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. Thoreau
Edward 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 Ginsberg
Standing Rock
Painting 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….
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