“Like all living organisms, trees die. But what is happening here is not normal. Large patches of trees are dying simultaneously, and saplings aren’t growing to take their place.” Emily Ury, The Guardian
America, America, America, turning into an open air prison, building Walls, turning public space into private, patrolled space, installing cameras and motion sensors, armed security guards. Angry country, as evidenced by mass shootings and slow deaths of despair. We draw the boundary lines and designate what tribe controls what. Won’t be long before states with fresh water supplies fight against states in the grip of drought. Hard to imagine the next decade being anything but a major downer, a clusterfuck the likes of which we’ve not seen. One day some people will look back and say, You know, it wasn’t that bad, even with Covid and the takeover by Christian Fascists. We got along alright. We adapted. Of course some got along in more style and comfort than others, this is America, after all. Trust, but verify in the age of Fear; Hunter S. Thompson called it the Kingdom of Fear -- a decade and a half ago. Evidence of the losing streak we’re stuck on. Too many guns, too few people able to consistently cast a ballot, too much injustice and inequality, too many needy, hungry, and broken. What manner of madness have we created here, on this once fruited plain? Of course that’s not true, either. If ever it was fruited, it was only for some, not all; there was plenty, but little equality. Riches for some, subsistence or slavish struggle for many others.
Accept and normalize. Democracy may die with a whimper. New doors have opened, new ways to suppress the vote of some, magnify that of others, new ways to deny the popular will. The Would Be Lord down in Mar-a-Lago pointed the way, showed how pliable institutions are, how corrupt and complicit, from the Florida congressional district that barfed up Matt Gaetz, to the waste of an elite education represented by Josh Hawley, to Trump’s idiot children, and that insufferable prick Jared Kushner, to Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio. What a fucking joke. Stephen Miller. All this performative politics, this grotesque American theater, the ineptitude we saw close-up and nationwide when Covid hit and key institutions failed, faltered, fabricated and fucked up, with almost all the death and fear and distrust down to Donald J. Trump and his loyal enablers in the Republican Party. 9/11, Katrina, Trump, Covid. Party over country, and power over principle, year after year, that’s the GOP’s bread and butter power. Trump accelerated our slide to the bottom, Biden’s trying to slow it down. John Boehner is out with a book longing for the good old days of the GOP, the Tea Party days, when the entire party wasn’t beholden to a moron. Boehner’s on the rehabilitation tour now, looking for broken pieces he can collect, use as collateral to wield some influence, maybe rake in a bit of coin in the process.
Meanwhile, we sit in our homes, apartments, cottages, penthouses, basements, suites, condos, duplexes, tippees, or tin-roofed shacks, if such are still around in this day and age. I suppose they exist, in other places, where the cost of land isn’t as dear, places far from the cooling ocean breeze and red-tile splendor of downtown, out in the arid hinterlands where the heat shimmers and dust storms erupt. If we’re among the lucky we sit and wait for GrubHub to deliver dinner. Material wants and needs satisfied with ease on our phones, through the almost instantaneous transfer of funds. That’s some impressive shit, when you stop and think about how quickly we can turn a want into reality. Dropped on our doorstep by a chunky brown-skinned man in a blue Amazon van. Amazon is where we get our food and medicines, our toilet paper, our tampons, our pots and pans, our slow cookers, our tablets, our dildoes and scented lubricants. Amazon for everything, even, sooner or later, XXX porn. Yes, one day King Bezos will figure out a way to make huge profits from porn, he will control the pipes that carry the images, movies, whatever you fancy and are willing to pay for. Any sensible person can figure out the problem with monopolies and the people who own them. It’s pretty simple. Too much ends up in too few hands, and by too much I mean the obscene wealth of men like Bezos, Gates, and Musk. Pick your favorite plutocrat. We can have such people, but we cannot have democracy, too. Even limited democracy is difficult when so few control so much. But I get the frustration with democracy, it’s a slow, time-consuming, at times enervating process, and building any kind of political consensus with staying power is long game work. Social movements that stay in the game, on mission and message, that are adaptable and relevant, that avoid internal corruption and external co-optation are hard to build. Autocracy, on the other hand, can be speedy and decisive -- and disastrously, murderously wrong. Pick your poison.
Is it better to toil in the gig economy than to work the line at General Motors under the United Autoworkers banner? Unions help working people and that’s why the political right has waged war on unions since Reagan broke PATCO. Look it up, younger readers. That broke the dam. But unions have problems of their own, no matter how much they profess to be “member run” and “democratic.” Power does things to people. A guy starts out in the union battling the tight-assed owner in cover-alls and boots, and sometimes ends up looking like a mirror image of the hated boss, and not only in dress and manner and speech, but in the way he acts the closer he gets to the center of power. Power is corrosive and has to be checked. It’s a diabolically difficult balance.
In a jam, back to the wall, and fresh out of lawyers, guns and money. What’s a man with no property to do? Whose flag does such a man rally around? Where does such a man find like-minded souls? Down at the Fool’s Cafe where the patrons recite poetry and throw knives, and chant to bring about the brotherhood of man. This world’s crazy. It’s upside down and inside out. Thinking too much about where we go from here could be hazardous to your health.
