Clumpton is a corporate-designed “look at the birdie” program
calculated to shield the people behind the scenes while they rob us blind: Of
our lives in the streets of Charlottesviille, Ferguson, and Staten Island; of
our homes on the steps of the Alameda County Court house where the Oakland
homes of black and brown people are being repossessed, people who the banks
sold down the river with subprime rate mortgages and who are becoming homeless,
harassed and shot by America’s finest men in blue; of our schools being
privatized, by our soils and waters being killed by fracking, pipelines, and
presidents; and of our air by the entire apparatus scheming to put “free” trade
agreements and fossil fuel in place while mountains in Alaska crumble, and slime coats the surface of our seas.
But never mind, we will have our trashy million-dollar
make-America-great corporate circus on Monday nights, an even glitzier display than
football!
Here’s the bottom line: While folks were leering, beering,
cheering, and popcorning before the screen, all the triumphant yahooisms of
racism, misogyny, homophobia, patriarchy, and packing (gun carrying) are crawling out of the
woodwork where they have been waiting for their triumphant trump moment from
before the civil war. Harriet Martineau, first woman sociologist and America-observer rivaling
Tocqueville writing about Americans in 1834 the year she visited the U.S. had
this to say: “they are self-congratulating and wedded to their own ignorance
and there is no way of changing them.”
Things have not improved very much since then.
November 8 this “selection” season will finally grind to a
screeching halt: the privately-held “debate” “commission,” the media, the pre-determined slate, and the
Republican-owned voting machines will do their guaranteed dirty tricks to make
voting in this US of A a travesty, gaming whatever shreds of democracy may
remain to us. The rich will get richer, and the poor will sleep under bridges,
and the planet will suffer more death blows. Drones will splat children and
adults indiscriminately all in the interests of corporate profit, and someone
or other will move into the Whitewash House. Who or whatever it is will
emblemize everything the U.S. loves and worships: money, murder, international
chaos, and global suicide. It will NOT represent the planet or the people.
And nothing much will have changed EXCEPT, the yahoos have
been let loose, and this time they mean business, AND THEY ARE NOT GOING AWAY.
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