We Dodged a Harris Bullet... and Were Hit by a MAGA Cannonball
The Bourgeoisie Versus the Boorgeoisie
Honest.
I wanted to write something Currier & Ives-ish for the holidaze - you know, some mulled false memories with rummy egg nog, horse drawn sleighs, family gathered around the fire place, roasted turkey and all those other yesteryear things that I did not grow up with.
Instead of roast turkey, the big turkeys who rule our world keep bonking me over the head with their rubber pool noodles to remind me just how awful they are no matter the time of year.
I do not doubt that we (collectively) dodged a bullet when Ms. Harris's campaign train derailed on its way to the White House. I know that is a horribly mixed metaphor - mixing bullets and trains - but I like mixed metaphors much as I like bastard rhymes. For that matter, the first quarter of the 21st Century has been nothing but one mangled metaphor and bastard rhyme after another after another, so a few more won't hurt much.
More muddled 21st Century metaphors follow.
Like an AI large (muddled) language model computer program, Kamala Harris was an artificial construct that scraped various delusional memes from the past, transformed them incoherently and presented an assemblage of inanities. But even as we dodged that artificially intelligent bullet, the naturally unintelligent Mr. Trump was already firing off his own delusional cannonballs.
Mr. Biden was senile and Ms. Harris was empty-headed... but could Mr. Trump be insane? Conceivably, that assassin's bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania took out more than just a piece of his ear. Based simply on what he says, might the bullet also have nicked that part of Mr. Trump's brain that controls logic, humility and restraint? Or else, those parts of his mind were always lacking, who knows?
Hmm. Mr. Musk has proposed that politicians should take cognitive dementia tests. Perhaps voters should, too.
No, I am not nostalgic for Joe Biden's presidency nor for the administration of Kamala Harris that never was. Both these folks were controlled by shadowy operatives and profiteering interests pursuing their grubby agendas. For that matter - other than Mr. Lincoln - I have no warm feelings for any past U.S. president. I praise, instead, William Tecumseh Sherman who, refusing a presidential draft at the end of the Civil War, passed the cognition test when he resolutely stated:"If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve." Indeed. Anyone who wants to be president is, ipso facto, cognitively unqualified for the job.
Joe Biden, throughout his four year administration, was stuck in the year 1950. He was a captive of the Cold War and continued to fight it against imaginary Cold War adversaries. The West's "Cold War" adversary was Socialism a/k/a Communism a/k/a Marxism. The Collective West or, rather, its ruling class, has been fighting the specter of Socialism/Communism/Marxism non-stop since 1917. I call it a specter because that is how Karl Marx described it in the opening lines of his Communist Manifesto first published in 1848:
A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter...
Does this sound familiar?
Substitute NATO or the EU or “the West” for “old Europe.” They are all haunted by this specter - which, by definition, is just an apparition, a ghost, a phantom - even into the 21st Century.
The Cold War, of course, was, in reality, a "hot war." It was only "cold" in nomenclature. It was only "cold" in that the fighting took place elsewhere than in the West. It was "cold" because the Soviet Union and the United States fought indirectly through proxies -- just like today -- and they did not directly engage with their nuclear arms. Just like today.
So far.
However, you would have had a hard time convincing the almost 60,000 American soldiers who died fighting for something-or-other, and the more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who were killed, that the Vietnam War was “cold.” It would have been hard to convince those of my generation who were drafted at age 18, or those waiting for their birthday lottery numbers to be drawn for conscription into the Army (and possible death), that this war was “cold.”
Well, maybe it was cold as in stone cold dead?
The "cold" war in Vietnam was no less warm than the one in Korea where more than 36,000 American soldiers died along with 2,500,000 Koreans from the North and the South. Or the "civil war" in Indonesia that left nearly 500,000 dead. Or the thousands who disappeared in Argentina after the military junta took to tossing dissident students and activists - men and women - out of airplanes into the sea. Or the countless insurgencies, counter-insurgencies and coups in Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
But if Mr. Biden was consumed by his never-ending "Cold War" psychosis, Mr. Trump has reverted even further backwards in time... all the way back to the Spanish-American war and Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders' charge up San Juan Hill.
Fancying himself the new capitalist colossus, Mr. Trump has resurrected the "gunboat diplomacy" of Commodore Matthew Perry who, at the barrel of his steamships' cannons, bluffed and bullied the feudal Shogunate of Japan into accepting "western values."1
Nevertheless, this is why mainstream Democrats and Republicans, neoliberals, neoconservatives and sundry elites of the American bourgeoisie all loathe Mr. Trump: he says in blunt and impolitic words... what they, too, think and they, too, would do... albeit with more finesse and more 'class.'
Class has two meanings, of course.
Mr. Trump belongs to the same socioeconomic ruling class as those who hate him. But he is déclassé, a boor in the sense that the man has no class.
It's the bourgeoisie versus the boorgeoisie!
The Trump-haters prefer the Bismarckian iron hand in the silk glove to Mr. Trump's bare knuckle berserker brawling.
Which is to say, most Democrats and Republicans, and nearly all American elites, disdain Mr. Trump's loutish lack of pretense. They prefer, instead, the polite white dinner gloves of proxy wars, 'color revolutions,' economic exploitation, and freedom from dissenting opinions. They will beat you to a pulp in the name (but just the name) of democracy, trivial pursuits, cultural homogeneity, and the primacy of capital.
To the conquered and cowed, however - Syrians, Libyans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Argentinians, Hawaiians, Inuit, Armenians, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Congolese, Somalians, Basque, Cherokee, or even the average American wage earner - it makes little difference whether your oppressor beats you up with gloved or ungloved fists.
Which is simply to say, judging from its slavish adherence to U.S. foreign and economic policy, that Canada is already America's 51st State and Greenland its 52nd. In deed if not as a matter of law. And if Panama believes it is truly sovereign, it has only to reflect on its own history.
Panama was originally part of Columbia until, in 1903 (during the uber-imperialist reign of President Teddy Roosevelt), the United States engineered Panama's "independence" to enable the United States' control over the Canal Zone. Thereafter, the U.S. casually assassinated one Panamanian president (Omar Torrijos), invaded the country in 1989, and forcibly captured/tried/imprisoned another president (Manuel Noriega) - all for presuming that Panama was other than an American possession. Such has been the historical pattern throughout Central and South America.
Which is simply to say that while Mr. Trump swaggers and blathers his bullying talk, his antagonists dispute not the reality of what he has said, but the fact that he has said it. Because it's all about style and appearances and the fictional narrative; and I really, really cannot stomach either the one or the other, the American bourgeoisie or the American boorgeoisie.
I am still sufficiently naive that I really do want something different and someplace better. If not here, then maybe Mars. Or another galaxy. Or maybe it is a parallel universe someplace.
So I publish these pieces at Substack - howling at the moon perhaps - for myself, for those few who read them and for the archives that save them. I do it, perhaps, only to make a record for those that monitor and record all these things that I - perhaps we? - perhaps just a small minority, perhaps more - do not concur, do not acquiesce, and are not fooled.
Which is why I did not, this holidazed season, write something Currier & Ives-ish with mulled false memories and rummy egg nog, horse drawn sleighs, family gathered around the fire place, roasted turkey and all those other yesteryear things that I did not grow up with. Because all the big turkeys who run this world keep bonking me over the head with their rubber pool noodles reminding me just how awful they are no matter the season.
Have a year. Make it new and better.
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Having been forced to accept "western values" by Commodore Perry's gunboats, Japan then aspired also to be an imperial power... consistent with "western values," of course. It then prepped itself as a competitor colonial power in its own right, leading to its inglorious role in world war and Japan's 20th Century military challenge to U.S. and British hegemony in Asia.
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