Sinking into Orwell territory
I feel like I’m repeating myself.
I am repeating myself.
I have repeated myself for nearly 25 years.
I’ve been writing about perverse wealth inequality, concentrated power, and the creeping — and now, under the Trump Regime — galloping lawlessness that makes the crime spree co-authored by W. Bush & Dick Cheney look tame by comparison.
To be fair to the deceased Cheney and the still living Dubya, they did substantial damage to the rule of law by expanding presidential power and unleashing horrific suffering abroad with their reckless War on Terror, but neither man had Trump’s uncontrollable fetish for self-enrichment. Though I despised the both of them with passion and prejudice, they at least operated in the realm of recognized reality. Trump is in full revolt against reality, against the law, and may not be far from from declaring himself lawgiver, jury, and the only judge that matters. Because the power train rolls only in one direction, Trump can’t slow down or stop, he must keep pushing the envelope, crossing and erasing the lines. When he declares the US is at war with Venezuela, no one will be allowed to dissent or demand proof that Venezuela poses any threat to the US without reprisal. Trump dreams of having the powers of a real dictator, like Putin and Xi, but somewhere in his curdled pudding brain he knows Time is working against him.
Nonetheless, we’re deep in Orwell territory. “In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night.” So wrote Orwell in 1984. Sounds like what ICE is doing, doesn’t it? The same goes for the murders being committed in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific in our name. I won’t be surprised when Trump’s lyin’ wind-up doll, Karoline Leavitt, declares “Hate Week in America.” The worst of what this Regime is capable of is yet to come.
Fela Kuti, the great Nigerian musician and political activist (son of a notable mother who played a role in kickstarting the movement for African independence), called his fans “Sufferheads.” Nigerians suffered from a government riddled with corruption, serial environmental disasters wrought by oil extraction, violence, and the societal deformities caused by European colonialism. I think Sufferheads is a perfect moniker for those of us living in Sane America, who still believe in gravity, ethics, moral behavior, and the potential for democracy. We want to live and let live, raise our families, see our children thrive, and play some part in making the world a more decent place. We’re not driven by hatred and grievance and resentment. We’re not afraid of people with darker pigment or those who speak unfamiliar languages. We’re not afraid of Women. We still believe in facts and reason, the possibility of reaching consensus. We want our country to live up to its ideals.
Such notions and beliefs make us adversaries of the Regime.
In December 2016 I wrote the following on Shouts from the Balcony, the blog I maintained for 20 years:
“To become viable again, the Democrats must purge every last vestige of Clintonism from the party, run Clinton loyalists out, and figure out who and what they stand for, and then, most important of all, learn to communicate with voters on an emotional level. Real jobs, economic, social, environmental and racial justice. Blocking and thwarting Trump’s mean-spirited, fear-inspired agenda is important and must be done, but it’s more important for the left and progressives and moderate conservatives to offer a coherent vision of something better. We know what we don’t want. The question is — can we articulate what we do want?”
What grade would you give the Democrats for their collective performance over the past nine years? What about the Supreme Court? The GOP gets an F, of course, after withdrawing from democracy. Are we closer to a coherent vision of society? No, because we can’t yet clearly articulate in a way people understand how we came to this moment, and who is to blame. The hands and the money and the ideological foundation that brought it about. Recognition of causes is a critical step on the path to finding solutions we can live with.
Indeed, we are Sufferheads. We suffer stupidity, cruelty, and kleptocracy on a scale not seen before on this fruited plain; we suffer mindless racism, triumphal white supremacy, and Christians who attribute twisted gospel to Jesus Christ, as if Jesus would starve children, dehumanize immigrants, and invite the money changers into the temple; we suffer an economy whose primary objective is extraction, from us, by rents, fees, and tariffs; and we suffer a political system that runs on legal bribery. We suffer because we’ve accepted the false idea that there’s no other way to organize this society. It’s all zero-sum, private property protection rackets, dark money floating around in the ether, by design out of our sight and beyond our control.
Yes, I am guilty of repeating myself, year after year, administration after administration. The country of my birth is in many respects unrecognizable. We voluntarily handed power to a convicted criminal. A country so brainwashed that millions of people think billionaires have their best interests in mind. A country that celebrates ignorance and cheers cruelty, in the same way that white crowds cheered when black people were publicly lynched. Our country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, is in the grip of a regime that, as the late anthropologist David Graeber noted of all such regimes, exercises “power without knowledge.”
Well my fellow Sufferheads, when it comes right down to it, the only thing I know to do is keep repeating myself. Better a broken record than a broken spirit.
