Banality and Bile At the Democratic Debate

Like Dante's fifth circle of hell, the fifth in an endless series of Democratic Party debates was an infernal three-hour mix of anger and sullen resentment. If you made it through all three hours,  you deserve more than a medal for valor. You rate an upgrade to Purgatory. That's because ABC-Disney didn't stop at torturing you with too many candidates and not enough substantive questions. The network actually chose to air a graphic ad showing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez melting down in flames - ostensibly to get Trump's base all fired up and ready to go.

The first part of the epic featured Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders furiously arguing health care at center stage, just above the River Styx. Once the TV moderators managed to get the requisite neoliberal talking points about "how you gonna pay for that?!?" out of the way, it was on to the supporting cast, who in a true democracy would have been left sullenly gurgling just beneath the surface.

But the theme of the evening had been decreed as "The Reanimation of the Moribund Centrists" in keeping with Dante's Fifth Circle actually being the middle portion of hell. Therefore, candidates polling in the low single digits got as much, if not more, speaking time than the lead actors. Except for Joe Biden, of course, uncomfortably sandwiched as he was as he was between Warren and Sanders. He talked up a word-salad tempest.

But in their homages to Droner and Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama, their loyalty to the world's biggest military machine, their waffling on immigration, their jingoistic approval of American exceptionalism, their naming of Donald Trump as the source of all evil without criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own shamefully complicit role in preventing passage another assault weapons ban, the 10 candidates admirably proved that they are, indeed, simply different sides of the same coin. As centrist Amy Klobuchar so brilliantly posited, a  Democratic Party divided against itself cannot stand. She didn't add that this is especially true when it's stuffed to the rafters with tons of foundation-busting filthy lucre. She also didn't add that the collapse of shoddy buildings is not only inevitable, it is desirable once the area has been safely evacuated.

But if we ourselves just couldn't stand listening to that litany of feel-good claptrap for three tortuous hours, and collapsed or tuned out from sheer disgust or just plain boredom, then we're probably too extremist for them to even bother with.

Not that the heavily coined candidates are all equally tarnished, of course. At least two of them are actually counterfeit. Kamala Harris, with her sordid "progressive" history of jailing poor mothers of truant kids, is one. Pete "Medicare For All Who Want It" Buttigieg is another. 

Joe Biden, though, is the real deal. Besides constantly hectoring suffering people to "get real, man!" while flouting his obvious senility, Biden also proved that he is as much a biliously burbling unabashed racist as ever:

Linsey Davis: Mr. Vice President, I want to talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago, but as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?

Biden: Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—

Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.
No. 2, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need… We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.
Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t know what— They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone—make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school—er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Somewhere in the murky pit that passes for his brain, Biden thinks that black and brown parents, well-meaning though they may be, are too ignorant to take care of their own children without a lot of outside professional help. He also seems to think these poor parents should playing LPs on their vintage phonographs in order to boost their children's vocabulary. It is essential that every single child develops the skills to make three, four and five-year-olds go to school.  Because their poor incapable parents never did. They might even be as befuddled as Uncle Joe himself.

Of course, besides being an unrepentant racist, Biden is also still an unrepentant plagiarist. His prescription for vocabulary therapy (in lieu of living wages, food aid, housing aid, etc) for black and brown people was stolen from Chelsea Clinton and her campaign for books in the laundromats frequented by black and brown mothers. If there's one thing that earnest bigots without a racist bone in their bodies sincerely believe, it's that black and brown mothers would never talk to or read to their children on their own initiative.

Biden made his remarks at a historically black college in Houston. It's too bad that Julian Castro didn't slam him over them like he did when, earlier in the debate, he accused Biden of senilely forgetting what he'd just said five minutes ago about healthcare.

The other candidates were not much better. Even Bernie Sanders obligingly described Nicolas Maduro, the brown Venezuela president, as a "vicious tyrant" - in an apparent effort to defend himself from comparisons to Venezuela-style socialism. He also didn't redeem himself in the post-debate spin cycle when he called the unabashedly racist Biden a decent human being and "a friend of mine."

I guess it was a blessing in disguise that the moderators kind of forgot that Bernie was even on the stage, because he'd appeared to be losing his voice. Croaking dissonant outrage combined with the cracked Biden-style long-playing record is not the kind of smooth, relaxing,"electable" sound that ABC-Disney obviously wanted to sedate its audience with.

Maybe if Biden and Bernie and Liz are the last candidates standing many months from now, they'll finally lose all the friendly pretense and the slick collegiality that reminds the rest of us that we're not in their club, and we never will be.

But How You Gonna Pay For That?