Postmortem; DAPL Escalation; Gratitude for a Pivotal Gift

DESPITE ALL THE intensified and now obviously never-to-be-diminished nastiness spewing from the Hillaryites, the one certainty about President Elect Donald Trump is that we cannot yet be certain what sort of president he will be.

As I emailed a profoundly distraught friend early this morning, Trump's acceptance speech was a model of reconciliation – and no I am not being sarcastic. He said, in essence, that he intends be president "for all Americans," and that he wants to befriend  any nation who will befriend us.

Shortly after the president-elect had spoken, RT (which had provided what was by far the most professional election-night coverage), reported that – as Western European leaders were still dithering about in shock  and horror  – Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had sent Trump a message of congratulations,  the first national leader to do so.

Putin's reaction means I can sleep much better tonight. Take it from me – because I was part of the last Civil Rights Movement – it is a helluva lot easier to fight domestic racism than it is to stop global war-mongering: in which context note the (temporary) successes of the Civil Rights Movement versus the permanent debacles of Vietnam, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. ad nauseam.

It is something of an aside, but in defense of the individual USian soldier, Marine, sailor and air-person, – and bearing in mind I was once a U.S. Regular Army soldier myself (active duty 1959-1962; reserves 1963-1965) – it should be noted a major part of the blame for our now-obviously permanent inability at conventional warfare is the fact that under capitalism, military equipment is designed for maximum profit rather than maximum battlefield efficiency. The classic example is the current U.S. service-rifle, the M-16 and its newest variant the M-4 carbine, each so notorious for fatal malfunctions it is often “lost” on the battlefield and replaced by AK-47s taken from enemy dead. The AK-47 and its successor the AK-74 – like all Sino-Soviet equipment – is designed to kill the enemy rather than to fatten the bank accounts of obscenely wealthy military-industrial profiteers and their bureaucratic collaborators.

Thus, despite the USian Empire's permanent-war mentality and militarily aggressive war-dependent capitalism, U.S. troops have not won a conventional war since 1950, when they conquered North Korea. But they were then battled into headlong retreat when the Chinese, employing Sun Tzu's principle of “when near, make it appear you are far away,” infiltrated 300,000 combat-seasoned soldiers across the Yalu River into North Korea, launched a surprise offensive along the entire front and sent United States and United Nations troops fleeing for their lives. The result, after the Chinese took back North Korea and returned it to Kim Il Sung, was the (oft-violated) armistice of 1953, which remains in effect. Clearly as embittered by the Empire's endless failures at conventional warfare as Sen. (“Nuke Hanoi”) Barry Goldwater was, Goldwater Girl Hillary unquestionably intended to use nukes to compensate for the now-notorious U.S. inability to win at conventional warfare – never mind the result would exterminate our species and kill the planet as well. That's why so many people, I among them, were legitimately terrified by Hillary's ever-more-obvious intent to start World War III, quite possibly with an unprovoked thermonuclear attack on the Russian Motherland.

But neither could I bear the thought of a Trump presidency and its threatened Holocaust against African-American, Hispanic, First Nations, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual-Queer, Communist, socialist, anarchist and libertarian peoples – not to mention the Christian jihad against female sexual freedom promised by its opposition to abortion and birth control. Hence I voted for Jill Stein, literally – as I said in a comment-thread post repeated below – so I could die with a clear conscience in another manifestation of Christian doctrine, Hillary's intended “better-dead-than-Red” enactment of the biblical End-Times Apocalypse.

Prior to Hillary's malicious and undoubtedly criminal theft of the Democratic (sic) Party's nomination from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I was of course a Sanders supporter. But Sanders betrayed us, becoming in the end a dedicated Hillaryite, thereby – or so I suspect – reducing his future political significance to absolute zero. The Democratic (sic) Party has in all probability similarly doomed itself. 

As Robert Parry of Consortium News wrote earlier this morning, (i)n the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America...voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value.

By his use of the euphemism “Establishment,” Parry seemingly hoped to give British respectability to what in the post-Occupy USian homeland are more correctly known as the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals – the malevolently greedy politicians, bureaucrats, generals, police chiefs, academics, religious leaders and mainstream-media propagandists who, as the Oberführers of capitalist governance, oversee its efficiency in assuring maximum power and unlimited profit for our overlords, total subjugation for everyone else.

Interestingly, though Consortium News has often joined in the protests  against Barack Obama 's self-proclaimed presidential power to order the murder of anyone  – U.S. citizens included, Parry makes no mention of this policy as a possible post-election factor. Let us hope it is not; the USian reputation for banana-republic politics, which dates to 22 November 1963 but is underscored by Obama's nullification of the U.S. Constitution,  is already damning enough.

Were I Parry's editor, I would have insisted he add three additional elements to his analysis.

One is the irrefutable statistical proof that non-Ruling Class USians are in truth as politically powerless  as medieval serfs or antebellum slaves. While the Moronic Majority are far too ignorant and reflexively anti-intellectual to understand the statistical proof of their ever-worsening plight or the ever-more-obvious fact its only lasting remedy is the permanent overthrow of capitalism, they most assuredly understand – as Parry correctly reported – its day-to-day financial realities, the suffering and death of which Trump promises to ameliorate. But Parry's report was most assuredly weakened by the absence of the statistical corroboration.

On another element of the same topic of the 99 Percent's powerlessness, the report was also weakened by omission of the fact many people my own age – including most of my 90 neighbors in the low-income senior housing complex in which I dwell – are painfully aware that in the notoriously dishonest difference between Hillary's “public” and “private” policies (the latter including the austerity promises she secretly makes to her One Percent masters), lurks her intent to continue the slow-motion genocide of the devastating but mostly unpublicized cuts Obama and the Democratic (sic) Party in general have made in Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

Two is the equally irrefutable proof the white segment of the Moronic Majority is reflexively, even malevolently racist – albeit often unconsciously so. This evidence is in post-Hurricane-Katrina studies by the Pew Foundation, perhaps the most credible of the USian polling organizations. Quoth a 2005 Pew report:

(B)lacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government’s response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm’s victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government’s response.

Given that the victims of racism should be the sole source of any definition of what racism is, given also how 77 percent of the whites arrogantly dismissed the blacks' post-Katrina grievances, it seems to me the implicit racism is undeniable.

(Disclosure: my own hostile encounters with racism include a plethora of nasty white reactions to the fact that, over the years, I had two black girlfriends, and of course the vindictive fury of Guy L. Smith, editor and publisher of The Knoxville Journal, that after my arrest in a 1963 civil-rights incident severely crippled my journalistic career-prospects; the same arrest prompted a venomous outpouring of hostility from professional colleagues, alleged friends, other fellow students, one of my four half-sisters and several maternal relatives. And let us not forget the Ku Klux Klan's subsequent efforts to murder me in retaliation for my resistance to the racist agendas of The Journal, The Knoxville News-Sentinel and most especially the University of Tennessee.)

Thus it seems to me the white USian population is no less racist than, say, the 1930s Germans were anti-Semitic. Thus too, when Trump began spouting racist invective, I concluded he was verbalizing the hitherto closeted and/or officially denied racism of Moron Nation whites, and on that basis predicted he would win the election. As a friend e-mailed me last night, “Fuck. You were right.”

The third element in Trump's victory is the methodically conditioned and thus truly limitless USian fear of material loss, a bone-deep cowardice that is easily mustered by our overlords to eternally prohibit even the mildest amelioration of capitalist depredation. As I emailed to another friend last night, “the problem – as common in the countryside as in the towns and cities – is that we are all taught from birth that our only real identity is in our material possessions. Hence we are terrified to lose them; hence too anytime that loss is threatened, we as a nation react with infinite savagery. Though I understood this dynamic from a very early age, I also scorned it, not recognizing the universality and literal bottomlessness of the associated fear until my own material possessions – i.e., the 'Dancer' manuscript and all the rest of my writing and photography – were taken from me by the 1983 fire. As a result I was utterly destroyed – destroyed forever and beyond repair – by their loss. This is, I believe, an extremely important lesson in how the psychic-vampire function of capitalism – especially aided as it is in so many USians by the sadistic opiate of Abrahamic religion – keeps us enshackled.”

Trump, therefore – in exactly the same way Hitler was unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-Versailles Germanism – is unquestionably the ultimate expression of post-New-Deal “Americanism,” whatever that may bode.

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I WROTE FOUR comments on the Reader Supported News website since my last post here on OAN, on 29 October. (Yes last week I entirely missed my self-imposed mid-week deadline; I had momentarily forgotten the horrendous amount of time consumed by running – hobbling, actually – first-of-month errands without an automobile; even with a ride to the supermarket provided by a friend, what used to take me one day by car now takes at least five days – often more – by bus.) In any case three of my RSN comments focus on pre-election issues; one is reprinted in full below; the others are merely titled, described by a few sentences and linked for the sake of the record. The fourth is a denunciation of the escalating war against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, also reprinted. And there was one other post I'm printing in totality, a short essay that began as a comment on a Chris Hedges piece published by Popular Resistance but – as if by visitation of the Muse – unexpectedly, even involuntarily turned into an expression of gratitude for a long-long-ago, far-far-away and profoundly influential gift from a young woman named Thias Smedley, who was as lovely as her given name, which is pronounced Tie-yeese, accent on the last syllable.

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The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign: Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this...Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest. It did not. Instead, email-related talk has...influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

My response was to repeat something I have already said many times, and will say once more for those who have not voted:

“The choice our overlords offer us is very simple: either Hillary Hitler (who believes she can top Adolf Hitler, Bonaparte, Charles XII of Sweden, the Teutonic Knights, the Mongols and the Persians in being the first-ever conqueror of Russia), or Donald Hitler, who promises to persecute African American, Hispanic, First Nations, LGBTQ and Leftist peoples.”

“Put even more simply...a vote for Hillary Hitler is a vote for World War III, thermonuclear apocalypse and the extermination of our species, while a vote for Donald Hitler is a vote for a new Holocaust.

“Which is precisely why I voted for Jill Stein. That way, in that final millisecond of consciousness as I am turned into radioactive vapor, I won't be blaming myself for having voted to turn our Mother Earth into a radioactive cinder.

“Yes, it truly is that simple.”

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Obama Is Pathetic on Human Rights in North Dakota (By William Boardman) – The President gave lip service to “the traditions of the first Americans.” He didn’t mention treaties between sovereign nations, of course, because he’s not about to break with the traditions of the second Americans: that such treaties are only a means to a genocidal end and aren’t to be taken seriously by the United States of exceptional, manifestly destined Americans whenever such treaties interfere with what the US wants. That’s what “properly attentive” means historically. Freely translated, “properly attentive” means “make a show of peace talk, then roll over them with whatever force necessary after it’s too late to affect the election.” The legal mind is nothing if not properly attentive to elegant turns of phrase in its unyielding hypocrisy.

“I think Mr. Boardman should have used much stronger language. 'Pathetic' is a bird with a broken wing, a child burned by USian napalm, and most assuredly not the exemplar of lies, corruption and genocide (whether by drone or austerity) who – thanks in tiny measure to my own two unforgivably optimistic votes – now inhabits the White House. But because I myself am a professional writer and editor, I understand Mr. Boardman's problem. The only truly accurate description of Obama is 'evil,' but – due mostly to the atrocities committed by Abrahamic religion – that noun is no longer fashionable.”

“You (on RSN) are all too kind in your denunciations of this most malevolent of presidents. Here we see the true legacy of 'change we can believe in,' the most maliciously premeditated Big Lie ever told by a presidential candidate, the prelude to his years-in-the-planning shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer.

“His intent – now in North Dakota proven to be what the far Right has claimed from the beginning – is obviously the reduction of the entire USian 99 Percent to the inescapable powerlessness and degradation that is the eternal lot of the (White Exceptionalist) Empire's African-American and Hispanic subjects, and even harsher subjugation for First Nations peoples – this so he can gleefully point to the Standing Rock Sioux and say 'see how I made their lives even worse, so don't you others dare complain.'

“It is indeed 'change we can believe in': change from less brutal charade of representative democracy to the overt savagery of unabashed fascism. And because there is no force on this planet capable of stopping the USian neo-Reich, the casualties are only beginning. Mark my word, the cops and soldiers and private-security stormtroopers – every one a wanna-be serial killer (and most of them already kill-hardened in the Middle East) – will soon be firing for lethal effect, just as occurred at Kent State University and Jackson State College. The propaganda preparation is already underway. And the orders are no doubt coming from the Betrayer himself.”

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Spiritual Blackout in America: Election 2016 (By Cornel West) – (T)he neofascist catastrophe called Donald Trump and the neoliberal disaster named Hillary Clinton are predictable symbols of our spiritual blackout.

Quoth I: “While the leaders are certainly as much to blame as the masses, don't forget that (precisely as happened in Nazi Germany), it is the USian masses' obscenely capitalist, lockstep conformist selfishness – each USian's psychopathically craven terror of suddenly having even one penny less than the proverbial Joneses – that has fueled the transition from limited democracy to zero-tolerance plutocratic tyranny. And – again like the Nazi Germans – as they have sown, so shall they be reaped.

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Animosity Towards Clinton Runs Deep at the FBI (Guardian UK) – Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

“Has it occurred to anyone else we are perhaps witnessing the opening moves of a soft coup by factions of the Ruling Class who are rightfully terrified by Hillary's (Goldwater Girl/Christian fundamentalist) intent to bring about the Apocalypse?”

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American Irrationalism (By Chris Hedges) – There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe, including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric carbon to above 400 parts per million... We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.

“Chris Hedges' 'American Irrationalism' is a protest so powerful it is strongly reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl, to which I was introduced by a keenly perceptive fellow University of Tennessee student named Thais Smedley whom I met, seemingly by random chance, as we were walking from opposite directions on a campus sidewalk.”

“It was 1959, when possession of the Howl text anywhere in the South was a felony.

“Thais was a senior bound for graduate school, I a 19-year-old freshman soon to run out of college money and enlist in the Regular Army to fulfill the six-year military obligation the Empire imposed on all save the most financially privileged of the draft-era's males. But on that hot May early afternoon I encountered Thais – whose raven hair fell below her shoulders in what was then a gesture of bohemian defiance, who was clad in the more subtle rebelliousness of a white linen blouse with matching white shorts and bare-legged black leather t-strap sandals and whose appearance thus drew from me the spontaneous salute of a memorably face-stretching grin – my poverty-imposed denouement was yet five months away in the unknown future. Thais grinned back, and now suddenly I was wealthy with the unanticipated gift of her presence, enchanted by her soft-voiced eloquence, smitten by the uniqueness of her beauty and flattered by the attention of a woman three years older than I.

“But I was also lost, lost in the dark miasma of contradictions between the undefined but nevertheless implicitly Marxian values with which I had been raised – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s – and the quagmire of incipient fascism in which the anti-intellectualism and lockstep conformity of the Joe McCarthy realm seemed intent on drowning me.

“Thais somehow sensed my existential quandary, invited me to her dwelling – with its painted stone walls and potted plants it was a study in green and white, the brightest, most airy, most welcoming basement apartment I have ever entered – and there we talked for perhaps two hours, during which she fed me a bowl of Campbell's beef noodle soup, gave me her copy of Howl – 'I think this will speak to you,' she said; 'and I don't need it anymore' – then oh-so-gently sent me on my way so she could continue packing for her move elsewhere to another university.

“She was right, of course; even at 19, I somehow knew better than to ignore the perceptions of a woman who, like some personification of the Muse, had momentarily appeared as if by magic in my life. Ginsberg did indeed speak to me, and Howl was for me the doorway to a new consciousness, an eventual synthesis of my father's Marxism and my own outrage at the casually brutal ignorance of the nyekulturniy state I have since come to damn as 'Moron Nation.' The key that unlocked it – the mechanism of epiphany for which I am forever grateful to Thais – is Howl's opening line: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...'

“Let us therefore hope Hedges' opening line, 'There is no shortage of signs of impending catastrophe...' awakens as many in the millennial generation as Ginsberg's words awakened in mine; let us also hope Doctor Margaret Flowers' gift of 'American Irrationalism' here via Popular Resistance is as pivotally influential on the multitudes as Thais Smedley's gift of Howl was to me 57 years ago.”

Later, in a dialogue with another reader, I added a defense of Hedges:

“(He) is one of the very few who dare tell us how dire our circumstances truly are. Yes this can cause despair, but if that's what it takes to awaken Moron Nation to what it has done to itself and is now doing not just to our entire species but to our entire planet, so be it. With its total surveillance technology, its domestic policy of slow-motion genocide (to exterminate all of us who are no longer exploitable for profit), and its doomsday foreign policy, the USian Empire is in hideous truth the most malevolently oppressive regime in our species' history. I know this sounds pessimistic, but it is in fact the opposite. As Sun Tzu so clearly understood, if we are to evolve an effective response, we must grasp the totality of our enemy's (oppressive) capabilities and (genuinely evil) intentions. And because I do believe we are capable of evolving such a response, beneath my apparent pessimism lies a profound optimism.”

LB/9 November 2016

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