American Pastoral #24

As I write, October 16th, 2013, the grand Kabuki drama of the nation rises to one of its cyclical peaks as the structural weaknesses of our Constitution come into synchronicity. In the next day or two this media orchestrated minuet will play out,  with a temporary collapse of the Tea-Party Republican extremist’s efforts to block so-called Obamacare, claiming the real concern is the Federal deficit, by threatening to defund the government, though most of the same people blithely upped the deficit, slashed taxes, and started two fraudulent wars without a care during the reign of George W. Bush – as VP Cheney famously said way back then, “Deficits don’t matter.”  But today, with a black man in the White House, they matter, if only as a rhetorical weapon-of-the-moment.  Or, instead, this dance may see the little hard-core of Tea Party Representatives willing and able to risk a global financial melt-down as the rigged “reserve currency” of the post-World War II era runs aground on the fractured politics of the nation which prints those famous old Greenbacks, as the “exceptional” USA defaults on its debts.  This in turn will accelerate the process where the great sloshing of globalized, unaccountable wealth is shifting its currency into what those with it imagine to be safer forms than silly old abstractions, like money.  Instead they buy “art” or real estate in places like London, New York, Abu Dubai, and other enclaves of the increasingly “only rich welcome” sanctuaries.

[Note: barring some last minute glitch, it appears the Republicans have blinked, and our grand Kabuki drama will carry on, with another riveting crisis being revved up off-stage at this very moment.]

Mark Rothko painting, sold for $86,882,500Jeff Koons work sold for $33,682,500

A Rothko painting is composed of a thin sheet of canvas, and some thin layers of paint, and a wooden frame.  Materially it is both easily degraded (the red tones in this work are especially vulnerable to fading), or destroyed.  Materially it is worth perhaps $100.   Clearly what is being bought is something else – either the experience of looking at it, or, the assumption that its investment value in terms of money will increase faster, say, than the value of stocks, or interest from loaning the money.   While the Koons work is materially more substantial, the money to purchase it was animated by the same assumption: that the “art” aspect would multiply its “value” more rapidly than other investments.  In both cases, the reality is that, exactly as is the case with “money,” what is being assumed is that a social agreement that something “abstract” has material value.  Money, whether “represented” with things like gold or silver (chosen long ago because they do not readily oxidize and change their atomic structure), or paper, is in effect a social contract, one which says X currency is worth X material something.  When I was young a cup of (bad in the USA) coffee cost 5 cents.  Today in most cafes a cup of perhaps good coffee would run $3 or so. You can do the math on the inflation and figure out that the social contract regarding the numbers shifted terms rather drastically in my life-time.   In a similar way the social contract in America – between Americans – has also drastically changed.

Two years ago Occupy Wall Street materialized, and shifted our political dialog sharply:  the phrases “we are the 99%” and its corollary, “the 1%” emerged from decades of suffocation with barbs about “class war.”  OWS was initially ignored by the press, and then briefly given coverage as it spawned across the country.  At the same moment the NSA, CIA and FBI, in a Federally coordinated effort, collaborated with local police departments to heavily clamp down and as best they could, destroy this movement.  But the cat had been let out of the bag and a broad social awareness of the ever increasing disparities regarding the grossly tilted distribution of wealth, topics which are now almost everyday conversation, and around which our thoroughly corrupted politicians must dance, had been birthed.  Hence today’s minuet, which, as I write, appears headed towards an absurd “settlement” of kicking the can down the road 4 months.  And behind the curtains, cynic that I am, I can see the next act in this American theater of the Absurd:  in the coming months, as the Congress sits down to “seriously” decide on the Nation’s budget for the coming years, decade, whatever they say, in a signal of his “flexibility” President Obama will agree to cutting Social Security costs, cutting Medicare and Medicaid costs, and doubtless many other things.  However our sacrosanct military, and its burgeoning adjunct of the vast security state which has blossomed since 9/11, will not be touched.  And perhaps, as a signal of its reasonableness the counter-party will admit to some tiny tax here or there, though preferably it would be along the line of a VAT, “so we can all share the burden.”  Bets?

But, just in case the dog and pony show in the District of Columbia doesn’t provide enough sleight-of-hand to duly befuddle the citizenry, we can always count on mass media circus to do the job.

Early Andy Warhol

As this scenario has essentially been going on since we started, at the very outset anointing ourselves as “exceptional” and telling whatever untruths were necessary to support our illusion, beginning with our blatant theft of an entire continent from its inhabitants under the ironclad law that “might makes right” – after all, what were “they” doing with all this except wasting its values?  And on through a founding document which asserted that “all men are created equal” which was written by wealthy men who owned slaves, and whose document actually only considered white male landowners as “men” and on through the rest of our sordid mountain of self-delusions, which we must confront every day, and which confound our politics and society as they historically always have.  To untangle this mess of contradictions is certainly more than our institutions can cope with, which as the stresses of these days indicate, will lead to a breaking up of our Union, as the diverse interests and beliefs of our populace decide myth is not a good place in which to actually live.

Bill TraylorTrick or treat!

They Came From Outer Space

The upcoming Presidential election is in full swing, with the Republican Party seemingly intent on committing suicide in full public view.  Leading off with their endless “debates,” in which the vapidity of the self-chosen nominees was put on full display – – or is it newly-minted billionaire superPAC anointed?    Then segueing into the primaries, the GOP has managed to compound its folly with the media-hyped roller-coaster shifting of favored dunces bouncing wildly from Cain to Romney to Perry to Gingrich with some of the lesser lights in their dim world cast aside earlier – Michelle and Sarah, and most recently landing in the lap of Rick Santorum.  Traversing the nation, this circus seems to live in some other-world bubble, firmly detached from the every day realities of the ostensible public to which they appeal for votes.  Of course in most states this particular public is winnowed down to the narrow band of Republican stalwarts who vote in these primaries – strident ideologues, racists, Christian fundamentalists and evangelists, and those who genuflect at the altar of St Reagan, patron of the party, even if in these times, like Eisenhower, he would be vilified for the actual things he did (raise taxes, critique the military-industrial complex).  Of these things those of the current Grand Old Party can hardly be bothered to notice: facts are distinctly not within their peripheral vision, not to mention in-your-face.

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St Reagan

With nary a hint of irony, these would-be political leaders all fall into lock-step, as rigid as that of the Third Reich or the unlamented long-gone USSR.  Bedecked in mandatory stiff suits for their debates, American flag lapel pin correctly shown, or “common folk” jeans and plaid when on the hustings, they preach a gospel of “family values,” of “bring back America” and a long litany of sure-fire cliches as fraudulent as their own selves.   Between the lines are racist cue words, carefully placed.   One by one, caught up in messes of their own making – sexual, financial, “ethical” or “political” they march to the gangplank and leap.   What the Great American Public actually thinks of these people – mired in hypocrisy, transparently bought and sold in the new Supreme Court version of “free speech” in which the ancient axiom of America “money talks and bullshit walks” was given legal sanction – is presumably to be deciphered in the tea-leave readings of our vaunted “pundits” who presume to have their fingers on the pulse of the nation, though they seem only to talk to the somnambulant zombies residing “inside the Beltway.”

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One is told that the vast American public learns everything on television, a medium some time ago seized by profit-minded corporate moguls who naturally attempt to seize any medium which demonstrates that it indeed reaches masses of people, or, in their minds, “clients” or “customers.”   Mass communications equals big numbers, and hence, big profits.   And so news became a commodity, just like anything else, and in keeping with the capitalist impulse to place money uber alles, the news had to be repackaged to be more attractive, exciting, and engaging.    So, like the dazzlingly packaged bag of puffed sugar/salt coated air carefully placed before your eyes at the check-out counter – a bag scientifically designed to catch the eye, and full of substances designed to be nearly addictive  (like cigarettes), and for sure you “just can’t stop eatin’ them,” the “news” also morphed into a high-profit margin substance full of air and little else. And so we got celebrity news, famous name violence (AJ on the Freeway), and whatever else seemed to hook the biggest audience for the longest time, the better to feed them the sin qua non of American television:  advertisements.

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At the same time “serious” news got shoved into the background, unless,  as in the events of 9/11, it is forced by circumstances to the headlines.  See, for example, the history of OWS and the news organizations. The news, shifted to being a conduit for profiteering, like any entertainment, is altered and takes on a curious semblance to “commercial” television and filmmaking: heavy on stupid comedy, sex and violence.  Very thin on serious “content.”

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String-pullers, media moguls Jeffrey Bewkes and Sumner Redstone

String-puller supreme: Rupert Murdoch (wire-tapping)

Not content with merely shaping the consumer desires of the populace, once having demonstrated through the wiles of Madison Avenue the effectiveness of advertising, as well as through scientific social research which focused ever more exactly on how to manipulate the consumer – so that now many people proudly wear the corporate emblems of the products which they purchase, be it high-end clothing, or bottom-end costly Nike shoes, or anything between – the corporations realized that they could themselves write “the news” and go directly to pure propaganda:  Fox “News.”   In a manner far more directly than their network predecessors, which reported news of a narrowed, provincial, “about/of concern to America” range, the new systems dispense with any pretense to objectivity.  Of course, in Orwellian language, they claim the opposite: “fair and balanced” they loudly announce as the exact opposite spews over the airwaves.

Draped in the requisite red–white–n’–blue, culled by a systemically corrupt order in which only certain things may be said, and certain things may not be said (for example, with regard to cutting the government deficit one must not mention the biggest and most needless hog at the trough – the military-industrial complex), our political process coughs forth these puppets, who with no small irony echo those of our arch-nemesis of not-so-long-ago, or the present.  The particularities of the costumes may be a little different – stars & stripes instead of hammer and sickle – but the genuflection to a given style is exactly the same.

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Chinese PolitburoUS Congress

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Bequeathed the toxic legacy of the Bush administration – a massive deficit incurred by tax cuts for the rich combined with two unpaid for failing wars, the lack of enforcement of existing regulatory laws and a peel back of regulation in general, and the fiscal bubble it provoked bursting shortly after the 2008 election – Barack Obama entered his office under the dark clouds of an economic crisis for which Republican policies were almost wholly responsible.   They have spent the last 3 years doing what they could both to prolong the economic trauma for Americans, and to shift the blame onto Obama and his policies.   It is a case of pure hard-core right-wing politics, no matter what the damages to the nation.  The consequences are the massive foreclosures, loss of jobs, and the human misery it produces.  Naturally the right blames the victims for their situation.  Class warfare in action.

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Foreclosure heaven

“Creative destruction”

Following 3 years of being pummeled by the Republicans – a process which began the day of his inauguration, and perhaps culminating in the Astro-turfed Tea Party events of last year – President Obama has seemingly stood aloof, distant from the political fray.  And seemingly he was whipped one time after another.   With each seeming triumph the rabble and potentates of the right smelled blood and upped the ante, moving in for the kill:  Boehner stated simply that his work as Speaker of the House was to assure Obama had only one term, and he very much acted out that role, painting himself in purely negative terms.  Others questioned Obama’s legitimacy, whether he was “American” at all.  Throughout this  scourging Obama remained largely silent, drawing to himself critiques of a failure to fight in equal kind to  the vulgar abuses dished out by the voices of the right – from Limbaugh onto the various personages vying for the Republican nomination.  As the vocal turmoil mounted, Obama seemed almost to disappear.   And now, whipped to a frenzy, those on the right, in their eagerness to produce a corpse, have interestingly turned on themselves.  Denied the victim they wanted, who declined the role, the Republican nominees are slicing and dicing one another.

Sitting back these last months, Barack Obama has been gifted this bloodletting by his ostensible opponents, and one imagines he recalls another famous African-American, who likewise bore a Muslim name, and likewise incensed the fury of our legions of racists.   In his profession he had a tactic, which bears some similarity to the political moves of Obama.  He called it rope-a-dope.  He’d let his opponent spend himself in a fury of punches, exhausting himself, while he, Muhammed Ali, laid back against the ropes, seemingly being whupped.  Once the flourish of energy spent was finished, he’d bounce back and deliver the coup de grace.  It was a kind of pugilistic Zen, of a kind Obama appears to exercise in politics.

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Ironically, in this theater of the political absurd, it is the king-makers of the “elite” ruling class who are likely to have the last laugh.  Once all the grand media drama of the election has subsided, and the fulminating of ideologues has drifted into momentary silence, and the votes have been cast (and perhaps, if necessary, jiggled, as recent history indicates is becoming our norm), those eminences, hiding behind their Wizard of Oz curtain, will doubtless be pleased with the success of their latest shell game.   After all the sturm und drang, indeed, the best and most useful Republican in the field will have triumphed:  Barack Obama.   Carefully masked as a “liberal” in the last election, this time around he is clearly put forward as a domestic, somewhat centrist Republican, though calling himself a “Democrat.”  He can do this thanks to having spent the last 3 years being vilified by the mindless shriekers of the right as a Kenyan anti-imperialist “socialist” (unsaid, “nigger”) who is, OMG, trying to turn the nation into a servile European-style welfare state.  Tarred with this, his actions on domestic matters slip easily into the mold of old-time mainstream Republican policies.  Which makes those behind the curtains happy.  And on the foreign front, Barack is happy to drones away whomever disturbs American imperial prerogatives, never mind the Constitutionality of it.  And likewise, while feigning to curb the ravenous appetite of the military-industrial complex, our biggest feeder at the Federal welfare trough, the figures show nothing of the kind.  Rather the numbers are shifted to focus on our new very costly very high-tech kind of warfare in which 10 million dollar Hell-Fire missiles are used to take out a few peasant guerrillas at a time.   Mr. Obama not only pursues this policy, he seems to relish it.  A virtual warrior on behalf of the empire.

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Manchurian candidate Barack Obama and the Harvard Class of 1991

Of course, this scenario might have a monkey-wrench thrown in it should the OWS emerge from its winter hibernation having learned from its militarized-police-imposed FBI/CIA nationally coordinated attack, and accompanying corporate-media rub-out, that it needs to acquire some new tactics.  I’m inclined to think they’ve taken this seeming down-time to hone their thoughts.  It was only 6 months ago that any national discussion about class warfare, income disparities, the 1%, or the ugly consequences of yahoo capitalism was simply unthinkable, totally taboo!  Without recourse to the governing establishment’s usual requirements – appearing on Sunday talk shows, having a clear bullet-point agenda, a “leader,” a party,  and all the rest – OWS seized the high-ground and pressed these issues into the national consciousness and discourse.  No small feat in our highly manipulated society.  The 1% are no longer invisible or chronically lauded; rather they are criticized and their actual actions are under scrutiny.   Whether their shell-game with Mr Obama will suffice to smother the discontent brewing across the nation remains to be seen.

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