As anger and grief morphs Into the habits and vagaries of daily life The heart is circled by its waggin’s In loo of revolutions more roil As if Too be stuck In The mettle Only to be Haunted by cursory echoes Of lives a custom to be frayed Of what might be Stranded Into the unbreakable Accord As knot the tear or stricken And still The heart fastens Awe that grows Unleashed
This poem addresses the challenges of palpable anger and grief “normalizing” as time goes on. The necessities and sheer habits of everyday living bear down on overflowing passions, often sublimating such powerful emotions into more comfortable or familiar patterns. This can tamp down more revolutionary impulses for changes in life. Such coping is commonplace.
Such a process causes me to reflect on the current post-election era. I remember the outrage when Baby Bush beat Al Gore only with the intervention of the Supreme Court, in the face of a popular vote loss and electoral college squeaker fraught with voting irregularities and inadequacies. I noted how the un-sexy issue of the mechanics of voting and elections receded from consciousness in due course within a matter of months. Multiple presidential election down the road, many of these election and voting deficiencies continue largely unfixed. The electoral college has taken US to school again! Plus, the striking down of key elements of the Voting Rights Act has left state-level shenanigans with voter suppression to run rampant. Add in the increasingly surreal gerrymandering of voting districts and the democratic process is literally moot for most of America in national elections.
While our national democracy stays the course on being massively dysfunctional at so many levels, this election cycle, a vicious cycle, is a quantum leap in dangerous effect. The sexism, racism, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant xenophobia reached for new heights and historic lows during the campaign. Women, people of color, Muslims, and immigrants have legitimate reasons to worry on both a daily basis and what looms in the future. Misogyny, white supremacy, and xenophobic nationalism are being baked into the Donald Trump regime. While in many ways this is nothing new to disenfranchised folks, the stunning respectability of sexual assault braggadocio, scorn of Black Lives Matter, collusion with white supremacists, and a national fortress mentality could easily converge into the most authoritarian presidential administration in our lifetimes, if not ever, in America.
This poem is a warning of the dangers of “normalization,” and a call to the difficult, lifelong, trans-generational work that needs to be done. I don’t believe that such work can be done unless it is equipped with hope. This poem culminates in the hope that by reaching deep and going long the solidarity of wholehearted people will supply needed power to resolute minds and steadfast hands to further incarnate seemingly impossible justice for all.
Dealing with endemic injustices calls for a demanding balance between daily coping and cultivating a long-haul way of life that shrewdly generates and regenerates, creates and recreates, produces and reproduces just and heartening habits of behavior and ways of being in the world. Will the better side of America prevail over the genocide of America? All I can say is that when sides are drawn, I know which side I hope and plan to be on. As Martin Luther King, Jr. so plainly observed and prophesied, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” Though I would update this a bit and expect to see sisters steadfastly leading this fight. Some things don’t change. This can be a good thing.
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POEM: Breath of Fresh Heir Each mourning Brings that which is light Though wanting to rest As the whirled spins under my feet I am Still Razed Too my feat Standing on Perhaps a singular word Mysteriously helled Together In God-ordained gravity Until that thirst Breath of fresh heir As awe is knew This poem is about coming out of […]...
POEM: Innocence — An Owed In A Sense Her innocence Was immune to their dis ease As be wilder And a tempt However tempered Only to be Dis missed As just A guile His innocence Deified awe bravery In the face Of accusations summoned As subdude As never a cur to them Posing the quest in Guise will Be guise Her bosom leaped […]...
If you want to make sense of the failure of neoliberalism, as typified by Hillary Clinton, and its vomiting up of proto-fascist leaders like Donald Trump, then author and journalist Chris Hedges nails it again, in this piece, Donald Trump: The Dress Rehearsal for Fascism:
Americans are not offered major-party candidates who have opposing political ideologies or ideas. We are presented only with manufactured political personalities. We vote for the candidate who makes us “feel” good about him or her. Campaigns are entertainment and commercial vehicles to raise billions in advertising revenue for corporations. The candidate who can provide the best show gets the most coverage. The personal brand is paramount. It takes precedence over ideas, truth, integrity and the common good. This cult of the self, which defines our politics and our culture, contains the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation, and incapacity for remorse or guilt. Donald Trump has these characteristics. So does Hillary Clinton.
Our system of inverted totalitarianism has within it the seeds of an overt or classical fascism. The more that political discourse becomes exclusively bombastic and a form of spectacle, the more that emotional euphoria is substituted for political thought and the more that violence is the primary form of social control, the more we move toward a Christianized fascism.
Last week’s presidential debate in St. Louis was only a few degrees removed from the Jerry Springer TV show—the angry row of women sexually abused or assaulted by Bill Clinton, the fuming Trump pacing the stage with a threatening posture, the sheeplike and carefully selected audience that provided the thin veneer of a democratic debate while four multimillionaires—Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Clinton and Trump—squabbled like spoiled schoolchildren.
The Clinton campaign, aware that the policy differences between her and a candidate such as Jeb Bush were minuscule, plotted during the primaries to elevate the fringe Republican candidates—especially Trump. To the Democratic strategists, a match between Clinton and Trump seemed made in heaven. Trump, with his “brain trust” of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, would make Clinton look like a savior.
A memo addressed to the Democratic National Committee under the heading “Our Goals & Strategy” was part of the trove of John Podesta emails released this month by WikiLeaks.
“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to the majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal …,” it reads.
The memo names Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ben Carson as candidates, or what the memo calls “Pied Piper” candidates who could push mainstream candidates closer to the positions embraced by the lunatic right. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”
The elites of the two ruling parties, who have united behind Clinton, are playing a very dangerous game. The intellectual and political vacuum caused by the United States’ species of anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” leaves candidates, all of whom serve the interests of the corporate state, seeking to exaggerate what Sigmund Freud termed “the narcissism of small differences.”
However, this battle between small differences, largely defined by the culture wars, no longer works with large segments of the population. The insurgencies of Trump and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a breakdown of these forms of social control. There is a vague realization among Americans that we have undergone a corporate coup. People are angry about being lied to and fleeced by the elites. They are tired of being impotent. Trump, to many of his most fervent supporters, is a huge middle finger to a corporate establishment that has ruined their lives and the lives of their children. And if Trump, or some other bombastic idiot, is the only vehicle they have to defy the system, they will use him.
The elites, including many in the corporate press, must increasingly give political legitimacy to goons and imbeciles in a desperate battle to salvage their own legitimacy. But the more these elites pillage and loot, and the more they cast citizens aside as human refuse, the more the goons and imbeciles become actual alternatives. The corporate capitalists would prefer the civilized mask of a Hillary Clinton. But they also know that police states and fascist states will not impede their profits; indeed in such a state the capitalists will be more robust in breaking the attempts of the working class to organize for decent wages and working conditions. Citibank, Raytheon and Goldman Sachs will adapt. Capitalism functions very well without democracy.
In the 1990s I watched an impotent, nominally democratic liberal elite in the former Yugoslavia fail to understand and act against the population’s profound economic distress. The fringe demagogues whom the political and educated elites dismissed as buffoons—Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudman—rode an anti-liberal tide to power.
The political elites in Yugoslavia at first thought the nationalist cranks and lunatics, who amassed enough support to be given secondary positions of power, could be contained. This mistake was as misguided as Franz von Papen’s assurances that when the uncouth Austrian Adolf Hitler was appointed the German chancellor in January 1933 the Nazi leader would be easily manipulated. Any system of prolonged political paralysis and failed liberalism vomits up monsters. And the longer we remain in a state of political paralysis—especially as we stumble toward another financial collapse—the more certain it becomes that these monsters will take power.
Fascism, at its core, is an amorphous and incoherent ideology that perpetuates itself by celebrating a grotesque hypermasculinity, elements of which are captured in Trump’s misogyny. It allows disenfranchised people to feel a sense of power and to have their rage sanctified. It takes a politically marginalized and depoliticized population and mobilizes it around a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance and an anointed political savior. It is always militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy and replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as diseased enemies that must be physically purged to restore the health of nation.
Many of these ideological elements are already part of our system of inverted totalitarianism. But inverted totalitarianism, as Sheldon Wolin wrote, disclaims its identity to pay homage to a democracy that in reality has ceased to function. It is characterized by the anonymity of the corporate centers of power. It seeks to keep the population passive and demobilized. I asked Wolin shortly before he died in 2015 that if the two major forms of social control he cited—access to easy and cheap credit and inexpensive, mass-produced consumer products—were no longer available would we see the rise of a more classical form of fascism. He said this would indeed become a possibility.
Bill Clinton transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. He pushed the Republican Party so far to the right it became insane. Hillary Clinton is Mitt Romney in drag. She and the Democratic Party embrace policies—endless war, the security and surveillance state, neoliberalism, austerity, deregulation, new trade agreements and deindustrialization—that are embraced by the Republican elites. Clinton in office will continue the neoliberal assault on the poor and the working poor, and increasingly the middle class, that has defined the corporate state since the Reagan administration. She will do so while speaking in the cloying and hypocritical rhetoric of compassion that masks the cruelty of corporate capitalism.
The Democratic and Republican parties may be able to disappear Trump, but they won’t disappear the phenomena that gave rise to Trump. And unless the downward spiral is reversed—unless the half of the country now living in poverty is lifted out of poverty—the cynical game the elites are playing will backfire. Out of the morass will appear a genuine “Christian” fascist endowed with political skill, intelligence, self-discipline, ruthlessness and charisma. The monster the elites will again unwittingly elevate, as a foil to keep themselves in power, will consume them. There would be some justice in this if we did not all have to pay.
The parent conundrum here is how to create a way out of neoliberalism while dodging the rise of fascism. Both require a much more politically conscious and politically courageous populace, who on occasion may also be an electorate.
POEM: Innocence — An Owed In A Sense Her innocence Was immune to their dis ease As be wilder And a tempt However tempered Only to be Dis missed As just A guile His innocence Deified awe bravery In the face Of accusations summoned As subdude As never a cur to them Posing the quest in Guise will Be guise Her bosom leaped […]...
POEM: Breath of Fresh Heir Each mourning Brings that which is light Though wanting to rest As the whirled spins under my feet I am Still Razed Too my feat Standing on Perhaps a singular word Mysteriously helled Together In God-ordained gravity Until that thirst Breath of fresh heir As awe is knew This poem is about coming out of […]...
How grate thou art Of the power grab Too expose the private part of US As innocence on the lam Sow so sorry As if He is just Exercising His first amend meant Rites Sow so owed An election Fantasies of a big rig in A necessary re-take Of the White house And pet project The Lincoln bedroom Maid into His own Personnel Locker room Aloud too due Any thing If only Given Enough Grope We must Yack knowledge That he will Be, well, hung Bye himself Sow giving The biggest hand Weave never scene
This poem is yet another tribute to the perversity of Donald Trump and his disingenuous, dissembling presidential campaign. His misogyny alone should be enough to disqualify him from elected office and holding women’s trust — or holding women’s.anything for that matter. His serial sexual assault of women should not be simply a private madder. Only slightly less scandalous and distracting are his schoolyard tantrums as his elephantine election dreams droop, projecting a parosmic paranoia that the election must be rigged. Perhaps the only thing that might finish off Donald Trump and such an over-sized election might be some penitential mass debating sow wince and for awe he can flaunt how chaste he is in mates.
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POEM: Innocence — An Owed In A Sense Her innocence Was immune to their dis ease As be wilder And a tempt However tempered Only to be Dis missed As just A guile His innocence Deified awe bravery In the face Of accusations summoned As subdude As never a cur to them Posing the quest in Guise will Be guise Her bosom leaped […]...
POEM: Breath of Fresh Heir Each mourning Brings that which is light Though wanting to rest As the whirled spins under my feet I am Still Razed Too my feat Standing on Perhaps a singular word Mysteriously helled Together In God-ordained gravity Until that thirst Breath of fresh heir As awe is knew This poem is about coming out of […]...
Donald Trump Is beyond doubt Know laughing madder Failing incalculable spells of misogyny Portending to have awe ready one his election handily Too the victor goes the spoiled Winner loose The racist goes to the fascist An object lessen in his AWOL service As commander-in-chief firing missives Deemed medically unfit to even serve with privates Regardless how doctored his broken record How telling Like it is Wile a red baiting hew Sow white He’s drunk on powder Convinced, he’s on, the waggin’ Shooting back helter skelter his boos Fuel of himself A rich man with drawl Reckoning the whirled Can’t carry on without him Or ails will suffer from DT’s Grip of irony Making America grate agin As some notorious big ahead A plan it unto himself If only So promising He’s got it covered As self-evidenced hair apparent
Perhaps the only certainty of a Donald Trump presidency is that he would be the fodder of thousands of comedians. This poem lambastes his care-free anger, his cocky misogyny, his spoiled-adolescent winning giving a big hand to himself, his high-handed authoritarianism, his red-faced racism, his casual sanctioning of rebel violence, his chicken-heart draft dodging, his serial red neck and white lies, his reckless megalomania, his addled addiction to privilege and license, his stupefying incites and benumbing savvy, his unimaginable plans in the wake of nuclear bombast, and his gaud-like rug under which to sweep it all, without even mentioning his bankrupt financial wizardry. Howbeit, his jobs program for comedians is after awe still under weigh.
May we be spared the capitol punishment of the Don’s big hand and sow magnanimously a void, given a brake, in a nation to be defunct.
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POEM: Innocence — An Owed In A Sense Her innocence Was immune to their dis ease As be wilder And a tempt However tempered Only to be Dis missed As just A guile His innocence Deified awe bravery In the face Of accusations summoned As subdude As never a cur to them Posing the quest in Guise will Be guise Her bosom leaped […]...
POEM: Breath of Fresh Heir Each mourning Brings that which is light Though wanting to rest As the whirled spins under my feet I am Still Razed Too my feat Standing on Perhaps a singular word Mysteriously helled Together In God-ordained gravity Until that thirst Breath of fresh heir As awe is knew This poem is about coming out of […]...
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