Beware a Fanatical Minority

 “Where are we heading? How do we begin to dream ourselves out of this dark place of death and destruction?” Robin D.G. Kelley

Fire, flood, pestilence and Trump, the wrath of a vengeful god aimed at his wayward and unruly children or simply the consequences of human stupidity and fear? 

Footsteps echo in the blue-black night. Friend or foe? Is it a white kid not even old enough to cast a vote, armed with an assault rifle, on the hunt for people of a darker skin tone? Do the footsteps belong to men in blue uniforms, also armed and dangerous? Seven police bullets in the back of another African-American man, Jacob Blake. It’s still open season on black bodies, as if the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd never happened. In some American cities, the police refuse to pause and step back, afraid that giving an inch will be seen as surrender. 

In his excellent book, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, historian Andrew Delbanco writes, “But if slavery was really a benign institution furnishing care for a simple people, why were the simpletons running away? It was a maddening question, and to read the attempts of antebellum southerners to answer it is to be reminded of the infinite human capacity for self-deception.”

In our own time a solid minority of Americans engage in self-deception. How else to explain the stubborn support for the Grifter-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump? Forty percent of the American electorate is simply too far gone, too far down the rabbit hole, unreachable by facts, logic, science, or common sense. Trump and his most loyal supporters live in a parallel universe unrecognizable to the rest of us; they see danger around every corner, in the form of marching, chanting black people, immigrants, angry women, liberals, and Democrats who, they believe, garnish their kale salads with the flesh of aborted babies. Trump’s hold on this forty percent is baffling. I can’t understand what they see in Trump after four years of lies, corruption, incoherence, and incompetence. How has Trump improved their lives? Has he delivered jobs, lower taxes, health care? 

But perhaps none of that matters to Trump supporters. Perhaps all they care about is airing their grievances against those they perceive as threats to their place on the social hierarchy. They back Trump because he says out loud what they think. Trump shares their victimhood, that’s the real bond between them. Trump paints himself as the white knight who single-handedly holds a deadly Deep State cabal at bay. Trump’s people lay their bag of woe at the doorstep of immigrants who take and take and take from hard-working real Americans, giving nothing in return; or black people advantaged by Affirmative Action; or gays, lesbians and transgender people; or snooty liberals from Hollywood and New York City, the elite. 

The Republican National Convention, which I refuse to torture my brain by watching, is a celebration of Donald J. Trump’s domination of the GOP. The party is so devoid of ideas that it offers no platform of its aims and objectives -- the platform is whatever Dear Leader says it is, whatever Dear Leader wants in the moment, whatever Dear Leader thinks his base wants to hear, no matter how batshit crazy or divorced from reality. If Dear Leader wins the election he will deem it free and fair; if Dear Leader loses he will declare it rigged, fraudulent, stolen by the radical Democrats. 

 

America gnaws at its own flesh, like a coyote with its leg caught in a steel trap. Look at what has become of the party of Abraham Lincoln. It’s devolving before our eyes, from Eisenhower to Reagan to the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus to QAnon. Lincoln, who danced on a political tightrope to hold the Union together, compromising when justified in the service of the greater good, wouldn’t recognize Trump’s GOP. Neither would Eisenhower. Even Barry Goldwater would say, “Where the fuck is my party?” 

In four years America has slipped from a nation most of the world admired to an object of derision and pity. The world watches aghast as Donald J. Trump stands before the country and rambles incoherently about light bulbs and dishwashers, while more than 100,000 (according to the Trump Death Clock) Americans have perished due to Trump’s bungling of the Coronavirus pandemic. That fact alone should doom Trump, but I fear we have become numb.

It comes down to the voters, and perhaps critically to eligible voters who have never before bothered to exercise their franchise. Americans who occupy the real world, not Trump’s Fantasy Island, have to turn out with the fervor of a long oppressed people who are about to vote for the very first time. 

I heard the author Mike Lofgren on Background Briefing. He said something that startled me: “A fanatical minority can take over a country.” 

If you’re eligible, you cannot sit this one out. Register, and vote. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 19

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.” Albert Camus, The Plague  

Three or four days ago I made some speculative notes about what might happen if Trump declares with great fanfare (fireworks, blaring trumpets, a 21-gun salute to his awesomeness) that the United States is open for business, raring to go, from sea to shining sea, from the mountains to the desert, but the sensible and rational governors of New York and California and Washington and New Jersey balk. What if Trump pitches a hissy fit and withholds federal aid to those states? No normal President would even think of such a thing during a pandemic, but if anything is absolutely clear about Trump at this point, it’s that he’s miles from normal. He needs to act petty and vindictive the way normal people need oxygen, so it’s not unthinkable that he would hold federal aid hostage until governors bend to his will. 

When did I write that the Coronavirus was going to eat Trump’s lunch? Days ago.  It’s happening, the empty vessel that is Donald J. Trump is cracking under pressure. He’s acting more like a sociopath than ever, describing 100,000 American deaths as a mark of an excellent job done. The man is sick. On April 13, Trump claimed that his authority as president is total, and therefore he can override governors whenever he feels like it. Article 10 of the Constitution be damned. Where are all the arch conservatives, the strict constructualists, the anti-federal government, drown-it-in-the-bathtub, small goverment loyalists now? Where are you? Come into the light so the people can see your face. Do you agree that Trump has total authority? What if Barack Obama had claimed such power to his black self? Hannity would have shit his pants, Limbaugh would have swallowed his tongue. Where is the Freedom Caucus? The Tea Party? Where are the Southern states screaming about federal encroachment on hallowed states’ rights? Come out, you fucking cowards, come out and watch your Boy Trump lose his shit on live television. 

We are being gaslighted by a con man in the midst of a deadly pandemic. 

My wife and I have been watching the HBO mini-series The Plot Against America, a masterful adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name by David Simon and Ed Burns. I am a Philip Roth fan of longstanding, an admirer of his mastery of the prose form, and his crystalline sentences. I read The Plot Against America when it was published, but admit to having forgotten big chunks of it in the intervening years. My wife keeps saying, “You read the book, you should know what’s going on.” I tell her I don’t remember all that much about Rabbi Bengelsdorf or Sandy or Bess or Philip or Herman. The series is well written, acted by a fine cast, and feels historic but also contemporary. By that I mean the viewer feels the Levin family’s world constricting, becoming more fraught, darker, and by the fifth episode, dangerous. Many Newark Jews have packed up and escaped to Canada.  In the Age of Trump, it’s not hard to imagine how fascism creeps into being. 

I began re-reading The Plot Against America today. 

If you’re always in fear of losing your job, you’re not free. If you’re afraid to speak up, challenge authority, you’re not free. If you’re afraid to stand up for your rights as a human being, you’re not free.

What hateful things we do in this life. Humans are imperfect, governments even more so. 

It’s a beautiful evening here, the sky is clear, the air fresh. The overhead fan is on, my wife is cooking in the kitchen behind me. It occurred to me today that I should go to sleep each night as if it is my last night, and if I open my eyes the next morning, rejoice at my luck. 

From Robbie Robertson: “Welcome to the new Dark Ages/it’s such a beautiful madness.”

Saved by the Blues

“Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion.” Hunter S. Thompson

The feckless mob that calls itself the United States Congress has kicked the battered debt ceiling/budget can down the road. Round Two of fiscal roulette won’t happen until after the holiday “season.” Republicans may be mildly chastened by their recent debacle and plummeting poll numbers, but the Tea Party nut-bags will return in force to tilt once more at the windmill. Come January, the same bogus arguments will ring out in the halls of the capitol. We must live within our means! Solution: slash Medicare and build another aircraft carrier. Entitlements are bleeding the federal treasury! Solution: reduce benefits and expand our military footprint in Africa. America is a welfare state! Solution: lower taxes on the wealthy.

It’s madness, pure and simple, lifted straight from the pages of George Orwell: black is white, war is peace, destruction is progress. Our government has divorced itself from the people in favor of political elites and wealthy interests, defense contractors and resource extractors, pharmaceutical companies, lobbying firms, and corporate-controlled media. Though we are called to the polls every couple of years, more and more our votes are meaningless; outcomes are decided in advance, by money and access to the apparatus of one of our corrupt parties.

No political leader will level with us about how bad things really are; we’re far down the road to third world status.

President Obama and the party he heads are faithful servants of the status quo. Even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress they behaved timidly, like a minority party, ever deferential to Tea Party kooks and neo-Nazis like Eric Cantor. Don’t look to the Democrats for bold ideas or a cogent, passionate explanation of what and who the party stands for. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do their best, but crackpots like Ted Cruz control the big megaphone and the headlines.  

Near the end of his life Hunter S. Thompson called the US the Kingdom of Fear. That moniker may have been true in the aftermath of 9/11, but a dozen years on the Kingdom of Fear has become the Kingdom of Stupidity. We play the same cards again and again and expect a different outcome: cut taxes on the rich and expect jobs for the poor; do nothing about climate change and act bewildered when the floodwaters rise; murder innocents with drone strikes and wonder why we are despised in the Muslim world; offshore US manufacturing to China and wonder why our tax base has eroded and the dollar is looked upon with suspicion on world currency markets.   

What is to be done to halt this insanity? The next financial meltdown isn’t far off, and I fear it will be even worse than the 2008 version. Our leaders engage in magical thinking, rely on myths and the pronouncements of false prophets, while spasms wrack the body of the American empire. The gulf between rich and everyone else inexorably widens, ho hum, and our leaders shrug, as if to say, it’s just the way it is.

It’s not the way it is; it is the way corrupt Money has made it. The American people have been played, duped, and robbed.

I was feeling low about all this, pessimistic about my children’s future, losing hope, until bluesman Kelly Joe Phelps came to town with two guitars and his voice; that voice and the way Kelly Joe worked those guitars for an hour and a half restored some of my faith in the human species.

For the time being, I’ve been saved by the blues.

Under the Influence

Every now and then Barack Obama opens the mini-fridge in the Oval Office and removes a mason jar left over from the Bush Administration. The jar contains the elixir first brewed by Bill Clinton but not perfected until Bush and Cheney moved into the White House to begin their long reign of error. It’s rumored – but only rumored, you understand – that the secret formula for this elixir resides in a slim silver tube that Dick Cheney slips into his rectum every morning after his bowel movement.

This morning, before being interviewed by Jake Tapper from ABC News, Obama unscrewed the lid and took a quick sip, just enough to take the edge off for a couple of hours.

The elixir is a potent concoction that induces politicians to make statements they don’t believe with total conviction. For example, when Bush claimed that tax cuts for the wealthy would produce an economic bonanza for the poor, he really believed it. Cheney was totally addicted to the elixir and for eight years ran around Washington D.C. making all manner of bizarre claims. Illicit substances are not for the faint of heart or those with weak constitutions. Bush and Cheney, two alpha males who enjoyed boasting about the size and hardness of their testicles, believed they could handle the stuff in small, consistent doses.

This was hubris at its best.

By comparison, Barack Obama is a weak-kneed wanker who shouldn’t mess around with toxic substances under any circumstances. Case in point: Obama telling Tapper that the Occupy Wall Street movement has many similarities to the Tea Party. Deeply under the influence and obviously out of touch with reality, Obama claimed he understood both points of view.

WTF! OMG! Is our president serious? All one has to do is follow the money behind the Tea Party to understand what it’s all about.

Obama was serious, in the moment, but don’t forget, he was crocked to the gills. A few hours later, after the elixir wore off, Obama realized the magnitude of his gaffe and called Dr. Drew Pinsky, the reality TV addiction guru.

“Dr. Drew, this is the President of the United States. It’s very possible that I have a problem.”

“I can help, Mr. President. What is it, crack cocaine, Oxycontin, booze, hash, smack, Internet porn?”

“It’s the elixir.”

“Holy shit,” said Dr. Drew. “That’s bad, very bad. I’m afraid you’re screwed, sir. The only thing worse than being addicted to that stuff is trying to kick it. Makes kicking heroin feel like a long weekend in Barbados. Ever been to Barbados, sir?”

“What does it mean, Dr. Drew?”

“Well, to be frank, Mr. President, it means that you will continue to make indefensible statements about movements you know nothing about, continue to put the demands of bankers and hedge fund managers above the needs of ordinary people, continue to insist that the way to put more Americans back to work is to export their jobs to low-wage countries. In short, for the rest of your presidency you will think and act, well, like a Republican.”

*Expert conjecture about the formula: Combine two drops of Newt Gingrich’s blood, four strands of Ayn Rand’s hair, one cup of Alan Greenspan’s urine, three teardrops from John Boehner, a pubic hair from Eric Cantor, a teaspoon of Ann Coulter’s menstrual blood, six drops of ether, four packs of Splenda, eight ounces of Kool-Aid mix, a generous splash of Jack Daniels, an ounce of high fructose corn syrup, and a tablespoon of water from the Hudson River. Mix thoroughly and serve chilled.

Broken Promises, Bitter Tea

Is it November 2nd yet? I can’t take much more of the lies and misinformation that clog the radio, the TV and the Internet, the silly assertions that candidate X will, like a superhero, single-handedly reform Sacramento or Washington D.C.

One small blessing this season is that there hasn’t been a deluge of direct mail pieces.

There are many things about American politics that I don’t understand. Sarah Palin’s popularity has baffled me since John McCain jettisoned reason and tapped her as his running mate. Palin struck me as a stone idiot in 2008 and my opinion hasn’t budged one centimeter since. Palin’s pronouncements are as absurd as her grasp of American history is weak, though I grant that she is clever and opportunistic and has imbibed the code words of the far right: “government” run health care, socialism, freedom, liberty, free markets and so on. Getting back to good old American values and Christian faith makes for pithy sound bites, but poor public policy.

In Palin’s world, as in Orwell’s 1984, ignorance is strength and lies are truth.

The Tea Party is another. Where was the Tea Party during the reign of George W. Bush and Uncle Dick Cheney? Bush and Cheney didn’t exactly shrink the role of the federal government, but as far as I can recall, angry white people didn’t flood the streets demanding the abolishment of Social Security, Medicare and the Department of Education during Bush’s eight years of misrule.

It was only when a moderate, inherently cautious black man moved into the White House that the Tea Party flared to life, powered by secret financial donors and far right front groups. The mainstream media can’t get enough of the Tea Party, covering its rallies and whacky, incoherent proclamations, all of which make the Tea Party seem stronger and more ubiquitous than it actually is. Tea Party candidates who should be muzzled and locked away in padded rooms are treated like prophets, fawned over by the talking heads on the major network news programs.

The government that the Tea Party and far right conservatives excoriate and blame for our ills is the only force capable of reining in runaway corporate power.

How did we get into this mess?

The attacks of September 11, 2001 shattered America’s psyche, and the reactive military response launched by Bush – first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq – contributed to the breaking of our national treasury, not to mention vividly demonstrating the limits of brute force. We can bomb the hell out of a country with our high-tech weapons, murder thousands of non-combatants, and -- when the smoke clears and the dust settles -- find ourselves in a quagmire from which there is no easy escape.

Add the financial meltdown of 2008 into the mix and it’s no wonder that the United States has become the Kingdom of Fear. Americans are fearful that our best days are past and that the economic, political and environmental problems facing us are insurmountable; Americans sense that the way our economy is organized is deeply flawed and that money has corrupted our politics and rendered the wants and needs of average citizens irrelevant.

Whenever fear takes hold, the need for scapegoats increases and reactionary forces rise up and attack anyone who seems different or dangerous: gays, immigrants, Muslims, atheists, liberals, dissidents. Fear breeds polarization between those who want to break from convention and those who want to hold onto it at any cost. Every moderate and sensible idea that surfaces is drowned out by the caterwauling of extremists and ideologues.

November 2nd will come and go but these dark and dangerous times will remain.

Who Are These People?

Let me make this clear at the outset: the Tea Party does not speak for me. I prefer to think for myself, speak for myself, and not be swayed by the worst excesses of a mob mentality.

Who do these people want to take the nation back from? Do they really think Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are socialists or are they just flat stupid, like their heroine, Sarah Palin? If Obama, Pelosi and Reid are socialists, I’m a fascist. The problem with Obama is not that he leans too far left but that he’s too wedded to the center. Putting Obama on a poster with Chairman Mao is like putting Adolf Hitler on the same poster with Saint Francis of Assisi – it just makes no sense.

Here’s another thing: I don’t mind paying my fair share of income taxes, as long as the money is used to enhance the common good. I like smooth roads and highways, safe airline travel, national parks, clean air, drinking water and oceans, and sensible regulation that prevents too much power from concentrating in too few hands.

What I don’t like is watching public dollars siphoned off for private gain or wasted on wars of choice or for maintaining a gargantuan military/security/intelligence apparatus. Although I’d like to keep more of the money I earn, I’m not in favor of abolishing the federal income tax, as the Tea Party faithful advocate at every turn. That’s a ludicrous idea in a complex, interconnected society, but then again, most of the ideas parroted by the Tea Party are ludicrous.

But, OK, it’s a kick to mass in the streets with like minded folks, carrying a picket sign, chanting slogans (even totally goofy slogans), and making your opinion known.

Where was the Tea Party when Bush and Cheney were raping the Constitution, fabricating a rational to invade Iraq, torturing detainees, and giving the richest Americans generous tax breaks?

We're No. 1!

I went over to the Home Improvement Center on Gutierrez Street the other day to look for a shower curtain rod. I didn’t need anything with designer or decorator touches, just your basic 72” curtain rod. I figured I’d find one that was cheap and made in China, but to my surprise the rod I found was made in Delaware – right here in these United States.

A few days later I read excerpts of an interview with Vice President Joe Biden in which the Veep defended the US economy and insisted that America would never lose its position as the world’s leading economic power. Biden had strong words for those who claim that America has seen her best days.

Joe Biden tends to be verbose and hyperbolic -- and of course it’s the duty of a Vice President to defend our nation’s honor even if it means denying reality -- but like the majority of politicians, regardless of party affiliation, Biden is unwilling to look reality in the face and admit that America doesn’t manufacture enough shower curtain rods. Or toaster ovens. Or flat screen televisions. Or computers. Or blenders. Or durable medical equipment. Or -- you name it.

And unless Americans are building tangible products that the rest of the world wants to buy, our economy will never fully recover nor will the yawning gap between the haves and have nots narrow. A “financialized” economy cannot produce widespread prosperity; what it will produce is banana republic-like income disparity.

Of course there are many more things that Joe Biden and the ruling class need to wrap their heads around if this country is to pull back from the brink.

Open-ended wars are one. The government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan talks about being dependent on US military assistance for the next two decades. With the exception of opium production, Afghanistan doesn’t possess an economic infrastructure lively enough to produce the revenues needed to build and sustain a functioning police force and military. The US is that revenue source, and we are therefore trapped in Afghanistan, unable to “win” the war and equally incapable of cutting our losses and exiting; we will waste bodies and coin for years to come.

The ruling class in Washington cleverly keeps the true costs of our foreign adventures off the books, but the bottom line is that the capital we are pissing away in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan should be invested in rebuilding our country.

The sclerotic, paralyzed, and corrupt state of our politics isn’t helping matters, either. Forget for a moment the absurd Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, and instead consider the political strategy of the Republican Party. At every turn the GOP says, “No.” Not “maybe,” not “subject to discussion,” not “we’re willing to negotiate,” but flat out “No.” The only policy the GOP will support is tax cuts and obscene amounts of spending on the military-security complex.

Not that the majority Democrats are any less ridiculous. In the Clinton Era they abandoned their traditional constituencies in favor of bribes from corporate America, and now Democrats more often than not sound, look and smell just like Republicans.

To make the political landscape even more toxic and surreal, the mainstream corporate media takes people like Sarah “No-Brains” Palin seriously. Did you hear her rambling speech at the Tea Party convention? One tired, worn out conservative orthodoxy after another tumbled out of Palin’s mouth and the audience lapped it up like she was the second coming of Dutch Reagan.

I hate to admit this, but Palin is so vapid that she makes Reagan look like an Ivy League intellectual.

Palin is the poster child for what Hunter S. Thompson called America’s “downward spiral of dumbness.”

In the same breath, and with no sense of contradiction, Palin advocates that government level the playing field for average Americans AND get out of their lives; she proposes a “market” economy AND “small” government; tax cuts AND big spending on our war machine. It’s as if Palin and her clan have been living in an isolation chamber for the past decade.

Note to Sarah: Bush/Cheney tried that circus act and we are reaping the dire consequences.

I can’t take Sarah Palin seriously and for the life of me can’t understand why anyone does. On the other hand, I’m sure there were plenty of Germans who thought Adolf Hitler was a harmless crackpot right up until the time his henchmen torched the Reichstag.

The state of collective denial in this nation is stunning, but at least there’s a company in Delaware that manufactures a fine shower curtain rod.