The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 10

“It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you or your kin, and then death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.” Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

Trump Death Clock

84,589

Estimated U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Due To POTUS Inaction

Trump has his own force of Brownshirts now and they are deployed on the streets of Portland, Oregon, uninvited and unwanted by state and local authorities. Heavily armed, decked out in camouflage fatigues sans branch insignia or name plates, riding around in unmarked vehicles, their mission is to stir the cauldron of social unrest on behalf of our demented president. Trump is itching to demonstrate how to dominate the urban “battlespace” and show the enemies of our beautiful white republic how a real “strong man” operates. If largely peaceful protests and acts of legal civil disobedience can be turned into a street brawl, so much the better. The tactics are straight from the tattered authoritarian playbook; first light a small fire, fan it with armed goons, add copious amounts of gasoline, then ride in with the Law & Order brigade to put the conflagration out. 

Trump is an arsonist, his target is the Constitution.

Silence from the ranks of the GOP Death Cult of traitors, cowards, hypocrites, and opportunists. The rancid moonshine Republicans have been guzzling since 1994 (Newt Gingrich’s family recipe) has shrunk their hearts and muddled their brains, and now a majority of the party is indifferent to the suffering of others whose race, gender, or religious affiliation differs from theirs. They’ve got the power disease as bad as Southern Democrats had in 1857. They’ve convinced themselves that the blood running in the veins of some Americans is inferior to their own. 

Trump will send his Brownshirts to other cities where they will be as unwelcome as they are in Portland. The Orange Menace is desperate for a foe he can vanquish to lift his sinking reelection prospects; Covid-19 is far too formidable, and when it comes to the economy, the GOP will ride their nihilistic ideology into the fires of Hell before they marshall the resources of the government to help ordinary citizens weather the crisis that is barreling toward us. Trump’s betting the last of his chips on beating the mythical “radical left.” I wish we had a radical left in this country. 

The excesses of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 return to roost in 2020, and Democrats bear as much responsibility as Republicans for creating this monster in the first place. Misuse and abuse was an inherent danger of granting so much power to the executive branch in the name of “security.” That brand of power will inevitably be used for nefarious purposes by unscrupulous actors. Thanks, Congress. 

Trump is an arsonist, his target is the Constitution.

In the late 1880’s, when southern Democrats had reclaimed political power and derailed the lofty intentions of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass urged his fellow Americans to “Remember that all the present rests on all the past.” Almost every day, Donald Trump tries to make Americans forget the present. After all these months, after all the insane pronouncements about the pandemic, after all the blaming of others, after all the denials, after all the suffering and deaths, after all his abuses of power, Trump still insists that he, and he alone, can defy gravity. 

He can’t, but Trump will go down swinging at his real and imaginary enemies. He will make our three-headed crisis -- pandemic, economic collapse, and police violence -- worse. With every passing day, America sheds its democratic skin and takes on the visage of a pathetic banana republic. Our political leaders, of both parties, have failed the nation, failed the people, and failed to do their Constitutional duty. 

Ally Of The Poor

“The Europeans had managed to dirty up the good land and good water around the world in less than five hundred years. Now the despoilers wanted the last bits of living earth for themselves alone.” Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

What outrage against the human family has the Trump Junta committed today? What laws has the Orange Menace broken or flouted, or demanded others break or flout? How much longer will the failed War on Terror continue? These questions, and many others, dance across my mind as this strange nightmare goes on; it’s like a river of toxic sludge, there’s no waking up from it, no respite or relief. I write to make myself feel better, to bleed my system of anger, despair, and disgust. My country is becoming a full-fledged banana republic, albeit one armed to the teeth and always ready to bomb an enemy real, perceived or contrived. It’s not difficult to see a total collapse, a descent into chaos. The foundation isn’t solid anymore, if it ever was. The edifice might look formidable, but under pressure it will collapse in a cloud of dust. Empires rise, empires fall.

I’m still reading Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, published in 1991. The book is eerily prophetic. Silko imagined a militarized southern border, streams of refugees from Central American countries ruined by US policy and the brutality of the narco trade. European colonizers were masters of destruction and death and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of their plunder. Slavery, racism, genocide. Millions of expendable indigenous people died. They were god-less, ignorant, superstitious, inferior to the colonizers, so who cared how many were killed? Red, black, brown, yellow, leave the vultures to rip the rotting flesh from their bones, and leave the bones to bleach in the sun. Turn the survivors against one another, distract them, entertain them, bedazzle them with spectacle and make the simple complex, convince them that tyranny is freedom.  

The catalog of horrors grows. Like mold, Stephen Miller’s dark shadow grows longer on the wall of the White House. The Department of Homeland Security -- always creepy and suggestive of a nation under endless siege -- is in disarray, not sufficiently cruel enough for Trump and Miller’s tastes. If you’re not prepared to rip a newborn baby from its mother’s desperate grasp, you’re not made of the right stuff. On his recent trip to the border, Trump apparently encouraged government officials to ignore the law, which is what all dictators do eventually. Yet, Republicans still won’t turn on Trump, as if their instinct for self-preservation has mutated into a desire for a glorious, flaming end under the tattered banners of Christianity and white supremacy and Capitalism.

Everything in America is based on winners and losers, profits and losses. The will of the people is ignored now as it always has been, shunted aside by corrupt judges and crafty politicians, muted by clergy, ridiculed by the corporate media. The precise point at which the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice is very hard to find. Was Dr. King wrong? Is the notion of a moral universe just another fairy tale, like American exceptionalism? The oppressed must always be patient, must always wait, must always accept incremental progress. But as they wait, the plunder continues, day and night, winter and spring, under the rule of Republicans and Democrats, through boom and bust, the greedy hand never stops reaching for what it covets, be it precious stones, oil, gas, young flesh, land, water, gold,  cocaine or the thoughts inside our heads.

I ask again: what outrage against the human family has the Trump Junta committed today? What perversity has Trump normalized?

Give the last word to Leslie Marmon Silko: “All across earth there were those listening and waiting, isolated and lonely, despised outcasts of the earth. First the lights would go out -- dynamite or earthquake, it did not matter. All sources of electrical power generation would be destroyed. Darkness was the ally of the poor.”