#48 LIFE IN THE UPSIDE DOWN BEGINS 

The True Sociopath in Chief

Personally, since the election results rolled in, I’ve made an effort to limit my intake of political news through watching as much sports as possible.  There are winners and losers there as well, but it stays confined to the field or the court, and—wonderfully—doesn’t rely on anybody’s ignorance about what’s taking place there to determine which is which.

I’ve felt I had to conserve my mental/emotional space for what’s coming.  It has helped calm me.  There’s a highly toxic danger here of getting completely displaced, rattled, and out of sync with myself and the world I’m in.  “Elon Musk has control of Americans’ data” is enough to do it; I don’t need to know that a drunken sot got confirmed to lead the Department of Defense, an erratic conspiracy theorist who hates vaccines is on his way to head up the Health Department, a guy who filmed anti-F.B.I. propaganda for the Russians is on his way to head the F.B.I., and the head of “Intelligence” routinely spouts Russian propaganda.

The next step would be putting actual apes in charge of these departments, but then again, if they shot their turds at subordinates from behind their desks, you’d know that to be an honest gesture.  There’s nothing faintly honest about any of this.

None of it could have happened without the remarkable ignorance of the American citizenry.  Yes, we have the MAGA faithful, fed an exclusive diet of Fox News and rightwing media.  They’re lost souls, subjugated and utterly conditioned to believe absurd bullshit in the service of billionaires.  But certain intransigent illusions persisted that threw that election to Trump.  A big one has been his unearned reputation as a smart business man.  In a highly American turn, he simply projected himself as one on TV (thanks, NBC).  In the retarded mathematics applied by the average person, this translates into his having a magical, miraculous understanding of macro-economics.  No, Trump has only understood how to enrich himself, and he doesn’t do that through genuine business acumen.  A la advertising, he sells himself.

As a lady very concerned about inflation commented to a journalist shortly after the election, when she heard Trump won, she instantly felt relieved.  Why?  Because now someone who can handle inflation would be in the White House and solve the problem.

I’ve been lecturing such people in this space, and I’ll lecture her: HE DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT AND WOULD NEVER TAKE THE TROUBLE TO LEARN!  That certainly would never restrain him from saying he’ll stop the problem of inflation on “Day One.”  But she lives in this illusion.  It’s completely real to her.  I can only hope when all the prices go up instead of the slow stabilization they did under Biden, she at least recognizes that Trump failed to do anything about it.

Fiscal probity

Literally, the election depended on this level of ignorance.  Democracy, as envisioned by the Founders, required an informed electorate.  That would not be her.  We’re literally awash in more information than at any moment in human history, but she can’t avail herself of it.  And here we are.

The other important swing in the electorate can be traced to the Democrats and the Left.  Biden did not create a coherent border policy that prevented immigrants from flooding in.  (And in fairness, the Republicans, at Trump’s behest, refused to work with him to come up with legislation—maybe Trump’s most meaningful political move.)  The Left had a strong reaction to Trump’s viciousness the first time around, and wanting to accommodate migrants, pressured Biden on this to the point that he did nothing until it was too late.  He actually took measures this last year that significantly braked it —kind of like Saquon Barkley gashing you in the running game for three quarters; when you finally start to slow him in the fourth, it’s way too late.

Here’s a migrant I’d like to deport: Elon Musk.  You’re worried about fentanyl importers and gangbangers coming over the border?  How about this guy taking away your job, your government medical program, or—even better— your Medicare and Social Security?  That’s the big apple rightwingers have been salivating over forever.

I remember listening once to a Republican town hall—it may have been some Senator from Kansas, but I can’t remember.  He presented his view of governance to the crowd, and some old lady got up, full of ire, and shouted: “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!”

That’s the Republican ideological song and dance, aimed at making the American government seem the most evil institution imaginable, summed up in this arrival at complete ignorance.  That its ideologues seemed to have drunk the Kool-aid shows in the attempt to simply shut down large swaths of government programs.  If, for example, you shut down US foreign aid, you may rip 50 million bucks out of the hands of farmers in Kansas who sold their extra crops to food programs for countries with starving people.  If you stop a program combating ebola in Africa, that’s a disease that could spread, and spread here.  While there may be waste in government, are these investments as senseless as they make them out to be?  They sound like a win-win to me, and one that also engenders good will towards us, creating further security.  We sure spend a lot of time engendering ill will.  But Republicans apparently thrive on ill will and we win and fuck you, you deserve to lose, you dirty, filthy animals who can only migrate to America because you want to rape it or something.

Funny, though.  There’s a rapist in the White House.  Seems like the rapists have already arrived, mostly home grown.  That’s the self-immolation of empires.  It becomes a fight to see who can get their hungry ghost fingers on the big wealth, and what brought such prosperity about—the innovation, hard work, communal purpose—gets trampled.  All those laws and checks and balances very smartly understood by the Founders, if you can find a way to run over them roughshod, it’s all yours.  Like they let you into Fort Knox, and you start backing up diesels to load them up with gold bars.  (I imagine we’ll be seeing that on our televisions in the future, assuming there’s still a free press.)  Trump’s now the fifth grader freely cavorting in the ultimate candy store.

The Right has prepared for this moment for a very long time.  It couldn’t win the middle so easily anymore, so it absorbed in all kinds of extremism, particularly the racist kind, and especially Christian evangelicals and Christian nationalists.  Reagan changed the tax structure to favor the rich, and it’s gotten pulled more and more their direction ever since.  The very rich have bankrolled its efforts in order to aggrandize their own wealth and paid handsomely for political operatives at the local level and illusion purveyors in the rightwing media.  Elon Musk sits on 400 billion dollars, and somehow that’s not nearly enough.  In the name of “fiscal responsibility,” he’ll happily pull food out of the mouths of starving people and take medicine from those depending on it to stay alive.  He’s going to strip out all these programs that help regular people so that people like him can have more—and regular people can applaud that someone is “finally doing something,” and that something happens to be taking it from regular people.

In one of the supreme ironies of this wholly ironic moment, the conservatives have become wholesale, wild-eyed, militant radicals, while it’s fallen to the liberals to protect the Establishment.  It’s within my lifetime that the Left stood for shaking up the Establishment and the Right for holding it firm.  Though the Beltway press and mainstream media still seem to think there’s such an animal as the “moderate Republican,” they went extinct under George W. Bush quite sometime ago, and still these commentators seem not to get the moment we’re in.

Well, fuck, someone’s got to get it.

Fortunately, there have been signs of life, as protests have broken out all over the U.S.  The Democrats, more flat-footed and outflanked than ever, have been showing some backbone and resistance.  Since much of what Trump/Musk is doing comes from breaking laws and defying the constitution—something, Voters, they’re intent on shredding, if you haven’t noticed (and I’m sure you haven’t)—the courts have been shooting them down and at least freezing their efforts.

Since the legality of what they’re doing doesn’t concern them much, and they’re subjugating the legal system through decimating the F.B.I. and the Justice Dept., while beyond it all waits the Supreme Court who wrote Trump a blank cheque to do whatever he wants…well, so far there’s only so much that can arrest the forward motion of this—and we might as well call it what it is—coup aimed at destroying the U.S. as a democracy and putting a few highly self-interested, bloatedly rich guys in power.  And if it suits them, they’ll eventually allow the Christian extremists to take it over and run the U.S. as a Christian dictatorship.

Are you feeling good about this yet?

I can see some hope coming in the form of people broadly hating them for what they’re doing, especially if they go after things that affect everyone’s daily lives, and particularly if they try to ransack Medicare and Social Security.  That’s the one thing that easily could still bring them down—wide spread, intense dissatisfaction with their actions, where calling white black and down up will stop working.  The guise of conservative fiscal probity gets stripped away revealing the actual rapacious greed that’s at work here. As a country, we’re armed to an unimaginable degree to repel military attacks on our borders, but we have so far seemed incapable of dealing with people at the high end who flout norms and transgress laws rather than simply conform in the way everyone has in the past.

That’s the problem here.

Thus the response can’t be purely rote and formulaic.  They’re not playing by the rules, and this is something that continues to vex the Democrats, who really have a lot of trouble thinking outside their conventional Beltway conceptual box.  A couple nights ago at the Boulder Shambhala Center I heard a talk by Douglas Penick, who’s written three books on the Tibetan King Gesar.  Gesar’s the ultimate spiritual hero acting to subjugate difficult or seemingly impossible worldly problems.  Penick made the point that Gesar arises in relation to obstacles.  That’s when his energy is needed and not otherwise.  He operates within uncertainty rather than avoiding it or somehow making it go away.  He innovates with situations because they’re constantly calling for innovation, and he doesn’t duck the uncomfortable, inconvenient, outright painful qualities they present.  So he trusts himself to find the way forward spontaneously, and responds according to the precision of circumstance, not through some fixed preconception.

I’m afraid that’s where we are.  We may have to do things we simply don’t want to do, or act in ways that we hadn’t previously considered.  We definitely have to keep our seats, not panic, and proceed from clear-eyed responsiveness.  Even the “enemies” in this situation are trapped in its delusions.  Sanity has to come from somewhere, so it begins with us, whoever we happen to be.  If you’re inclined to credit astrology for understanding the times, it’s predicting radical change over the next couple months or so.  We’re here.  It’s arrived—the Dark Age, the fall of America, the destruction of democracy, whatever you’d like to call it.  It’s happening before our eyes.  That is, if our eyes are open…and we still have the heart to care, no matter how much fear seeks to subjugate us.

Warrior-King Gesar: innovative spontaneity