Jay Gould was, is, and deserves to remain a national icon. One of his virtues is the demonstration his career and reputation provide against the idea that Donald Trump represents anything original or unprecedented in US culture or politics.
In a cunning example of the irony of popular justice, Jay Gould may be primarily remembered for a quote he probably never actually uttered.
“I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
Gould’s verifiable quotes are more interesting and more instructive. Clearly, he was more complicated and more intelligent than a chimp-like Trump. It’s easy to imagine him snorting in derision at the idea of paying members of the working class to kill their compatriots. Why should I hire them? he’d ask, eyes twinkling - or eyes dead. They do it for nothing!
But still.
Too many of we “Libtards” seem to think Trump “is the only trash here” we see. It’s undeniable - and understandably a symptom of the latest strain of virulent “election frenzy” which (this time around) also causes some victims to spew hatred and disgust indiscriminately against both major candidates. Neither fair nor restorative, this actually gets so much wrong about both Trump and Hillary. They are by no means equivalent in the infamy they merit.
But from a distance, it kinda works out.
“From a Distance” is of course a sublimely gorgeous composition by Julie Gold, who deserves a lifelong stream of sustenance and comfort for that single contribution.
Little Donny Trump is just one noxious link in a long chain of bullies, grifters and showmen who rose to prominence on the shoulders of us - a distracted, peanut munching crowd milling about between the funhouse and the factory. He is the bastard spite child of his own dad and “Citizen” Roy Cohn who infamously rubbed greasy shoulders with the likes of Bobby Kennedy and Carmine “The Snake” Persico.
But Trump, together with Clinton (his much lesser partner in grime), is performing a truly valuable public service in this, the best of all recent presidential campaigns. So it's somewhat unjust he may be long remembered as a vile manipulative clown who crushed and shattered the radical insurgency that once could have (straight-faced) been referred to as the “Grand Old Party”.
It’s supremely crucial for as many people as possible to recognize - and appreciate - that this current pageant of grotesquery is actually the best presidential campaign that “We The People of the United States of America” have ever inflicted upon ourselves. Anybody who doesn’t see that, or anyone already moaning about what a fatiguing ordeal this campaign is, should at least be aware of being a major part of the problem.
This campaign is laudable not only for its entertainment value - although the laughs it ought to generate are intrinsic to its restorative power. History should enshrine this election in a cherished place because of its clarifying and instructional value.
Democracy is not a state of being, nor even a system of government.
It never was, and never could be.
It is a claim. It is a struggle. It is a process that has always been resisted, traduced, and betrayed. But democracy is a claim and a struggle that can never be totally exhausted. It is the only force that can ever come close to "guaranteeing" human dignity, justice, and equality in any culture more advanced than scattered bands of hunter-gatherers.
Democracy is the ugly palooka in the boxing ring who won’t stay down. Despite being overmatched. Despite having already agreed with thugs to throw the match. He drinks too much. He whores too much. He sometimes beats his wife and often neglects his children. Or maybe democracy is simply one part of the spirit that thrusts him up again for another savage beating, and then another - just like the ones he’s survived since he was a child, ever since his mother dosed him with gin and paregoric and left him on the stoop of the precinct house.
Democracy is among the most frustrating, enraging, and heartbreaking compulsions of human life. That’s what makes it worthwhile. That’s why we ignore it when we’re not running from it. That’s why we betray it - and Peter like - deny it.
Most of the “both sider-ism” and “lesser evilism” cant lamentably dripping from thoughtless mouths and lazy pens in every election campaign rings especially hollow - and obviously empty - this year. The same is true of any gassy messianic tendency to idealize one candidate over another. Everyone knows that neither offers more than dismal prospects. This campaign, in the context of the half dozen or so that preceded it, forces even the least sentient of us to pine for something new. We are compelled by the cruel cunning of reason to try to raise ourselves at least one crisp nacho above where we’ve stagnated so long.
Long?
Not long.
Not so long at all.
Even the term “democracy” as it applies to institutionalized practices in societies capable of supporting urban populations is not much more than 2,000 years old. Our, species with its capacity for symbolic representation, is at least 100 times that old.
There is the argument that Hillary is truly the more evil of two lessers. That her complicity in racist crime laws, the travesty of welfare reform, drone bombings, and military coups puts pale to Trump’s petty gangsterism and retail racism. Of course, that logic melts like a wicked witch as soon as Trump is inaugurated. But, aside from that, the argument should not be dealt with glibly - or at all dismissed. The key point is not whether we should or shouldn’t have higher standards for female leaders. The key point is that our leaders are ours. The key point is that we have used such standards to disqualify any leader who could not cope with the long span of uncreation between our standards and our reality.
How long?
In a recent article in “Common Dreams” Jake Johnson "concludes" it might be easier to build a new party centered on the concerns and needs of working people then work to reform the Dems. Of course, he may be correct . . . IF such a party stays very small, doesn't have too many "working class" people, and doesn't care that much about winning elections - at least in the short run.
The power of the idiot elite (.1%) bunch of baby men who have hijacked our economy and our politics stems from the hold it has on the hopes and fears of the mediocre class of college "educated" strivers and slackers. We're all submerged in an ideological soup of commercialism and confusion that’s essentially a numbing agent to help us better bear the burdens of student debt, mortgages, and institutional futility in the context of a hierarchy of oppression and brutality in which we occupy a rather "privileged" (if precarious) position.
The base of that soup is fear - and that fear is the reality of how precarious our positions are. Our unjust hierarchy is forever offering subtle reminders of its power to devastatingly convince us that we "never deserved" our "comforts" at all. Of course, this soup is also mercifully spiced with more diffuse types of menace such as fear of nuclear annihilation, civilization collapse due to climate change, terrorism, super predator street "thugs", trigger happy frightened police, Trump, Hillary, Ebola, and Zika. (There really is something for everybody in America!)
We DO need movements, organizations, and factions that contend against the enveloping webs of lies and seductions spun out constantly by the ideological organs that underpin the most rancid elements of our oligarchy. But to worry too much about whether these are "in" or "out" of the Democratic Party is just another diversion - and a snare.
But Pogo had it right.
So did Eleanor Roosevelt.
The calamities that would result from a Trump presidency are unthinkable. Recent polls put Hillary 7 about points ahead. Seven points! Seven points of difference between a conventional politician and a vulgar talking yam of a sideshow promoter? Yes, that’s an indictment of “politics as usual.” But it’s ultimately an indictment of us.
The idea that Trump might still be elected is cringeworthy. But nearly as revolting is imagining a Hillary victory greeted with any kind of Pollyannaish “glad gaming” where we pat ourselves on the back for having “seen through” Trump and vindicating ‘democracy”. That would be just another cruel kick in the teeth democracy does not deserve.
A current rumor attests the Trump Campaign's latest shakeup is confirmation of a new entertainment venture to be launched following the vote. Perhaps that was the originally intended function of Trumpulism all along. It would be so brilliant if Trump loses and then makes such a claim: true or not.
Who can predict the impact on Trump’s supporters if it came to be accepted they were being played and betrayed just like Joe Palooka? Just like democracy. Just like always. Would it be a surge into rage? A sag into resignation? A sad shaking of the head? It would hardly be a Capraesque revelation.
But:
"I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands."
Eugene Debs said that.
He said that as his own fanfare for the common man and woman.
He was someone with a lot to say.
He was a socialist, and for that his words continue to be scorned.
And Jay Gould would still remind us, eyes dead - or eyes twinkling - that (for whatever reason) there have always been those who would sell themselves cheap.
But.
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Yet even though he claimed that label, the young stirred to him. Even though he was a man and old, young people who are women chose him before entrusting their support to Hillary who is, after all, trustworthy enough - and their sister, their mother, their fate.
Our fate.
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, but he is a liberal on the leftward range of that blurry spectrum with its origin in the Enlightenment, a name for yet another arcing human project only recently started and covered not completely in glory.
But inspiring still. From a distance
Bernie Sanders does not call himself a Democrat, yet he is the current exemplar of the best that those compromised spawn of Jefferson have yet offered to we the people and our overarching projects.
The New Deal is not in the past, and is indeed much more alive than the Great Depression which itself will continue to influence us even well past the final decade of the last person with living memory of it. Many who didn’t know any better (and a few who surely did) told us that the economic, social, and legislative lessons we learned in the 30s had somehow became outdated. Or that their very success in creating a “stable” middle class had made them somehow superfluous. This is the same toxic logic endorsed by the Supreme Court to gut the Civil Rights Act. The major difference in these crimes against history and justice is that the effects of the Shelby County v Holder decision were immediately apparent. It’s taken 40 years of stewing in the aftermath of the damage done to the New Deal for its effects to begin to register on our politics in a meaningful way.
But as egregious as it is to deliberately ignore or distort history - or to fail to teach and learn from it - History has its own cunning. It’s passed on to the young in more ways than words and pictures. Those, after all, can be shredded, erased, burnt or altered - or suppressed. History is passed on in the way our bodies tense when we hold our children. In the way old men walk and talk. In what we say when we’ve drunk too much or haven’t slept. In what we buy and what we gift. In the songs we sing.
Trump’s (hopefully diminishing) support is strongest among older white males. But the key word here is really “older”.
The young people stirred to Bernie.
Like they stirred to Obama.
Like they stirred to Kennedy.
Like they stir to Martin Luther King, and Mandela, and . . .
And to the young, it doesn’t matter (as much) that those icons, those men, are not all what they ARE imagined to be. What matters, more than anything, is what those imaginings are. And the images in those young minds matter just as much to us.
I was a child in the sixties. And I believed.
And then came the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and then Fox News, W, and now Trump.
It’s fine that today’s young people haven’t made as many compromises as we have. They aren’t as tired. They aren’t as confused. They aren’t as brainwashed.
They still have time.
And there will be new generations with new inspirations. And they will believe.
And, many years from now, no matter what’s in their words, something in the things they show their children will help us all to believe and move on.
Or not.
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