Make Americans Grovel Again

In January, I bought a box of masks at Walmart.  The box cost $4.79.  After that, there was a shortage of masks and no boxes at all.  Then, three days ago, a fresh supply of masks had arrived.  They were prominently displayed, at $17.99.

Ah yes... Our Free Market at Work!

At the same time, our state (finally) passed a requirement that everyone where a mask "when outside."  Our wonderful government went even further.  For those who could not afford a mask, they could apply for MASK ASSISTANCE.

All they have to do, after finding which agency took care of this, and standing in line for six hours, is fill out a six page

 PROOF OF NEEDFULNESS 

application, detailing just how poor, wretched, and lacking in even a decent amount of minimal funds, they were.   After sufficiently groveling and humiliating themselves and proving to the welfare office that, no, there wasn't an extra nickel being hid under some cushion -- God forbid! -- they might qualify for some sort of voucher they could use to buy masks while at the same time letting everyone in line know that they were too poor and wretched and forsaken by fortune to afford a mask on their own.

NEVER PASS UP AN OPPORTUNITY TO HUMILIATE "THE LESS FORTUNATE."

It never occurs to the whores that run the (not our) government to force manufacturers and billion dollar retailers like Walmarts to sell the damn masks at cost pro bono publico.  Why.. that would run contrary to the the Free Market, the greatest "tool" ever invented for the good and progress of mankind.  What would we want another socialist failure?

No... just that our whores in charge act like Roman Emperors....

Rome had a grain problem.  The free market (subject to natural fluctuations and shortages) could not do the job of feeding the populace. by itself. The city’s politicians therefore intervened in the grain supply, or annona, beginning in the second century B.C.

There were direct interventions, like Augustus’ purchase of grain for distribution, and also laws which mandated grain sales at subsidized prices. The first such law was passed in 123 BC.  In 58 BC grain was made FREE and the eligibility for receiving it broadened. Augustus and his imperial successors maintained this system at enormous cost (as we have seen); In order to bring down the market price of grain and, in addition to direct price controls, Claudius built the port at Ostia and insured the cargoes of grain carrying ships.  He began various infrastructural projects aimed at increasing arable land.  In the early third century AD Septimius Severus added olive oil, and later on Aurelian added pork and wine.

It speaks volumes about our ever more exceptionally loathsome country, that Roman Emperors stand in a better light than our government.

Images of the State - 2020, Ch. 3

One of the images of the state in 1984 is that of the windowless, faceless ministry.  The ministry can see out at and into everything but no can see into the ministry which remains impenetrable to the outside.

The windowless ministry symbolizes the abolition of civil society; for civil society -- at least in the sense of burgertum -- presupposes openness and comity, a willingness of citizens to be exposed to one another and being exposed to engage.  Civil society is a matrix of two way streets.  You may not be agreed with.  You may be criticised and opposed but you will be heard.

In 1984, no one exists to be heard but only to be barked at and told. The ministry can see and extract what it wants but the denizens of Oceanea exist as units to be informed and worked, manipulated and excited.

The windowless ministry is a grim image of a grimmer perversion of society. But in the United States of 2020 we have learned to make the ministry cheerful, colourful, accessible and seemingly open.  In 2020 the ministry goes by the name of Webpage.

The Webpage is first of all colourful.  Depending on the department its portal shines with pictures of Scenic Natural Vistas, Alabaster Monuments, Glowy Mornings, Happy People with Glowy Faces,  Towering Trees, Radiant Parrots and Butterfles,  Grizzlies and Polar Bears, Breathtaking Bridges, Happy Silver Birds ("managing" their health or portfolios) in the active, ongoing honeymoon of Glowy Retirement, shiny appliances, gadgets, cars, sports equipment handled and driven by handsome, pretty, zesty (and glowy faced) youths... or simply pictures of "our team" always smiling and on the go.  Twenty-twenty is out to prove with a vengeance that life is not bleak.

Webpages are of course the mainstay of all types of merchants, as they are a cheap, effective, and a mass way to hawk goods.  But webpages are also the mainstay of banks, insurance companies, corporations, non-governmental organizations, the media, academia, ecclesiastica,  government agencies and last but not least elected officials.  To perpetuate the illusion of transparency and openness, everyone one of these ministries has some sort of contact or feedback form where, in exchange for disclosing your name, title, age, sex, address and phone number ("tracing information") you can ask questions of your bank or insurance company or express your views to your local media "outlet" or elected official.

But consent and comity end there.  Your "feedback" will never be read.  You will have written it, perhaps even laboured over it, but when you "hit enter,"  are reminded to fill in a "required field" you preferred not to answer, hit send again, answer and pass the CAPTCHA test and finally hit enter one last time... your missive will immediately be shit-canned into a memory hole. 

Of course, even here, Amurka in 2020 offers an improved version of 1984.  Wonder of wonders, the Memory Hole actually answers back!  If you are truly stupid enough you can rest assured and contented that your thoughts have been considered by to whomever they were addressed.

This new improved Memory Hole offers two options.  The first is the non-answer which gives the impression of more or less engaging with whatever it was you had to say; the second is the more brutal direct brush off.  This usually goes like this: "Thank you very much for writing to the editors of The Daily Times-Mirror-Herald. Every day we receive hundreds of letters from readers around the world. We regret that because of the large number of submissions we are not able to respond to all of them, other than by this automated reply. Because of computer security concerns, we do NOT accept attachments; they will NOT be opened..."

In other words: thank you for your missive; we want you to know that you are an insignificant worm among worms not worthy of our time much less attention.  You can renew your $ubscription at paynow@sellingpaper.com

It is hard to say which one of these is worse.  The answer that calls you a nothing or the answer that takes you for a stupid nothing.

It will be said that I complain unrealistically. After all... how can anyone expect that Senawhore So and So, or Chief High Editor Poo Baum would really have time for everyone...  Not even Mr. Us has time for all of us.

There is a story that addresses this point.  A woman once approached the Emperor Hadrian with a petition.  He waived her aside, saying "I haven't the time...."  She snapped back, "If you don't have the time, then don't be emperor." He heard the petition.

Why?  Because the early Roman Emperors were very solicitous to preserve the image of a free republic within a civil society.  In Hadrian's time the Empire covered an extent about the size of the continental United States.  It had an estimated 100 million inhabitants.  Every day thousand upon thousands of incidents of one sort or another had to be managed by local, regional, senatorial and imperial governments.  But the emperors were keen to maintain the promise made by Augustus that he had "restored the Republic."

Of course, he had done no such thing.  The image of a free republic was history's most colosssal joke.  But it was joke they put genuine effort into.  In Gibbon's inimitable words, "the Caesars concealed their powers and expressed themselves the humble servants of the Senate whose decrees they dictated and obeyed."

Needless to say, Rome had its webpages too; the Ara Pacis being one of them.  But the earlier emperors put genuine time and effort into maintaining the illusion... They mingled with and exposed themselves to the public and heard their concerns.

Did they really give a damn about Marcus Anonimus and his petty problem?  No more so than the Queen of England today gives a rat's ass about the thousands of people she meets in a year.  But they and she do put time and effort into seeming otherwise and, paradoxically, to that extent, the illusion is not quite an illusion.

The United States in 2020 puts no effort into the illusion and to that extent the reality is that it is not a civil society but rather a conglomeration of hermetic power clusters, each open entre nous, but otherwise  blaring at and manipulating the drudges outside the circles. 

To be clear, this is not a criticism of just corproations, ecclesiastical bodies, media and government.  It is as  much a criticism of so-called grassroots movements, the most recent example of which was Bernie's "Not me, Us!" campaign.

How very engaging!  But try to reach anyone in Bernie's campaign and one was confronted with the widowless facade of the Ministry of Love.  Nowhere on Bernie's campaign page was there a who's who list and nowhere could one find out who was in charge of what.  Nowhere was there an email except a small window for input to "info@bernie.com" 

I sent input to Bernie, via the Input Window and via hardcopy snail mail to the campaign P.O.Box  (not even a fucking street address).  Not once did I get so much as a robo-reply.  Not once.

Of course, if you donated money, you got a chance to write something in a comment box.  But if anyone thinks that anyone gave the comment five seconds for $27.00  he or she needs her I.Q. checked. 

Bernie's windowless Webpage was state of the art.  It even sent out pretty please requests to answer questionnaires asking for your views.  Click.  Up popped a window asking four questions:  (1) do you want Medicare for All; (2) are you concerned about the climate; (3) do you support free tuition; (4) do you support a livable minimum wage.  Now, how about donating... HERE. Pure Pogey Bait for political junkies.

This was far more denigrating than the New York's Slime's thank you for writing we haven't got time for you.

At around the same time, I sent two email "feeback inputs" to my state senawhores.  The one who was running for re-election robo-replied with a one page non-answer. The one who was not running for reelection did not bother to reply at all.

No... the windowless ministry is ubiquitous. Every institution, every corporation, every organization, every political or religious agroupement shields itself behind impenetrability, pretending to be open and engaging but hiding the "inner Us" from the rest of "Us."

What this actually reveals is the total breakdown of civil society. Everyone is selling and pushing and getting their message out.  The illusion is bi-directional but the reality is uni-directional.  Citizen Q exists to be prodded and plucked but not to be heard.

It will be said that it is physically and temporally impossible to listen to everyone, to engage with everyone, to answer every letter or comment.  That may in fact be true, but such an answer only reveals that our society is no longer built to human scale. 

The lack of human scale shows itself in our buildings, in our one way media, and our webpages and, increasingly, our algorithms.  We are in fact no different that Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.  The citizen exists merely as a receptacle for one way communication.  There is no engagement, no burgertum.

Madison wrote that the Republic he envisioned presupposed a certain limitation in size and extent; and, among historians, it is commonplace that burgertum ended around the time of Woodrow Wilson.  In many respects the United States did a decent job of masking the realities of a mass society. This was due in part to the agricultural nature of American society and to small towns in large spaces.  It was also due to the fact that "society" in the United States always meant a very small segment of the whole which might be summarized as "college and above." The World War (2nd) and the post-war consumer society put an end to that.  When the internet burst on the scene in the 1990's the hope was that it would re-open and equalize civil society.  Alas, the oligarchy found a way to make the internet an instrument of mass control and exclusion.

The question now is not how to improve or reform this mass configuration but how to abolish it.  That is not a progressive task but a humanist one.

©WCG, 2020
 

Rubble of Self

    In an interesting New Yorker article, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor argued out that “[t]he quest to transform cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.  She reviewed the failed policies of the last 30 years and pointed out that “There is a palpable poverty of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a banality of ideas pervading mainstream politics today. Old and failed propositions are recycled, but proclaimed as new, reviving cynicism and dismay.”   That is spot on.   But although Yamahtta-Taylor made the point three times in her article, she herself did not provide a new worldview.

    Neither will I, at least not here.  I would, instead, add to the point that the country is at that same point an individual reaches when his/her bad qualities lead to a total breakdown at a dead end. At that point -- in the Rubble of Self -- the individual has two choices: die or renounce the entire construct of values, habits and desires that brought him to the catastrophic end. Only then can a rebirth begin.

 
    Americans will get nowhere until they turn in disgust at their sense of national self and repudiate every value and ideal  they thought they stood for.    People will recoil at hearing this very proposition and respond with an angry love it or leave it remark.  Others will say that I go too far.  They will indignantly insist that “not everything” was bad; that we've had our good points and heroic moments.  One should, it will be said in a tone of sage moderation,  get rid of the bad things and build on the good ones.   “At  bottom, America is a good country still capable of great things.....” 

 Hear me laugh.  That is not the way crisis works.  Ask the Germans.  Ask Augustine. 

What brings a person or nation to the crisis point is not just the bad qualities he has.  He is brought to the crisis point by all the qualities he has -- good, bad, indifferent -- dysfunctioning together.    A terminal breakdown does not occur because some components don't work, but because the whole doesn't work.  The French cynic La Rochefoucault came close to describing what happens in his epigram on amour propre. 

On ne peut sonder la profondeur, ni percer les ténèbres de ses abîmes. Là il est à couvert des yeux les plus pénétrants ; il y fait mille insensibles tours et retours. Là il est souvent invisible à lui-même, il y conçoit, il y nourrit, et il y élève, sans le savoir, un grand nombre d'affections et de haines ; il en forme de si monstrueuses que, lorsqu'il les a mises au jour, il les méconnaît, ou il ne peut se résoudre à les avouer

One cannot probe the depth, nor pierce the darkness of self-love's abysses. There the love of self remains covered to the most penetrating eyes; there it makes a thousand insensbile twists and turns.  In those abysses, self-love is often imperceptible to itself, it conceives, it nourishes, and brings forth, without knowing it, a great number of affections and hatreds which are so monstrous that when they come to light it  ignores them or refuses to avow them as its own.

St. Augustine had his crisis moment when a pear fell on his head causing him to fall to pieces. It was not just that he had been reminded of a stupid, wasteful transgression when, as a boy, he stole some pears just for the fun of stealing them.  It was how that act was the first step on the path of what was his life and that implicated everything he was and was not, did or fail to do.    As in any tapestry, the whole unravels at the pull of a thread.  “I am become,” Augustine said in exhausted despair, “a vexation to myself.”

And that is where we, as a nation, are now -- a confused, panicked, clueless, a vexation to ourselves.   The United States has reached its crisis moment when what are called its “endemic” and “structural” failures reveal a country that exists only in name and only under the panoply of a mawkish and belligerent patriotism, aided and abetted by football.   For decades, all the metrics have pointed to a country headed for disintegration.   But we have ignored the signs,  We have willed away the symptoms.  We have appealed to excuses.

In this respect, lulling charmers like the Flawless Obama are like physicians that feed you more of a drug you don't need and that is killing you.    Obama's latest nostrums are classic high-toned aspirational blather mixed in with a dash of down home folksiness. 

"We have seen in the last several weeks, last few months, the kinds of epic changes in events in our country that are as profound as anything that I've seen in my lifetime,"  

We have?  What “epic changes” ?  Epic?   A raging virus that is killing thousands and decimating the economy while the ruling class is at odd and at a loss as to what to do is epic?   What the fuck are  you talking about O'Bambi?

"When sometimes I feel despair, I just see what's happening with young people all across the country, and the talent and the voice and the sophistication that they're displaying,"

Why should you feel despair if, as you've just said, we've seen epic, once-in-a-lifetime changes?   And no... young people are not displaying talent and sophistication. They are displaying brute rage.  Outrage at a system you, O Flawless One, presided over for eight years. 

And now for the dash of down-hominess

"And it makes me feel optimistic. It makes me feel as if, you know, this country's gonna get better."

Just so y'all know he didn't totally loose his heart at Harvard.  

And he concludes with

"To bring about real change, we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable."

My God.  Behold, a Second Rienzi!   One is left to wonder if Obama means that what he did for eight years was “make people in power uncomfortable.”   Y'all know... like when he told the “Banking Community” in February 2009 that he “had their backs.”

The man is such a nauseating hypocritical piece of work that it makes one yearn for the honesty of George W. Bush.

But more than just a display of sanctimonious-down-home hypocrisy, Obama's bullshit actually reveals the fatal first step that has led to the forbidden end.

"Just remember,” he intones, “this country was founded on protest: It is called the American Revolution, and every step of progress in this country, every expansion of freedom, every expression of our deepest ideals has been won through efforts that made the status quo uncomfortable.  And we should all be thankful for folks who are willing, in a peaceful, disciplined way, to be out there making a difference."  

The way we “peacefully” started firing on British troops?

I find it astonishing and appalling that educated people could ever fall for this historical nonsense.  But historical nonsense is what Obama has been about from the very beginning when he delivered his Trademark Treacle that “Hope is on the Way!” speech back at the 2004 Democratic convention.  Ah yes.  Hope but never Help.  The Pilgrims' Progress view of American history.  We'll get there by George; we'll get there!  Jerusalem is just around the corner.  Mine eyes have seen...... blah, blah, blah.
   
We have written before about Obama's off-the-rack, Neo-Lincolnesque cant.  [link].  Ten score years ago, a new hope, a new dream, issued forth from these shores, a light unto the Gentiles ....

2004:
“Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation not because of [our power and wealth but because]  "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ...

2008:
What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

        “We hold these truths ...

These eternal, exceptional, American truths are then sentimentally linked to “the dreams of little girls as they go to bed at night,” and to that sunny day when “ our daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts;” when “no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote;” when “our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law;” until all our children, are always safe from harm....  Yes!! Mine eyes have seen, the Coming!  Yea, my eyes are gonna be seeing!  Oh yes, I know; I know, deep in my heart, I know.... And so, armed with  Our Truth, we beat of Path of Righteousness through the wilderness ....toward (always just “toward” never “to”) a fuller, more perfecter realization of the Promise of America.   This, PBS tells us, is the “American Experience.”  

Gag.


My ninth grade English history book described Jefferson as a “young country squire” with a "certain flare for words"  in whose “magical words”  the Colonists had found justification for their insurrection. (England 1688 - 1815 ch. "Loss of the American Colonies.")

Among the justifications offered was the claim that King George was  “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province” and inciting “the merciless Indian Savages” to prey upon our frontier inhabitants.   What this referred to was the fact that the Crown was protecting Indian and French (Catholic) subjects in an extended Province of Quebec, allowing them to live according to their own laws and limiting the Colonists from invading, plundering and settling in the greater Ohio Valley.   The Crown was seeking to balance and regulate the rights of the various peoples in the Continent. The Colonists felt it was their Manifest Destiny to have it all for themselves. ... in pursuit of their happiness.

No one was fooled by Jefferson's blather. 

In 1783, the Count of Aranda wrote a famous Memorandum to  King Charles II of Spain,

"The American colonies have achieved independence; this is my sorrow and misgiving.  ... This Federated Republic is born, shall we say, a pygmy ...  But tomorrow, as it consolidates its constitution, it will be a giant; and after that it will become an irresistible colossus in those regions.  ...[I]t will call forth laborers and artisans from all nations,  ... Thus fortified, we should apprehend that the Anglo-American power will cast its first sights on the full acquisition of the Floridas from whence it will seek to extend its dominion into the heart of Mexico.  Not only will it interdict  our commerce with Mexico at will but it will aspire to conquer those vast imperial regions, which we will not be able to defend from European shores...."

The Colonists were enraged that they were not allowed to venture into the wilderness of Quebec,  slaugher the French and Indians and take and subdivide their land.  They wanted to expand their trade, unimpeded by any government regulation, into the rest of the hemisphere.   The continent lay before them for the taking, God's Gift to their avarice.  Virtually the first thing the new Republic did was fight a war with Spain for control of the Mississsippi River.   The magical words of the Declaration were but the clarion call for  expansion, extraction, exploitation and extermination

No.  Our exceptional, Fundational Truth, established in those immortal words, was simply Randian egoism,  in the rhetorical style of the 18th century.    Does anyone seriously believe that by “pursuit of happiness”  Jefferson had Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics in mind?   If they do they might disabuse themselves by reading Madion's Federalist Paper No. 10 in which he explains with candour how the checks and balances of the Constitution were established to protect the oligarchical minority in their pursuit of wealth.  (And yes, he does say it explicitly if one understands English.)

Their wealth was pursued not only at the expense of  foreigners, the savage natives and millions on millions of animals slaughtered and forests demolished, but at the expense of their own hoodwinked fellow citizens.  Hardscrabble poverty has been endemic throughout our history.  Our cities, half teeming with slums of half employed young men selling their sweat in a gig economy always moving from one place to another “in search of a better life.”  

When the oligarchy needed more labour resources, they opened the country to Europe's “wrteched refuse” so that they could scrounge and huddle on our squalid teeming shores.  Anyone can go on  line and look -- just look -- at the pictures of the the Lower East side or of company towns.   There is nothing pious, nothing Acadian, nothing ennobling in these scenes of industrial and agricultural squalor.

The problem with Obama's rhetorical fluff is not simply that it is in sentimental bad taste.  It is a narcotic that lulls people to sleep; that puts a brief moment of Lidocain numbness on a festering wound that with every jab of pain is telling us that something serious is seriously wrong.  It is the narcosis of a national religion, and the Flawless Obama is its high priest.

 In this respect, Obama is worse than Trump.  Obama obscures the situation;  Trump is open rawness.  Trump is the gaping wound, the festering boil, the din  of ignorance, avarice and violence; and just as the boil is truthful and honest about what it is and what it symptomizes so too is Trump.    But a man, like Obama who tells us just to get rid the symptom, is far more dangerous.  He lulls us  into a curious indignant complacency that vents outrage against Trump but rests assured that without Trump all will be well.  Not.  

And the reason not is that to be rid of Trump we have to make a fully burnt sacrifice of the Trumpism than inheres in the American psyche and that flows from those “exceptional” words the great O'Bambi loves to intone.

The genius of American democracy is how it turned government into the obedient steppinfechit of the rich and then coated the whole sordid enterprise with pseudo religious nonsense which perpetuated a Delusion of Self.  The whole American misconception of self is based on narcissistic self-love; a collective case of Trumpian Ego. 

America's original sin was not slavery but individualism.  An individualism that was alienated  and infused with a selfish self-righteousness. The man who first and best understood this was de Tocqueville who coined the word

"Individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions.   ...  As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."

In so saying,  de Tocqueville saw and pierced straight to the heart of those foundational magical  words that have so intoxicated Americans with themselves.   The price of your “god given” pursuit of individual happiness is to be ever thrown back upon yourself alone and confined within your amour-propre.

No song more incarnates this self-righteous, selfish alienation than Amazing Grace.  It is an insipid, treacly tune that revolts me on every level,

        Amazing Grace! How sweet a sound
        That saved a wretch like me.
        I once was lost but now I'm found
        Was blind but now I see.

"But now I am saved..."  Who says?   Really,  who says?  Moi!   And Le Moi says that I am righteous unlike those (point finger) who remain lost. The hymn is a paradigmatic expression of the psychological phenomenon of creating an “external locus of control” out of one's own desires.  The nauseating fact of Amazing Grace is that the composer of its lyrics, John Newton, was a slaver and he continued to peddle his brutal cargo even after his eyes were opened.

It was no accident that Newton continued to profit from human bondage while being himself released in the spirit.  The tune most precisely echoes the heretical spirit of Calvinism that infuses the American psyche  -- (yes, “heretical;”  heresies do matter) --  that spirit of acquisitive triumphalism that assuages its conscience by disparaging “the less fortunate” blind and wretched. 

Amazing Grace distills the hydra of selfish-righteousness that is so quintessentially American. The continent was viewed as a gift from God to us the deserving whose Manifest Destiny it was to simply pick the fruit.   It was another Frenchman, Talleyrand  who immediately perceived the matter, in his trenchant passage on The Woodsman.

 "The American woodsman is interested in nothing.  He has no memories... His only thought is for the number of axe strokes required to cut down a tree.  Destruction is what keeps him alive.  Destruction is everywhere, hence, every place suits him."    

It is the wondrous nature of the French mind, that it can distill tomes into an epigram!  In so writing, Talleyrand, an aristocrat, saw and foresaw exactly the destructive plundering nature of the American economy where the only thing that mattered is the cost of extraction, exploitation, extermination.  Go and look at the photographs of literal mountains of dead bear and buffalo.  Go and look at Californian yahoo's destroying 1000 year old trees just for the fun of the competition.   Then go and compare Europe's cultivated fields with the garish, monotonous, unsurpassable ugliness of the American city and landscape. 

When Obama intoned his belief in American exceptionalism – its superior, righteous, uniqueness and exemption from the laws of history – he was simply articulating Amazing Grace  and in secular terms and exalting the cult of the woodsman, what Marx derisively called the Robinsonnade of capitalism.  Me, ma'h axe and m'ah Bible, contra mundum.

"Pursuit of Happiness" is the doxology that sanctifies the socially indifferent pursuit of wealth by the rich and justifies the exploited poor man's ornery indifference to the consequences of his behaviour.  In either case, it is the mantra of social irresponsibility.

Most everyone else in the world gets it.   De Tocqueville got it.  Talleyrand got it.  Aranda got it.  Native Americans,  Mexicans,  Canadians,  South Americans, Philipinos... anyone who ever felt the squeeze of American hegemony got it;  but Americans do not.  

America's “educated” class lives in a world of historical illusions equivalent to Versailles.  A year ago, Paul Krugman, of the Slime, wrote a political appraisal which referred to America has the “birthplace of Democracy”  Uproar in the  House of Commons.  This is not a question of fair opinion; it is simple, plain historical fact that, in the modern era, representative democracy began in England with the 1688 Glorious Revolution.  Krugman was not lapsing into poetic license.  He repeated the assertion in another article several months later. 

Krugman's Krap is noteworthy because it reflects a typically fundamental self-misconception that pervades our ruling intelligentsia.  During the most recent impeachment hearings in the Senate a gaggle of renown legal scholars took to the stand to assert that America had been the first to apply the principle that no one (not even Trump!)  was above the law.  Really?  The supremacy of the law is a principle that dates at least to Greco-Roman times.  Augustus himself was scrupulous to follow the law.  The Crown's subjection to due process de ley was the bone of contention behind Magna Carta.  (1215.)  In more recent times, Lord Coke provoked King James I  to assault when he asserted that the sovereign was subject to law.  Several years later he went further and asserted the supremacy in law of Parliament. (1611.)  To say that America exceptionally invented this maxim is ludicrous to the point of contempt.   What this cream of American legal scholarship confused was the removal of the sovereign with his or her subjection to law.   But after all, the best  propaganda is the one that is credulously believed by the propagandists themselves.

America is a deranged Saturnian colossus that actually sees itself as a pious saint.  As Clemenceau put it,  "Wilson talks like Jesus Christ but acts like Lloyd George."  At this point the We-Saved-Europe-From-Itself mantra is trucked out and, along with it, a veritable legion of heroic and bathetic war movies.

No we didn't.  Wilson himself is on record as stating that “every child” knows that the causes of war are economic.  There is a direct line between Wilson's “making the world save for [American] democracy”  and the NeoCon doctrine of “expanding zones of democratic freedom.”  As Maj. Gen. Smedly Butler (USMC) put it

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents..  (War is a Racket, 1935.)

But it is a racket that America has pursued under one excuse or another since that day, over 200 years ago, in that declaration which proclaimed....

I do not for one second believe that the Second World War was fought to "save civilization."  I am convinced of A.J.P. Taylor's thesis that the cause of that war was the rival pursuit of economic hegemony; and it bears emphasizing that the worst of the economic hegemony is exercised at home against so-called fellow citizens.  It is par for the course that empires plunder lands they have conquered.  But what is forgotten here is that what is called “the United States” is the land that has been conquered and our ruling class treats Americans, native and otherwise, as conquered people.

Back in 1947, Walther Reuther led an auto workers strike against General Motors. One of his key demands was labour representation on the Board of Directors.  The company resisted with all its might.  It offered one benefit after another, annual raises based on productivity advances, cost-of-living increases, supplementary unemployment benefits, early-retirement options, and health and welfare benefits -- anything but a voice in management of the company. Eventually the basket of benefits was simply too plentiful to refuse.

 
But why?   Why such resistance?  Because to do so would be to ennoble the worker.  It would make him an economic citizen; and that, in a slave-based economy, would be intolerable!   Yes indeed, a well paid slave is a happy slave, but at the end of the day just hired labour nonetheless.   And being just hired labour nonetheless, at the end of two decades when the benefits were withdrawn, the worker had no say in the matter.

  
It is that same slave owning mentality that finds expression in Senawhore Lindsay Graham's statement that a $1,200 “benefit” check might disincentivize people from working.    Better to dangle a piece of bread before him on a stick as he pushes the plow. 

Graham's remark is one of those lapses into truth when a crisis, such as the one we are in, reveals all the insidious twists and deceits of collective amour propre.   On the whole, the United States has been exceptionally good at varnishing avarice with a colourful alluring veneer.  We have fooled many and certainly ourselves.   It was an act of artful deception that not even Goebbels could have achieved to get the American working class to enthusiastically and belligerently bellow

    And I'm proud to be an American because at least I know I'm free

even  as his unions were being destroyed, his benefits trashed and his sorry ass was thrown out into the cold of a gig economy.   The only thing more pathetic was the rare, isolated waif who believed that Le Roi looked out for him.

But now, a ruthless police force daily demonstrates what Le Roi really thinks of us at that same time as a heartless virus has killed thousands, decimated the economy and revealed the avaricious inadequacy of ... of well just about everything.  The collapse of a diseased system that long gave up seeking the slightest remedial  cures has left us in the rubble of our delusions.   I do not regret the denouement.  I welcome it.   It is time for Americans to face where this false heroic individualism has brought us.  It is time for Americans to stop singing Amazing Grace and start singing an anthem of collective responsibility and endeavour. 

Post Script.

There are those who will take exception to my broad brush condemnation.  They will point to their aunt Tillie, who is a good person and who bakes cookies for the homeless.  They will protest that they themselves don't believe they earned or deserved their good fortune.  They complain that you can't tarnish everyone.   But in so saying they betray and lapse into the very individualism that is the problem.  The whole is always greater than the some of its parts.  The synthesis of parts that forms a nation has its own nature which is drawn from the parts but with which the parts then draw from and become infused with.  It is simply not the case that one good apple saves the rotten bunch.  

©wcg, 2020

Images of the State in 2020 - Ch. 1

One of the "images of the State" in Orwell's 1984 is that of a "boot in the face." 

 Needless to say, the latest iteration of cop-murder and violence against Blacks will trigger the usual outrage and excuses.   African-Americans will assemble in public places and loudly protest.  Police departments will denounce “inexcusable” violence and will promise to internally investigate.  Op-eds will denounce “institutional racism.”   It will be regarded as some kind of progress that we are no longer openly and officially talking about “a few rotten apples”  but rather of an “institutional” and “systemic” problem.   At least we are recognizing, the endemic and pandemic and “deeply ingrained” nature of racism in this county and blah, blah, blah.

All of this totally misses the point. 

“You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power,” Brian said, “Now tell me why we cling to power.”

Winston did not speak for another moment or two.  Then he spoke.  “it sought power because men in the mass are frail, cowardly creatures who cannot endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who are stronger than themselves.  The choice for mankind lies between  freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.  ...  You are ruling over us for our own good,”

A pang of pain shot  through his body.   “That was stupid, Winston, stupid!”  Brian said. “You should know better than to say a thing like that.”   Brian went on,

“We are not interested in the good of others;  We are different from all the oligarchies of the past,  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.  We are not like that.  Power is not a means, it is an end.”

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”

Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?   Power lies in inflicting pain and humiliation.   The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.  ... If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever.”

Brian was right. 

At all times, rulers have sought to legitimize their having and their exercise of power.   In early times they did so with recourse to a cosmology and a divinity... Baal, Huitzilopochtli, Yaweh, Allah...  It was never they who demanded squealing babies or pulsing hearts but the god who had to have these sacrifices in order that it might rain, or that a pestilence would go away or a victory be achieved.    With the establishment of the secular state in the 18th century the excuses changed.  Violence and deprivation were exercised for some greater humanistic or economic good.  But, in essence, there was little difference between feeding babies into the fire or men into the maw of machine fire in order to make the world safe for democracy.  There was little difference between ripping out hearts in order to keep the stars in their orbits and imposing austerity -- hunger, cold, disease, hopelessness -- in order to keep the economic cycle going.  All this legitimizing prattle was simply a tissue over a more primary and naked truth:  Power, that sense of surging vitality and purpose that makes life life is not possible without the feeling the effects of power; that is, without causing  pain and suffering. It is plain Newtonian physics.  Power demands impotence.  Eventually impotence comes to understand that it needs to feel power  also in order to be what it is  -- helpless, hopeless, inferior and afraid -- the perpetual recipient of power. 

Blacks are the easiest and most visible targets of police power; but, in truth, the police seek out anyone who is marginalized, poor, powerless.  They seek them out instinctively because without impotence to be validated as impotence their power cannot be validated as power.   The excuses the cops offer up for their exercise of power are thinner than a fig leaf.  Among themselves and in their locker rooms they talk about turkey shoots and joke about what bullshit infraction or crime they can come up with to justify their “resort to force.”   When it comes to testifying in court they call it “testilying.”

And do not believe that the judges are fooled.  They understand full well what went down on the street and what is going on in court.    The might say that they wink at a few “irregularities” here and there for the sake of the greater good of maintaining public order or vindicating victims.   Some of them might believe it like Pasrsons, “an active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms.  One of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.”    Perhaps.

But the more systemic fact is that the United States in 2020 is increasingly and in all manner of things dedicated to the pursuit of power as its foundational and inalienable right. Racism is itself, in a perverse way, merely a legitimizing excuse.  As I shall detail, in subsequent episodes, bullying, rudeness, throwing one's weight around, pushing on others is a national pastime because it has become the naked nature of what we as a society are, once we have betrayed and forsaken all our excuses.

But when it comes to cops beating on, choking and blowing away Blacks, the means and end of the matter is simply the thrill and validation of feeling a boot on the face. 

©WCG 2020

Blowhard Bernie

My Facebook Feed still cranks out messages from Bernie...

"The Pandemic ought to have taught us the need for Medicare for All...

"Workers need to be kept on the payroll...

"It's unacceptable that people should be evicted during the crisis...

"Bail out working people, not corporate executives...
 
"We cannot lose sight of the climate emergency around us. ...
 
"The workers on the front lines of this crisis are heroes. They must be provided hazard pay, child care and safe working conditions.

"While working people struggle to survive, the rich reach unthinkable levels of wealth. We can and must build a system based on justice and dignity for all. It is fundamentally immoral that health insurance companies make billions in profit every year by denying care...”

The usual. Typical Bernie.

I don't disagree with any of it. Earlier this year I was sending money to promote all of it.  Now I find it obnoxious and want to say

OH SHUT UP ALREADY

Why?

Because there's a difference between a message with content and one without.  Or, put another way, between political rallying and moralistic speechifying.

Once Bernie threw in the political towel by suspending his candidacy and -- worse yet -- endorsing his rival, his words lost their political content.  They became noise from the sideline rather than shouts from within the game.

My sister said a nasty thing about Bernie. She called him a "whiner."  Of course, she was for Warren whom, she said, at least had done something.  I shrugged it off as the rationalization from yet another System-Invested Boomer.  But after Bernie capitulated I began to think twice about my sister's perjorative.

Bernie was certainly no revolutionary.  Not even a work-within-the-system revolutionary.  A real revolutionary would never had thrown in the towel to back his "good friend Joe," the Banker's Whore par excellence. 

Bernie's program was no more revolutionary than Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical calling for the establishment of the social welfare state

Funny how most Ah'murkans have never heard of it... not from Fox News nor the New York Slime's resident Catholic, Ross Douhat  The one thing the Huckstocracy of this  country does not want is for its hapless dumfucks to realize how reactionary and just plain 'tarded the country is. But I digress.

For those who don't bother with the likes of the New York Slime or MSNBC, it is hardly news that Bernie's program was warmed over New Deal. But it is worth reminding ourselves that the New Deal was itself just psuedo social democracy which in turn was nothing but fake socialism. We are three cousins removed from any fundamental structural change.  Regulating capitalism, curbing its excesses, remediating its economic cruelties is not the same thing as replacing it with a system not based on the use of money to make money (to put it simply). 

 In my view, New Dealism won't work.  It won't work because Pope Leo XIII did not understand the inherent contradictions of capitalism.  He, like Bernie, attributed capitalism's excesses to GREED; that is, is to a moral failure of the ruling, wealth-owning class.  

This is not to say that greed is not a problem.  In the United States, greed has been a virtual pandemic for the past 40 years, ravaging whatever pathetic distribution of social product there might have been.  Greed certainly needs to be curbed ... preferably with a sharp blade.

But other countries, where wealth is more moderate and certainly more discreet -- Germany, France, Sweden --, have still been cutting back on social benefits.  Why?  Why do Germany, Sweden, France outsource jobs to Eastern Europe, China or third world countries?  They do it out of economic necessity; that is to say, under the imperatives of the way capitalism works and the way it generates wealth.  Again, to put it simply: PROFIT IS NOT POSSIBLE WITHOUT CHEAP LABOR.  This is not a "failing" of capitalism; it is its essence and its inherent contradiction. 

America's high standard of living immediately after the Second World War was not due to the superior merit of our system but simply because we were victors.  America had all the gold's world (literally, except for a relative sliver held by Argentina).  We were the only country with an intact industrial infrastructure. We could dictate whatever terms we wanted and we had virtually free oil.   

We were rich in the manner of Attila the Hun and could fling our money around to create an artificial "middle class."  When the money and the free oil ran out, the Huckstocracy began the process of social triage which it has carried out for the past fifty years.  And things will only get worse.

So... from a revolutionary socialist point of view, Bernie's program was a mere panacea.  But what the fuck. Some respite on the road to collapse is nothing to sneeze at. More than that, it is always foolish to exalt theory over practice.  In real life, things happen organically if unpredictably. Transmogrification ("change") emerges from and with failure and contradiction. Let us suppose that the U.S.  were to adopt a full social-democratic, welfare policy within an operative capitalist system.  Let us suppose that it worked well for 15 years and that at the end of that time Capital started screaming that it couldn't "afford" all the welfare anymore; that the demand for investment and profit made paying for the welfare state impossible.  At that point a choice would arise: abandon social welfare and return to economic liberalism or scrap capitalism in favor of genuine socialism.  In abstract theory the choice was always one or the other: clean slate A or clean sweep B.  In practice no one can say what the choice will end up being except that it will be a mish-mash on the road to furthr mish-mash.  Half measures like the New Deal lead to experiential choices by which people at least reject going backward.  Stumbling forward is nothing to sneer at.

The reader might have noticed that "not being able to afford" the cost of welfare sounds rather familiar.  Indeed! It was the panic cry of Reagan, Thatcher, Blair and Clinton and, in Germany, Schröder.  In 2008, when the Flawless Obambi was elected, Nancy (La Bon Bon) Peelousy said "Don't expect a new New Deal."  Nancy understood that social democracy "won't work" -- which is the Huckstocracy's way of saying that it won't work within a capitalist system intrinsically based on cheap labour. If Nancy understand this, Jim Bezos and Jamie Dimon certainly do as well.  They are just hoping Dumfuck won't.

In my opinion, we don't need second experiential run to realize that New Dealism ultimately can't and won't work. But again, what the fuck. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  At the same time, however, it is well to bear in mind how tepid Bernie's demands really were the next time some Huckster's Helper over at the DNC begins blabbering about the need to “compromise.”  Bernie's progam was the compromise.

In the end, I supported Bernie because there was nothing else to get behind.  His program offered desperately needed relief to masses of workers and sub workers and non-workers suffering in need.  The alternative was to demand a real socialist revolution and, if one thing was clear, the 'Murkan working class completely lacked the class consciousness required for fundamental change.   

So as not to sound too hifalutin' "class consciousness" is just a doctrinaire way of saying "butt hurt awareness" and the Huckstocracy has been so expertly good at promoting dumbfuckery that this country's lumpen plebes are either numb to the pain or have been convinced that the pain is their own fault or worst of all don't even fucking notice no more.  They say that if you get butt-fucked long and hard enough you "grow" to like and even hunger for it.  

All that said, somewhere in the middle of 2019, Bernie's message underwent a subtle shift. He stopped hawking his Basket of Benefits and began to talk about taking over and cleaning out the Democratic Party.  My ears perked up.

It can be assumed that if Bernie were to have become the nominee, the party would in great measure fall under his control.  However, that would still leave quite a few "centrist" Democrats (i.e. Republicans in Kumbaya Clothing) in the Senate eager to block any change at all. Bernie's reply to this problem was to say (1) that his election was only the beginning of the fight and (2) that as president he would use his office to back real progressive candidates against corporate Democrats.   Now that sounded revolutionary.  It was not substantive revolution. Bernie's program remained the same. But it hinted at procedural revolution and that is more important than it might sound.

Let me explain. Any movement or political faction has a set of substantive goals and changes it wants to achieve.  However, the means of bringing those goals about itself requires a change in how things are being done. Bernie was no longer trumpeting just a program, he was aiming to take control of the levers of the party and, through the party, of government.  This more than anything else scared the shit out of the corporate whores and hucksters who comprise the DNC. Bernie had declared war on that cabal that controlled the means of politics.

Even here, Bernie's procedural revolution was tepid. A real procedural revolution would aim to scrap the Constitution even if it nominally kept capitalism.  It would not simply "overturn Citizens' United," it would abolish the Senate and institute a ministerial parliamentary system.  It would forbid presidential reelection and give the prerogative of appointing the judiciary to a non-partisan commission.  A real revolution in "how things are get done" would entail more than just taking over the Democratic Party.  It would be based on the understanding that the means of politics is related to maintaining or changing control of the means of production.  A true procedural revolution would realize that the Constitution was designed to protect and enable the Huckstocracy and that if the distribution of wealth is to be changed the means of politics also has to be changed.  As the much overlooked Lucy Parsons put it over a century ago,

Never be deceived into thinking that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

Certainly not with a Senate controlled, always, by some shameless, Huckster-whore, without an ounce of  human sentiment. 

But at least Bernie was doing more than advertising a platform.  He openly realized that to achieve a set of goals he would have to wage a war of means. A limited engagement, as it were, but about time nonetheless. 

Whether "revolutionary" or not, he was more of a politician than the country had seen in decades.  This statement might at first seem baffling until one distinguishes a politican from a political huckster... a person who sweet talks, puff talks, razzle-dazzles and equivocates all the while serving the Masters of the Status Quo. Obama was (and remains) a political huckster.  Bernie was offering a real economic-political choice within a battle for control of political means. 

He came close. The array of empty weaslings the Demorat Party threw in his path in an effort to eat away at a first ballot victory proved too vapid for even an electorate brainwashed into accepting cornflakes and cheerios as meat.

Panic in Alberich's Cave on the Upper East Side.  One wonders how many niebelungen at the Slime got taken out back and whipped for failing to sufficiently omit facts and obfuscate issues.  The panic of the ruling Demorat Party Cabal was typified by the most ridiculous editorial endorsement, not only in American history but in all of journalism anywhere.  Bernie had them on the run.

Then came South Carolina. The proximate reason Bernie lost the state was that he failed to get the endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, Kingfish to the majoritarian Black demographic of the party and personification par excellence of Demorat racial identity politics.  Clyburn is the political foreman of a dumbfuck demographic that does what it is told under the aura of Negro Iconograhpy.  The usual chicken feed for the poor wrapped in Overcome Talk.

 It is hard to see how such an endorsement was possible given that Kingfish is the very type of fake "liberal" corporate Demorat Bernie had vowed to sweep from power.

The only alternative left to Bernie was to do an end run around Kingfish by appealing directly to the state's black voting block. This did not, as Bernie's campaign evidently thought, mean appealing to Black millenials but rather to Black Boomers.  But Bernie's campaign consistently failed to address the needs of seniors.  "Protecting Social Security" -- a meaningless political slogan as it is -- only got mentioned every once in a while.  The most radical thing Bernie ever said about social security is that he would "expand it"  by a hundred bucks here and there for the poorest recipients.  In other words, do no more than Kingfish routinely promises to do.  The failure to address the needs of Not OK Boomers -- whether Black or White -- was a major defect in Bernie's Youth Folk Rock Movement and it cost him the state and the next state and the next.

Even so, Bernie's defeats were not a rout.  Of course, the DNC AgitProp Apparat swung into full gear, ballyhooing the inevitability of a Biden triumph.  Plus ça change.  But the difference between politics and a battlefield is that is Bernie still had the accumulated balance of prior wins and this gave him leverage over Biden until and through the convention

Two scenarios were foreseeable: (1) Biden was the inevitable nominee and (2) Biden was not the inevitable nominee.  DUH, right?  The second option arose from the fact that Biden is a terrible gaff prone candidate who managed to flub two prior runs. We are not dealing with winged Pegasus fleet of hoof.  A disastrous exploitable gaff was not only possible, it was a probability.

The first alternative would have been harder and more complicated but it basically boiled down to using his accumulated delegate count to blackmail the party into committing itself is an actionable way to pushing at least two of Bernie's signature programs.  The blackmail is simple: either commit or I run as an independent.

The Covid pandemic actually dovetailed with the strategy of political blackmail.  Bernie could have demanded a postponment of the primaries.  He should have vigorously, publicly, and incessesantly accused Saint Obama and Lunch Pail Joe of murder... of aiding and abetting a killer virus.  He should have tied up the issue in the courts and, if necessary, reduced the convention to one huge cluster fuck.  A real revolutionary understands that at times you have to press your advantage to the point of destruction.

Disgracefully, Bernie lacked revolutionary guts.  In fact he lacked ordinary political guts.  He was summoned by the Flawless One and emerged, whimpering and contrite.  A true Sanbenito.

And what was the confessorial cant that accompanied this miserable revolutionary fizzle?  "We can't afford to let Trump win."  Standard Corporate Demorat Lesser Evilism.   A Bankers' Steppinfechit to save us from the Pathological Liar.... as if anyone in Washington were addicted to truth.   Let us be clear.  When it comes to lying the difference between Trump and Obama, Hillary or Biden is that Trump isn't good at it.

The propaganda that we need to "stop" Trump at all costs is just routine political scare mongering. What we need to stop is the economic and environmental trajectory we are on.  Not a single politician in the last 60 years, at any level, from either party has done jack shit to alter the direction of this trajectory.  At best, the Demorats merely slow the rate of devastation.  But the trajectory has now reached the point where the complete collapse of bourgeois civil society and the complete destruction of the environment are at hand.  When the next step is off the cliff, lesser evilism is not only not an option, it is irrelevant.

Let me put it another way.  Lesser-evilism is part of the system.  It is the "gear" the mechanism routinely slips into.    If you accept it, then you will always be tricked out power and out of change.  If you reject it, then you are willing to destroy the party in order to gain control of it.   

One had thought that Bernie actually understood what was happening to our society and our planet. He said all the right things that had not been said before, at least not in our lifetime.  And yet when the Flawless Obama blew his dog whistle, Bernie fell into line as much as Karamela Harris, Pogey Bait Pete, What's my name Warren and the rest of the gaggle of DNC hacks for hire.   And so now we get,

"The Democratic Party must stand up to powerful special interests and fight for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. I'm pleased that some of the strongest progressive leaders in the country will work with the Biden campaign to unify our party in a transformational and progressive direction."

Does Bernie really think that his "good friend Joe" will let him inch the party to left? Do you, dear reader, think that having anguished and connived to stop Bernie at all costs, the Demorat Establishment will now adopt his program?  Oh sure!  NOW we believe in Medicare for All! 

Really?   It is so utterly beyond belief that the question I now have is whether Blowhard Bernie wasn't all along Bait and Switch Bernie.

Even the New York Slime has gotten into the act.  This Gentrified Liberal rag, which but four six months ago begrudged Bernie so much as a column inch, is now loaded with progressive sounding op-eds, suddenly denouncing our health “care” system, our educational system, our housing system our justice system our anything system all as ineffective and unfair.  These days Slime is starting to sound like a progressive blog; surely this shows that the party, the establishment, are “moving to the left!”

DO NOT BELIEVE IT. It is a farce and sham; the Huckstocracy at its most cunning and vilest.  The Slime knows full well that it can print all the progressive homilies it wants but, in the end, the Senate will be there to protect it from its own hot air.

Bernie at face value was the last stop chance to change the Sheissestaat  from within the Muckway. Whether he blew it or was never serious, that path to a change in trajectory no longer exists.

Stay tuned, dear non-existent reader. Upcoming... what next?

©2020 WCG

Soap Box Bernie

Bernie* is continuing to bang the gong and clang the cymbal on progressive issue on social media.  In this morning's Facebook Feed, Bernie* pronounced that the Covid 19 virus had laid bare the defects in our for-profit health care system, showing -- now more than ever -- why Medicare-for-All was necessary.........

I really don't understand the point of this. By withdrawing from the race, by foregoing the threat of abstention or running a third party ticket, Bernie gave up any all leverage he had to bring about "our" agenda.

Does Bernie really think the pandemic was needed to make people see the need for medicare for all? Rubbish. Through January polls showed that a substantial majority of all ordinary, working Americans favored Medicare for all. THEY didn't need a pandemic to make them see the necessity.

Does Bernie really think the Flawless Obama, or Nancy (La Mousse) Pelosi, Furious Hillary, the New York Slime or any Centrist Democrat didn't understand the imperfections of the for-profit health excuse industry? Of course not. They just don't give a damn. Corporate profit is what they are about and the system works great for that purpose.

It pains me to say this but Soap Box Bernie is just talking himself into irrelevance. He got his NYT op ed. By summer the media will have forgotten him and progressive reform will be buried under a heap of commissions.

The Democratic Party is just a tool. The tool remains in the hand of corporate puppets. So it's back to square one. Either progressives gain control of the tool or find another one. To that end, the progressive movement needs a leader, someone who will not just talk but talk, act and win political control over something with tangible political consequence.  Bernie* is no longer the leader of anything because there is nothing for him to take control of, neither the party, nor the presidency.   As such he is just another voice in the din.

©2020

The Hucksterism of Political Homiletics

Typically, my Facebook Feed provides a more or less steady diet of homilies of one sort another: the importance of being kind, the need to help those in need or to have our neighbour's back, the way to find balance amid the turmoil, to bring out the positive in life or to achieve a sense of community while being mindful, cheerful, hopeful... and so on.  These gently nagging but uplifting thoughts are accompanied by pictures of a sunset, a rose mandala, a firefighter, a giggly sweet child or an adorably cute puppy and, of course, of Jesus.   

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic the number of such moralizing posts has surged, compounding the usual number of homiletic exhortations one could expect at Easter.  And so it was I learned the other day that someone out there was looking for the "opportunity" to love me in order to be able shout ..Alleluja, Alleluja. Alleluja, Christ is risen!"  Evidently, the solution to the economic and health crisis we are in is to smile on your brother; everybody love one another right now!

Arrgh!!!   Arrgh!!!  Arrrgh!!!

I've had it with religion. Throughout its history Amurkans have confused homiletics with politics. Politics is about how to organize obligations and benefits within a society; how to produce and distribute social product. You don't need a lot of aspirational feel good/do good stuff for that. It is a practical question.

To the extent it arises at all, a moral issue arises with the primary question of what is the purpose of living together at all? There are two possible answers: either society exists as fodder for hucksters or it exists to provide fodder to all.

The question was posed at the beginning of Plato's "Republic." Thrasymachus gave the first answer stating that what is called "justice" is simply the advantage of rulers who manipulate and exploit the demos as sources for their own profit. The second answer, given by Socrates, was that justice consisted in promoting the well being of all in accordance with the capacities of each.

You don't need religion to make the choice. A study was done some 20 years ago with Bonobo apes in which a group of six apes were given a task to do at the end of which they each got a banana. For several weeks the apes did the task and got their bananas. Then, one day, they did their task and everyone got a banana except one who got nothing. The apes immediately raised a ruckus, threw their bananas at their keepers and refused to cooperate further.

Evidently, the apes did not need Buddha or Jesus or Mahomet or Swami Prachtamuchtananda to make their choice.   Unfortunately, Amurkans are all but genetically predisposed to substitute preaching for political discourse whenever possible. 

In fact, homiletics is just the other side of hucksterism. De Tocqueville noted that while "acquiring the good things of this world" was the prevailing passion of Americans, certain momentary outbreaks occurred, "when their souls suddenly burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained" and whole families trekked off into the woods to listen for several days on end to wandering preachers who hawk about the word of God from place to place. "Religious insanity is very common in the United States."

But just as common is hucksterism. Just as whole businesses are devoted to religion, whole business (lucrative ones at that) are devoted to branding and marketing one worthless box of cereal over another. Worst of all are the political hucksters who sell aspirational cornflakes while shoveling public treasure to banks, corporations and those whom Thrasymachus called the "true rulers."

In fact, the homiletics is used to detract attention from the hucksterism. As Clemenceau famously said of Wilson "He talks like Jesus Christ but acts like Lloyd George." Our politicians are always tear jerking us with hopeful homilies about this and that while they lead us to economic slaughter. Meanwhile gaggles of preachers, do-gooders, self-improvement specialists, and swindling swamies of one sort or another detract us from the task at hand with vague nostrums about finding self and helping others. It is all beside the point. Social activity must never be based on philanthropic flim-flam, but rather must aim at the elimination of the basic deficiencies in economic and cultural life that lead to the degradation and degeneration of the individual.

I have nothing against harboring private religious sentiment or practicing goodwill toward men; but eliminating the basic deficiencies in our economic life does not require Jesus. It simply requires counting bananas.

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Post Script. The day after I wrote this, David Dole posted the latest tee vee ad from Joe Biden which serves as a perfect, paradigmatic example of how homiletics substitutes for real politics and carries water for political hucksterism.  Watch and Gag.

https://youtu.be/_68E2ghjNis

©WCG, 2020