“So much for ‘democracy’” by Paul Edwards
The Axis Of
Atrocity
September
05, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - If daymare isn’t a word, it should be. We’re living one. And the shameless, infantile ugliness that rules America today
was predicted by visionaries and poets long ago. H.L. Mencken nailed it nearly a century
back:
“Before
small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through,
carrying the mob with him by force of personality. But when the field is
nationwide all odds are on the man most devious and mediocre—who can most
easily disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends to go to such men. As
democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner
soul of the people. On some great and
glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire and
the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Ecce
homo. So much for our “democracy”. But this plague is not confined to The
Empire. The blood-dimmed tide Yeats felt
coming has inundated the world. Three
Cynosures of Psychosis suggest themselves aggressively today, each a match in
his way for our Cretin Caligula who thought he’d snag Greenland on the cheap,
as if it were a trashed Bronx tenement.
Bolsonaro,
Reichsmarshall of Brazil, in recent frothing fury, blamed his own Neronian
burning of the Amazon on NGOs, lying about his direct pitch to scofflaw
ranchers to turn it, once burnt off, into a Confined Animal Feeding Operation. Gringo beef dollars matter, nao?; rainforest,
not so much.
Then,
there’s Modi--the Hindu Ubermensch--who, having presided over a massacre in
Gujarat that elevated him to racist icon status, has spiked both the laws of
Jammu and Kashmir and his own nation in a brutal anschluss that made a bullied
territory into a free fire zone and Moslem dungeon.
Of course,
neither of these Sturmbahnfuhrers can claim parity with the past master of
venomous race hatred, that brazen liar, shameless provocateur, and criminal
fabulist, Netanyahu, regent of the Fascist State of Israel. This clinical embodiment of the abused become
abuser, in exacerbating the worst elements of Israeli character--bone deep
racism and paranoia; the arrogant claim to superiority that’s the warp and weft
of its religion; the babaric cruelty urged by its gruesome, twisted, medieval
rabbinical voices--has goaded Israel to embrace and celebrate its most hideous
attributes and flaunt them in the face of an increasingly appalled world.
How is it
these four sick horsemen of the coming apocalypse have clotted together now
like a rancid, congealing gravy of dead tissue?
Serendipity wouldn’t account for it.
Nor probability predict it... What if
emergence of such pure evil simultaneously results from peer group
patterning in which the rabidity of the top dog sets a template others are then
induced to emulate? There is precedence
for the idea. When Stalin ran the Soviet
world, he and his system were replicated across it. When JFK flashed his Camelot style, “Free
World” leaders strove to mimic his elegant finesse.
Having been
pretty much gifted with the Presidency--because of wholesale abandonment by the
Democratic Party of anyone who ever had to earn a living and obliteration of
all concern for ordinary citizenry--Trump set the tone for his solipsistic
funhouse from day one, sending his twitter yawp of vulgarity, dishonesty and
cruelty out to a gobsmacked world, while these sociopaths watched, pondered,
and then acted. Could it be clearer that
the key enabling factor for the rise of this set of human monsters was our
morally null, ethically vacant, childishly vindictive Pathogen-in-Chief?
The supreme
tragedy of our age--for us and the world--is that there is no countervailing
force in our country, no powerful, principled dynamic the sheer gravitational
force of which might coalesce what exists of the vast hunger for wisdom,
justice and decency latent in a majority of our people. America is full of conned, tranquilized,
intimidated folk who nevertheless have a strong residual inclination toward
fairness and honor and humanity, and who are deeply offended, saddened, and
ashamed that our country has become the most viciously murderous engine of evil
on the planet.
Due to the
fact that the Democratic Party has repudiated and betrayed the principle that
made it a compelling, dominant social and political force--its core pledge to
represent reliably, and legislate predictably, for the good of a citizenry of
all colors and conditions--it represents no refuge at all to an electorate
finally fully aware of its callous indifference to their well-being.
For most
adults’ lifetime experience--say, from the JFK/LBJ era on--the Democratic Party
has done nothing to advance the general welfare and economic security of the
great majority of working Americans, while deceiving them endlessly with
cynical, rhetorical jive. Their cop-out
from Obama back to the 60s has been that Republicans blocked every effort, that
their good ideas and benevolent plans were killed, that they failed in spite of
good intentions, but this is just dishonest.
The fact is that even when they had power and numbers in Congress, they
never rose up, took a stand, and fought hard for legislation to advance the
common good. All their defeats have been
essentially capitulations, and self-inflicted.
When Lew
Powell issued his warning Bull to Capitalists in the 70s about the frightful
danger that The People, aroused and militant, represented to Omnicratic
Capitalism, Big Corporate Money began to flow lavishly to reactionary
Republicans. Democrats, outfunded,
outspent, took shocking electoral hits that terrified their politburo and
convinced them that politics was only about money and that they had to get a
lot of it, whatever it took to do it.
What they decided it took was to abandon their traditional support base
in the vast Middle and Under classes, and to seek the dollars where they lived,
with Corporate Capitalist elites. This
turn was completed under Clinton, who concluded that to stand for anything
beneficial for The People was to risk status and office. Hence, his dropping the fight for decent
health care legisation, among other spineless and disgraceful retreats.
In that
decision the Democrats blew it. They failed to make the choice that could have
empowered them and would have consolidated progressive politics far into the
future: to champion The People. Of
course, there would have been grave risk.
It would have taken great resolve and courage, but more importantly, the
element that was completely absent in them: intent.
Politics is
only about money when it is not substantively about anything else. The fierce passion and phenomenal power of a
people, when they know their leaders are truly committed to vigorously champion
their welfare, is a force that no amount of private wealth can obstruct, let
alone defeat.
America was
at a crisis, when what was to be determined was whether the country would be
run in the interests of its citizens or in that of its Capitalist masters. Official Democrats, intellectually co-opted,
elected to represent the giants. In that
action, they walked away from a path that would have enabled them to remake the
world in justice, and sank to the sorry, contemptible nullity they are
today. Rejecting greatness, they
condemned themselves to extinction.
And, in the long run, they may have done the same for us all.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in
Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
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