Violence is Not the Answer

Michael Moore embarks on a voyage seeking (and getting) free Cuban healthcare for a flotilla of chronically ill US 9/11 responders and others in his 2007 film Sicko

But sometimes it gets the attention.  I can't recall a case in my lifetime when the murder of a stranger evoked such a visceral intrigue.  I could sense my conscience giving up before it could muster an ounce of obligation to the dead guy's memory.  It may have been the identification of the victim as UnitedHealthcare CEO that clinched it.  I didn't know who that was, but the title itself has a built in villainy to it, like Chancellor of the Third Reich, Grand Inquisitor or State's Executioner.  Judging by the comments the little snot Ben Shapiro is getting on his videos chastising the left for its (involuntary) unabashed glee over the man's murder, it's a sentiment that is shared across the political spectrum by workers (and the under- and unemployed) of every stripe.  The contradictions have never been sharper than the media's predictable obtuse puzzlement over the outpouring of glee that they mischaracterize as "online" while showing graphics demonstrating UnitedHealthcare's outlying offline superiority at denying its customers claims even among the shameful dozen or so megacorporations nominally providing insurance to the American masses whose society is alone among so-called developed nations in refusing to see the health of its citizens as a right and not an expensive privilege-- an overpriced and undelivered commodity profiting its entrepreneurial and shareholder classes by withholding care from those who need it most.

Michael Moore has made his 2007 documentary on the topic, Sicko, available for free on YouTube.  It was made at the end of the Bush Era, before the financial crisis, before the election of Obama and the implementation of the insurance-giant-friendly Affordable Care Act conceived by Mitt Romney but tarred by Romney's fellow Republicans as Obama Care as part of a long term strategy to have it clawed back from the Americans for whom it has been better than the unaffordable care that it replaced and that the Republicans would like to return them to.  Surprisingly (or not) Obama Care does not appear to have made a difference in the relevance of Sicko to the American situation with respect to health care (but also to family leave, post-natal care and  secondary education) available as a human right in much of the rest of the world.  As Moore demonstrates, the quality of life of those living in Canada, the UK, France and Cuba is demonstrably better for those burdened with footing the tax bill for these universal rights that Americans alone are deprived of.  It seems the free care and services their taxes make available to all relieve the burdens that Americans are beset with that make forking out the taxes that are designed to give nothing in return such a hassle to come up with here.

The beauty of the act that is on everyone's lips, that inspired Moore to make his film free to watch when he learned that it had been some inspiration to the assassin, is that it has become a fulcrum around which you can learn who your enemies are.   They are the ones whose priorities and sympathies lie solely with the fat-ass MBA whose fiduciary responsibility to UnitedHealth's shareholders made him blind to the death, disease, grief and misery his profit-seeking policies routinely and purposely inflicted on his unwilling customers.   They are the ones responsible for the arrest of Briana Boston, the 42 year old mother of 3 in Florida who in a fit of the very relatable rage it's easy to imagine being provoked in her in the course of trying futilely to reverse a claim denial for one of her sick children told her own insurance company over the phone that they were next.  We can well imagine the mindset that would view this woman's rage as an opportunity for the state and the corporatocracy to set an example to anyone else emboldened by the conversation the assassin's act has inspired rather than as a chance to turn the tide and start acting like humans.  The consolation to take from the tone-deaf tack they have taken so far in an effort to miss the point is that it's not outrageous to think it's a sign of a deeper panic. They are talking to themselves within earshot, beefing up security in case this is the start of an epidemic of customers taking matters into their own hands. Could the story get away from them this time?  When our judges, police, media and politicians reveal themselves to be the enemy on a matter so essential to most of our lives, it's a sign that the whole structure on which their power is based is on rather wobbly grounds.

It's a shame it takes the blood of a CEO to get some attention.  It's a shame they will do their best to re-write the MBA's death as the tragedy, when the tragedy happens every day to UnitedHealthcare's customers.  They always seem to succeed in making sure we all miss the point as well; and they could very well succeed this time too in making us forget this ever happened so that they can more quickly get back to screwing us as before.  But until they do, it's a pleasure seeing them squirm.

Last Ramble on the Topic

I found myself getting super annoyed this cycle with people thinking parties and voting were the answer to our problems. I too put too much stock in the outcome of this election, but I also have come to feel that voting is a mere maintenance project to try to survive the evils of electoral politics until an actually effective system of self-governance can be implemented.  I do have high hopes for that effective and representative system of self-governance--- even if just in the immediate solution it poses to the worst excesses and dangers of electoral politics.  If I were starting a career in academics I might want to study Self-Governance and the Art of Politics – namely how does a fluid self-governing body navigate the challenges of this world imposed by the remnants of electoral politics, oligarchy, careerism, authoritarianism, elite ownership and capture, surveillance, the deep state and the military industrial complex, among other things.  (How does it do international affairs with non-self-governing bodies- etc.)   Getting ahead of myself, but anyway, I don’t feel like wasting my time with politics anymore (unless something appealing pops up—because I think political groundswells are still more likely than the world suddenly coming to its senses about how fucked things are by politics and how much better they’d be if we just governed ourselves which is what we all proceeded to do.

I don’t think the American people know what they want.  On purpose I’m sure. They don’t even have to wait for Jake Tapper to say How are we going to pay for it?  It’s already formed in their heads.  They had change dangled in front of them in the form of Kamala Harris—an actually young attractive person and they went with the guy they figured they knew, mostly because he was a Dad.  That’s the change people want.  They want their Dad to love them.

It’s not their fault, I hasten to add.   Their isolation from each other, their alienation from what’s going on, and from a sense that they can do anything about it has been inculcated in them.  They may wish things were different, but they are only too happy to pretend that things can at least get back to that last time they thought everything was going fine.  Maybe Dad can get us back there.  That’s what his hat says.

I am getting irritated by the non-sense and bullshit being shat out about what this election means.  I’ll tell you what it means, it means we are a very confused and fucked up and complicitly powerless people. Election Day is not an opportunity for change (unless it is—but that takes some serious planning.)  What Election Day is in my opinion is an obligation to make the best that you can of a terrible choice.  I honestly think for a complete unknown with dark skin and a vagina Kamala Harris did a creditable job given the short time span she was given and these unprecedented circumstances.  I’m not saying she was faultless.  But I think it’s ridiculous to assert as though it’s the truth that if she had pandered to my tastes instead of Liz Cheney’s she would have won.  We have no fucking idea.  Likewise, I think it’s absurd to say that people actually meant to make this incredibly poorest of 2 possible choices on purpose.  People are doing their best in the voting booth.  Fractions of people on both sides are true believers in what they’re voting for.  The rest are just doing the best they can and hoping for the best.  Not enough people understand the con job that Trump and the oligarchs are pulling.  It looks like Dad level stuff.  Dad makes me vomit (not my Dad necessarily but the concept of Dad) but a lot of Americans feel safer with Dad than with some dark skinned person with a vagina.  (apologies to KH for harping on her genitals.  Anyhoooo!11)   This is a classic example of what’s wrong with electoral politics – it is not intentional.  We’re not choosing healthcare and income equality and peace.  We’re choosing a celebrity and hoping for the best.

People who think this was like 2016 or even 2020 are dead wrong.  We’ve never had an election like this before where a known entity, a former president who lost his re-election, a charismatic asshole tv celebrity with a well-established propensity to get away with anything was up against a virtual unknown with an apparently unpronounceable name who 3 months before got called on by unseen hands to substitute for the current (Carter-like) president in his bid for re-election due to the public catastrophe of the president’s spectacular decline on full display to all.  The task of this substitute was really Herculean.  I thought she might actually do it which is what makes it extra disappointing—devastating—to me.  I was placing my dreams on that blank canvas of my imagination of what her administration could be capable of.  Foolish of me.  And foolish as well to bear a grudge against anyone who didn't adopt my fantastical hope in the unknown one.  But in truth, I am always hoping for change.  I am always voting for Revolution.  I just know that that kind of voting if it has any effect at all has it in the primaries.  Until the operatives get their hands on it.  But in this case, I was hopeful that there wasn’t enough time for the operatives to get their hands all over it.  I also believed (maybe too credulously) that she was being advised to not reinforce stereotypes about her demographics, which was why she was over-compensating with the republican bullshit, which made sense since her campaign was being run out of Delaware with Biden’s people.  I hated that she missed the dumb easy opportunities to reassure the left wing of the base, but I had been convinced that there was method to her madness, and I’m not convinced there wasn’t something to the strategy.  There just wasn’t enough time (or Bernie people behind the scenes.)

One reason people don’t like liberals  is that they are huge fuckin’ unself-aware hypocrites.  They are clueless about themselves:  they're just as cretinous and mean as everyone else but they think they intend better.  I don’t like the US being like Hungary.  I don’t like having to live with the Hungarian dilemma.  How do you keep being a Hungarian when the uber Hungarian has made that awful.  What good is being cynical (which you can’t help being) when people are being deported and Israel is being encouraged to turn Gaza into beachfront real estate for Israelis and other investors.  How evil is it that the coolest way to be dissident is to be ironically complicit in fascism in the name of accelerationism?  I do believe the US has to fall but that ain’t happening.  It’s just turning into Hungary.  So giving you the benefit of the doubt, what you might have intended originally with your oh so clever cynicism was to be accelerationist, bur what you are in point of fact is merely complicit in fascism.  What I don't think is forgivable is that through your eagerness you've made every one else by virtue of their own ineffectualness necessarily complicit as well.

The Answer

The Answer from Erik Stephens, recording as Apollo Brown, on his 2014 soundtrack in search of a movie, Thirty Eight.

Stephens sampled this exotic novelty from the Carpenters' Crescent Noon (words and lyrics by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis) featured on their second studio album, 1970's Close to You.

Ramsey Lewis must have covered it first, in 1971 on his Back to the Roots album.  Cleveland Eaton is bowing the melody on bass.

I Go There

Of course I don't blame voters for Kamala Harris's loss.*   But if I'm being honest with myself, I do blame you.  You know who you are.  You're the voter who voted, worked, persuaded against Kamala Harris knowing that it was either her or Donald Trump-- knowing that Donald Trump was a fascist-- as a way to demonstrate your superior disapproval of the choice, especially if you did absolutely nothing in the primary to improve that choice.  And especially if you savor the thought that your purity vote was superior to my dutiful, nose-holding obligation. You went into the election with open eyes, knowing Kamala Harris was sub-optimal but that Donald Trump was a menace.  You had one job on election day, and you chose to punish the system rather than dirty your hands with a choice you couldn't be pleased with yourself to make.  She lost because of you.  More importantly, she didn't lose because of you.  She didn't learn anything from your withholding.  You'd like to think your vote was a lash.  It was a wet noodle.  You were no help at all.

You and I rightly blame Joe Biden for enabling Israel's genocide for a full year and counting but you were in a punishing frame of mind.  I hate to remind you but Joe Biden wasn’t running any more.  We obviously have an irreconcilable difference about the usefulness of presidential politics. We both agree Presidents are not where it’s at, and yet I can’t escape a feeling of responsibility about who wins an election to what is still for now and for the foreseeable future one of the most powerful and tragically consequential offices on the planet in a contest between a seriously evil and fucked up fascist and a run of the mill characterless careerist.  You should at least be sorry she lost because we will never know how much of a difference to what’s left of Gaza (which is over now by the way) a different outcome would have made.  You don’t understand: I feel I chose better for Gazans than you did.  And now we will never know how right or wrong that feeling is. Donald Trump could surprise us.  He could force Netanyahu to step down and go to jail, the aid and offensive murderous weaponry from the US to stop, the cease fire to be permanent, hostages to be released on both sides and Gaza to be rebuilt and life repaired for Palestinians, and if he does, I will be convinced I was wrong and that the outcome of yet another stupid presidential election between two type-A American assholes really didn’t matter.  But we both knew going into election day that Trump’s going to help Israel finish the job.  

True we didn't know what Kamala Harris would do.  While she gave a bellicose speech at the convention,  I had hopes.  My hopes were based on a couple of things.  I understood that  Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's DEI Vice President had had virtually no say in his Gaza policy.  What's more, I understood she, alone among White House officials, reached out to a Palestinian American who had lost 150 family members in Gaza with condolences before she was put at the top of the ticket, the same man who Rashida Tlaib took with her to shame Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke in front of Congress.  I understood Kamala Harris as nominee skipped Benjamin Netanyahu's Congressional address unlike the shameful number of AIPAC-bought democrats who sat there and applauded Bibi's odious speech like circus seals. So that already got my false hopes up.  I also heard rumblings about negotiations of her team with the Undecided folks in Michigan.  She in spite of her bellicose speech at the convention, did voice acknowledgement that cease fire and Palestinian self-determination are among what an end to the conflict must look like. My understanding about Kamala after she was put at the top of the ticket, after all the buzz and excitement died down, was that her solitary goal was getting elected.  I understood she was keeping policy vague on purpose.  Toward the end of the campaign I heard that she was focused on sticking to the right of center in an effort to overcome the assumed demographic strikes she had going against her. 

Now I grant I could have been wish casting but to be honest, this is the bottom line about what my hopes were for a Harris presidency:  The two possible winners of the election were Trump, a known anti-muslim fascist pig or Harris, an unknown smart lady from California.  Those were the 2 outcomes.†  Trump had a record, a history and a promise of anti-Palestinian Pro-Israel aggression.  Harris was basically an unknown.  I did not believe her when she said she would do nothing differently from Biden--- my belief was she would say anything to retain the support that Biden had and even stand next to a war criminal to increase it.  I did not believe that in the office she would be immovable, and certainly not as immovable as Trump.  I wanted to increase the chances of a movable president because to me at a minimum that was a way I could have a say in one of the most likely ways that the genocide would stop.  Do you have any other ideas?  I have asked for weeks what is the alternative and never heard an answer from anyone who refused to play the president game as their way of punishing Joe Biden (even though he was no longer on the ticket).  What anti Democrat people don’t seem to get is that some of us – I’m guessing many if not most of us voted for Kamala for the sake of Gaza.   Is it possible we would get our hopes squashed?  Of course.  We’ll never know now.  But even a shred of relief for Gaza would have been an improvement.  If Harris got Gaza aid, food and medical supplies and personnel that would be an improvement.  I never heard from anyone who refused to grant that Gaza’s chances were better with Harris than with Trump how to effect an end to genocide without her.  

I know you can say she said she would do nothing differently than Biden.  I don’t give a shit what she said.  Politicians lie all the time. I give a shit what she does as president.  Again, in my view peace for Gaza was largely going to go through the Oval Office.  (How the fuck else?)  If it was going to go through the oval office at all, it was only going to go through Kamala Harris’s oval office—not through Donald Trump's.  That was my thinking.  I don’t understand why that is so hard to see.  

To anti-demoncraps, Kamala not winning serves her right.  To me it is the death of Gaza.  Do you see how differently we experience that?  To you it’s sort of ha ha, she lost!  To me it’s the end of Gaza.  I don’t need you to see her loss that way.  Believe me it has to be better for you not to.  But that’s the rawness of the nerve the topic has for me.  Laugh if you want to.  In my ridiculousness, I still feel pain and mourn for Gaza.  (You  could console me by showing me how this outcome is better for Gaza.   What’s *your* fucking plan.   I’m not holding my breath.)

~~~~~~

* If  the vast majority of voters are innocent lambs, they were shepherded away from the muddled unknown shepherd  with the screwy technique sprung on them at the last minute and toward the lunatic pandering shepherdings of the more familiar peril they knew.  Still, while it's no wonder the innocents were lost due to what appears in retrospect to have been an incompetent gambit on the part of Harris's team, not all voters were so innocent.  The twisted irony is that those voters who knew better but refused to play the duopoly game on election day (and I reserve a special animus for the single-issue influencers who encouraged voters not to stain themselves with a vote for less harm) are more deluded about democracy than those of us who played along.  They actually thought their votes could count in this absurdly disempowering system.  I will grant it took me 13 elections to finally figure out that Election Day has nothing at all to do with Democracy or choice. It has to do with mitigation. If democracy happens at all, it's in the primary, which this year, everyone skipped.

† I know I sound like a broken record with the "2 possible outcomes" speech, but I can't help but feel that this reality is an instrumental part of what's missing for voters who knew better who nevertheless preferred to indulge in a luxury vote for nothing when the time came.

If

What if the election were held today?  I know it was already held more than a week ago, but what if that result were nullified and the election were held again?  Would we get the same result?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Maybe some of those who showed up the first time would give it a pass on round 2.  Maybe some who skipped it would take advantage of the do-over. What percentage of the repeaters would remember let alone stick with their original choice?  How many of the voters who reportedly learned in the voting booth that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race would have educated themselves a bit more on who this Kamala person who replaced him was?  Would the November 5 result inspire a pile-on against the incumbent party or a groundswell for the opposite result? In terms of the electoral college, the usual suspects would probably turn out the same-- it's the swing states where I suspect there might be some differences.  I could be wrong, but listening to the reasoning behind the last minute decisions of the sizeable group of stubbornly undecideds, I have come to the conclusion that any conclusion about the outcome of the election that attempts to explain the result is probably incorrect.  This goes for those that explain why Trump won-- which in my readings tend to be focused on the mood of the electorate regardless of the success or intention of Trump's campaign-- and those that explain why Harris lost -- almost universally faulting the campaign for failing to excite the will of voters.  Given the disastrous conduct of both campaigns, it's not hard to see why blame is the word that we want to apply to the loser whereas credit can hardly be given to the winner.

Until Joe Biden was booted from his own re-election campaign, the rematch between two geezers reeked of staleness and produce beyond its expiration date.  As unprecedented as the switch was, it made for an exciting change-up while the novelty lasted.  While the campaigns were equally rancid in their approaches, the same could not be said for the candidates.  Kamala Harris is actually younger, smarter, saner, healthier, more attractive, more normal than Donald Trump by any measure.  The fresh blood should have-- and in the opening days of her truncated time at the top of the ticket frequently did-- stir things up in unanticipated ways.  It seems to me it would only have paid for her to remind us of her youth and vitality -- and to assure us of the difference she represented from both Trump and Biden-- as frequently as she could.  When she did show up especially in contexts that contrasted her with her opponent, it tended to work for her.  There should have been more.  The counsel she received was apparently the opposite.

If there is one area in particular that is emblematic of the blame the Harris campaign can take for its loss, it is immigration.  Polls since the beginning demonstrated that on the issue of immigration, voters to whom it mattered trusted the xenophobic pandering of the Republicans on the issue more by a long shot.  When Democrats introduced tough anti-immigration legislation last year designed to fail solely as a demonstration of the hypocrisy of Republicans who dutifully cooperated in begging off, they had already ceded the issue.  Similarly, inviting the unpopular with both parties Liz Cheney along on campaign stops sent the conflicting message that you just needed to ask the Republican supporting Kamala Harris and standing there right next to her whether Republicans could be trusted.  Meanwhile, actual concerns of voters were purposefully ignored.

If only there could be a do-over, would Harris have learned that she needed to assert herself more strongly as a representative of a different more hoped for future than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump have demonstrated they are capable of leading us to?  Could she have flipped the coin of those who went with the evil they knew over the lesser evil they didn't?

My thought experiment aside, the rules of the game do not allow for a tie and are not best of 3 but that whoever wins on election day wins and takes all.  Given the increasingly dire circumstances we find ourselves in, I'm not a fan of the game.

Grappling for lessons

As much as it's a certainty that Kamala Harris' grotesque strategy of leaning in on making swing state campaign appearances with an unpopular GOP loser with deep-state war criminal ties softened enthusiasm among her base, squandering much of the good will that came with her replacement of the visibly malfunctioning Joe Biden at the top of the democratic ticket in July, it's also possible that it got her the strongest showing an unknown California woman of mixed non-European stock with a less than stellar (or particularly visible) term as doddering Joe Biden's veep could ever have wished for with the exceedingly short amount of time she had to do it.  We'll obviously never know the outcome if she had gambled on a bold break from the guy who was going to tank anyway-- if she had promised conditioning military and other aid to Israel on immediate ceasing of the genocide in Gaza and other aggressions against their neighbors, making reparations for damage they caused and facilitating humanitarian aid to the survivors of Israel's devastation;  if she had urged a quick diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine; if she had sold a case for distinguishing her position on immigration from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump from a humanitarian and economic perspective; if she had urged expansion of Medicare to cover those that Obama care lets fall through the cracks; if she had promised an aggressive approach to mitigating the climate disasters of increasing magnitude that threaten the future of the planet and frankly portend greater chaos from unprecedented weather-related events for the foreseeable future; if she had articulated a fix to the abortion crisis and thrown her support behind court stacking and term limits for Supreme Court justices as a fix to the Judicial problem that brought it about.  But it's entirely possible her doubling down on demonstrations that she was not intending to make the radical break from the status quo that the color of her skin and the femininity of her gender seemed to signal to even the very organized factions of non-white and non-male traditional voters she courted deprived her opponent of an even bigger blowout.  It was an uphill climb this eleventh hour appointment to assume the head of a badly faltering -- increasingly doomed-- ticket, and she may have done the best she could possibly have done with a larger segment of voters than she would have by focussing more lovingly on the progressive segment she took for granted.

If you want to look for blame, start with Joe Biden and his enablers.  While he still had a modicum of sense, he strongly signaled early on in his presidency that he would be a "bridge president" with a single-term administration whose mission would be to undo some the worst dysfunctions of Trump's first term, clearing the way for younger blood to speed the country away from the dark proto-fascism of the Trump era. Then he didn't restore treaties with Iran and Cuba, he doubled down on Trump's dystopian immigration policies, he wimped out on student loan debt cancellations and used excuses of parliamentary procedure to let COVID era moratoriums on evictions and child tax credits that reduced child poverty by 40% lapse. He expanded drilling and pipelining.  He publicly sided with management in the 2021 railroad worker's strike bringing a rapid end to the workers calls for sick pay and saner, safer working hours and conditions with larger crews on smaller less hazardous trains.   Then he conveniently under-responded to the subsequent colossal derailment in East Palestine Ohio that demonstrated the urgency of what those workers were asking for.  At least he finally got us for the most part out of Afghanistan-- bellicose bellyaching about it from the expected quarters notwithstanding -- with the predictable result that we had nothing to show for our commitment of years, blood, limbs and guilt in too many scores of thousands of civilian Afghani (and American) deaths.  While I applaud the withdrawals of troops and cessation of hostilities in one of too many pointless forever wars of the neoliberal era, the fault for the dubious and ultimately futile mission of democrats to retain the presidency and the senate and to win back the house lies squarely at the feet of Nixon-era perennial Joe Biden and the wimps who let him break the promise of his one-term presidency.  He won the primary by force of the etiquette that sitting presidents are not challenged, and in some cases by legalistic force itself.  By then it was too late to float alternative visions for the future. When his legendary hubris led to a national pratfall of a performance in his first debate with Donald  Trump in June, well before the Democratic National Convention, the ticking of the clock made the temptation to switch him out for younger blood too tempting for the string pullers and back channel operators to resist.  It may have been too late to organize a democratic process to pick a successor-- who, face it, would have been the one the operatives wanted anyway by hook or by crook-- but it was not too late to put forth Biden's hand selected Number 2, the untested but youthful and well-packaged Kamala Harris, who could plausibly be said by virtue of being named on ballots to have been selected in the primary.  By this point, she had no choice but to use the services of the team that graced us with Uncle Joe to run her last minute campaign.

As always, we on the left need to set aside grievances and work toward a world that isn't dependant on suboptimal periodic choices between overfunded under-imaginative careeerist politicians.  In the meantime, if you are complaining about the choices that people made on November 5, you are too late.   The opportunity to vote for change is not November 5.  November 5 is the obligation to mitigate the outcome of a choice made long before.  Being among the 2% that cast a fatuous and futile vote for change on November 5 by voting third party may boost your personal cred.  Good for you.   But if you're complaining about the rest of us, what did you do to make our actual choices better?

Where were you all in the primaries?

The Rules of the Game - Danse Macabre

A spooky interlude set to Camille Saint-Saëns's 1874 death-themed tone poem.  From Jean Renoir's 1939 classic, La règle du jeu.

Non-sequitur Bonus:  To evoke that after party feeling, you can't beat Confidence Man's 3 AM LA LA LA