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| What happens when you gut public education and glut police budgets |
As I'm writing this, an army of big circle-bearded lunks have breached a thin blue line and swarmed the US capitol just in time to prevent outgoing Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the November election of Joe Biden as President No. 46. The invaders were sent to the capitol by their cause célèbre, outgoing President Donald Trump whom they had come to support on his fictional quest to overturn the election, and who after exhorting his supporters to go to the capitol to see what would happen had made himself scarce with a hasty retreat to his COVID palace at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the protestors about nothing got to the capitol, the police put up a struggle but as they had never properly prepared for how to handle rioters who are big, pasty, circle-bearded and covered in Blue Lives Matter patches, they were swiftly overcome.
The hand to hand combat between 2 groups (police and lunks) usually associated with the right and with each other made me temporarily forget an analogous rift raging on the other end of the spectrum (or by some visualizations a small hop from one pole of the horseshoe across to the other). That squabble though fierce is taking place mostly on our smart phones and computers, and while it had threatened to consume my soul as recently as this morning, it looks rather insubstantial compared to the specter of some creep in a Trump beanie mugging dopily for the cameras as he walks off with the actual lectern from the Senate Chamber. The excuse for the firestorm-- a disagreement over whether the Squad should be cancelled for not threatening Nancy Pelosi's* reelection as speaker of the house unless she put Medicare for All up for a symbolic, performative and most certainly doomed floor vote-- seemed rather quaint juxtaposed with the image of AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib (who used the occasion of Pelosi's re-election to successfully push through a limit to Pay-Go rules in certain cases-- a prerequisite for any sort of sweeping legislation such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal) suddenly spirited away to a hidden location for their safety in the bowels of Congress. Perhaps we'd better figure out what the hell is going on before we start purging allies from the cause for lack of purity.
It's almost too easy to go after these people who stormed the capitol today -- these men-- these boys-- for their stupidity. There is a side of me that wants to see what's going on with them as an extremely misdirected outlet for extremely justified rage. They are after all citizens of what's left of America. They have not escaped the wealth inequality that is home grown here. If they get shot in their oil lord's wars, do they not bleed? If their livelihoods were undercut, outsold and squeezed dead by a monopolistic global monolith or if their jobs were moved overseas to sweeten a corporation's profit margin, do they not starve? If COVID ravages their lungs, do they not die and their surviving family members get stuck with the loss and the bill? If a diet of Fox News and right wing media distract them from the squalor of the future laid out before all of us with irrelevant outrages like the petty gall of transgender rights, black lives matter, feminism and the war on Christmas, do they not get distracted and outraged? Whiteness comes with special blinders that makes patsies of us all; some of us identify with the masters rather than face the fact that they have enslaved us too. The lords wanted to separate us from each other to save their own necks and the proof of their success is in not just the intactness of their necks, but the bottomless supply of circle-bearded jerks willing to make asses and fodder of themselves publicly in the service of their lords (yet again). A sort of emblem of their stupidity - while their brothers in arms were rampaging through the halls of congress, looting, vandalizing, taking selfies from the senate floor where Pence had just been speaking, some outside draped giant TRUMP banners over the railings as though rebranding the capitol for the object of their wet dreams, the outgoing dumbass in chief. Poor dumb fucking saps!
I've been reading about the rise of the right in Rick Perlstein's multiple volumes (with volumes of pages) series on the topic, most recently Reaganland, and have come to think of it as something deliberately manufactured by clever scoundrels out of certain people's inchoate outrage and their susceptibility to abandon solidarity and to blame their discontent on the neighbor in front of their face rather than on the owners hidden from view who actively immiserate them. Something manufactured and as such something that can be disassembled. The laws of entropy dictate that the dismantling will be more difficult than the assembly. But in the spirit of this thought, to anyone on the shallow right who wakes up from this moment as if from a bad beer-and-wine drunk and finds that maybe they aren't all that averse to the idea of putting our heads together to figure a way out from the bleak future that global capitalism has in store for all of us, let's talk.
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Lastly, a little meditative musical antidote that is perhaps in keeping with the theme of the day:
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