[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]T[/dropcap]here is speculation that Bernie’s Big Misadventure in the sucker-fleecing, traveling carnival of the Democratic Party Primary system will cause disillusionment with the Party.
You think? But the disillusioned would be coming a bit late to the apostasy party. We are discussing the political party that provided the bulwark for slavery; created Jim Crow; during the racist Wilson administration levied racist policies on federal agencies and lied the nation into World War 1; under FDR, during the Great Depression, saved the capitalist parasite class by instituting the minimum of progressive measures and the sum total of zilch socialist ones; dropped nuclear weapons on the civilian populations of two Japanese cities when the Truman administration knew the nation’s
leadership was attempting to surrender; also, under Truman, began the military industrial complex and national security state; started two unnecessary wars in Asia i.e., Korea and Vietnam; and initiated a proxy war against the Soviet Union using Saudi Arabian Jihadist factions in Afghanistan, an imperial action that was the genesis of both ISIS and al-Qaeda; started neoliberal deregulation under Jimmy Carter; inflicted further neoliberal economic deprivations on the middle and working classes and the poor, and more effectively under the Clintons and Obama than Reaganites and the Bush cartel dreamed possible; and speaking of Bush, Democrat Obama has been worse on matters of government secrecy, mass surveillance, imperial intrigue, drone murder, and constitutional and civil rights than his Republican predecessors.
How is it even possible to evince enough idealism regarding such a klavern of the corrupt and the clueless to experience pangs of disillusionment?
Feedback loops of methane gases poison the ancient memory of seas. Self-resonating feedback loops of mass and social media inanity poison the spirit of the age. Knowledge of U.S. mass murder, imperialism and its concomitant domestic component, staggers the mind and mangles the heart.
A billion quotidian moments pass into infinity. The tragic or even the remotely extraordinary seem anomalous. Yet history is written in blood. So called human civilization is built on the backs of the enslaved. Or as a certain time-grizzled troubadour limned in lyric: “[P]ower and greed and corruptible seed/ Seem to be all that there is[.]”
Image: Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
