Category Archives: History and Politics

The Free Market

When politicians talk about our Free Market, many of us realize it is a variation on a glittering phrase like “Freedom is On The March”, spoken over the burnt corpses of those we liberated from a modern-day Hitler while making half of the survivors stateless refugees and leaving the rest in a permanent killing zone.   The Free Market sounds like a great place.  In theory, it’s wonderful.   There is free and sportsmanlike competition, on an even playing field, where the best product, sold for the best price, sets the pace for the race to give people the best of everything at the most affordable price.  Like the best health care in the world, available here in America, to those who can afford it.   Like a delicious and filling meal containing several times the daily sodium, sugar and fat recommended for health, for under $5.   That’s the magic of the Free Market.  How can you beat that?

The “Free Market” is very much like the red and blue fucking baseball hats and the loyal, uncritical thinkers who wear them.   There was a critique of Hillary’s campaign– her message didn’t fit on a baseball hat.   Trump had a great, if ambiguous to the point of sinister, motto: Make America Great Again.  Sekhnet snapped a great shot of a smiling older man at an anti-Trump rally wearing a red Make America Hate Again baseball hat.  Closer to the mark than Trumpie’s motto, but still — just a gotcha.  Sticks and stones can break my bones, but political mantras can never hurt me.  Unless, perhaps, I look like a Muslim to a group of angry guys in red hats.

I’m reminded of this “invisible hand of the Free Market” bullshit, demonstrably stinking bullshit at that, by the pills I receive in the mail from an outfit that mails out my prescription drugs.  One pill is to keep my blood pressure under control, a Herculean task these days.  The other is a statin, because my kidney disease has caused my cholesterol to spike.   Here is a photo of the two pills, greatly magnified, to show one of the tiny wonders of the Free Market.

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This is an example of the Free Market being free.  You see, these wonder drugs were originally developed by big pharmaceutical companies at the cost of many millions of dollars.   Then, after a certain term as a patent protected drug, to pay back the cost of development with a handsome profit as a reward, the drug was allowed to be produced as a “generic”.   Same chemical composition, a fraction of the price.  I get the generic Avapro and the generic Lipitor.  My mother always said, of the latter, “I luuuuuuhv Lipitor.”  She did, apparently.

Luckily for me, I have a magnifier app on my new brilliant phone.  It allows me, when studying a pile of these pills, to separate the 329s from the 10s.   As I do this I wonder how intolerable to the Free Market the government intrusion would be if they mandated “red for blood pressure drugs, green for statins” to the manufacturers of generic drugs taken by tens of millions of Americans.  I know, I know, it stinks of state-controlled Communism.    Seriously, I don’t fucking get it.   Is America really that fucked up?   Are we really this fucking stupid?

I get that Obama had to please those who put him in office, that he was constrained and coerced left and right.  Mostly right, in fact, but also left.  Money, it is said, has no political allegiance, although recent American history may argue that point.  It’s not like anyone with a brain said money has no political allegiance, money said it.  Yes, money talks.  Of course it does.  It told Obama that his signature health insurance plan could not overturn some very, very lucrative practices fundamental to the American Free Market.  Those hungry foxes?  They are the best and most experienced guardians of the hen house.  

Look how well it worked having Goldman Sachs guys in charge of economic recovery from the massive financial fraud they profited from, an intricate scheme of deliberate deception that would have embarrassed Bernie Madoff, and almost sank the boat in 2008.  These experienced foxes know exactly how many hens they need to eat, let them do what they do best.  Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the continued unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans a year.   Those dead Americans are patriots, in a way, dying for the Free Market we all love and defend to the death.  Those preventable American deaths are the price the rest of us pay to live in a Free Market, and don’t you ever forget that.

I’m harsh on Obama because I actually believed the poetry he recited while campaigning.    Sad to say, my man was mostly saying whatever he needed to say to get into power, like they all do.  Sad to say, the alternative, both times, was seemingly much worse.  Now we’ve got a wobbly, over-confident scary clown for a commander-in-chief, thanks in part to my man Barack “Raking in Some Serious Tubmans” Obama.  People can only hear so much polished, meaningless bullshit coming from a bullshit artist, even a genius of the art, before they shut down.  

You like the Free Market so much?   Let the private health insurance industry compete with Medicare for all.  Let the best entity win, as it is written by the invisible hand of the Free Market.  “That was never in the cards,” say those in blue hats who still believe Obama had no choice.   Tacitly, they add with a silent sigh “super lucrative business interests and very well-paid, in-the-loop, revolving-door lobbyists are too powerful here in the Free Market to allow that massive incursion into their market share.  No matter how much better virtually everyone agrees a public option would be.”

Amy Goodman:

(After writing that meteorologists need to constantly explain that the latest catastrophic climate event is related to the pattern of increasingly disastrous global climate change)

How else will people understand the connection between disparate weather events, from dust-bowl conditions in the Midwest, to epic wildfires in the Northwest, and record-breaking cold in the Northeast?  Scientists tell us that climate change played a role in at least half the droughts, floods and storms in 2014.  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), on its global climate change website, states that “multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.  In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.” In Europe and other parts of the world there are debates on what to do about climate change.  But in the United States, we have debates on whether it exists at all, or if humans have contributed to it.   It’s as if every time we talked about the earth being round, we interviewed a member of the Flat Earth Society for “balance”.  (Democracy Now! p. 213)

The idiotic American debate on whether climate change even exists has been underwritten, at a cost of billions over several decades, by the industries that profit the most from the ultimate destruction of life on the planet.   Those industries are simply too lucrative, and too powerful, to let themselves wither and die just because the earth is being destroyed by the fossil products they extract and refine. 

The Secretary of State we have now knows this better than anybody, he was until recently the CEO of Exxon.  Exxon’s scientists were among the first to discover, in the 1970s,  the connection between burning fossil fuel, increased CO2 in the atmosphere and rising global temperatures.  The corporation published these findings, then spent the next few decades funding studies that would obfuscate those findings, cast them into doubt, create a debate between Alarmists and Skeptics.  Who are you going to believe, a hysterical Alarmist or a cool, calm skeptic?  Let the debate continue.  Meanwhile, CAH-ching!  Fossil fuel.  Good to the last drop.

What is the lesson of all this brouhaha over global warming for a leading voice of the Flat Earth Society, former loudest, unrepentant “Birther” voice?  Simple. Shut down NASA’s fucking website.  DUH!

Free Market, baby.  Like Justice, you get all the Freedom you can afford to pay for.  If you are poor, you know, you can’t afford much of either.  Probably best to shut the fuck up and keep your head down while the best and the brightest Make America Great Again.  Freedom, as always, is on the march, taking flight in the skies over your hovel.   Ask any ten year-old in Mosul, Waziristan or Raqqa. 

The Campaign for Critical Thinking

This campaign, which I am officially launching, though nonchalantly, will likely meet with the same fate as my undeniably innovative and, I’m sure, verifiably effective, program for team problem-solving, the student-run animation workshop.   A good idea, no matter how good, is not enough, of course.  If the idea is not self-monetizing and irresistible to angel investors, one needs funding, or, at minimum, a large network of enthusiasts.   In our culture, money speaks, and spreads the word, and makes or breaks.  One billionaire backer makes all the difference.

Even in the case of genius, great skill, luck and complementary genius is often necessary before an idea can get huge, become a force in society.  The Beatles would quite possibly never have become the worldwide phenomenon they became without the public relations genius of Brian Epstein.   The president we have now would not be the president without the genius of those who helped promote him, target his message, data-mine voting patterns to pinpoint the exact number of districts he needed to win the Electoral College, an anti-democratic mechanism created by the framers of the Constitution that can only be understood in connection to protecting the rights of slaveholders, who were a tiny minority of the population.  In some cases these poor slaveholders lived in states where they were also part of the racial minority!  Can you imagine the pressures on them?!

The certainty of failure must not deter the pursuit of a needed idea.   I heard Chris Hedges couch this in terms of his Christian belief– the duty to intervene on the side of righteousness does not depend on your chances of success.  In fact, you could argue that the duty becomes greater as the abuse escalates and the odds of failure increase. 

A simple idea then.  Reserve opinion, and advocacy, until you have as many facts as you can get.   Facts, you will say, are slippery.  There are now also “alternative facts” and facts invented for profit.   Many of the unverifiable facts that influenced the outcome of our recent election were dreamed up by industrious young capitalists, creating a market-driven product for which there was a huge demand.  

Millions hated Hillary, it was simply shrewd business to create another incendiary reason to hate her.   Make it wild enough you could get millions of monetized clicks.  How about a factual account of a child-sex ring she was involved with, located in the basement of a pizza place that has no basement?  They got millions of hits on that one, each one sounding a distinct “cah-ching!”. The story was repeated over and over among those who hated Hillary, each time it was liked, more profit for the “content creators”.  A guy with a gun finally went to investigate, to free the child sex slaves that Hillary and her people had locked up in that basement.   Hard to blame the guy, in a way.  

The same cynical genius, or a similar nonpartisan businessman, also came up with the Trump and Sheldon Adelson gang-raping the under-aged girl story.  CAH-ching!  Much of this fake news was created by highly successful content creators who wrote the fake news of the right and of the left.   They had no dog in the fight, did not even like dog fights, maybe, but there sure is money in the right dog fight.

Critical thinking is harder than reflexive thinking, for sure.  It is harder than many things.   The confirmation bias is one factor, we tend to believe new things that conform to what we already believe.   This has been greatly exacerbated by that tsunami of capitalist genius, Facebook.   Most people get their news from their friends on there, and algorithms track the news and send them more like-minded well-liked stories (and related ads).  Everybody wins.  Except for critical thinking. 

There has been a deliberate campaign against critical thinking in the United States, accelerated since the days of Reagan when political debate began to be reduced to “I Know You Are, but What am I?”  That anti-intellectual ideology is now personified in a party “intellectual” like Paul Ryan whose political credo was forged while reading a really long novel by a supremely opinionated Russian anti-communist named Ayn Rand.  Paul Ryan considers this poet, a rationalist, a self-proclaimed Objectivist, who believed that the “Invisible Hand” of the “Free Market” would free mankind from the tyranny of altruism, a profound political philosopher.

In Ayn Rand’s gigantic allegories about the evils of Communism she makes her case that the remarkable man will always be considered an enemy of the State, hated by the herd.  The titanic struggle of the remarkable visionary protagonist of her books inspires readers to admire persecuted individual genius and to value it far above the craven needs of the masses, who are lazy, corrupt and indifferent to evil.   Her novels also hammer home the message that it is no virtue to want to help others.  

Paul Ryan is considered a Republican intellectual because his political epiphany came while reading a really, really long book.  Take a quick, mocking look at the philosophy of Ayn Rand.   Here is the visionary herself, explaining to Phil Donahue why wanting to do good in the world is not a virtue.   If you have the stamina, toward the end of her presentation, you can hear Ayn Rand’s attack on public education, which she says creates a class of brainwashed slaves to government tyranny.  She also states that she would never vote for a woman for U.S. president.  A female commander-in-chief of the Army, she said, is “unspeakable”.

I am not using this despicable example simply to bash Republicans and Libertarians.   Democrats may be arguably likelier to critically debate policy positions, at least during the primaries, but they are hardly great advocates of critical thinking.  They defend their own indefensible inconsistencies as doggedly as their colleagues across the aisle.  

Any time you have only two positions to choose from, you are probably leaving important considerations and options off the table, not thinking very critically.   And critical thinking is now more critical than ever, as vast areas of the inhabited earth will soon be uninhabitable, as we pass a climactic tipping point while false arguments are forcefully presented, at great expense, by those who profit handsomely by the destruction of the planet. 

Critical thinking.  The Campaign for Critical Thinking.  Hastag don’t be a fucking asshole.

Compassionate Care Act, my ass

In a nation that for more than one hundred years could not agree that freed slaves had a federal right not to be lynched by terrorists in the states that formerly employed them, or anywhere else, it is not surprising that other, lesser injustices are sometimes tolerated.  We only have so much ability to be vexed by injustice, after all.  How many people can really get exercised when Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the diminutive racist Attorney General with the recently affronted honor, apparently blind and deaf to the lessons of American history, declares that the long war on marijuana users is back on, big time, baby.  Lock ’em up!   Lock ’em up!  

I am thinking of the short, violent, lawless failed experiment in making America sober, the Constitutional Amendment that gave us Prohibition, before that Amendment was repealed by another Amendment thirteen years later.   For many of the years it was illegal, you could do heavy time for transporting or even drinking alcohol.  Not surprisingly, it was a better bet for the mugs making a dollar hauling booze to reach for a machine gun than a driver’s license when stopped by the feds.   Today, the same is true, in certain states, for people carrying large amounts of marijuana in their cars.  

You can make a good argument that this country’s inexorable swing toward surveillance and the ever-increasing exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures (not to mention increasingly organized crime) are all traceable to the selective war on selected intoxicants.  I would — and I will, for my customary fee, drop me a line and a check.   In the meantime I’m here to say, once again, what the fuck?

Alcohol is a dangerous drug that fucks and kills thousands of Americans a year, destroys lives.  Liver disease, drunk driving and vehicular homicide, increased risk of heart disease, domestic violence, foolish and/or disgusting public behavior, bar fights, fights between angry drunks at sports stadiums, regrettable teenage overindulgences, direct deaths from alcohol poisoning in cases where a college freshman may have a quart or more of vodka poured into a tube inserted into her asshole, or when delicious, sweet liquor is guzzled by a child.   It’s not surprising that there was an effort to curb its abuse.  

But like the War on Terror, the war on some people’s need to abuse certain intoxicants can’t be won by SWAT teams overpowering people and throwing them into cells for long prison stretches.  

Hey, YO! it doesn’t fucking work, if your purpose is to actually address the problem you claim to want to solve.  That’s not really your purpose, as any child can see, but who am I to question the motives and wisdom of those who declare and conduct such wars?  

Anyway, dating back as far as Prohibition, there was a federal effort to root out marijuana use.   It is racist and xenophobic in its roots, sure, was codified and doubled down on by Richard Nixon, a paragon of moderation in his nightly alcohol use as his paranoia escalated in the lead up to his resignation in disgrace, yeah, yeah.  We know all that.   One can say that the criminalization of marijuana, a relatively innocuous intoxicant, while alcohol, a drug whose ongoing destructiveness is well-known, is readily procurable by any determined ten year-old, is a bit hypocritical, or whatever.   I just want to point out one recent example of “let me take a shit down your throat and tell you that it’s raining.”  It is part my campaign for critical thinking.

Criminal law under our Constitution is a matter for each state to decide for itself.  That is a cornerstone of our federal system.  The states make their own criminal, matrimonial, family and business laws.  That’s why, before the Supreme Court stepped in, some states could allow same sex marriage while other states could as be homophobic as their most influential homophobic constituents pleased.   Same goes for pot.  In some states you can now smoke marijuana “recreationally,” in other states you have permission for “medicinal use” which is given liberally, in some states permission for medicinal use is given less liberally.  

State laws are generally untouchable by federal law, except in the very special case where there is an overwhelmingly compelling need for a uniform federal law that preempts local and state wishes.  For the important federal purpose of breaking up protests and jailing political enemies, Negros, jazz musicians, itinerant Mexican workers, hipsters, hip-hoppers, poseurs, vipers, slackers, scoffers and other morally degenerate pot smokers, enforcement of the federal law against marijuana is clearly one such compelling exception to our general rule of States’ rights here in America.

States wishing not to arouse the federal government to literally send a SWAT team in and mass arrest those who, while complying with the laws of their own state nonetheless defy the unamended 1970 Controlled Substances Act, the federal anti-marijuana law, must “narrowly tailor” their state marijuana laws so that they do not run afoul of the federal law. The federal law defines marijuana as a dangerous drug with absolutely no redeeming medical value, a substance that needs to be controlled at all costs.  Federal law makes it very difficult to even conduct scientific research on marijuana.

Wait, I know, how do you not run afoul of that federal law with a medicinal marijuana law based on marijuana’s proven medicinal value when the federal law from 1970 clearly classifies marijuana among the most dangerous drugs, a potentially deadly substance with no medicinal value?  You actually can’t, of course.  But New York State, under its neoliberal asshole governor, gave it a good shot recently with its incredibly narrowly tailored, and puckishly titled “Compassionate Care Act”.  Check it out the overflowing compassion.

In the State of New York, you can use a preparation made from marijuana (but not the natural product itself– it is illegal under all circumstances, in NYS, to smoke or vaporize the actual plant) if you suffer from a select list of debilitating or deadly conditions AND have an additional associated, complicating factor.  If this surgically drawn list makes you think of John Yoo’s cunning redefinition of torture in that secret memo he wrote for Dick Cheney’s trip to the dark side, you’re not alone.   Here you go:

You are potentially eligible for medical marijuana if you have been diagnosed with a specific severe, debilitating or life threatening condition that is accompanied by an associated or complicating condition. By law, those conditions are: cancer, HIV infection or AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury with spasticity, epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease, neuropathy, and Huntington’s disease. The associated or complicating conditions are cachexia or wasting syndrome, severe or chronic pain, severe nausea, seizures, or severe or persistent muscle spasms.

The source of this is the NYS Department of health website, via the FAQ, the last of a few dozen, from the website of a corporation with a franchise, that includes New York City, to provide medical marijuana derivatives under New York State’s Compassionate Care Act.  Check out these dynamic cutting-edge, physician-led benefactors of the selected extremely ill of New York State.  

If you have PTSD, glaucoma, loss of appetite from chemo (but neither severe nausea nor facial wasting), sleeplessness, anxiety, severe pain not associated with the listed conditions, or suffer from the effects of any other non-specified condition that marijuana is known to palliate — have a very nice day, and best of luck to you.   New York is interested in complying as strictly as possible with the Controlled Substances Act, even though it is a clear logical impossibility to do so.    We’re working harder to serve you better, bitches.  Vote for me and I’ll set you free.  

And if you just want to get high, and not use alcohol or a pharmaceutical, we can still lock you up, if you’re going to be an asshole about it.

I’m going to go drink a flagon of Monkey Shoulder now, if you will excuse me.

 

The Reason I Know Flag Day is also DJT Day

I was a bit harsh on the late night comedians the other day.  They really do serve a vital purpose in our democracy, beyond making us laugh and being an escape valve for the relentless feeling of helplessness all but a super-privileged few experience in the face of the policies and priorities of our democratic republic.  Trevor Noah, Colbert, Seth Meyer, Samantha Bee and their ilk inform us, put things plainly that are obscured by millionaire media assholes who perform for their advertisers without the sense of humor.  

It does relatively little to report that the Attorney General may not have been entirely truthful in his sworn testimony in front of a senate committee.    Playing the clip of what he said while tap dancing at the hearing, and then playing a collage of clips where he said the opposite a few weeks, or days, earlier, as the late night comedians routinely do?   Priceless.

The president had a film crew on hand the other day to make a record of his first full cabinet meeting.  Reince Preibus, a man with the best name for his job this side of Rex Tillerson and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Turd, began by telling the president with an ingratiating smile, on behalf of the entire White House staff, what a privilege, honor, blessing, benison, stroke of good fortune it is to serve this remarkable and historic president.  They went around the table, each one declaring similar sentiments.  Among the well-wishers, Ben Carson may have unintentionally spoken a sobering truth by his selection of a verb tense: Mr. President, it’s been a great honor to work with you.   

The president smiled graciously.   Then he addressed the group and informed them that although he had declared his candidacy on June 16, a candidacy that nobody could believe, leading to a presidency that nobody can believe, his birthday is actually June 14.   “Flag day,” I thought, when I heard it.  Anyway, that’s how I know today is the president’s birthday.   I laugh now, admittedly without that much mirth, thinking of the merciless imitation of the child-president by Trevor Noah, done in connection with the surprise announcement of his birthday.  

If I was a nicer guy, or in a better mood, or truly the selfless servant of my reader(s), I would find the wonderful moments I am thinking of, place the links here.  There is a feature on youTube that allows you to copy a link to the exact moment you want a friend (or hated enemy, or whatever) to see.   I could scroll through one of Trevor Noah’s wonderful pieces and find that moment where he does the president as a spoiled child of less than average intelligence.   I could find that great expression Seth Meyers makes in a comedically pregnant pause following a freeze frame from the president’s photo op/cabinet meeting.  But my attitude today, in honor of our president’s birthday, is fuck you.  Seriously, and sincerely, you can all go fucking fuck yourselves.    

Anyway, at the risk (even certainty) of being redundant, that’s how I know that today is the president’s birthday.  I could look up how old he is today,  I’m pretty sure it’s either seventy-one or three, but, honestly, who gives a shit?  

If I was sending him an electronic birthday card today, I’d include this link.  I told you I’m in a foul mood today.   For a fascinating discussion of the Emoluments Clause violations charges Democrats are bringing against the birthday boy, clickez ici.   God bless.

I Don’t Know How Amy Goodman Does It

I admire Amy Goodman.  She is plain-spoken, hard-working, fair-minded, idealistic, undeterred, reporting important, often otherwise unreported, stories every day.  I am informed by her reporting, learning things you never hear from the wealthy talking heads of the main stream media, the consolidated, advertising-driven corporate mass media even our president reviles.   Watching her update for today just now I noticed this by the side of the video:

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I know about this story from Democracy Now! and the reporting of people like Jeremy Scahill (a one-time protégé of Amy’s, if I’m not mistaken).  Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, is being assaulted by Saudi Arabia as the wealthy oil producer seeks to keep Shia militants from taking  over control of Yemen, an impoverished country bordering Saudi Arabia.   Our president, moments before doing a sword dance with leaders who behead heretics and protesters in their nation,  announced the great deal he made with the Saudis. We are giving them a very good deal, we learn, on $110,000,000,000 of America’s best armaments, munitions, weaponry, planes, drones, bombs, missiles.  

The Saudis are putting state of the art American weapons to good use against their Shia rebel enemies in Yemen.   Saudi ordnance is killing the Houthis, and anyone else within range, as the Saudis lead a coalition of other wealthy Arab nations intervening violently in the civil war in Yemen.   Meanwhile, in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, there is what the United Nations calls a massive humanitarian catastrophe underway.  Among other horrors, people are dying of cholera, an ancient disease that today mainly effects those living in poverty.

Cholera, google tells us, is an infectious and often fatal bacterial disease of the small intestine, typically contracted from infected water supplies and causing severe vomiting and diarrhea.  

With all the problems we Americans have at this moment, is it any wonder that only six people have watched the Democracy Now! report on the cholera deaths in Yemen?  After all, nobody knows that doomed child staring out of the youtube hero frame, one of countless poor brown children doomed to die today in dozens of war zones all over the world.  It’s not as if the anonymous child is an American kid from Connecticut, a young individual with a name, a cute school photo, a bright future and grief stricken parents, caught in a preventable but, for him, deadly epidemic.   Yet Amy Goodman persists in reporting the “anonymous” kid’s terrible story.  God bless her.

Amy followed up on the ongoing Saudi white phosphorous war crime issue today.  What is white phosphorous?  

In September 2016, The Washington Post reported that Saudi Arabia “appears” to be using US-made white phosphorus munitions against Yemen, based on images and videos posted to social media. Under US regulations, white phosphorus is only allowed to be used to signal to other troops and to reduce visibility in open ground, creating a smoke-screen. It is not to be used to attack humans as it burns human flesh down to the bone, which is considered excessively cruel. A United States official said the department was looking into whether the Saudis used white phosphorus improperly.[376]

Look, I get it.  We can all agree that using a weapon, even one made in the U.S.A., that burns flesh down to the bone is excessively cruel.   War crimes are horrible, whether allegedly committed by our allies, by our troops or by our hated enemies.  Who wants to read about that kind of thing, an atrocity we are utterly powerless to stop in any case, when we can all rally around even a foolish American president who drops a gigantic bomb that is magnificently filmed as it falls and fills the night with majestic flames?

If, as Amy reports, an armed U.S. Reaper Drone in the skies over Somalia rained down several Hellfire missiles yesterday, and reportedly killed a bunch of Al Shabaab militants in a camp, isn’t that something to celebrate?   We are killing the terrorists over there before they can kill us here.   This is the War on Terror that Bush and Cheney started, and it will take more than the rest of our lifetimes to finish the job.   It would take Jesus Christ himself, punching out the American president on live TV during prime time, to change anything about this sacred and lucrative war against religious maniacs who want us all dead.  

And still Amy Goodman reports, and endures, and finds hope wherever it is to be found.  

In other news she reported this morning, the attorney generals of Maryland and Washington D.C. have sued the president for alleged violations of the Emoluments Clause, a provision in our Constitution which makes it illegal for a president to take money, or anything else that could be counted as a bribe, from foreign governments.   The suits center on the millions this president has allegedly received so far from foreign governments who were paying guests at the president’s hotel in Washington D.C., including dignitaries from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait who have all paid to stay at the hotel since the inauguration.   I’m sure the Grey Lady reported that one today, too.  I see that within the last hour or so many mainstream news services have jumped on this story.  God bless the press.

Here’s an inspirational moment from today’s Democracy Now! broadcast.

Institutional Personality

This is not the time to write this, but I want to jot it down right quick before I forget.  Institutions actually have personalities.   It is related to the legal fiction that a corporation is a person under American law, but much more tangible.   To be direct: a corporation is a “person” with only one consideration– maximizing profit to itself and its shareholders.  The corporation, as a person, is essentially a very powerful psychopath, a constantly advancing predator incapable of anything but feeding.   Institutions, in contrast to the stark personality type that is the modern corporate “person”, actually have distinct personalities.  These institutional personalities are expressed in how they treat the people they deal with.

I give one example, then I’m out of here.  Two hospitals, both with fine doctors (and asshole doctors) both with considerate support staff (and inconsiderate support staff).   This is about their institutional personalities.

Columbia has a hospital, it’s corporate identity has changed a few times in recent years, it was called Columbia Presbyterian for many years, it’s now New York-Presbyterian, apparently.  The hospital has no Patient Advocate or ombudsperson.  Its billing is done by a third party.  The bills they send are non-negotiable.  Sometimes the bills turn out to have been sent in error, but in all cases they are the responsibility of the patient to pay or make excuses to the third party billing service until they can be straightened out with the insurance company. There is no discount offered, the fee is the fee and it is not negotiable.  If you are indigent, and can prove it at an off-site office, charity may pay your outstanding bill.  Otherwise, have a nice day, you will get collection letters from our attorneys if you do not remit.  

From time to time the Columbia hospital non-profit corporation sends, amid collection letters from their lawyers, solicitation letters touting their generous service to the community and seeking your tax deductible donation.  This institutional personality is what’s known as an asshole.  The personality likely reflects that of the wealthy, supremely talented twat who accepts his multi-million dollar salary to captain the charitable ship of the hospital he’s so rightfully proud of.

NYU hospital, next door to Bellevue, is another large, non-profit operation.  I had a problem recently getting medical records.  One call to a very nice woman at the Patient Advocate’s office quickly resolved the problem.   I’d been informed two weeks earlier, that I owed $2,100 out of pocket, an advance payment, before they’d perform the renal biopsy the following day.   When I expressed dismay and asked about financial assistance, I was given the number of an office that quickly relieved me of the $2,100 copay, based on my income and the large payment my insurance was making on my behalf.   I had a letter confirming the waiver two days later.  When I got NYU’s solicitation letter the other day, I did not feel bitter at all.  

It would not surprise me at all if the board members and executives of Columbia and NYU eat dinner together every week at the same exclusive club, frequent the same high class house of prostitution, support draconian economic policies that only benefit them and indulge in every other refined behavior that goes with being in the 1%.  I only know what I have experienced of the personality of the two institutions.  I prefer the one that is not the asshole.

A Search for Truth

Reading Amy Goodman’s wonderful, terrible new book, which is a search for truth, I was struck again by one of the habits of highly successful psychopaths.   They have learned what gangsters and abusers have always known:  never admit fault for anything.  Amy describes situation after situation where atrocious things are done, often in our name, and the punishment is placed squarely on those who reveal the crimes, rather than on the criminals.   Ensuring a lack of transparency is one of the key habits of highly successful psychopaths.   Deniability is everything.   “If you can’t prove I did it, go fuck yourself, ass bite.  Maybe YOO fucking did it?  Eh, fuckface?”  

Poor people, we are often lectured by conservative pundits and politicians, fail to take personal responsibility for their situation.  If they would only admit it was themselves, and not somebody else, who was born poor and hopeless, they could begin the process of taking responsibility and pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.   Indeed.  Even the cliche is perfect.   Picture how one would actually pull oneself up by her bootstraps.   I did not do well in Physics, but it doesn’t take much grasp of the physical laws of our planet to realize the impossibility of that trick.

Old people who find themselves in need, I’m sure it’s the same deal, if you are old, and weak, and don’t have a boatload of money,  who is to blame but you?  Sick people?  Same deal.   An elected Republican talking head said a few weeks ago, about the proposed dismantling of the ACA, that people who lead good lives and make good choices don’t need much health care, because they’re healthy.  Spontaneous, painful cancer of his brain would fix that particular spokesman for psychopaths, in my humble, if merciless, opinion.  

The failure to admit wrongdoing is a society-wide pathology.  It’s not limited to CEO-types or restricted to any political ideology.  I saw Elizabeth Warren being interviewed by Bill Maher a few weeks back.  Maher got in deep shit the other day for an ad lib referring to himself as a “house nigger.”   There’s no real dispute as to the accuracy of the characterization, the slave is very privileged, it’s only that he chose a taboo, incendiary word to describe it.   Anyway, the “house nigger” (got to love quotation marks) was interviewing Senator Warren not long ago.   I admired Warren very much when she first came on the public scene.  Her careful party politics and recent votes for some of Trump’s worst cabinet picks irked me, as did her weak ass rationales for her votes.

At one point Maher asked her if the Democratic party bore any responsibility for losing the presidential election to the most widely hated presidential candidate ever.  Warren danced away from the question adroitly and Maher let her dance.  She would not allow that the Democratic party had anything to do with the loss, or the swing in Congress, or the rash of new Republican governors.  

I sat there watching her calmly avoid the question and jump to her talking points and a bit more of my respect for Senator Warren dribbled away.  Reminded me of the old “how do you know when a politician is lying?”   You know, when their lips are moving.  Et tu, Elizabeth?  Even as I recall how most elections are decided on gut feelings based on gotcha sound bites, how every national politician has to play the careful public relations game in our advertising culture.  I get how the sound bite of Warren criticizing her party would be used endlessly against her, but there was a way to answer the  question that would have shown more integrity than her poised pivot.

I’m reading Amy Goodman’s book and I am full of admiration for her life’s project of searching for and revealing the truth.  It is painful, to look closely at our recent history, to see terrible things that were done in our name, are being done right now.  The worst of it is reading how these terrible things are spun, to profit those without conscience and protect the architects of murderous programs.  Much as I am engrossed in the book, I am also wondering if it is not a bit masochistic for me to look at these awful things so closely.   Then I realize it is my obligation as a citizen, that looking squarely at the facts of terrible things done in our name is a solemn duty, if we are to live in a meaningful democracy.    

My father would never drive a German car, buy a German camera, use any German product.  He’d describe to us how Mercedes Benz (maybe it was BMW, maybe it was both)  was involved in building machines to help the Nazis kill and dispose of Jews.   He would recite similar details, that I have forgotten, about other well-known German corporations.  The point is, it’s not hard to trace the complicity of German corporations in Hitler’s mass murder machine.  A lot of shrewd businessmen, in Germany and elsewhere, made a killing during the Nazi years. Fuck, if Monsanto could hire slave laborers from the SS for $1 a day, don’t you think they’d do it?   Their shareholders would demand it.  It would be irresponsible of them not to do it.  

I asked my father at one point if the Vietnamese had the same right to hate us because of what our country was doing to them.  He said they absolutely did. Even as the vast anti-war marches I participated in were taking place, even as I told myself I’d burn my draft card or go to Canada if it came to it.  It was confusing to a teenager that I was responsible for what the war-mongers in my country were doing, doing against my will.  I believe my father was basically right on this count of national responsibility.  Even if there was nothing we could possibly do about it.  Even if the vast majority of us were nothing like the brave Germans who were hunted, tortured and killed by the Nazis for being more loyal to humanity than to their infallible leader, Mr. Hitler.  

“It always comes down to Nazis to you,” a friend reminds me with a smile.  I remind him that I may be overly sensitive on the subject because twelve of my mother’s aunts and uncles were shot in the head at the request of Nazis visiting their town. Because the hamlet my father’s people come from was plowed into the swamp without a trace, along with everyone but his mother and his uncle.  Life is no different for civilians fleeing from Mosul today than it was for my family in 1943.   Why are there explosions everywhere, and gunfire, and bombing, doors being kicked in, piles of corpses?  Because the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to free those poor, oppressed people from a monster.

I know, I’m being very unfair.  How is it our fault?  Saddam Hussein was like Hitler, after all, we did the right thing to invade, execute Saddam’s two sons in a hail of bullets, give Saddam a good old fashioned Texas-style lynching under cover of darkness, as all good lynchings should be done.   Was Dick Cheney that much different from Saddam Hussein when it came to brutal coercion and willingness to unleash large-scale violence?   I know, I know.  I should get over it.  Obama owned the war once Cheney left office.   Dick Cheney will never be held accountable for his crimes, even if anyone could prove them.  Obama will be our first self-made billionaire ex-president.  He is already well on his way.  Besides, as Diane Feinstein said of David Patraeus after he was allowed to skate for sharing thousands of classified emails with his mistress, haven’t these men already suffered enough?

I am left with my admiration for people like Amy Goodman, and there are far too few of them.  Bill Moyers was in many ways like Amy.  A broadcast journalist in search of the truth, and bold in reporting it, wherever the search led.  It is because of their reporting that we can understand, on an institutional level, how an American man can be cleared of murder after getting out of his car to confront and shoot to death an unarmed black teenager who was minding his own business.  It is, we are told, because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.  

What is “Stand Your Ground”?  Thanks to their investigative reporting we understand that it is a law drafted by a far right corporate lobbying outfit called ALEC.  They introduced the model bill in many state houses, it became law in more than twenty-eight so far, including, not that surprisingly, the entire former Confederacy.  It extends the “Castle Doctrine”, the right to defend yourself with deadly force if confronted with violence in your own home, to everywhere you might feel threatened.   In some jurisdictions you have a duty to retreat, if you can do so safely, before you can use deadly force.  Not so under “Stand Your Ground”.  

If you’re terrified of young black men, for example, it may not be unreasonable, depending on your fear, to shoot them in the face in any public place where you have a right to be.   It’s the law in Florida and in a majority of these United States, a matter for a jury of your peers to decide.  A troubled vigilante-style killer with a long history of domestic violence walked thanks to a successful “Stand Your Ground” defense.  In fairness to him, George Zimmerman, his father was also a local magistrate.

Democracy is not democracy without informed debate.  If secret deals are made, and laws are skirted, and lobbyist-written laws promulgated, by little known, very powerful outfits like ALEC, and we are never even informed of the existence and influence of ALEC, the politically active billionaire Koch Brothers and their ilk– how are we to have a democracy?  

The choice is made for us behind closed doors about what kind of nation we are.   We are a nation that shoots people in the face, in the back, in the spine.  Not long ago we shot an eight year-old girl in the spine and let her take her time dying.  It was in Yemen, a nation we are not at war with, during the new president’s first SEAL team moment of glory.  The girl was Anwar al Awlaki’s daughter Nora.   We are a nation that doesn’t get fucked with. You’d better fucking believe it.

I don’t know what gives Amy Goodman the strength to carry on, producing and hosting Democracy Now! as she has been doing daily for the last twenty years. All I know is that I am very thankful for her work.  And that we need democracy, now, more than ever.

 

 

 

 

On a Lighter Note

Our thirteen year-old cat, Skaynes, recently diagnosed with a fatal and irreversible disease, chronic renal failure, just hopped up on to his feeding post and looked at me expectantly.   His appetite has been spotty lately, but he still shakes us down for treats, even if he doesn’t always eat them.  I took a break from thoroughly cleaning his litter boxes to find out what he wanted as a snack.

I took down the box of his various treats, and, as I offered the first to him, he sunk his grey fangs into my wrist.  I pointed out to him that he was literally biting the hand that was trying to feed him, but he was unimpressed.  He bit my wrist again, by way of reply.  He bit it every time I tried to place his treat in front of him.  We often refer to him as The Baron.  This was certainly baronial behavior, it seems to me.  

Thinking of fucking barons, those born booted and spurred to ride and rape the rest of us, reminded me of this lighter note, such as it is.

Farmers used to love Thomas Jefferson, they saw him as a fellow farmer.  I heard a quote of old TJ’s yesterday, a wonderful quote by the old agrarian.  

“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.” [1]

I know it’s wrong, and I couldn’t help myself, but I started thinking of the rest of the quote, lost to posterity:  “and I should know, bitch, I own more than three hundred of them!”  

Just then his beautiful half-sister-in-law (his wife and her had the same white father) and long-time mistress Sally, a piece of his personal property, in both senses of the word, walked by.  

“Got to go now, bitches,” said the Author of Liberty with a wink, a man way, way ahead of his time.

 

[1]   It goes without saying (he said) that Jefferson held this truth to be as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.

The American Left Goes Too Far, and Not Far at all

The other night, after an exhausting trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, meeting with world leaders, the president got back on Twitter.  A fair-minded person would assume he was tired after a grueling trip and quite possibly dozed off mid-tweet, his thumbs probably hitting random keys.   The tweet was an unintelligible prelude to a complaint about the liberal media that is busily, gleefully crucifying the president, who is doing his very best to learn a very complicated job on the job. Much merriment was made over the president’s incoherent tweet, kind of confirming the very point about the media that the president was in the process of tweeting when he passed out.  

Here it is, have another laugh:  “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”.   Hilarious, yo.

The president had been greeted warmly on his first stop by the medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia.  He promised them a good deal on over $110,000,000,000 in weapons so that Saudi Arabian royalty can remain in power.   The House of Saud are Islamic fundamentalists, adherents for two centuries of  the most extreme and intolerant form of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism (they prefer to call it Salafism,  apparently), an ideology they’ve spent billions to export.     For a perspective on the consistency of the president’s worldview, google Saudi Arabia.  Third from the  the top, this summary from Wikipedia:  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocratic monarchy in which Sunni Islam is the official state religion based on firm Sharia law and non-Muslims are not allowed to hold Saudi citizenship.  [1]

The president likely intimated to our close Saudi allies that he planned to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, joining Syria (Nicaragua apparently didn’t sign on because the voluntary deal didn’t go far enough to protect the environment), a move that would ensure the ongoing value of  Saudi fossil fuel since there would be no decrease in American demand if the U.S. was no longer a signatory to the pledge to reduce carbon emissions.   Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State from Exxon, no doubt smiled about that part too, even as he publicly speaks about the need to curb rising temperatures.   In Israel, the president’s old friend, right-wing hard-liner Bibi Netanyahu, greeted the president as an old friend.  Only the Pope was bitchy to the president.  

I mean, did you see the Pope’s face, his body language?  What unPopelike behavior!  SAD!

Things went downhill for the president after that bitter cameo by the Pope. NATO countries were also bitchy to him, particularly after he called them a bunch of deadbeats.   The French president practically arm-wrestled him during an extended handshake, afterwards explicitly saying he did it to show that Europe was not prepared to take any shit from the pushy American president.  One can imagine how psychologically taxing the trip was for a germaphobe who does not like to travel, except between the D.C. White House, the southern resort White House and occasional trips to Trump Tower in New York City to see his wife and youngest child.

So the Left makes sport of the man, because of a typo.  Isn’t that just like the petty, gotcha Left?   The so-called fact-based, proof-reading fucking Left.   Very clever, one more reason that patriotic people who do not always think things through to their logical conclusions, and sometimes react out of rage, hate the fucking smug liberal elites.    Yes, you’re hilarious Samantha Bee, Colbert, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fucking Kimmel.  Laugh while you still can.

Why am I bothering to tap the keys today instead of getting about my business?  Because it was the only way I could stop myself from watching endless video clips of people opining about what is wrong with the president, how long it will be before he self-destructs, how much damage he will do to us all before he does. Better to chatter here, I figure, than to keep watching people like Dan Rather carefully say that the president is the most “emotionally troubled” president since Nixon.  Liberal smart aleck Keith Olbermann compares the behavior of our divisive, decisive, learning on the job president to notorious first century Roman Emperor Nero.  

I am troubled because, beyond the mockery, I don’t see much evidence of organized, principled opposition coming together.  I can’t picture so far how we organize it on a large enough scale to influence law and policy.   On the left, among nationally known elected officials, meaning those of the rather conservative post-Bill and Barack corporate Democratic party, only Bernie Sanders is consistently articulating a vision of needed change and specifically refuting every one of the right’s talking points.  It makes me wish that once Bernie saw which way the wind was blowing inside the Democratic party during the tilted primaries he’d opted for a third party run against the most hated and second most hated presidential contenders ever.  Even as I am well-aware of the fate of every other American third party.  This may have actually been the moment for it, given the unsavory contenders, and I’d have liked his chances.

Meanwhile, the faux-populist billionaire reality-TV star genius of branding president, although only marginally effective so far,  has managed to advance a short list of extreme right wing wet dreams.  He has gone down the greatest hits of cherished extreme right positions and taken bold steps to advance several big ones as he throws bloody meat to his base.  He is doing a lot of damage before he flames out.  There is the real possibility that, in spite of everything, he will not be held to account for anything:  winning is everything and he is exactly the kind of angry winner enough Americans voted for to make their president.  No matter how much he winds up hurting those who still believe he would stand up for them, get their jobs in the coal mines back, make America great again.

Protect the environment?  Fuck the environment, where’s the money in the environment? Appoint a man who has repeatedly sued the EPA to head the EPA.  That’s how we fucking take care of business, in your face!  Oh, and Global Warming is bullshit too, come negotiate with me, rest of the world (hats off to you on this issue, Bashir al-Assad) if you want to convince me it’s not.  What’s next?  Public education?  Fuck that shit, we’ll have the Christian fundamentalist daughter of a right wing billionaire, a generous campaign donor who has never set foot in a public school, oversee the end of that fucking scam.  The stupider and less critical-thinking people are, the easier it is for all of us.    Science?  Cut the funding, research is stupid.  Support for poor children?  They made the wrong choice in life, being born fucking losers.  Immigrants and Muslims?  Fuck ’em.  Black lives matter?  I beg to differ.  Poor people in government-supported housing, the so-called housing of last resort before homelessness?  We got a sleepy looking right wing black guy, famous as a doctor, who says he’s not qualified for the job of HUD Secretary — and he’s our man to oversee the dismantlement of those ‘entitlements’, he’ll do it because he’s a patriot.  Women want the right to control their own bodies?   Wombs don’t vote, asshole, huge blocks of Christian zealots do.  Privatized prisons open for business as the Attorney General vows to renew Nixon’s federal war on marijuana addicts and those who profit from that evil, unAmerican weed.  Go down the list, a cynical far right freak show at every stop.

I recently had a long email conversation with an old friend about America’s permanent war against “Terror”,  now almost fifteen years in.  The fact that Obama signed off on it, along with mass surveillance, secret kill lists, escalated drone strikes and many of Cheney’s other “unitary executive” policies, while paying lip service to smart wars, negotiation and “transparency”, disturbs me as much as anything President Hope and Change did or didn’t do.  My friend is a skillful devil’s advocate and he argued, convincingly, that Obama was no worse than other presidents, better than most.  

My friend, in his spirited advocacy for devilish policies, even seemed, at one point, to argue in favor of the idiocy of “kill ’em all over there so they won’t kill us over here”.  He pointed out that the president, whoever that person is, is severely constrained in what he can actually do.  The president serves at the pleasure of very powerful forces, and is also dragged along (he reminds me) by the irresistible currents of history, culture, natural disaster, ancient prejudices and constantly updated hatreds.   These larger forces will always have the final say in how much the U.S. winds up spending, and how many innocents and bad hombres alike are killed, maimed and displaced to keep the world safe for Freedom, Liberty, Democracy, the Free Market and things like that.  Hard to argue against all that.

In the end he agreed that the ruthless, endless, escalating war on multiple Islamic nations probably creates as many terrorists as it kills.  I signed on to a long list of horrifying realities that dictate American foreign and domestic policies including the vast war profits for the wealthy (nothing is more lucrative than permanent war), the tragic gullibility of many frightened Americans and how excited most Americans of both parties seem to get any time our president sets off a huge explosion that kills a lot of brown people somewhere.  I sent him this list of acknowledged horrors and he wrote back, with the beautiful brevity of a spot-on tweet:  Now you see my perspective.

That perspective is hard to miss, as is the worst side of human nature, vividly on display when times are tough and citizens are gripped by anger and a deep sense of hopelessness.  Just turn on the news– the media focuses almost exclusively on conflict and violence, the more extreme the better.  If it bleeds it leads, baby, you know the drill.  Then the only question is who is to blame for this deplorable state of affairs, and who you blame will depend on whether your baseball hat is red or blue.  

There is a large and influential industry devoted almost entirely to assigning blame and channeling anger, and it’s big money, yooge money. Though reflexively blaming, rather than seriously discussing problems and possible solutions, misses the point of the whole exercise of what democracy is meant to be, of course.   With rooting reflexively for a team there is no informed debate, no need — only die-hard loyalty is required.  Political discourse is conveniently reduced to lustily rooting for your team; it means the team with the savviest marketing, the best on-slogan market saturation and most enthusiastic rah-rah section takes home the trophy.  That the trophy is making policy that will drastically effect the lives of tens or hundreds of millions for a generation or more is easily enough missed in all the excitement.

We have arrived at a moment in our history when the American president appoints, as a top advisor, his young son-in-law, oldest son of another billionaire, whose chief experience and qualification is working for his dad.   This young man is put in charge of virtually everything important in government.  The president expresses great confidence in him.  The Pope poses disgustedly next to this personification of nepotism.  And so it goes.

Acknowledging the enormity of the horror can’t be the end of the story. Powerful people run a corrupt and evil machine that can never be stopped  — The End.  What kind of fucking movie is that?  Who’d pay to see that shit?  I had to send my friend Howard Zinn’s words, spoken while accepting an award late in his life.  Zinn explained why he studied and taught history, why he sat down to write A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

I love the fact that in America I can sit at the computer and watch smart, funny people deconstruct the destructive idiocy of these unrepentant Birthers, Flat-Earthers, Climate Change Deniers, Free-Market Trickle Down Tricksters, Post-racial, color-blind alt-racists, Creationist Science Skeptics, Homophobes, Xenophobes, gun-crazed believers that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with well-regulated militias, whatever libtards might say about it, whatever the text itself might arguably say [2], and every other sort of insister on their right to be as inconsistent, irrational or unjust as their massive wealth, or their dream of acquiring same, allows them to be.  

We can still make fun of them here in America, no matter how powerful the personifications of these idiotic beliefs become.  It’s great to live in a country where the First Amendment allows satire and comedy to flourish, no matter how challenging it is for satirists to keep pace with the straight-faced, serious-as-cancer, real-life seeming satire that happens many times a day now in the highest reaches of our pay-to-play democracy.   Humor is healthy for democracy, it is good to laugh, good to mock powerful idiocy.  It’s a release valve, it’s a start, and it’s essential, but it changes nothing, wins no hearts, minds or votes.

I hate the fact that satire seems to be the best we can do here and now in the land of the free and the home of the brave spectators.  Sit in an on-line echo chamber and laugh with a like-minded comic, or smirking pundit, while in a parallel echo chamber they deride your derisive laughter.   Rachel Madow?  Smug, rich, out of touch, super liberal bitch.  Anne Coulter?  Smug, rich, out of touch, super right wing bitch.  According to your deeply held worldview Coulter is a psycho, Madow is a psycho.  It is virtually impossible to like both, if you hold any values at all.  Those who hate one or the other agree on only one thing, the other one is a bitch.  

It behooves us other bitches to heed the words of Howard Zinn and reach for that rare but essential spirit that organizes, and fights effectively, especially when the fight seems the most hopeless.  

It’s not enough to watch like-minded pundits, laugh at like-minded comedians and wait for leaders, hoping for marginally better ones than what the big, smart, well-spoken money provides for our vote every four years.  We need open public conversation rather than the far more profitable televised debate which often comes down to “nyah nyah!!!”.   Personally, I can’t watch somebody like Tucker Carlson without wanting to punch him in the face, in spite of my commitment to ahimsa.  Bill Maher, funny as he sometimes is, same deal.  I have no problem understanding why anyone would want to sock him in that smug, adorable face, though we don’t act that way in a democracy.

It’s not enough to bark words on your social media feed, as I am doing right now, although this doesn’t reach nearly as many people as the average anonymous Facebook post.  We need to somehow get to the serious work of organizing a real alternative to solve deep and persistent problems.   “How?” is the question.

To borrow a few felicitous phrases from Howard Zinn, I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that such organizing is already happening, that I just haven’t figured out how to find and join it, and that we are, all of us, poised to participate in a fugitive moment of compassion rather than in the increasing darkness of eternal total warfare against everything that does not turn a handsome profit for the most powerful, and heedless, among us.  

 

NOTES

[1]  Can’t resist piling on to badmouth these murderous billionaire religious fanatic House of Saud fucks: 

The majority of mainstream Sunni and Shia Muslims worldwide strongly disagree with the interpretation of Wahhabism, and many Muslims would denounce them as a faction or a “vile sect”.[8] Islamic scholars, including those from the Al-Azhar University, regularly denounce Wahhabism with terms such as “Satanic faith”.[8] Wahhabism has been accused of being “a source of global terrorism”,[34][35] inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),[36]and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi definition of monotheism as apostates[37] (takfir) and justifying their killing.[38][39][40] It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic shrines of saints, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.[41][42][43]

[2]    The Second Amendment:  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.