This week, while Indivisible proposed its “consequential”
plan, a three-point proposal to “beat” #45 (notice the language: beat) accompanied
by a six-approach tool kit, it set me to thinking: where’s the other 42
million? The folks that give #45 a steady approval rating. What about them?
First of all, it occurs to me that response to #45 reflects
a disconnect, an inappropriate use of
language: the language of rationality that consists in the procedural legalese
of the law, congress and the courts on the one hand; and the societal response
through the public and the corporate media—and those very few remaining independent
voices on which we are still able to rely.
It is a language we might apply to normal affairs. But what we have here is not normal; it is an
altogether different phenomenon, a frenzied whirling about by a society obsessed
around one solitary figure, and a refusal or inability to look at the broader
problem.
 |
| Botticelli: Inferno |
It is hard to fully envision in what a more appropriate
language might consist, but the language of rationality is NOT IT. And the
language of 5150, directed solely at individuals, is too rudimentary at best,
and serves its uses only in humbler emergencies, not a national one. (5150
refers to the California law code for the temporary, involuntary, psychiatric
commitment of individuals who present a danger to themselves or to others.)
Another disconnect
#45 is not an individual phenomenon; it has its
ramifications in layers of no-longer representative government which cushions and
replicates its many violences and atrocities. It is a phenomenon that extends
as well to those 42 million people who keep those approval rates steady. Who are they exactly? And
do the iterations of American election year politics—whether by Indivisible or
by Nancy Pelosi—even begin to take their plight into account?
Categorizing 42 million people is altogether impossible, but
in general, they are white people, many of them with high school educations at
most, who have been systematically left behind educationally and economically.
Many of them inhabit decaying worlds: rural America, the grandsons and
daughters of once thriving agricultural communities, now bankrupt, and of
factory workers of the nation’s rust belts who were left behind when factories
closed, and the initiative for retooling fell haphazardly—if it fell at all—into
privatized hands. Most of them are the
products of a dumbed down public school system given to blinkering its
students, never much given to critical thinking, and its second ring of
sycophants, the media that gave up its practice of journalism in favor of
gossip, greed, and entertainment many years ago.
They hold in common their need to grasp and exploit the last
straws of demagoguery which promised them what they needed to hear as a better
life, where their losses might be recouped and where their communities might be
lifted from abject poverty and despair. But recent tax cuts have benefitted the
oligarchs, and global warming has seen to it that Midwestern farms, those not
yet bankrupt, are still water logged and not ready for planting.
To compensate their losses, they have been offered the demonization
of migrants, more brown, more poor, more desperate than they (but far gentler) pouring
in a steady stream from central America, victims themselves of global warming
and U.S. meddling in their duly elected democratic governments.
The mind-made-up characterizes them. Almost all are closed
to any form of inquiry because they have to be. Their sense of victimization—or
their greed for profit—require it. A minority form part of doomsday cults eager
to see the planet’s warming end in a Walpurgisnacht, which they believe will
usher in a Second Coming—a last desperate pitch for the Ur-Savior to correct
their woes.
According to
Chris Hedges, it is this susceptibility to America’s long tradition of
cultism that has drawn them to a figure like #45, who represents for them many
of the qualities cult leaders usually embody:
Immunity to the norms of established society, a quality
their followers (and the media) find
endlessly fascinating and appealing.
Refusal to acknowledge impending disaster, such as global
warming.
Insistence on fawning and total loyalty over competence.
Inability to tolerate criticism.
Grandiosity and bellicosity as covers for insecurity,
Use of those around them as objects to be manipulated for
their own aggrandizement.
Unfortunately, any attempt to oppose rationality to what can
only be identified as absurdity plays into the hands of the cult master. Quoting Joost Meerloo in Rape of the Mind, “They
never knew what [Hitler] was going to do next. [He] was never logical because
he knew that that was what he was expected to be…” and illogic is impervious to
the structures of logic.
To these two linguistic disconnects, the first in the political
sphere, the second in the public sphere there are answers, but they are far
from easy ones. For starters, we might look to the sage advice of the Sansksrit
puranas which counsel: Do not cultivate madness. In an age where all is
madness, one needs to tread lightly, to question all, to examine how much of
this culture we wish to embrace. And to come in contact daily with one’s
imagination for living.
That requires the courage to live at the edge, to avoid what
everyone else is doing; and to do what everyone else avoids.
And in our present existential dilemma, Chris Hedges offers
us a choice:
“… organize the overthrow of the
corporate state that vomited up Trump….We must, like liberation movements of
the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and
non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true
sources of power and abuse…. We give people an alternative to a Democratic
Party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression and cannot be
rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we fail
to embrace this militancy, which alone
has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward
tyranny.”
Sign international appeal to stop 5G on earth and in space
at https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/the-appeal
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Hung Arizona jury
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