Slip, sliding away

I sit here feeling like I committed a mortal sin.  Even though I am a lifelong Democrat, I chose not to listen to the speakers last night.  Why?  Because quite frankly, I am tired of drinking Kool-aid.  I am tired of listening to the exaltation of those who have an agenda and are trying to get me to believe in something I no longer believe in.  The party is broken, the country is broken.  

I pondered my fall from grace (so to speak).  Why was I so dismissive of the First Lady, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and even my choice Bernie?  Because this quadrennial farce is getting old.  I thought about the power of the spoken word.  I didn’t think of pulling the lever (a relative easy and non thing to do).  I thought of a suicide bomber going into a crowd and detonating a bomb.  Isn't that person motivated by what someone said?  The point is I am easily confused and oftentimes spirited to action by other’s words and encouragement.  When I act following that disposition, I may well act not from reason but emotions.  Good writers know this.  This is the hook.  This is what makes a speech effective.

Last night speakers to the one are motivational.  They can wrap a message in rhetoric, pull on your heartstrings, stimulate your thinking, and move you.  Riding in on the tide of prose, there lies a virus that once ingested begins the downward spiral into non thinking.  It is when we are in a fever and chanting and acting like some “Holy Roller” that we lose our individuality and huddle with the masses.

We are victims of our biases.  As inane and factually incorrect Trump’s speech was, his ardent supporters felt they were being transported by the rhetoric of their candidate.  They like the Democrats were moved.  We humans are like that, aren’t we?  It is our nature to coalesce behind one thing or another and to follow the lead of those who are enshrined on some pedestal.  In the end, we are like the lemmings who in the heat of the moment get behind the one who is out in front and rush head on.  Unfortunately, all that remains at the end of our efforts and troubles is a cliff.

Dem Convention

The only concern the establishment has in its constituents is what it can get.  The old guiding principles that those in power live by is “what have you done for me lately.”  There is a great divide between the rank and file and the powerful elite.  That divide can be traversed only when you give all that you have to the cause.  Like a voracious raptor, the establishment will suck every drop of blood and if it is to their advantage they will discard your remains without a scintilla of concern.  Wasserman, deserving of scorn, is a case in point.

To see Bill sitting up there all smug knowing the cartel had taken its weak and limping candidate over the finish line is to witness an actual “Game of Thrones.”  Like the Lannisters the Clinton move through the objective unconcern upon the effects they are having.

The Democratic Party is an entrenched establishment designed to further the ends of those who are still capable of doing things for them.  Their lackeys and sycophants are in numbers too large to calculate.  That they lack even a semblance of hope and change is evident in the hue and cry of those who have given their heart and soul to change yet are expected to sit quietly while the made for tv event unfolds.

Obama was to be the grand champion.  Once in office he followed a trajectory that could only be described as lackluster.  He did a capable job, but that Hope and Change was jettison while his super majority was eroded away and he was left to face the jeers of a Republican Congress hell bent on ensuring nothing but nothing would get done.

Now, there are pleas for Bernie supporters to get behind the candidate who was the rigged choice of the party.  The general argument forming now she is the lesser of two evils.  Funny Thing, if we choose the lesser of two evils, we are still left with evil.  

To encourage people to care is a dangerous thing.  Caring is just not some commodity that can be transferred on a whim.  Certainly, if the caring feel as if they were betrayed, and evidence that later comes to light that they were, well, that is a stinging indictment of a system and is a cut too deep to heal in a day of supposed unity.  Fuck Kumbaya!

“The Russians did it” is probably the best bullshit argument ever to bubble out of the cesspool of insider politics.  Even if the Russians did leak the documents, they weren’t the ones writing the emails.  Again, if the light is shown on evil doings by the Russians, the scandalous actions of a body to favor a candidate while the election is going is evil.  

I can remember when the candidate was chosen at the convention.  This made for TV world of hype and showmanship is pure horseshit.  The days of the smoke filled room and the deals is something I wish would come back.  Because this year long money driven cluster fuck is nothing short of some grand scheme by power elites to window dress a system that has literally degraded into a circus.  And what about all the money that is changing hands?  I contributed because I believe that change is needed desperately.  I am tired of the Clintons, the Trumps and all the other power elites that have been running this country for a long time and have presided over the largest decline in roads and bridges, income inequality, decaying cities, etc. etc. Crooks on Wall Street are praised.  Obama singled out Jamie Dimon as a great man,  More horshit.  So here we go again.   A great surge of optimism is being tamped down.  We are being told we need unity.  Why?  The Republicans don’t have it, do they?  Hell that is a rolling disaster with a clown leading the parade of fools.  Two parties are outdated.  The Republicans had a coup.  Unfortunately, the crazies had taken control thanks in large measure by the bullshit spewing out of the mouths of their elected officials and the news junkies who peddled their crap.

The Dems are now circling the wagons, but it is only the power elite, the mouth spewing spinsters who never answer a direct question but always babble on and on.  I guess the theory goes if you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it.  Funny thing is that power brokers just don’t get it.  They all say the same thing.  It is as hollow as the wind going through the mouth of an empty bottle.

Modern day politics is pure bullshit.  Conventions are empty displays of carefully crafted words written by gnomes who try to convince us this horseshit is meaningful while actors (sad and sorry elected officials) mouthed the words displaying passion as vapid as their histories.  They coin phrases because they know our attention spans equals that of an insect.  We who believe in change are left with our hands out while the glib candidate press flesh in an attempt to fool us into choosing.  I said it once and I will say it again.  Choosing lesser of two evil still leaves us with evil.

On Violence

This essay is not designed to diminish in anyway the tragedies of the recent past.  The horrors of watching a young man too scared to be carrying a gun shooting a man whose family is there to watch his murder is beyond reason.  It is truly absurd because we have a ringside seat to a snuff film.  The news media cranks up its reporting, which I think is partly to blame, given the twisted thinking of some who think their miserable lives can be justified by sometime in spotlight.   The gunning down of five police officers becomes a reason to roll out the pundits who wring their hands and talk their usual nonsense about everything.  Yet, is it the story that is important or the need to feed the 24 hour news cycle?  

The Orlando shooting was a case in point.  The bloviators began trumpeting their claims of the greatest mass murder of all time.  I guess the Indian massacres are now beyond the grasp of these so called experts.  The history of this country cannot be separated from violence.  While the talking heads talks their talk, one must remember every page of our history is written in blood red.  That minorities are the primary victims in the savagery of this nation, and yes we are all an insane thought away from being a statistic.

I don’t know about you but the haunting images of hanged young black men while whites stand their looking with their scorn countenances are as haunting of any of the recent photos or movies.  As Billie Holiday sang,

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

Violence is what we Americans are about.  I know it is sweeping generalization but let’s not talk about violence as if it is anomaly.   It is who we are.  Our diplomacy seems always tied to some military action.  Now we fight wars remotely.  The police department in Dallas struck a blow to policing by blowing up the suspect.  That is not to say that this violent person needed to be stopped.  But were there any options before that?  Just like those fellows in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, what happened to the stun guns?  What is it with this shoot’em up, blow’em up mentality?

The sad reality is that we are a violent nation.  It is our way.  It has been that way from beginning and continues to be.  Isn’t it ironic that Dr. King, a non-violent activist, was gunned down?  The statistics on shooting and deaths are staggering.  On an average day 36 people will be killed.  So let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this business of deadly violence is new or novel.  The fact that people are aware of the violence hopefully will bring some change.  As for me, I am cynical when it comes to change in the culture.  Violence is who we are.  What is striking is that there are so many of us who really aren’t violent.

But rather than just point a finger at Americans, it seems there is a persistent and pernicious tendency for humans to wreak havoc on ourselves and the world at large.  We are cruel by nature.  Some will argue that it is not our nature, but history shows us otherwise.  The more serious immediate concern is that there are too many humans on this planet.  Perhaps if we were truly rational sentient beings, there would be hope.  That isn’t the case.  We tend to separate ourselves with religious beliefs and political disagreements, to name the two primary ones.  We stand in horror as we look upon our violent experiences as foreign to us.  In reality, this is who we are.  The change needed to make a correction in this chain of never ending violence is nothing short of a complete transformation.  While some may see a path to this end, I see a road strewn with bodies of those who engage in violence and those who are victims of it.  Fact is as wise men have said in many ways and in many forums, you can rid the world of violence with violence.  All I see are guns and hate and firm convictions that do little but separate us from each other leaving all in the grips of that which we abhor.       

The election of 2016

It has come down to this:  Clinton and Trump, two of the most unliked public figures of these times we live.  One a brass and stupid buffoon; the other a cagey opportunist too smart for her own good.  We are to chose the one least likely to lead us further down this road of decay.  Both are like characters in a Greek Tragedy playing out their doomed destinies never for a moment attempting to face the personal consequences of their flawed egos-- hubris unchecked will always signal the destruction of that which is coveted the most.

Hearing Obama invoke the cadence of MLK, exhorting the crowd to elect Hillary, one wonders if his efforts are designed more to affirm his popularity.  Will this be his legacy?  To elect an unlikeable person because he will, and in his words, “ she will carry the torch,” “she will finish the race.”  What race?  The race to mediocrity, the race to allow corporate greed to go unchecked.  Obama is a good man, and he would have been remarkable if he had a strong senator and a congress to take his mediocre proposals and fashion them into truly innovative policies and programs.  Was it too much to ask that the country take the bold steps like those of FDR and repair a nation and its people? Why does it always come down to a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Alas, now we have a Democratic candidate who has been singled out as a person with poor judgment.  While a server is no big deal, what happens when the consequences of actions become serious?  And what of her husband, the first “whatever?”  This mischievous miscreant who has a history of doing things that are truly embarrassing has the tendency to put personal above country.   Why else would he use the oval office for his assignations?   And if that wasn’t enough we have the two of them acquiring wealth?  Does one think that with her ascension to the Oval Office Hillary will now be able to do the things she never was able to do.  Sure, she could handle the Department of State, the Office of Blah Blah Blah.  Her work in the Senate was as much about helping Wall Street as anything else.

How uninspiring she is or will ever be, she pales in comparison to Donald Trump.  Here is an example of a Mencken observation, “no one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American Public.”  A character right out the pages of a comic book he saunters forth babbling like a fool and spouting nonsense.  He is a textbook narcissist. He is a product of a culture and a party that have given itself over to ignorance.  That he rose above the circus of the candidate field in the Republican Party shows how low an organization can fall when it opts for lies and chicanery to promote the selfish aims of its cabal.  

Democrats are not much better.  They rig a selection process designed to reward the one who will reward their loyalty with the spoils of high office.  Of course, the chorus, to return to the allusion of a Greek Tragedy, is comprised of the moneyed people who stand ready to grab even more.  

The play is entering the 3rd act; soon the forces of our fate will drive the action.  As we learned, hubris will rule the day and the fatal flaws will in one last and disturbing thrust reduce all to the outcome we all knew was coming but was hoping it wouldn’t.