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.
*********
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.
*********
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.”
*********
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.”
*********
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.
*********
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?”
*********
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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