"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart concealing it will break." - The Bard....
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic.”
- Plutarch....
Need Little. Want Less. Love More.
"When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless." From today's The Intercept here . Well worth reading (The Intercept is always a step ahead of everyone) as we move into the surreality of Trumpworld.
Below is a new article commenting on the "surprised white voter" written by my friend Delthea, recently posted on her website. It's just too good not to repost the whole thing. She's one of my favorite writers, gifted, original, engaging and true, don't know why she isn't writing speeches for some candidate worthy of her talents. Plus her sly cultural references totally crack me up. But make no mistake, the lady knows from whence she speaks.
White Folk really don't deal well when white folk disappoint them. I expect to be disappointed by white folk so when they do, it doesn't really faze me. And on those occasions when they don't, it's a red letter day for me and they actually make me happy. But when white folk disappoint white folk, Oh My God! That is a world ender! I don't think I have ever seen so many sad and shocked faces, heard so much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and of course all the "whys?" and "How-could-this-happens?" as I have in the last 48 hours. It's like white folk had never met white folk before.
Of course white folk voted for Donald Trump and in numbers sufficient to elect him President of the United States. Why does this surprise anyone? Is it because we have a black president? Hasn’t everyone been watching how our black president has been treated? How his family has been treated? No, he hasn’t been shot, but that is not because people don’t want to shoot him but because the Secret Service has been doing its job and doing it well.
Is there some belief that bigotry stopped some time in the last 8 years? If so, can someone please explain to me The Tea Party, Alex Jones, Voter Suppression, the hatred of the name #BlackLivesMatter, and why shooting unarmed black people by the police doesn’t get anyone fired?
Poor white folk blaming non-white folk for what rich white folk to do them, as well as believing anything rich white folk tell them, has been going on ever since the 17th century when rich white folk noticed poor white folk and non-white folk were forming alliances. Rich white folk thought they had to buy the allegiance of poor white folk or watch their fortunes be taken from them. They came up with a currency of cruelty named by W.E.B. Dubois as the Psychological Wages of Whiteness. Whiteness itself became a thing of value that made all white people simply due to the color of their skin better than anyone who was not white. So valuable was this wage that all kinds of racial rules and regulations were set up to protect whiteness from any taint or blemish even by one drop. So precious was this thing called whiteness that even the institutions of society were called upon to uphold its rightness and protect its existence from all enemies foreign or domestic. Soon whiteness was permeating every aspect, every corner of society until whiteness was a fundamental to being American as breathing the air here, and in some ways just as visible.
Over time, we have eradicated and eliminated the more overt aspects of the primacy of whiteness (also known as White Supremacy) in our daily lives: Race slavery and Jim Crow, American Indian Boarding Schools, Anti-Asian immigration laws.
But by the time de jure White Supremacy was done away; de facto supremacy was firmly entrenched in the American way of life, living in the institutions of society and the norms of the culture. Racism without effort was found to be far more appealing and effective than any misogyny law or restricted hotel.
In the norms and institutions lived the ideas and ideology of supremacy. People didn’t really have to explain it, people just sort of knew. White folk are above other folk. Why, isn’t it obvious? White folk are deserving of the benefit of the doubt in all they do, the assumption of innocence, and when they fail, second, third and fourth chances, as many chances as necessary. Thus, white people treat each other with both a sort of sight and a sort of blindness. They tend to see the good in each other and not the bad, the help offered in society’s institutions and norms but not the harm they do. This brings us to the day after the election of Donald Trump.
White folk, most if not all of whom pride themselves on the black friends they have, the volunteer work they do with immigrant communities, all the marches and vigils and Cornel West and Tim Wise speeches they attend were feeling pretty good election day morning. They had watched Ted Talks and Fora TV and were feeling pretty confident that herstory would be made. They knew racism was real and racists existed, and that racists supported Trump. They watched PBS and listened to NPR and the hardcore among them had actually been in a Die-In for Black Lives Matter. But there weren’t THAT many racists. After all, the white people they knew, while they might tell a bigoted jokes or express a disturbing idea, were all decent people deep down, not like a REAL racists like David Duke.
Well it turns out, when good people tell racist jokes, it’s because they are racist. When they talk about knowing how those people are, they mean it. And while these people may never wear a sheet or burn a cross, they will vote for a fascist. Welcome to the full effects of your privilege ladies and gentleman, the luxury of white denial.
So have a good cry white folk. It’s hard when a good dream dies. So get some rest, get some sleep and wake up and face the bright white day. White supremacy is real and all around you. In fact, you’re soaking in it.
From today's New Yorker online, and many thanks to Ben for sending this and David Remnick for being a brave journalist while the major media cower in fear and willful ignorance.
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY
The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world.Source Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.
Early on Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I. director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,” “Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still with Hillary Clinton.
All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”
Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because they saw that this slick performer, once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris Johnson and so many others. The Democratic electorate might have taken comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to 4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney, announced their distaste for Trump only seemed to deepen his emotional support.
The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.
Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.
For eight years, the country has lived with Barack Obama as its President. Too often, we tried to diminish the racism and resentment that bubbled under the cyber-surface. But the information loop had been shattered. On Facebook, articles in the traditional, fact-based press look the same as articles from the conspiratorial alt-right media. Spokesmen for the unspeakable now have access to huge audiences. This was the cauldron, with so much misogynistic language, that helped to demean and destroy Clinton. The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as the oxygen of his campaign. Steve Bannon, a pivotal figure at Breitbart, was his propagandist and campaign manager.
It is all a dismal picture. Late last night, as the results were coming in from the last states, a friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.
From Charles Blow's NY Times op-ed today. "To put it more succinctly, Donald Trump is a lowlife degenerate with the temperament of a 10-year-old and the moral compass of a severely wayward teen."
Invulnerable to Prosecution?
But there's more. Blow's reference to a rape case pending in New York against Donald Trump (the hearing scheduled in December, after the election) got me digging. Just when I thought I couldn't be more disgusted by Trump and his followers, the bile rose in my throat. This Republican nominee for President has been sued no fewer than 1,500 times, not just for fraudulent acts involving Trump University, but, and this one really boggles the mind, by young women, now in their 30s, who contend they were raped, not sexually accosted, but raped, by Trump when they were 13 years old! At parties, the existence of which was well known by many in the 90s, thrown by his pal Jeffrey Epstein. According to a rather thorough summary of the suit here, Epstein "has been named in multiple sexual assault lawsuits over the last several years, served 13 months in jail, and is registered as a sex offender for life." And yet, Trump, the Republican "party of family values" candidate, not only attended these parties but expressed public admiration for the guy. ' "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,'' Trump booms from a speakerphone. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life." ' Younger side indeed. (More on slime ball Epstein here. He has some interesting pals, or did.)
Apparently Donald's momma never told him people judge you by the company you keep.
So a guy with the "moral compass of a severely wayward teen" has the support of, according to lawn signs, a substantial number of folks in my neighborhood despite his despicable reputation, or, more frighteningly, because of it. And that's what scares me.
According to a Huff Po article about it, "The rape case must be viewed through the lens of Mr. Trump’s current, longstanding and well documented contempt for women. Men who objectify women are more likely to become perpetrators of sexual violence, just as one with a long history of overtly racist comments is more likely to commit a hate crime." Unbelievably – though this presidential candidate has "taken lifelong joy in objectifying women, including his proclamation: “Women, you have to treat ‘em like shit.” – he has the support of not only a huge portion of men but some women as well. That any woman supports him is shocking. Does she not realize that, despite Hillary's many faults, it's because of women like Hillary that she gets to vote at all? Is it a case of national Stockholm Syndrome or what? And who are the kidnappers? Ans: The Republican Party. The same party whose base has preached for years that women belong at home, powerless, pregnant and prayerful, where they might silently and dutifully (Melania, an example) reproduce white- skinned babies in sufficient number to out- populate the dark folk. Zeig heil, mon herr.
My party believes women belong in the House... and the Senate... and the White House. And have the right to decide when and with whom to procreate.
The older I get the more I can't help but see most social issues, from war to civil rights, through the lens of feminism. Because it is increasingly obvious, and to that extent Trump has done us all a favor by making it so. Anyone who still denies that this election is anything other than the ultimate smackdown between misogyny and feminism is blind, or willfully so. Because there's nothing more vulnerable to exploitation than a child who's broke and homeless, and tied to a bed by a monster who believes he's invulnerable to prosecution, answerable to no one.
Trump and the Republican Party: a distinction without a difference. They are locked in a death embrace. The evil that is Trump is root and branch the evil that is the GOP, ever since Nixon's white racist "Southern Strategy" every Republican Presidential candidate has used white racism, covertly or overtly, to win votes. Birther boy Trump offers nothing, not tax breaks, not jobs, not educational opportunities, not child care for working parents, that will actually help the struggling middle and lower economic classes. All he offers is racism. Win or lose, he has already dragged this country into a cesspool of white racial hatred. Snooty Republicans can clutch their pearls and pretend that they just can't understand where Trump and his storm troopers come from. He comes from you, the GOP elite, and your 50 year embrace of racial hatred. The only remaining question is, will voters vote Democratic and reject all GOPers in the Senate, House and statehouses, and cast off the hatred that is Trump. Or will we all go down the maelstrom with him."
Clutch their pearls, indeed. As we say in Jersey, Noice!
Big Brother and the Moment of Hate. This picture says it all. (from today's NY Times) The following paragraph from a NY Times comment back in July sketches a brief factual history worth heeding when considering HOW on earth such a bunch of dumbkoffs ended up holding congress and the nation hostage for more than two decades now, then had the effrontery to offer the voting public the Orwellian Trump for President in 2016. With a calculated, publicly and repeatedly declared (was everyone deaf as well?) plan to dismantle ("shrink the size of") the US Government. How was this not treasonous? How did the People and their Representatives get so dumb? Here's how.
Another noteworthy angle on GOP anti intellectualism is how they systematically lobotomized Congress from 1995 onward. Just a few years after the end of the Cold War, and on the cusp of the Internet revolution, they eliminated Congress' science forecasting agency (the Office of Technology Assessment) Seeing public sector infrastructure as competition, they then wiped out the shared issue caucus staff--who performed much of the continuing education on complex policy for members of both chambers and both parties. Keep in mind, these global public interests don't have strong domestic constituencies, so they can't compete with private or lucrative advocacy tactics. The only entities who survived inside Congress were ideologically aligned "think tanks"who took over policy tasks and K Street lobbyists who doubled down. Finally, the Republicans "reorganized" the Congressional Research Service to severely restrict specialized experts and consolidated the committees, diminishing the institutional memory by getting rid of staff. These actions eliminated hundreds of deeply knowledgeable individuals who were dedicated to Congress. This is truly tragic. Today Congress bitterly scorns the White House for consolidating power, yet our first branch of government did this to itself! Our current disrepair and incompetence is not an accident, its an outcome. I would even say it was a purposeful GOP strategy.
And, speaking of treason, what about Donald's security clearance? Below is from the US State dept. website. Would he qualify? THE SECURITY CLEARANCE Eligibility for access to classified information, commonly known as a security clearance, is granted only to those for whom an appropriate personnel security background investigation has been completed. It must be determined that the individual’s personal and professional history indicates loyalty to the United States, strength of character, trustworthiness, honesty, reliability, discretion, and sound judgment, as well as freedom from conflicting allegiances and potential for coercion, and a willingness and ability to abide by regulations governing the use, handling, and protection of classified information.
For a more complete chronology of how the GOP dumbed the nation down to the point of Trump, read Max Boot's column from last July. The history of the GOP effort begins way back in 1964 with none other than Raygun. And of course, thank you, W, for paving the way for Trump as well: At a Yale commencement: “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”
