“With public opinion on our side, we can do anything, without it nothing.”
A meme was circulating just days before the fateful Nov. 2016 election, discussing El0n Musk’s proclaimation that ‘We need a revolt against the fossil fuel industry.’ While quoted from May 2016, it had no less poignancy in November. The world stood at a precipice–American exceptionalism supporting shadow government interests, or transition to a new ecological and social dawn.
It was clear early on that Clinton’s campaign had problems. Emails, minimized and dismissed. Here waffling and hawkishness. Her insider politics and lack of transparency in disclosing transcripts of speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial tools. And all of this was dismissed as ancillary, not to her real stances on issues, but to the heralded historic moment of becoming the first US female president. It was “Her Turn,” a presumptive, privileged rich white woman haughtiness if ever there was one. She failed to connect with people in distress, with those who actually cared about their communities, their families, and their ecologies in disrepair. Her response to Flint was lackluster.
Yet she was so overqualified, so went the script.
Instead, here’s a piece of speculative realism, that flips that good liberal’s script:
I don’t think anyone has a clue how devastating a Republican Whitehouse, Senate, and House, and Supreme Court is for the planet. No country left alive, after this doozy. And these aren’t your parents’ Republicans. They are alt-right neo-fascist GMO Republicans created in the Koch laboratory. They are ready for war, for ecological destruction, and for massive oligarchic rule. They feed into the most parasitic tendencies of you, me, the Chinese government, and any others who might be at their doorstep.
These Tea Party Republicans on steroids lack the finesse of even Newt’s Republican revolution. This is the command and control, winner-take-all strategy that we saw with the Nazis.
One of my cousins believes that the Democrats are “just as animalistic as the Republicans.” Of course, we all are animals, but there is a large kingdom of animals with different dispositions. Some are hopelessly tamed (Democrats), while some jackal-esque are willing to kill everything around them to not feel threatened anymore (Republicans).
It is the deep fear of the world, of difference, of otherness which is most scary of all. It is the reptillian instinct to kill anything that moves, that will usher in a dark time on this planet, where the healers and earth-keepers are put on the defensive, and are forced into triage, rather than restoration and prevention.
Bernie Sanders would have lead the Democrats to victory because he’s a team player. Instead of just campaigning for himself, he always was in solidarity with others, in contradistinction to HRC’s would-be coronation that was all about her. Bernie made it about justice, environment, fair wages, pensions for seniors, and thus was supported. He really knew how to be a true public servant. And by lifting others up, he was lifted up in kind. The DNC, on the other hand, spent all their money on HRC, and HRC spent all her time in front of echo chamber of “me, me, me” instead of seeing that her role should have been to pull Senators across the line, and raise the vibe of the whole party. Instead, the whole party had to slump under her, and now we are all in desperation. I know what I Sanders presidency, with Sanders Supreme Court Justices, and a Sanders Senate would have looked like. It would have been possibility for true world leadership. The US would cease to be an embarrassment, pushing around the rest of the world, bullying everyone into the lowest common denominator of interests, thwarting climate change mitigation policy, human rights, and other urgent issues.
The joke is, of course, that Trump is actually probably the most virtuous person in Republican leadership. He could be swayed to lessen the tsunami of damage the American people supposedly just elected into office.
The business with the FBI investigation into HRC was too perfect of timing not to have been planned. Comey’s investigation–against protocol–without a doubt help upset the election results the media and pundits and pollsters thought they had figured out. But of course this was intentional.
Election-rigging happens in myriad ways. There’s voter suppression, there’s gerrymandering, and then, there’s discrepancies between registered votes on DieBold voting machines and exit polls, one of the surest signs of corruption. The US has the least transparent, likely most corrupt system of voting in the so-called developed world.
To believe that the election result was the “will of the people” (whatever that is, in this technologically-controlled era), is naivety at its most severe.
Be all of this as it may, here is the crux: With a Sanders government, or even possibly with a Clinton one, the possibility existed for reparations to Native Americans, reparations to blacks in the US, justice and respect for Latin Americans in the US, and most of all, for ecological harmonization and the end of the oil/gas/energy oligarchs. Under a neo-facist Republican McCarthyite government, installing Supreme Court Justices, the only route to our species’ continued existence is some sort of new system of everything. Government, economy, society, devolution of political power–everything must be sluffed off and wrought anew. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants,” Thomas Jefferson frequently avered.
Well, the current US Constitution no longer serves us. The Nation-State model is obsolete, ecologically destructive, and prey to corporate interests. We need some sort of strong world government with a decentralized enforcement team, so that it always has checks and balances on itself and there is no question of “who guards the guards.” The US has turned into a police state as repressive as Orwell or other could have dreamed up. We need a devolution of control, a separation of mechanisms, and a return to the natural, rather than digital, world.
Recent Comments