brett Kavanaugh. The only thing I know for sure is that any person who dons a MAGA hat deserves an ass-kicking. That hat stands for one thing and one thing only: intolerance.

The partial shutdown of the American government drags on. Trump tossed out some tired, worn, and ridiculous ideas as concessions, but these were never to be taken seriously. Trump’s approval rating is in the crapper and there are signs that his base of support among a minority of Americans is starting to fray. Trump, the great negotiator, is still trying to find a way out of his corner without alienating the wingnuts who cheer for him at his rallies.

Where did the $5.7 billion figure Trump is demanding for his vanity wall even come from? This question was posed by the media watch group FAIR, and it’s a good one. What would $5.7 buy US taxpayers? (Or it is Mexicans?) Who came up with this number, what rational analysis is it based on? Oh shit, I forgot that this entire Wall project has no basis in rationality.  

Finally, a tip of the cap to Mariano Rivera, the newest member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, elected unanimously. Rivera had nerves of steel and a devastating 95 mph cut fastball that was nearly unhittable. The man is a champion, the greatest closer of all time.

Despair in the Time of Donald and Madam Clinton

“The current corrupt and dysfunctional state of American politics is about a growing authoritarianism tied to economic, political, and cultural formations that have hijacked democracy and put in place structural and ideological forces that constitute a new regime of politics, not simply a series of bad policies.” Henry A. Giroux

Journalist Robert Scheer was in Santa Barbara the other night, giving a lecture for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. In a career spanning more than four decades, Scheer has covered plenty of important events, penned a number of books, and founded the award-winning news website, Truthdig, which, among other things, provides a platform for the uncompromising work of Chris Hedges.

At one point in his talk, Scheer said, “The enemy is us.” Not ISIS or Iran or China. Us. We are the enemy because of our own stupidity and arrogance. Take military spending, for example. In fiscal year 2016, according to one report I read, 54%, or roughly $625 billion, of the discretionary federal budget is devoted to defense expenditures. More than half the entire discretionary budget. Education accounts for 6%, or about $74 billion of discretionary spending. The US, of course, outspends every other nation on the planet on armaments. We are bristling with weaponry, armed to the gills, ever ready to wage war on our enemy du jour.  

Our level of military spending and our boot print on the globe is grotesque and completely unsustainable, but our political leaders keep shoveling money at the Pentagon, despite ample evidence that all this insane spending isn’t making the US any safer or more secure. While America’s social and practical needs – like bridges, roads, water systems (think, Flint, Michigan), mass transit, solar power, wind power, care for the young and the elderly – are allowed to go to seed, or get sold off to private operators, the politicians continue to sink billions into hopeless causes like Afghanistan.  

Has the disconnect between the governed and the federal government ever been more pronounced? The system is now so perverted that the will of the people is ignored without consequence. Both parties are ruled by the same sources of money: Wall Street banks, insurance companies, resource extractors, and the military-intelligence-security complex. The corporate-owned media works in tandem with the power complex, feeding the public a steady diet of misinformation, spectacle, and trivia. It takes very little effort to hoodwink the electorate into supporting bogus military conflicts, not to mention economic policies that make the majority poorer, enslaves people in debt, and brings ruin, even death (again, think Flint) to communities. 

The regimes of Uncle Ronnie, Slick Willie, and Cowboy George went too far, created and unleashed a neo-liberal Frankenstein that today is beyond control. Obama maintained the beast. Sadly, too many citizens sat passively by as the American Dream was put to the sword. What happened to American working-class militancy? Who speaks for average working people now? Nobody. In its rightward march toward the political center and beyond, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class.  The only use the GOP has for working people – white ones, anyway – is to stir them up about abortion or gay marriage or gun control.

The prospect of a presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fills me with despair. Forget choosing between the lesser of two evils. We face a choice between the lesser of two lessers. Standing on one side is Trump, a boorish demagogue, nearly a cartoon character, and quite possibly a fascist; on the other side is Hillary Clinton, an utterly corrupt opportunist with a track record of failure and mediocrity. This is not good, not good at all. I was reading something today that opined that people who support Trump honestly believe that he will restore order in the world. Why, because he’s rich and talks tough?

Yes, the enemy is us. The empire decays from within and is destined to totter and fall. The only question is when.