REGULAR READERS KNOW I am slowly dying from the aftermath of Covid, which has so intensified my geriatric medical problems, my doctors told me last September I have no more than two years to live, and I suspect it will be far less than that, as I am already reduced to breathlessness merely by walking through my ground-floor apartment. But the real-world blessing implicit in such circumstances seems to far outweigh its imagined accursedness, for -- at least in my case -- it compels a self-honesty and clarity of vision more inescapably imperative (and often more unabashedly brutal) than anything I have ever experienced, no doubt as the final evaluation before my lifetime's experience is, as my dialectal-materialist left brain believes, reduced to nothingness (and therefore to meaninglessness), or, as my unabashedly superstitious right brain contends, is launched to bear its karmic seasoning into yet another reincarnation, though admittedly I cannot but wonder what form that incarnation might take in a world climate change is reducing to a bug planet.
Whatever, I began learning in 1943, my third year, how beyond the urban Northeast and its tiny sanctuaries of relative enlightenment, the violently bigoted underbelly of U.S. politics irresistibly dictates all the decisive circumstances of our lives, and 13 years later I began focusing my life accordingly. My intent was adult application of the Boy Scout mandate to always leave the campsite in better condition than we found it, which is why at age 16 I began building a career in journalism. But then the events of 22 November 1963 revealed our national masters as the actual source of what I had hitherto supposed was a merely regional malevolence. Now, having been schooled both as a journalist and an activist by the subsequent six decades of murders and betrayals -- the forcible suppression of literally every potential I had ever seen in this now-obviously disintegrating realm -- I have no doubt the United States as I once imagined it and fiercely loved it is in fact as inescapably doomed as I myself am post-Covid.
Neither can I forget the fact our nation dies on a doomed planet fatally wounded by our own national excesses, and that the death of the United States is therefore most likely to be preview -- a pre-hearse'l (if I may be permitted a morbid pun) -- of the fate to which its global command of patriarchy's misogynistic war against our Mother Earth has condemned our entire species. Though on that dismal topic, I have no (present) inclination to say much more than what I've said already.
Our masters fanatically insist "a healthy society requires patriarchy." But we of the 99 Percent increasingly recognize patriarchy as the cultural and socioeconomic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets. We are awakening to the fact it has robbed our species (and probably all non-insectoid life) of any long-term legacy beyond extinction. Patriarchy has nullified our 200,000-plus years of collective experience, squandering all human creation, reducing all our exquisite arts and breathtaking science to the meaninglessness of wind-blown debris amidst abandoned ruins. We cannot un-know this. Consciously or not, it burdens us more heavily than many of us can bear -- the obvious but relentlessly downplayed reason for our increasingly suicidal hopelessness and its murderously hateful expression in our skyrocketing plagues of mass shootings and traffic deaths.1
Of course we will never be granted widespread public acknowledgement the horror that understandably overwhelms so many younger folk when they contemplate the fact they have no rationally conceivable future is probably the ultimate human trauma, a realization akin to an 18-year-old's last thoughts while dying in combat, a uniquely terrible truth perhaps even more toxic in subconscious form. While alcohol or drugs may temporarily minimize its anguish, it is like any other psychological trauma in that it's only lasting amelioration is therapeutic acknowledgement. But the so-called "mainstream media" -- the collaboration of a half-dozen of our billionaire masters' corporations in the world's first privately owned, for-(maximum)-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) -- will never allow such a bandaging to take place. To do so would be to admit that patriarchy and its theocratic and capitalist derivatives are precisely what I said above: the cultural and socioeconomic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets.
Nor are we told the real reason for the stock market's all-time highs -- the vindictively triumphant glee with which our masters anticipate the now-unstoppable ascent of Donald Trump as lifelong führer, the final death-spasm of the murdered U.S. republic, the birth of the de facto Fourth Reich.2
Just as I've no doubt the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the murder of our republic, so am I now painfully convinced Trump, who is Adolf Hitler's chief 21st Century disciple, will be the republic's tombstone. History's circumstantial evidence tells us Trump is the fulfillment of a bipartisan, multi-generation plutocratic conspiracy that surfaced in 1933 as the Bankers' Plot3 and became invincible in 1944 when its unprosecuted perpe-traitors unabashedly embraced absolute Evil by compelling the federal government's adoption of thousands of Nazi war criminals as their advisors and comrades-at-arms. As proven by the irresistibly total Nazification of fiercely progressive Weimar Germany in a mere six years and the fact only the Red Army had the might to stop the Third Reich's unprecedentedly genocidal military, these morally imbecilic monsters were the most diabolically cunning plotters our species ever spawned. Nevertheless, despite our masters' methodical reversal of every progressive measure ever enacted, and despite their de facto reversal of the (first?) Civil War's triumphant conclusion, the USian Empire will never be the thousand-year reich the Nazi war criminals intended to make of the United States. Terminal climate change guarantees the empire's demise by the end of this century and our species' extinction no later than the end of the next. But with the deadliest, most powerful military in human history to enforce the empire's absolute control over global finance, it will most assuredly be the final befouler of our planetary nest.
Given the lifetime-appointed and therefore effectively permanent dual roles of the Supreme Court's majority as oberst-gruppenführers in the capitalists' restoration of de facto slavery and zero-tolerance ayatollahs in Christianity's relentless jihad against sexual freedom, the fact that this time there is no Red Army to rescue us means our sociopathic masters' hateful regime of gleefully sadistic theocratic ecogenocide is literally forever -- the concluding chapter of humanity's permanent record. And the evidence of the Supreme Court's intent is irrefutable: note its obvious endorsement of matricide, its eagerness to terminate the federal government's ability to protect us against predatory masters and its reluctance to block the nation's most notorious criminal from his inevitable ascendance to dictatorship.
Note too how the court's endless betrayals of our nation's (former) progressive intent are enabled by the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-JFK function as the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party's Fifth Column. Let us not forget the infamous Powell Memo, the USian plutocracy's equivalent of Mein Kampf, was authored by a Democrat, Lewis F. Powell Jr., who was then -- in obvious collaboration with wanna-be führer Richard Nixon -- voted onto the U.S. Supreme Court by the Senate's "Democratic" (sic) majority. Cunningly disguising the Christonazi/Neoconfederate purpose of his economic rulings behind a socially progressive facade, Powell began the court's slow-motion transformation to the pluto/theocratic cabal of sadistic despots it is today, a judiciary whose rulings are but stepping-stones to Trump's imposition of terminal tyranny.
I have spoken with enough younger folk to know that what I describe above -- the absolute certainty of early doom inflicted on millennial and post-millennial generations by the incurably metastasized, inescapably apocalyptic cancer of patriarchy and its capitalist and theocratic progeny -- is the sole reason for the skyrocketing rates of suicide and mental illness. But as I said, our masters will never allow its therapeutic acknowledgement, for that would be tantamount to admission they are in fact our murderers. While I will die knowing everything for which I lived and struggled has been abolished forever, at least I was born in a time of universal hopefulness, and it is undoubtedly my recollection of that too-brief era -- my angry knowledge of all that has been stolen from us -- that will keep me doing what (little) I can to vex our thieving conquerors until I am no more. But the younger folk are denied the poignant memory that fuels such anger; they know only that they have been born to a doomed species that is murdering its planetary mother, and whether that terrible knowledge is conscious or not, they know with absolute certainty they are inescapably cursed with permanent imprisonment in irreversible futility and utter hopelessness, which is why they increasingly ask themselves, "why bother to live at all?"
Yes, thanks to our masters' malfeasance, it truly is as Churchill said on the eve of the Battle of Britain: "Only a miracle can save us now."
__________________
1See also "Reckless Driving as Possible Suicidal Ideation," a courageous analysis that
comes very close to breaking the capitalist taboo against acknowledging
motor vehicles are deadly weapons, statistically as dangerous as
firearms.
2My pessimism is shared by both the World Socialist Web Site and The New York Times.
(The latter analysis is pay-walled but theoretically accessible by any
non-subscriber who has not exceeded the limit of 10 reports per month.)
3See also "The Plot to Overthrow FDR," particularly my comment, for which scroll down.
LB/22 January 2024
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