Death Valley Ruminations

A few weeks ago, lured by past visits, and the promise of a certain seasonal quietude and benign weather probabilities, I went from the San Francisco area out to Death Valley.  I passed through the Mojave desert, by derelict towns and Air Force bases, old mining camps and their debris, then through the valley, passing famed Zabriski Point, and on to a town I’d visited before, Tecopa Hot Springs, there to bathe a bit trying to chase the flu or cold I’d picked up in the City.   And to scout and think, as it was my intention to shoot another landscape film in the Valley – envisioned in my mind a wide, vast and brooding image of this foreboding area.   I spent a few days soaking in the hot springs, surrounded mostly with Asians – Koreans mostly.  Nosed around the area taking photos, and then, drove north into Death Valley, taking the Badwater route.  As it happens the Badwater basin is the lowest point in North America, 282 feet below sea level.   Approaching from the south the density of traffic grew, from the occasional 4 wheeler or snazzy van headed south, to a near traffic jam.  Badwater was filled with tourists, folks who came to take selfies or take a walk down into the saline bowl to experience America’s lowest.

My casual observation was that most these tourists were Asian – Korean, Japanese, Chinese.  Most meaning perhaps two-thirds or more.  I assume they were lured by travel agents, pointing out that Death Valley was indeed a spectacular place, and winter was the time to visit to avoid being broiled.   And the world being as it is today, they have the money to be tourists, and America is certainly a prime location for spectacular selfie backgrounds.

Seeing this herd of tourists out in the midst of the aptly named Death Valley also underlined the profound change which we humans have brought to “nature.”  Once a lethally forbidding landscape, this remote and harsh desert has in the last 30 years,  along with much else in our world, been converted into a play-ground, a part of the vast Disneyland into which the globe has been transformed: today we zip through the European Alps on highways which simply flatten them – tunnels or elevated bridges letting us literally fly through them, making them mere spectacle.  No zig-zag tortuous hairpin curve up-down required any more.  And the same is true of almost everywhere. Great and modest suspension bridges leap over chasms, four-wheel drive ORV machines churn up desert sands or swampy marshes; para-gliders swoop over mountain ranges or ocean up-rises; base-jumpers leap from cliffs and buttes and natural arches (as well as man-made towers); skiers are hoisted to the tops of mountains only to zip down once treacherous slopes as entertainment.  Cheap airlines jam the air with tourists who traipse en masse through once near sacred sites – the Parthenon, Machu Picchu, Notre Dame, the Taj Mahal, and any other remarkable piece of architecture or symbolic totem of societies past.  All the world’s a playground, a kind of game.

The Pacific, off Cape Flattery on the Makah Reservation

It had happened by accident, but looking out over Badwater, it made sense.  A month earlier I’d been to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, on the north western tip of the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State.  It is the furthest western point on mainland USA.  As it happens Neah Bay is an Indian Reservation, the Makah Tribe.  Like most reservations it is a place of drug use, alcoholism, domestic violence, trash and trashed housing – a lamentable if understandable response of a culture which has been simply squashed and destroyed by another culture.   A sad place.  And in a literal and geographic sense, The End of America.   I went to shoot for a film, Plain Songs, thinking I’d begin it with a shot of the Pacific, from there, The End of America, in the metaphoric sense – a desolate community destroyed by America’s ugly history.

Neah Bay, on the res

I found it oddly ironic that I’d accidentally come to Badwater, the lowest point in America, to watch tourists gather and gawk, at the same time my country had fallen into the morass of the Trump administration and metaphorically, at least for many of my fellow countrymen, we’re enmeshed in another “lowest point.”   I took another shot for the perhaps swan-song film on America, and wandered on, taking many still photos of the valley.  While the imagined landscape film escaped me, instead another idea came to mind, which, though far more work, might be a nice change of pace.

Wandering from Death Valley I went to Beatty, Nevada, a small town scrapping to stay alive on the coat-tails of tourism, just outside the National Park.  Still chasing my cold, I hunkered down in a few motels, trying to think and perhaps write.  Neither came at the time, rather more diffuse thoughts meandered in mind.  At the same time clangorous “news” rattled the nation’s nerves – Trump Trump Trump, 24/7.  The rush of daily traumas ran into a smear – North Korea, Bannon, bigger buttons, vulgar statements – a non-stop litany of Trump’s obscenity, and his magical revelation of the utter corruption of America’s political and social institutions which appeared powerless in front of this pathetic man, thus showing their own decadence.   Beatty, a dead-end town of desert desolation provided a suitable setting to sour still more my contemplation of America.

A VFW outfit offered a decent amber beer for $3, and an assortment, depending on the night, of grizzled camo decked vets, or other nights, a swarm of Asian tourists, sent there by the nearby motel – not that there were many options as where to go.  One wondered just what person would willfully choose to settle down in this town, or thousands of others I have traversed in my travels in America in the past decade or two.  The grim signs of failure littered the townscape in ramshackle housing, trailer homes, junked cars, abandoned stores, and the transparent poverty written on the faces and bodies of the people who live there.  The same is replicated with regional touches almost anywhere one goes in the United States.  Behind the hip gentrified facades of liberal America, or the closed gated communities of the well-off, or the distant penthouses or estate mansions of the very rich, there is a pervasive cancer gnawing away at our social accords.  It is a disease fraught with contradictions and confusions, one which breeds a mutual stew of contempt and hatred, and has long since embittered our national “unity.”   I think this largely accounts for our most American habit of flying the flag in the front yard – a kind of desperate wish for union which masks an awareness of our deep disunion.

James Benning’s replica of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin

James Benning’s 22 star flag for Alabama

With such thoughts I continued my journey, passing derelict towns, juxtaposed to vast tracts of shopping malls flanking the sides of our cities, endless miles of Big Box stores, corporate logos dotting the horizon as far as the eye could see, and the goading shrieks of our media – television, radio, giant bill-boards – all urging us to buy buy buy and run up our credit card bills into the trillions.

I await the imminent burst of this bubble as the stock market zooms past Dow Jones 26,000, and the homeless camp beneath freeway overpasses, and the fractured psyche of the nation intensifies its internecine squabble with itself, with precious few any more honest or self-aware than Donald J. Trump, our titular head of State.

The United States of America represents about 5% of the world’s population.  It consumes 25% of the globe’s resources.  There is an explanation for how this occurs, and it is not owing to our supposed brilliance, inventiveness, our “can do” attitude.  It is owing to other things.  Things which America at large is unwilling to acknowledge or address in any meaningful manner except to demand still more funding for our military.

Trailing the dry cough of the flu I and millions of others picked up this winter, I moved along.  Some suggested this disease was metaphorical for the winter’s political and social discontent, and not merely a passing bug.  My own thoughts persisted, like the cough, to meander through the debris of now decades of seeing my own country through the eyes of a harsh critic, and seeing nothing has changed, really, for the better.  Rather it all appears to be coming to a bitter fruition as we collectively fulfill comments made long ago by a French visitor, or by some of our own sages.   In this case, being “right” in my own views, bears no consolation whatsoever.

Salton City, California

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

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“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”  — Alexis de Tocqueville

And the bitter truth is that America has never been good.

100 Daze

As we edge toward the fabled 100 first days of our newly-minted President’s term, there seems enough evidence in to warrant a modest appraisal.

“Holy shit!”

Peering through the rubble of this new administration’s record, we won’t recite the litany of Cabinet officers chosen to destroy, by one means or another, the departments to which they are assigned, nor those cronies – mostly family and friends – plonked down in the West Wing suites at 1600.  Nor the botched first week’s so-called not-Muslim ban, nor the great “repeal and replace” debacle of gutting the Affordable Health Care Act.  Or the other myriad fumbles which came from the small hands of our dear leader, and his cohorts of the moment: Bannon, Sessions, Hill, son-in-law Jared and daughter Ivanka, Hill, Cohen, and the quickly departed Flynn (and the many others who doubtless will be dumped from the team).

These matters and others have been fully aired by our pundits left and right, with due respect given to the evident chaos and mismanagement with which the wizardly self-proclaimed dazzling NYC businessman The Donald Trump™ has commenced his stay in DC.  Nor mention the many millions of tax dollars spent to shuttle the Trump entourage from Washington to Mars-a-Lago, where the serious business of state is discussed over nibbles and golf.  Nor the Machiavellian intrusions of Putin and company and the many criss-crossed connections between Trump’s campaign and the Russians.  All these things and more have been duly covered by the purveyors of real news and “fake,” from Right and Left and middling in-between.  As was predictable, it is TrumpTrumpTrump™ 24/7/365. The castigation of Trump from the liberal left, as well as his elevation (for the moment) to savior by the alt-Right, can only have occurred in a particular setting – a setting which almost all sides choose not to discuss or investigate too deeply as the pointing finger invariable sends three back to the accuser.  In both cases, blame/shame is a diversion, a way to evade more fundamental matters, to elude one’s own responsibility in the serious matters at hand.  Invariably it boils down to “we are screwed” and it is always the fault of someone else, of a party external to one’s self.

In the simplistic manner which seems to appeal to the American public – not only now, but over the brief historical blip of the nation’s existence – we tend to boil things down to a binary sequence:  yep/nope, Dem/Rep, right/wrong, right/left, white/black, and so on down our either/or set up.  “You are either with us or against us.” Our value system leaves little room for a middle-ground, a space for contradicting beliefs and practices.  In consequence we tend to self-segregate, and whether “legal” or not, we live in clumps of mirror images: the rich live with the rich, the middle-class, the gentrified hipster, the educated, the poor, the black, brown, Asian, native American all coalesce into common groups, each with a particular set of blinders on, blinders seldom contradicted within the community.   Confronted with those outside one’s own community there is shock and dismay: they live like that!  they believe that!

And so, as a society we are vulnerable to the easy division of us and them politics, which Mr. Trump, a highly successful TV personality, poll watcher and life-time con-man, easily played upon.   Though this could only have worked in a situation in which the various institutions of society were already hollowed out and rotted.  As the last 3 months have shown, indeed these institutions – the ones that theoretically are meant to serve as a check on wild societal swerves – have all shown themselves to be the proverbial empty suits.   The Republicans, those scolds of the past so concerned about Christian beliefs, and sexual propriety, or running up debt or — well, take your pick of the litany of GOP totems which Trump has smashed into a pulp of incoherence, while the party faithfully toed his line, but months after having asserting he was far beyond the pale, vile, insane and worse.  But now, no matter how much he has diverged from supposed Republican rectitude, the party has been in lock-step following his lead.  Principles?  Family values be damned.

And ditto the Democrats, now subdued and powerless,  whimper in virtual silence, Clinton’s brilliant technocrats stunned by their defeat at the hands of a true impresario of the fetid American psyche, whose sort has graced our history since the start.   Our founding fathers wrote, in establishing the Union, that “all men are created equal” though at the time Native Americans, Blacks, women, and folks without land weren’t, well, quite equal.  They were instead genocide victims, slaves, chattel and not allowed a vote or a voice in the running of their newly founded country.  A little “original sin” of the hallowed founding fathers, supposedly corrected in the past 250 years, though most of those corrections were crammed into the last 100 years, and are under constant threat.

American history is a long litany of lies, from its founding document, now enshrined in Philadelphia as a virtual religious document, which citizens are taught to revere, and to which they recurrently must swear to uphold and defend, more or less upon pain of certain banishment, or even death should they refuse.  Try sitting at a baseball game through the National Anthem, or declining to recite the Pledge of Allegiance when it is requested.

And so it has been since we commenced, a deeply ingrained hypocrisy, in which we moralistically mouth platitudes inversely proportional to our actions.  This is our history, which artists have told us in so many fables and novels, Elmer Gantry writ large across the two and a half centuries of our national life.  While we conjure up the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, and extol his purported honesty, it is only centuries later we get word of his black mistress, and the rest of the “story.”

Trump then represents a culmination of America, the place we were always headed, and the kind of person whom our national destiny designated to rise to the pinnacle of our society.

P.T. Barnum

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

 ”As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by an downright utter moron.”

H.L.Mencken-1928

“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in.”

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

Of course most of our citizens would object to these thoughts, and insist matters are exaggerated, and that it is only those people who are at fault.  The blacks, the Mexicans, the Wall Streeters, the druggies, the banksters, the libruls, the racists, the rich, the poor, you know, “them!”

But as Pogo said, we have met the enemy and he is us.  For if one looks with a tiny bit of honesty, one must see that our society is utterly corrupted – ethically, morally, financially, politically, socially.   The corruption is so thorough, and our dishonesty about it so complete, that naturally we do not see it.   Or if we do, it is only in others. 

So, in the minds of perhaps a majority of Americans, Trump has been visited upon us by the red-neck yokels of back-woods fly-over country.  It is their damned fault.  And in the minds of said yokels, it is because those latte sipping LGBT welfare-sucking goddamned libruls were forcing their unChristian anti-job values on the country with big guvmint.

Yep, we’ve all got somebody to blame.

So, to really understand how we arrived here, we need to – how unfashionable in these days –  look at history.  Our history.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Seizing, in increments, the larger part of a large continent – by “discovery” and “colonizing,” by war, by purchase, by military invasion – the United States consolidated its power and then expanded it to include the entire Western Hemisphere, enunciated in the Monroe Doctrine.  This ostensibly was to ward off European meddling in South America, but in truth was simply a carte blanche written by and to ourselves to meddle down south of the border whenever and for whatever reason we saw fit.  Most of those reasons were about resources and money.  Since World War Two we have expanded our self-declared “national interest” to more or less every nook and cranny of the globe and asserted our right to intervene where ever we like.   Naturally, to make ourselves feel good about ourselves, we tend to do this under cover of spreading “freedom” and “democracy” to those we are invading and whose resources we are taking.  We are, as we continually insist, “exceptional.”    And indeed we are: exceptionally powerful, exceptionally self-deluded, exceptionally selfish.  But, of course, we like to think we are exceptionally “good.”

While our Presidents are unable and unwilling to utter the word “imperialist” to describe US behavior, the Marine hymn, along with the thousands of VFW halls (Veterans of Foreign Wars) littered around the countryside, along with the American Legion and other militarist and corporate economic organizations testify loud and clear as to just what America does for a living.  As do our 700 military bases scattered around the world, supported by a military establishment which spends half the US government’s budget, and the cost of which is as large as what the next 11 nations spend on their military.

From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea;
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to claim the title
Of United States Marine

Our flag’s unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We have fought in every clime and place
Where we could take a gun;
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes,
You will find us always on the job
The United States Marines.

Here’s health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve;
In many a strife we’ve fought for life
And never lost our nerve.
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.

This is all part of a political process in which the United States, comprising 5% of the world’s population consumes 25% of its resources.  #1 indeed. The disproportion in these figures is backed up by the US military – which spends 4 times more per year than our biggest competitor, China, and as much as the 11 following nations combined, all but one of which are allies, and buy much of their weapons from the US .  Both the Democrats and Republicans fully endorse this system, and what it requires of the United States to maintain it.  This same militant behavior is part and parcel of American culture in full.  It is seen in our sports, in our cut-throat capitalism, and across the full range of our society.  And, for the most part, it is supported by most Americans, who happily go along with the grand larceny, fraud and global violence which is the United States.   To do otherwise would be to choose to take an 80% drop in our collective living standard.  Not likely to win any elections with that on the party platform.

This has been so for decades and the arrival of Trump merely rips off the mask of our self-delusion of apparent civility, and exposes us for what we really are. While our centrist and liberal/left people decry Trump’s vulgarity and evident stupidity, and recoil in horror at what appear to be his would-be policies (which do indeed change with each day), beneath the show of disdain and contempt, there is something far more unsettling: Trump is a perfectly natural outcome of America’s culture, something which was long ago figured out by de Tocqueville, H.L. Mencken and numerous other observers of our country.

So the question hangs – how did we get here, our elected President a man of such shallowness and vacuity, his political party utterly compromised and hypocritical and the other major party devoid of character.  The answer, shoved in your face anywhere you look, is the same one Pogo gave.  Us.  The us of Prius driving, solar paneled, “green” middle-class folks getting on the plane for a vacation in some far away place, perhaps an “eco” vacation in Guatemala, or off to their other house in the mountains or seashore.  The us of an SUV driving rip-roaring Nascar fan, headed to a race, with a Make America Great Again bumper sticker, headed to have a good beer-soaked time in Daytona.  The us of a vast swathe of Americans, whatever their political affiliations, who subscribe to the idea of “American Exceptionalism” (as, for instance Hilary Clinton did in her campaigning), and hence to the continued pursuit of our disproportionate wealth, secured by military violence and economic leverage around the globe.

Until the majority of Americans, from “left” to “right,” deal honestly with their own history, and with themselves and their place in it, we will remain as we are, mired in deceit and hypocrisy, ever willing to blame others for our own failures, and caught up in our simplistic binary two-party politics.  Of course this will never happen, and our grand experiment will unravel as has every other empire.  We are already well on our way.  Donald John Trump is merely a symptom marking a final step or two towards the collapse of the United States of America.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Electoral Post-mortem (3)

Seasonal ho ho time is about upon us, and normally this would provide a respite in political news. However, this time around it is difficult to know if our Impressario-in-Chief will be willing to relinquish the limelight in favor of Rudolph, the elves in the melting North, or Santa himself. I imagine The Donald perceives himself as Santa, bequeathing his greatness to our blessed country.

Now a month and more after our national election, Mr Trump has revealed more of his show-biz moxie, making of his cabinet and other high officers of government selection process a non-stop reality TV show, riveting the press with his spectacle. Traipsing to the gold-tinged lobby of the mighty Trump Tower, his supplicants pass the gauntlet of the press, moving upward on the magical golden escalator, for a hearing with his royalness, the President-elect.   Almost each day a new name is anointed, nominated by Mr Trump for this or that office on the Cabinet or some other role. They descend the escalator, chosen or emasculated, to say their two-bits. Mr Romney supplicated several times, once for a 20 minute talk session, then for a classy dinner out. According to Roger Stone, Trump’s sometime advisor, the point was to torture Romney for having characterized Trump during the primaries as a fraud and a phony. His reward was to be played with like a nearly dead mouse by a cat. Speaking of classy….

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Of those selected for cabinet posts or other positions, the list reads like the worst possible nightmare of a liberal. Most of those selected are billionaires or millionaires, chosen in part because Mr Trump feels he should pick those “who have made a fortune.” Perhaps he is well acquainted with the saying that “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime” (Balzac), a concept which fits well for someone busy establishing a kleptocracy. While The Donald may be a compulsive liar, he also seems unable to hide his real self for very long. The Pussy Grabber in Chief is simply too proud of his accomplishments to be discreet – it shows glaringly in his nouveau riche garishness, verily in the Trump Lobby where gold-plating announces loud and clear the 80’s ethos of “he who has the most stuff when he dies wins.”  His Louis IX interior decor for his sprawling 56th floor apartment is more of the same.   The Donald has it and wants to make very sure you know. The Queens kid’s chip on the shoulder is gargantuan.

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Beneath the show-biz glitz and Trump’s knowing use of lowest-common-denominator TV smarts, there is something far more disturbing in his choices: the “alt-right” Chief Strategist Mr Bannon, who has run a website supportive of neo-nazi’s, the sequence of military generals, one in particular noted (and fired) for his strident extremism, the Secretary of Education choice whose aim is to destroy public education in favor of evangelical vouchers, the Secretary of Labor who thinks the minimum wage is too high at $10 (of course the President-elect thinks workers should work harder – the old Stalinist Stakhanovite view, work yourself to death for an ideology – in this case that of rapacious Crony Capitalism). Yes, Mr Trump, is making a grand stew of his and his fellow oligarch’s corporatist fantasy, the uber alle’ism of capital over labor, the union of the powers of the government and …   Hmmm, this, for those of us old enough, or learned enough in not-so-distant history, all has a familiar ring.

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As demonstrated by events in North Carolina, where a Republican just lost the governorship, and the GOP controlled House there had a sudden meeting to write draconian new laws to restrict the powers of the governor, like the good old fascists of old, the GOP of our present USA is playing quick and fast hard-ball. The GOP has on a State level done the same with extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, and anti-union laws, all with an aggressive air of vengeance. There is little reason to think Trump’s group will not do likewise with its near complete control of the Presidency, House and Senate, and likely quick control of the Supreme Court. The coming months and year will let us know, and if my hunch is correct, quickly, if this is the direction Trump will take – to consolidate power, suppress dissent, attempt to silence what has thus far been an all-too supine press, and carry on with what certainly has the appearance of a kind of coup. Given Trump’s current “victory tour” where he still feeds his fans “lock her up” red-meat, we can await the emergence of a ready and willing grouping of well-armed brown-shirt militias to begin to enforce the new “political correctness” terms. Being highly realistic we’d have to note that most of those who have been busy arming themselves while stridently asserting their Second Amendment patriotism lean decidedly to the right-wing side of the political spectrum. (And I bet if black men and perhaps Latinos began to stream into the local WalMart or hardware store to buy assault weapons and such, they would suddenly find that somehow they couldn’t get them with the same facility of a good old country-boy.)

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As a long experienced left/anarcho sort, I have had a deep aversion to the knee-jerk tendency of many I know to whip out the “fascist/Nazi” rhetorical card, when ever the State oversteps, or ill- or mal-trained cops get power/gun happy. However at the same time I try to keep my political antennae well-tuned to the frequencies of the day, and, a bit reluctantly, I myself would have to say the sound I am hearing certainly carries the background thump of 20th century fascism. Trump clearly has an authoritarian streak to match the chip on his shoulder, and his supporters – a clear minority of Americans – appear to like this. Not unlike a little Austrian corporal in the echt civilized world of Germanic kultur not-so-long-ago.

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No, history does not repeat itself verbatim, but over a deeper historical time, responding to profound shifts in economic and social realities, it takes on a clear cyclical rhythm. These shifts occur from technological changes – say the Guttenberg press, or the Industrial Revolution – which in turn are provoked by or provoke major changes in the organization of societies – say the shift in the European world from feudalism to capitalism, which signaled the collapse of religion’s grip leading towards a secular-scientific view. Or from a dominantly rural food-producing based society to a dense urban mechanized one.

We are in the midst of such a profound change, instigated by rapid technological leaps (global communications systems, computer controls, robots) all of which have served to destroy old patterns across the world, while not really providing any time-tested alternative. The mantra of the time is change change change, at such a rapidity that we scarcely know the real consequences of what we are doing. At another pace, the period from early industrialization – circa 1850 or so – through to the present, did much the same. The consequence was several industrial-scale wars that leveled much of the world, at the same time prompting many of the great technological changes which are, more rapidly, doing the same to our societies now.

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Given the seeming lessons of history, great convulsions in the social order – caused by technological shifts, by “natural” catastrophes (droughts provoked by human activities for example), by cultural one-off events (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, etc.) – in general bring great waves of disorder, violence, and in an imagined effort to control these things, frequently authoritarian regimes arise. We are only at the early edge of even greater tectonic shifts in humanity’s global presence, shifts caused by human actions of myriad kinds, and we should anticipate, as is already occurring, that the social response will reflect itself in a desperate attempt to bring “order” to the increasingly difficult changes incurred by mass migrations, wars, inundation of low-lands by rising oceans, radically changed weather patterns, all of which will drastically change our collective sense of “normality.”

Human individuals, in general, don’t really like to be responsible for themselves, and prefer to defer to institutions which “know better” and let them take care of things. Hence group behavior, tribalism, and the broad tendency to acquiesce to those more powerful.  So we shall see in the coming period if the American public behaves as did the German one in the Weimar Republic, and rapidly submits to the new disruptors’ actions, taking the promises offered at face value, and so lead us into an American fascist period, or whether it resists with actions which will be risky and dangerous to many, and well outside their “comfort zone.”

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We are long past the time for worrying about “safe zones” when our political system has established cordoned-off “free speech zones.”  It’s been a long time coming, and it appears it’s actually arrived.  Wrapped in an American flag and thumping, as hypocritically as possible, a Bible.

Electoral Post-mortem (1)

In a profound miscalculation, the myriad powers-that-be in the USA have inadvertently ushered in a new era, definitively abolishing the general framework that governed America and the globe since World War Two.  Those powers – often masked from public view – had constructed a complex social/economic/political edifice composed of corporate business interests, the military-industrial complex (which naturally includes corporate interests), and media (corporately owned), all bound together with an ideological glue of American nationalism embodied in a kind of mindless patriotism of flag, (and for some Bible, guns and grits), and capitalism.  As famously stated, “The business of America is business.”

It was the ideology of American Exceptionalism, which Hillary Clinton recently extolled, and as the heaving crowds of Trump’s fans echoed as they chanted USA USA USA!  This ideology is seen expressed in the countless VFW halls in small-town America, in the national genuflection to our military – “the finest and best” – and in the blind and usually totally provincial insistence that the United States is the greatest country on earth, goddammit!   Most insistently this is said by those who never set foot in another place, unless in the military.

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Since 1945, at the conclusion of the WW2, America stood as the singular industrial power still standing, with marginal losses, and wielding nuclear weapons to boot.  It had put the 30’s Depression era aside and largely unchallenged it proceeded to install itself as an unstated empire, taking most of Britain’s holdings and those of others.  The emergence of the cold war with the Soviet Union, and then the Chinese, propelled this process, which had moved rapidly in the 1950’s, such that the former general and Republican President, Eisenhower, cautioned us against the dangers of our emerging military-industrial complex.  We paid no heed, and in the following decades the linkage of the military, corporate interests and the media were bound ever tighter, as we expanded our military force beyond all reason aside from maintaining a stranglehold on global natural resources – especially oil.  And we sought to maintain political control with the installation of puppet governments game to kow-tow to Uncle Sam.  While we intervened in South East Asia, in the Middle East, in Central and South America, and Africa, our corporate controlled media largely dismissed what we were doing by simply not reporting it.  America was too busy imagining itself as Ozzie and Harriet while it stitched together its far-flung “business holdings” backed with its military might.   In the aftermath of the American loss in Vietnam, the collusion between the military-industrial complex and the media became such that for the most part our adventures abroad were simply not reported, as the body-counts in Vietnam had proved toxic to our imperial ambitions.  Instead the American public was led into a fog of permanent propaganda, whether officially, from the mouths of government speakers, or unofficially in the onslaught of 24/7 television, Hollywood films, and talk radio.  We were “exceptional” so we told ourselves, somehow exempt from judgement and from history, or from the consequences of our actions on the world stage.

Americans were constantly told theirs was the richest, best country on earth.  They were not told that they were but 5% of the world’s population while they consumed 25% of the globe’s resources.  They were not told that in order to acquire this imbalanced share of the world’s wealth that it required robbery, rape, mayhem and political knavery of the worst kinds.  Nope, instead they were told that America was “good,” a shining city on a hill, and that whenever we were forced to intervene out in the big bad world it was to be the White Hat bringing the blessings of democracy or freedom or something “good” to those we were bombing and robbing blind.

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When 9/11 came our slumbering public was blind-sided, completely unaware of American meddling since the early 50’s (and far earlier) in the middle-east.  In turn the vast majority were easy marks for Bush’s imaginary WMD and Rumsfeld’s it’ll-pay-for-itself easy war.  From the fraud of Bush’s failed Presidency, Americans leaped at the do-good chance to erase the stain of our slave state origins and deep racism, and elected a good Harvard trained establishment man, Barack Obama.  Nice as his outward appearances were, Barack was a company man, and did his duty while liberals swooned and ignored the brass knuckle business being quietly conducted – drone assassinations, more military meddling, economic strong arming, and, well, America as usual.  We were “defending our national interests,” however far from our own shores.  “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” is how the marine hymn has it, since forever.

In 2016, still limping from the 2008 economic collapse with which the Bush administration departed, with many still seething at the failure of Obama to pursue those responsible (bankers, big corporate execs), and others likewise angered at the failure to bring Bush and company to account, the US political atmosphere was transparently smoldering with anti-establishment resentment.  The success of Trump in the Republican primaries, as well as of Sanders with the Democrats, was evidence enough for even the thickest minded.  And yet the Democrats, enmeshed in their narrow horizon Beltway vision, did backroom dirt to shove Sanders aside, and plowed on with their anointed one, HRC.  Backed with a phalanx of political pros, pollsters, billionaire funds, pundits, and their own arrogant presumptions, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into advertisements, a slick convention, and endless polls – all for naught.  Like the CIA with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the professional wisdom in the world failed to perceive the obvious, and Clinton came up short in the Electoral College on November 7th.

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The shock waves still reverberate as Donald John Trump prepares to take on the Presidency, surrounded with sleaze in the form of Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie, and a cluster-fuck of others, including the editor of a strident right-wing website, Breitbart, and a Vice-Presidential side-kick ready to attempt to impose mid-western fundamentalist Christianism on the nation.   I would not pretend to predict what Trump will or won’t do, or what it will do to our polity.  During the campaign (and well before) he did open a can of very ugly worms, and in doing so legitimized them as OK for public discourse.  I doubt he can, as President, make a U-turn, and stuff all the vile things he has said and done back into that can.  Welcome to Pandora’s not-nice box.  Of course the truth is that this can of worms was sitting there under the pressure cooker of the nice world of PCism.  Naturally it stewed and festered, and now we will have its off-spring running the White House – Mr Bannon looks to be Chief of Staff for President Trump, which promises a very rough ride.

Who to blame?  Most obviously, first in line is the Democratic National Committee which was as corrupt as Trump suggested.  Hillary Clinton was their girl, and despite the obvious evidence of Sanders’ primary successes, and those of Trump, they stuck to their insiders game plan, awash with money, all those experienced “professionals” and drove themselves and the country, and perhaps the world, into a ditch.  They did it in plain sight, and carried on despite numerous warnings that it was not the season for more “Change You Can Believe In” nor for “Stronger Together” sloganeering, but for up-ending the Establishment.  Ah, but if you are the Establishment, what do you do?  As demonstrated in this election, you stick your head up your butt and pretend it ain’t happening.

But it was, and rather than taking the path offered by Sanders, the DNC persisted, and handed us Trump on a silver plate.

Some of the rest of the blame belongs to the American right-wing which, since Reagan, has flooded the national psyche with hysterical radio, Fox, et al, with 24/7 propaganda, and, aided and abetted by the Clinton gang, let corporate interests run roughshod over the public interest in the form of trade agreements, privatizing education and prisons and whatever else they could grab, producing a dumbed-down populace in thrall to celebrity and money and the miracle of capitalism.  Trump is the natural result.

That Trump, a Queen’s kid with a massive chip on his shoulder and a chronic loser himself, should pick up the chips may seem surprising but in the warped landscape of America circa 2016, it is perfectly logical even if his syntax and vocabulary aren’t.  Frankly half of America cannot speak English decently and I am not talking about the ones who happen to have Spanish or some Asian language as their first tongue.  Nor am I talking only about the uneducated whom Mr Trump asserts he loves, but rather the millions of dubiously “educated” college kids who are gifted with grade inflation while being unable to construct a coherent paragraph in our corrupted universities, many of which are more interested in football income than in the “liberal arts.”  Reading, writing and arithmetic hardly covers the bases.   These folks want “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” in which to obscure their helicopter parented ignorance.   In this America Trump is a natural.  His vulgarity, sexism, racism all slides nicely in with a large portion of the population who in fact think and feel just like that, especially when put into the pressure cooker of the new gig economy.   Trump has given them their voice, and promises they they too will enter the Valhalla of a glittery gold-plated coal mine or factory, and a future in the New Again Great America.

Well, good luck with that.  Though, frankly, while there likely would have been some softening of the rougher edges for some had Clinton won, those who voted for Trump in anticipation of working in the West Virginia or Kentucky mines, are more likely to find out they’ve been mystically turned into canaries.   In fact it appears that all Americans have been so morphed, as we move into the post-WW2 “American Century” of the last 75 years, and enter a new era, with all the volatility which radical changes always bring.   Whether Americans will take kindly to being weaned from their imperially enforced quarter of the global goodies for their 20th of the globe’s population is doubtful.  Or for giving most of that “stuff” to a tiny minority of people – like their new President – while in time honored fashion, they feast on the crumbs falling from the table.

Mr Trump’s first wife, Ivana, tells us that her ex-husband’s bed time reading when they shared their lives, was Mein Kampf,  the story of an aggrieved failed artist and corporal who went on to leave a significant imprint on history.  Mr Schicklegruber reinvented himself in a highly theatrical manner, in a period of extreme economic and political stress in his time and culture.  The sophisticated world of Beethoven, Hegel, etc. succumbed to his wiles and his prejudices.  And paid a price.

Donald Trump was a kid from the Queens who got a nice head-start from his hustling father.  Bedazzled by the classier folks across the East River, he moved to Manhattan, out to impress those people, with his string of sexy babes, his golden towers, his beauty contests and casinos.  His nouveau-riche garishness failed to win their favor, and while happy to play with his money, Donald was never really accepted by the toney East Siders and Wall Street honchos. The chip on his shoulder grew bigger and bigger, and he had more and more to prove, revenge to take, scores to settle.  He ran for President, and despite being reviled by almost everyone – the Republican establishment, the pundits, the intellectuals, the security experts, Wall Street, the hipwasie, the Democrats, and the Hollywood clans and monster pop stars, not to mention the minorities whom he joyfully slandered – he won.

My crystal ball is occluded, though history provides some clues where things might go.  That well thumbed book at his bedside might be a place to look.

Item pertinent to this, worth the read:

http://forsetti.tumblr.com/post/153181757500/on-rural-america-understanding-isnt-the-problem