Back in the US, back in the US(SR)

Yellowstone National Park

Following a week of recording in Piangipane, Emilio Romagna, Italy, and a one day stop in London, I returned to the USA toward the end of October after an absence of a year and 8 months.  For me personally much had changed – a back operation, recuperation, a few friends no longer with us, and the usual thoughts that come with some many spins around the sun.  And America had likewise undergone a sea-change.  An election had been held, a new President had taken office, and it seemed as if for the social culture a long shadow had been cast, and a general air of gloom had taken hold, at least among the kinds of people I tend to know.  Others I understand are quite happy with the changes. On arrival my own immediate life was seized with mundane chores: grab the van, update the car insurance, new plates, head on to destination #1, and so on.  Hit the road, which was the plot and plan.

Charles Therminy, August 12, 1934 – March 9, 2017, my roommate in 1963

Sam Shepard, November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017Dan Cornell,  Feb. 11, 1947 – April 7, 2017

The last time I’d returned to America in such a way was back in 2002, after 10 continuous years in Europe with nary a visit back in that decade away.  Then I was prompted by the post-9/11 words of friends who cautioned the air was thick with unhappiness and the steady encroachment of a police-state regime.  I wondered, and on return had to agree, except it seemed worse than what I’d heard.   America was down, riled up with old hat arguments which seem our fated history.   We were paranoid, unconscious, in endless denial.  Was 9/11 an inside job?  Why would an Arabic group attack us?  Were we safe anymore? And on and on.   The schism between urban and rural widened, Fox took hold across the heartlands, and two America’s seemed to struggle to emerge.  Not a happy time.

And now, a decade and a half later, the sour brew which had begun at the start of the Millennium has turned toxic.  A new President, not really elected by the people, but installed courtesy of an arcane system meant to reward slave-holders way back when, has done exactly what it was clear he’d do during the farcical election when with a childish petulance he revealed his Republican opponent’s vacuity with an infantile bullying BS, and they all caved, the hollow men of TS Eliot.  And then the DNC/Clinton Democrats were up, only to reveal their hubris and political deafness.  Since November 7, 2016, the nation has been in a state of shock, each day amplified by new waves of bull-in-the-china-shop actions taken by the Trump administration.  From the relative stasis of the long post-WW2/Cold War era, we’re now in a seeming terra incognita.

That we have arrived in this state should in reality be no surprise.  The underlying grounds have been more than visible for decades, if one only chose to look.  Most people instead preferred the comfort of denial or ignorance, or both.   Since World War Two, when America took on seriously its role of global super-power, wielding its nuclear weapons, its manufacturing base cranked up for war-making, intact in not having been bombed as all the other were in the war, we have lived in a perpetual condition of illusion.  And we have been lied to by our government chronically, again and again, in all that time.  From hiding and denying the evidence that our nuclear experiments in fact had seriously dangerous side-effects, on through our lying about covert operations through out the world, from Iran to Cuba to Vietnam, to Central and South America, the American government has paved the way both for our relative wealth, and for the corrosive effects of having lied to achieve it.  The JFK white-wash with magic bullets.  Gulf of Tonkin. The World Trade Center collapse.  WMD.  The story is long and full of government lies-as-policy.

“Globalization” has only served to exacerbate this process, loosening the regulations regarding corporate behavior which in turn sent jobs to the cheapest labor pools, and decimated middle-America, all under the rubric of neo-liberalism, promising great economic gains across the board while in reality culling the winners to the rich, and abandoning those lower on the totem pole.  All under the guidance of the government’s Brightest and Best, money sloshed loosely around the globe in a most un-benign manner. The whole process has resulted in an across-the-board corruption of our society – from the lowest to the highest.  From Wall Street to Main Street, from academic grade inflation to “safe spaces” for the coddled children of a misguided middle-class. The Trump administration is in fact a fair reflection of the society it represents, both “Conservative” and “Liberal” sides.   Like that society, it is corrupt – fiscally, socially, morally, politically. Trump could never have won office in a healthy society, but American society has been increasingly ill over the last 5 decades, or in truth far longer.   And the chickens are now home to roost.

I came back to the States in part to see friends for a probable last time, and to try to make a bit of money.  The latter is proving a hard go – screenings promised and then cancelled, inquiries unanswered and such.  You can see a few other posts regarding that topic.  I also came back for a perhaps last look at America – its cities and landscapes.  And also perhaps to make a final essay about America, Plain Songs, a companion for my previous two films on the US:  Speaking Directly (1972), and Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses) (1987).    I’ve been back now two months, and while I have taken a few shots which I imagined to be for this new film, I sense it will not be made.  The one shot I made was from Cape Flattery, far out on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, the farthest west one can go in mainland USA.   Nestled next to it is Neah Bay, an Indian rez town, and like most of them I have ever seen, a sad place of derelict homes, signs against meth and alcohol, and an air of final desolation.  I thought to begin with a first segment called “The End of America,” as this end-point of America, like the “Center of the Nation” in Plain Talk, is ripe with ironic meaning.   I took a shot, and inside something curdled in my soul.

Each day here is greeted with an avalanche of “news,” whether it is of the machinations of the Trump administration or of an almost Biblical kind – hurricanes flattening islands in the Caribbean, or flooding Houston, or fires decimating California, or the huff and puff of Kim Jong-un, or the unmasking of yet another sexist man in showbiz or politics, or yet another gun massacre or cop killing another black man.  Each day seems to shriek calamity, and the social atmosphere grows dark and fraught with fear.  Amidst this cacophony one feels an aura of irrational hysteria, a society caught in the throes of a major change, one which might easily slip any direction, but seems headed for the worst.   I can’t say I am surprised, after all it is exactly what I examined in the earlier essay films [as well as in numerous fictional films – Sure Fire, The Bed You Sleep In, Homecoming, Over Here, Parable, Coming to Terms]  –  this decay of American society and the costs incurred by it out in the wide world, and inside, in the personal one.

 

Last of the now extinct carrier-pigeons

So I ask myself, what might I add?  And, honestly, I imagine there is ample room in my thoughts to toss in my two-bits.  But then I ask, and who would it hear it and how would that happen?  And my answer is that while perhaps a handful or even some hundreds or thousands might see such a work, in the present political reality that is tantamount to no one.   It would amount to a nano-second blip in the vast ocean of noise and shouting which envelops us daily.  And while I, and perhaps a handful of others, might derive some pleasure or learning from such a work, it would surely do absolutely nothing in the face of the tsunami of media, money, and cultural leverage which our society wields each day, every day, all day.  Socially, politically, it would be simply nothing.  Of that I am utterly sure, just as I am likewise sure – and history shows it all too clearly – that the prior two films, along with all the rest of my life’s work, have done nothing politically or socially in any way I might have intended.  Yes, a very very small number of people may have been personally touched, and perhaps even a few saw their lives slightly deflected by it.  But, bottom line, in the real world of society and its mechanisms, zilch.  Really nothing.

Perhaps these are the thoughts of a banged-up burned-out doddering old geezer. Perhaps  – I certainly qualify for some of that.  Perhaps it is time to turn my attentions elsewhere, and leave the transitory stuff of politics to itself.  Or perhaps it is just a transitory quiver of doubt, long over-due.  Or perhaps instead of a filmed essay it will morph into another form.  Written, or….  well, we’ll see.  For the moment though, the idea of Plain Songs as a video essay has gone dormant.

FAKE

With each passing day the Trump White House Reality Show Saga staggers forth, drowning the public arena in plots and events which would leave a Brazilian soap opera in the dust of absurdist improbability. Each day the various spokespersons emerge to spew ridiculous lies, one after the other, with seeming shamelessness. Nearly each day Herr Trump emits a sequence of Twitter enuncios, often mangled in misspellings, grammatical knots, and, yes, the invariable Everest of lies which seem to be his singular reason for being. This grand drama has carried on ever since his highness descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower, greeted by a large gaggle of paid actors, and announced he was in the ring, running for President. It was in more ways than one a real class act.

He’d laid the groundwork for this grand Guignol theater with decades in the trenches of the New York real estate biz, and then the tinsel glamor of casinos, draped with gambling’s usual cast of thugs and local Mafia which, in fact, was not a great change from NYC’s corrupt building industry. And then, having failed in both these endeavors, with a trail of bankruptcies to show for it, he moved onto TV’s reality-show sewer, and ever greater fakery.

As with his businesses, so it was with wives. Failing with one, he dumped her and moved to the next, littering the way with a string of children, the last of whom is named after the fake PR agent which Trump himself used to play to pass along juicy items to New York’s yellow press. Barron was his name, and he’d call to let the world know of Trump’s latest conquests in the field of fucking. His son now bears this albatrossian monicker. Lucky him.

 

And now looking more haggard with his vast comb-over and sagging flesh, eyes peering out from their odd white sockets from the fake tan skin job he applies to himself, The Donald is able to command the world’s attention, his stubby fingers but a code away from incinerating the whole globe, should the corrupted American system comply with a demented order from The President.   Thus far the theoretical “checks and balances” of the Founding Fathers scheme seem to be faltering seriously.

All of the above is appalling, and sadly true. The Rosebud of Trump’s psyche is clearly hidden in the massive chip on the Queens kid’s shoulder. Bruised with a silver spoon up his ass at birth, and apparently a harsh unloving father and mother, The Donald took his million buck wad from his father, moved into the Manhattan real-estate racket, and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, a real Horatio Alger American success story. Well, not quite. Hobbled with a bone spur in one of his feet, he forgets which, Donald blazed a pecker-track trail through the decadent Manhattan party scene of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, emerging, so he says, unscathed with STD, his own private Vietnam, risking AIDS with each psycho-sexual battle. Along the way he blew his million buck starter kit, had some bankruptcies here and there, and built a reputation as a scam artist, from high to low.  He moved on to Atlantic City casinos, and gambling there, lost again.  His dad bailed him out with a legally dubious multi-million dollar purchase of casino chips.  The Trump Taj Mahal recently shuttered its doors after being sold to another sucker. Along the line The Donald learned that old PT Barnum maxim, there’s one born every second.

 

Failed but famous, he saw his name was the best product on offer, mystical and golden. Trump Steaks! Trump National Golf Courses! Trump Vodka! Trump University! He built a tower on 5th Avenue, asserting it was 68 floors when it was in fact 58. He installed a private Versailles on its top floors, a garish palace of fake Louis XIV and hauled his third wife up there to spawn his 5th child, dear Barron. And yet, despite all this, the Manhattan elite never accepted him and his brash, crude and rude ways, and the best tables at the classy restaurants were not reserved for him. In fact the boys on Wall Street finally declined to bank with him, and he turned his sights to other funding sources, and, along with other New York real-estate moguls, Trumpworld became a money laundering machine for Russian and East European dirty money, carefully funneled through an arcane web of  off-shore shell companies and banks.

 

This fantastical story is no fable, but rather the unhappy truth, a real American novel writ large if crude.

 

Though the still more fantastical story – no fable – is that this one could never have been lived if it were not for the world in which it has been played out:  America, circa now.  In an America where corruption on a vast scale is the norm, though not so long ago we primly lectured the world on probity. Where the once staunchly proper Republican Party lies supine, awaiting Donald’s allegedly very little dick, for a daily reaming. Where a party of pious moralizers about women’s bodies turn utterly silent when the most obvious of liars occupies the White House in their name, and tramples daily on the “values” which they once harped upon so loudly. The hypocrisy is so vast as to diminish the word “hypocrisy” to nothing. It is something else. It is something which has incrementally entered the American body politic in ways that, as ever in hindsight, seem so obvious now, though were invisible as they entered the bloodstream. A stealthy terminal cancer which does not reveal itself until it takes your life.

Today the liberal world of Democrats is still in shock, unable to believe their most worthy candidate actually lost to the uncouth bullying braggart which Donald John Trump is. At the outset of the campaign they were salivating at the obviousness of their win, it was a no-brainer no-match. They’d take the Senate, clean up in once Red States, and waltz happily from the wonders of a black President to smashing the glass ceiling of sexism, and have a woman in the Oval Office. And, in a manner they did: 3 million more votes  went to Madam Clinton than Mr Trump received, just that, in the arcane electoral scam world of America, they were in the wrong places. Firm in her belief that certain fly-over zones, traditionally Democratic, were hers for granted, she declined to campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and missed out on noting the collapse of these realms which Don the Con so expertly gamed into his head count.

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 04: U.S. Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) listens as he speaks to members of the media June 4, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The Senate Republicans had their weekly policy luncheon to discuss the Republican agenda. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

And then of course there is the litany of GOP tricks of gerrymandering, of voting roll purges, and, so it seems, a bit of Russian cyber warfare to tilt the appropriate tables just enough to pull out a Trump Electoral College win.  Such is the Dem lament.  If, indeed, Putin had much to do with it (I’d guess he did, but the roots go far back into post-USSR oligarchic mafia money flooding into NYC and along the way bailing The Donald out of his business miseries), then in terms of grand real-politik, he’s already had an immense win:  the USA is in severe internal turmoil, and seems headed towards a dissolution similar to that which the good old USSR went through.

The bottom line, which it seems Democrats are unable to comprehend, nor did their GOP counterparts, is that the USA is, socially, utterly corrupted, top to bottom, and only in such a situation could a Donald Trump emerge triumphant.  With the GOP he acted like a juvenile delinquent, he huffed and puffed and called his opposition truly stupid bad names – and they all shriveled up and collapsed as they were nothing to begin with.  And once he won, having insulted them all, they showed their true characters and value and went to suck his butt.

“We came, we saw, he died.” (Laughter.)

And while the Democrats imagine themselves somehow different, in truth it is their own corruption – for decades – which brought this debacle upon them, and upon the nation. For decades they have spoken nice liberal niceties, while wallowing in the trough of corporate malfeasance, and enhancing their personal wealth along the way.  Clinton (both) did half-million buck speeches to Wall Street honchos and said no quid pro quo was involved, while they backed the corporately-written trade agreements that have decimated American labor.  Obama, well-mannered Harvard-trained Step’n Fetchit did the Man’s bidding and let Wall Street off the hook for illegalities up the kazoo in the 2008 collapse.  Ditto did he say he was “looking forward” and not back in letting Bush and gang off the hook for lying the USA into a disastrous war, the consequences of which are still being played out. One of the club. The list of Democratic dishonesty is equal to that of the Republicans, because, bottom line, they all belong to the same institutions and the same insider game.  That is the corruption which blossomed over the decades as the few became obscenely wealthy, and the many fell ever further behind, and the social infrastructure was effectually let to rot while the liberal-left of America mouthed platitudes about race, sexual identification, “safe” spaces, and all the rest of the fake stuff of “political correctness” which invaded our public commons, while the invisible hand of the market consigned a vast portion of the country to Walmart and worse.  While 22 veterans a day, left homeless, commit suicide each day – now far out-numbering those killed in combat.  While meth and then opioids cut a lethal swath across the nation’s failing economic casualties.    It is not as if these things were not visible, it is just that for the liberal world, the large mental “fly-over” country was dismissed as a yahoo red-neck Nascar wreck, unworthy of attention or care, and was left to Fox and friends to warp with 24/7 right-wing propaganda.  All in plain sight, but until it came to whack them over the head in the 2016 election, seemingly unworthy of giving the time of day.   And now the institutional Democrats are convulsed in an internecine war with themselves, fingers pointing blame at anyone but the person in the mirror:  It was Sanders’ fault.  It was the blind DNC.  It was Clinton’s ham-handedness and arrogance.  It was the Russians.  It was…..

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton looks on as she speaks during a town hall meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada August 18, 2015. REUTERS/David Becker – RTX1OPKY

 

It was anyone and anything aside from the rotted corrupt society that is America today.  A society in which corruption is such a norm that a great majority is blind to it, taking it as how the world is, and how it should be.  Grade inflation in schools, from kindergarten to PhD’s in Harvard.  Cheating as a necessary way to get ahead. A medical system which is little more than an extortion racket.  Our vast and corrosive “entertainment” industry that feeds virtual death on a grand scale 24/7 – look at your TV and Hwd block-busters.  Sports which are but a step away from Roman gladiators killing each other for the pleasure of violence besotted spectators. A military-industrial-media system that functions as a quasi-religion and contorts the American economy in a death-lock. Look almost anywhere and the ugly specter of corruption materializes: social, economic, cultural, political.

 

This should be no surprise in an imperial system which lies to itself, and has done so from its inception.  The United States of America comprises 5% of the world’s population and consumes 25% of its resources.  While America insists that it is “exceptional” and that this disproportion derives both from having a large landmass and brilliant creative entrepreneurial people, the brutal fact is that it has a vast military machine which enforces its economic sway on much, if no longer all, of the world.  It is imperialism, plain and simple.  But Americans, self-deluded, do not acknowledge it, just as they do not acknowledge that the US is almost always at war, supposedly defending “US interests.”  In such a system the moral rot is innate: no one wishes to admit their wealth is ill-gained, no one wishes to really admit the history which is that of America.  Almost no one in such a system will volunteer to relinquish 80% of their wealth to help even out the grotesque distribution of global wealth.  And so lying and self-delusion arise naturally and “normally,” and with it a fertile ground for corruption of all kinds.   And a hence, a field ripe for the emergence of Mr Trump and his cohorts.

 

“A candidate for public office…does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. 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

 

 

 

American Pastoral #27

 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956

 

The long season of America’s electoral process has finally finished, and having dispatched at first the comical “best” of the Grand Old Party in an embarrassing sequence of primary “debates,” Donald Trump, regarded as the least likely candidate, and the easiest to beat by the Democratic National Committee, has emerged from the cultural rubble as victor.  Much of the nation appears to be in shock, having been told by most of the national media that Trump’s chances were nil.  The vast realm of what bi-coastals call “fly-over country” – the swathe from Eastern Pennsylvania on to the Rockies, and as well, all the West until you get to the sliver which hugs the Pacific Coast beyond the Sierras and Cascades – usually dismissively derided as uncultured and beneath contempt, all rose up to vote for Trump.  And given the oddity of the old slave-holder derived Electoral College, a minority of voters were able to secure a majority of the votes in this institution and hand the Presidency to Trump.  While geographically rather amiss, it appears indeed the South did rise again.  The irony that it did so through the hands of a Queens NYC crony capitalist is perhaps a bitter pill better left unmarked.

 

From Upton Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935): “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

Mose Allison

Mark Twain and John T. Lewis

Photo by Joe Podlesnik, Phoenix

Having known back-road America – that fly-over turf – now for 5 decades, living there or passing through on one-laner’s or dirt roads, with many friends living “out there,” I am well acquainted with the slow degradation of life that has happened in rural America.  Railroad services stopped, Main Streets gone dilapidated and empty, family farms absorbed into giant corporations, dwindling wild life, pollution from big-ag run-off, the blossoming of WalMarts and Dollar Stores, trailer parks, a plague of meth and alcohol, and all the signifiers of genuine social collapse.   In the hinterlands of the country this is what globalization wrought – devastation.  And at the same time an ever increasing political and social marginalization of those areas which did not partake of the economic benefits of this process.   Or in the rust-belt as factories closed, either shipped abroad to cheaper labor markets, or robotized, those whose livelihoods were lost were simply ignored, racked up in the statistics as un- or under-employed.  The coastal pundits suggested more education (or re-education?) while they turned college into another profit generator while running up a gigantic student-debt tally.  In the last few years, as the meth and then opioid epidemics hit this mostly white sector of the country, along with the suburbs, there was a sudden bit of attention directed to this population, as the nation’s pundits tried to figure out just what was going wrong.  If they ever left their cocoons of upper-middle class comfort and pulled their noses out of the academic studies and books du jour, and stayed in a low-class motel while slumming in the sticks, they might just begin to get a glimpse of what Donald Trump so expertly manipulated into his electoral win.  As Michael Moore, and others who actually know this world, knew and predicted, Trump played right into the zeitgeist of the national discontent that has been building for decades.

Trump’s America, voting-wise

Jim Harrison’s Montana writing room

Henry D. ThoreauEdward Hopper

Having willfully stirred the hornet’s nest of the nation’s traditional bass-line of racism, Trump has brought to the foreground a social poison which remains broadly with us – however much the previous years attempted to gloss it over, and despite the purely racist behavior of the GOP when confronted with Obama.  Dance as they would around “policy” it was clear from day one that McConnell and company were driven by hard-core racism to oppose anything Obama proposed.   And now, with the genie let loose from a decade and more of political correctness suppression, we are seeing a rising wave of racist acts across the country.  I am not surprised.  On my back road trips I saw graffiti such as “Obama” with a rifle cross-hair in the “O”, and other such outward signs that we were not at all in a “post-racial” time.  Trump has played on this repeatedly, and will surely continue to do so as he consolidates his power.  While he meekly disavows such things, he simultaneously goads them on with scarcely an effort to mask his real intent and views.    His cabinet choices underline this quite clearly.

Thelonius Monk and Alan GinsbergStanding RockPainting by Stephen Lack

Outside Scranton, Pa.West Virginia

America is at a crossroads.  Its decaying infrastructure is emblematic of a crumbling social contract, one that has frayed beyond recognition.  Were we a small country, like Italy under Berlusconi, it would be bad for many people, but manageable and to some degree even amusing.  But the USA is not a small country, and what happens in it impacts not only Americans, but the world.  As indicated by the last decade and more, as we oscillated from GW Bush, pressed under the sway of 9/11 (probably avoidable if it had not been desired by certain parties within the government) into a mindless war in the Middle-East, and then an economic collapse propelled by mindless consumerism and dirty banking, and then to Barack Obama, where for 8 years the tensions of the nation simmered under a cover of benign shoe shuffles from the White House while the GOP Tea Partied its way to a fundamentalist polka of racism, the Nixonian “Southern Strategy” on steroids, blanketed in a phony Christianity and “conservatism” dictated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.  I might note that in cross-country jaunts the only occupants of the radio airwaves are right-wing talkers like Rush, and sleazy Christian preachers, interspersed with today’s awful rock and roll and C&W.  TV is Fox and Fox only.  The great swathe of fly-over country has been truly brainwashed, almost without opposition, and their embrace of the Republican Party – whomever it coughs up – is virtually religious, an act of unquestioning and thoughtless belief.   That’s what’s wrong with Kansas (and NE MO IND WYO etc.).

With the theatrics of the 2016 Presidential Election the dead rot of our political culture was laid naked – the vacuity of the Republican candidates, including Trump, was unfathomable in its shallowness, and while Clinton and Sanders sparred with some intelligence, it was still carefully within the range of the old era polit-speak, though Sanders sometimes stepped slightly outside the parameters of conventional Democratic Party parsing.   Trump’s vulgarism and crudeness swept all this aside, his yahoo base as sexist and crude for the most part as he himself.  And as he sold the snake oil, they bought, without reservation, taken in by a carnival barker from precisely the same elite, East Coast, moneyed people of whom they complained so loudly.  Trump would, so he said, be their spokesman, he’d take care of them, bring back the factories, put those people in their places, build a wall.  He loved the uneducated.

If his pick of cabinet members and other advisors is remotely indicative of the policies of the coming years, those fly-over folks have been taken to the cleaners like the rawest country rubes by a real New York city-slicker, as archetypal an American story as ever. Mr. Country, meet Rev. Gantry….

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

The Bifurcated States of America

In the frantic last days of our national election mania, in this year of 2016, each day awaits some new internet routed disclosure, private beans spilled into public view of the (alleged) perfidies of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. In the last weeks we’ve been treated to Trump’s sleaze on the Hwd Access tapes, to the coming forward of 12 ladies to accuse his highness of doing what he says he likes to do and can do courtesy of his wealth and fame, to Wikileaks revelations of inside dope on the Democratic National Committee’s machinations, and most recently to the Comey/FBI innuendos extracted from the dubious Anthony Weiner’s laptop lapdance. Each day seemingly offers yet another exposure of the sordid underbelly of America’s Id, as if we’d morphed into a TV noir in which Sgt Friday’s mantra is inverted, and it’s “the rumors, just the rumors” which are in demand. Facts, truth – WTF are those?

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In the hyper-acceleration of “information” thanks to the nano-second nervous system of our new digital world, ADDS shunts our attention around in loopy contortions: fact-free and factful merge into the same realm with no time to think. It is the political equivalent of high-speed trading in which a millisecond’s advantage can be leveraged into vast winnings. Never mind those winnings might evaporate in the next minute as ever new revelations sour the public consciousness. Such is the miswired collective neural system we have constructed for ourselves, like an elephant wired to regard a mosquito as a major threat instead of an almost unnoticeable irritant.

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Whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s trek to the polls, what is sure is that the coming years will be a season in hell for the US, and sadly, as we are far too powerful on a global scale, a hell for the rest of the world. Should Trump win (not seemingly likely, but….) all bets on anything are off – he is simply too wild a card to predict anything except in Silicon Valley-speak, we can be sure he’d be a major disruptor, if only from an out of control ego and transparent incompetence at anything aside from conning. He has successfully so far proved a handful of American dicta: “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” If, as the polls thus far suggest, 42% or so of the American voting public are hot for Trump, the proof is staring us in the face. We’ll know on Nov 8 whether another dictum holds: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.”

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Should Hillary Clinton emerge victorious, we will enter a presidential term utterly lacking the positive energy which attended Obama’s start. Instead the atmosphere will be instantly curdled, with a sizable contingent of the liberal/left having voted only to keep Trump away and not “for” Clinton, and with a Republican party in disarray with the apparently single unifying element to be as hostile towards Clinton’s term in office as it was towards Obama’s. Or more so. Already talk of impeachment, endless Benghazi, email server and other matters to be “investigated”, and a refusal to accept any Supreme Court (or other lesser ones) appointments. The Republicans have in effect said if they cannot govern, then no one will. This will make for yet another four years of governmental dys- and malfunction, in which certainly the House, and perhaps the Senate, simply decline to “do the work of the nation” with the intention of making Clinton yet another “failed President.”

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As America, and indeed the world, faces unprecedented pressures and emergencies in the form of population growth, immigration, resource depletion, and the ever increasing real life consequences of global warming and all its complex effects, we will have a government paralyzed for idiotic parochial reasons. Internally we are divided along geographic lines, along urban/rural, along regional matters of genuine import: water, economic disparities, then, perhaps most importantly, deep cultural rifts (including plain old all-American racism). The United States simply are not united. The fracture lines run deep, and seem unbridgeable. For some decades now my hunch has been we will fall apart much as the USSR did – owing to excess investment in militarism, collapsing infrastructure, vast economic divides between a ruling political/economic elite, and the rest of the populace. And, as in the USSR, wide cultural divisions among the members of “Union.” A prescription for dissolution.

Of course Americans have been raised on the myth of our “exceptionalism”, and so they too perceive themselves as monolithic, powerful, special, “exceptional.” As do Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – on this I am sure they will agree big league, or bigly. Neither of them will level with the American populace, which itself is broadly not inclined to do so either, and acknowledge the ugly truth that the USA which constitutes 5% of the world’s population, and occupies 7% of the earth’s land, consumes 25% of the world’s resources. It manages this feat by operating a global empire backed by overwhelmingly the world’s largest and most powerful military, which enforces US economic policies, which are often extortionary and constitute theft in a suit, along with political and cultural leverages which gift America with one quarter of the world’s “wealth” while being only one twentieth of the world’s population. And, of course, within the USA the dispersal of this wealth is heavily skewed such that 1% own and control 80% of the wealth. A wealth which they use to distort domestic politics, and to dictate foreign policy. So yes, we are “exceptional” – in our voracious greed and the evils necessary to feed that greed, and in our communal self-delusion that denies this disproportionate wealth, and how we obtain it.

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Hillary Clinton is a firm believer in the concept of American exceptionalism, as well as in using our vast military power to enforce our economic empire across the world.  Should, as is expected, she win the office of President, she will surely pursue American foreign policy as in the past.  Having Kissinger as a friend and advisor, as well a other members of the neo-con and neo-liberal camps who have guided US policy in the last half century, suggests more of the same on tap.  The anger of both the left/Sanders people, as well as that of the right/Trump people seems unlikely to be assuaged by a Clinton administration, though surely she will try to soften the anger with domestic programs intended to help those on the lower rungs of our warped economic pyramid.  Whichever way the vote falls on Tuesday the immediate future appears fraught with the bitter tastes of the long electoral process now coming to a close.  The cleavages in the nation look to deepen with – as already demonstrated in the Oregon Malheur case – armed rebellions a clear possibility.  The crystal ball is looking rather opaque.

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A little item I found after writing this, pertinent:

https://www.tumblr.com/forsetti/153181757500/on-rural-america-understanding-isnt-the-problem