A Tyrant At the Funeral

If news that Donald Trump is going to Pope Francis' funeral instead of it being the other way around has you feeling bummed, please take heart.

Goodness knows there's so much magical thinking going on at the very highest levels of the decaying world order, why can't we little people indulge in a little of it ourselves?

Picture this: St. Peter's Basilica. When the collection plate is passed to them, Donald and Melania clink down a couple of their commemorative crypto coins in hopes of tempting the crooked Vatican financiers to rob the Church's vast coffers of all its riches and invest them in the latest Trump scam. Just at that point, a lighting bolt strikes Trump right smack in the middle of his cold blue eyes and he is instantly struck blind. And then, by a miracle, the soul of Francis restores his sight. Just like the Apostle Paul, who'd made a career of rounding up various undesirables for deportation and worse, Donald will finally see the light and devote the rest of his life to preaching the social gospel beloved of the late pope.

Maybe not. Actually, most likely not. But we can at least  imagine that even if he doesn't exactly experience a come-to-Jesus epiphany, he will compromise and transform himself into the second coming of Huey Long.

Long was the fascist governor of Louisiana who rose to power during the Great Depression. Even after his election to the US Senate, he continued governing his home state via proxy.

Despite being as corrupt as hell, he differed from Trump by being a not totally fake populist. He gave free textbooks to every poor child in Louisiana, taxed the oil companies to the hilt and built a modern highway system. Instead of trying to destroy universities, he built Louisiana State University into a premier national institution. Sure, he built it into his own image and allocated most of its public funding to the athletic department and beautiful grounds while giving short shrift to actual academics.

Sure, just like Elon Musk, he was rabidly opposed to the New Deal and especially Social Security. But rather than coddle the oligarchs, he espoused a "Share Our Wealth" agenda of radical income redistribution.

Of course, then as now, there is a huge public appetite for restoring government in the service of regular people. Bernie Sanders is bringing in record crowds for his "Fight Oligarchy" rallies, and millions of people are taking to the streets to protest Trumpian cruelty. Change is indeed in the air, but what direction it will ultimately take is anybody's guess.

So again, picture this: Donald Trump in  Rome, seeing the light.

Then again, he could just as well issue another executive order, this one declaring himself Pope of the entire world and converting the Vatican into a Trump-licensed resort and golf course. Anything to gain attention, anything to consolidate power by instilling terror and loathing wherever he goes.

***

Sorry I haven't been around lately. A combination of medication side-effects and being left, like most people, feeling speechless and powerless with the sudden revving up of this country and this world's fascist takeover by financialized capital and a desperate, dying Imperium. But I have been reading a lot during my self-imposed exile, and think I am beginning to make more sense of things. (As much as it is impossible to make sense of this chronic state of absurdity!)

Meanwhile, many thanks to the group of faithful commenters who've been keeping the place open this past month.

No Sympathy For the Devil

 "You should get it into your head, and pass it on to whoevr needs to know up above, that your power depends on not taking absolutely everything away from people. The man from whom you've taken everything is no longer in your power; he is free again."

               -Aleksandr Solzhenytsin, In the First Circle.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

                -Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee.  

In case you hadn't heard, nobody is coming to save us. In case you needed more evidence of this reality, look no further than an extraordinary admission in a lead article in the New York Times. It seems that the elite ruling class, both liberal and conservative, are all terrified of criticizing the Trump regime lest they, their families, their prestige, their careers and their finances come to grief.

The article, written by veteran journalist and consummate Washington insider Elisabeth Bumiller, baits the audience with a  subhead stating that "people" are so intimidated they're afraid to speak out. You read on, thinking they'll interview the little old lady worried about not getting her Social Security check or the immigrant terrified of an ICE raid or the college student fearing arrest for participating in a protest against genocide.

But the Times piece is nothing less than an abject bid for sympathy for anonymous CEOs, college presidents and elected politicians. Readers are graciously invited to cut them democrats, especially, some slack for staying mute in the face of a fascist takeover of the federal government.

Put yourself in their $600 Manolo heels and see how it hurts! Imagine being put in the position of having to deny that Russia was totally unprovoked into invading Ukraine. If you are against war and killing, it follows that you are a trump supporter and you are damned if you and damned if you don't. 

 It was a prelude to the spectacle of our elected congressional reps holding up signs during Trump's address. The Pepto-Bismol pink they wore in protest was meant to keep our gorges from rising, and the "Resist" logos emblazoned on their fleeing backs were obviously placed to divert our attention from the "kick me" offers placed just below their spineless spines.

It did not work. They displayed for the whole world to see their tacit complicity with Trump, that they are all siblings under the skin.

They are not so much afraid of him as they are of their constituents. Beholden as they are to their own billionaire donors and in utter groveling awe of Elon Musk, they're trapped in the hell of their own corruption.

Of course, once the social safety net is utterly destroyed, the masses of people might finally wake up, take to the streets, stage wildcat strikes and boycotts and form strong unions and all the other stuff that desperate people do when they have nothing left to lose. 

They don't want the desperate people they have helped to throw under the bus to blame them. On the contrary, the democratic cowards will pretend to "stand in solidarity" with regular people once the misery index increases so much that the capitalist facade finally begins to crack. That is when, as bottom-up victory approaches, they will attempt to co-opt any and all independent movements. They will want us to let the credentialed experts take over so we can retreat and go back to doing our assigned duties of voting and buying crappy Amazon stuff.

We must not let them. Now that they have lost face and lost power by taking too much away from us, we must seize the power we have and use it to change things for the greater good. We are our only hope.

What have we got to lose? 

Elon In His Abattoir

 In the cult slasher film"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" a family of dispossessed slaugherhouse workers get their revenge on technological progress by eviscerating and eating a group of bourgeois interlopers.

In the cult horror movie known as Trump 2.0. showrunner Elon Musk has turned that plotline right on its (severed) ear. The richest man on the planet has reversed the roles, casting himself as the victim rather than as the cannibalistic predator that he truly is. The oligarchy under his watch has been transformed intothe lumpen proletariat doing battle against the designated "Other" - millions of federal buraucrats and the parasitic citizens that they serve. The irony of course is that Musk is using the very "cutting edge" A.I. technology to transport the modern centralized welfare state right back into the stone age. You can't even call it a reversion to feualism, because back in medieval times there was such a thing as noblesse oblige. The serfs were allowed to keep living and serving the lords, albeit at an often a bare subsistence level.

Nobody will ever accuse Elon Musk of subtlety. His appearance over the weekend in the CPAC revival tent, brandishing an actual chainsaw gifted to him by his fellow cannibal, the fascist leader of Argentina, was a gross rip-off of the orignial Tobe Hooper 1974 slasher flic.

Given that Musk has relocated to the same Texas hill country locale where the movie was filmed also fits in with the whole role-reversal theme of this gore-fest. Just as Elon is gentrifying the previously afforable Austin area, so too as the orignal ramshackle building used as the low-budget set for the slaughterhouse been refurbished into something of a glitzy historical landmark.

The theatrical antics of the Trump-Musk regime are blatantly designed to divert attention from the real enemy of the people, which is the oligarchy. By including desperate people in their fan club, this administration is instilliing the fales hope that they, too, can someday become rich. But first, they have to develop more hatred against their fellow lesser people - immigrants, college students and academics, anyone poor renough to require Medicaid and food assistance... the list of the "undeserving" goes on and on. Just as the wealth of billionaires increases exponentially. As Elon and his cohort slash their way thrugh the federal bureaucracy, the indebted gig gig workers of America are invited to forget their own woes by vicariously participating in the mass slaughter of those with the luck to hold heretofore secure government jobs. No matter that many of these workers are military veterans hailing from the same conomic underclass as those champing at the bit to take part in the slaughter of the "cattle."

So it's no accident that power tools, a staple of the slasher genre of the 70s and 80s, are staging a comeback in the hands of the psycho-nerds of the Tech Bro Aristocracy, Why go to the trouble of explaining mass death by algorithm when they can display their machismo with serrated gear that anybody can understand and covet?

As Mark Steven writes in "Splatter Capital:

the Political Economy of Gore Films,"

"Cannibalism in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not only about eating the bourgeoisie. it is also about forcing them to feast upon their own flesh and the flesh of their kin...

"What we are seeing is the labour of disenfranchised abattoir workers made unemloyable by the modernization of their industry and the crisis in value caused by that very modernization."

Musk and Trump thus are inviting us, through their right-wing populism, to parake in their feast, if only at a base symbolic level . Just watching them gorge on their gore should make us feel full. Or so they shope.

Marxist critic Nancy Fraser takes the metaphor further in her "Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet, and What We Can Do About It,"

She compares unfettered capitalism to the ouroboros, the salf-cannibalizing snake that devours its own tail. "That's a fitting image for a system that]s used to devour our social, political and natural bases of its own existence which are also the bases of ours."

Since, as Fraser posits, the cannibalism metaphor invites us to see society as a capitalist feeding frenzy, in which the main course is us."

 I suppose we should be grateful to Elon Musk, who is arrogant and clueles seenough to display before the whole world that his ultimate goal is not stopping fraud and waste, but  destruction and cruelty just for the sake of destruction and cruelty.

Rather than wait for capitalism to destroy itself (and while we are waiting and hoping for Elon to choke on his own assholery) we might at least slow the process down a bit. Street protests are okay, but largely ignored by the powers that be.

They might pay more attention to mass strikes and consumer boycotts. I doubt they they have the ability, for example, to maintain and repair their own chainsaws.

DEI-ty On the Rampage

 What does Elon Musk have against D.E.I. anyway?

Conventional wisdom would have us believe it's an adverse reaction to the gender transition of one of his children.

Here's an alternate theory. Although D.E.I. ostensibly is an acronym for the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion marketing slogan adopted by government agencies and their corporate sponsors, giving a nice liberal gloss to predatory capitalism - in lieu of, say, legislating a living   wage and guaranteed universal health care to all people - DEI is also a derivative of  the Latin word for God.

And as the richest person in the world, Elon Musk is effectually a deity, the self-appointed ruler of the world. We must have no other gods before us.

In "As Gods Among Mn." his history of wealth since the times of the earliest civilizations, Guido Alfani cites medieval philospher Nicole Oresme, who in his own turn cited Aristotle:

"The super-rcih (superabuntaes) are so unequal and exceed and overcome the others regarding their political power so much that it is reasonable to think that they are among others as God is among men... the cities which are governed democratically should relegate these people, i.e. they should send them into exile or banish them. as such cities try and pursue equality for all."

Before there were nation states there were city states, which brings us to another acronym: DOGE. Today it stands for the Musk-controlled Department of Government Efficiency. But back in the time of late feudalism, Doges were ultra-wealthy oligarchs in Venice who bought their way into lifetime positions of political power. (In one of those weird events of history repeating itself, the demi-god Donald Trump Jr recently got caught illegally slaugjtering a protected species of duck on an island off the coast of Venice. Like any Doge worth his salt, we can assume he just bought his way out of his crime, or at least paid no price for his bad behavior.)

While the Musk-Trump administration (call them President Eldon Mump)go about their merry pranksterism of tearing things down just because they can, there is no talk of building things up, other than building Trump-branded seaside resorts above the bones of aslaughtered Palestinians in Gaza).

And you're not hearing any talk from the feckless Democrats of redistributing the savings that supposedly will be gleaned from paring back government waste. On the contrary, the recently elected chair of the DNC openly calls for more billionaire moeny from the donor class. There is no talk of taxing Elon Musk and his oligarchic cohort, let alone banishing him from power let alone giving him a one way ticket to Mars on a government-subsidized rocket ship.

They should just cut to the chase and redefine DEI as Elon Musk, or even better, as the de facto state of affairs in global capitalistic rule: Deprive, Extract, Immiserate. To be really smart and streamlined and transparent about it, they could simply scramble the letters a bit and call their official policy "Just DIE already!"

Why else would both government agencies and the corporations that own them already be re moving all mention of diversity, equity and inclusion from their websites voluntarily and proactively?

It was mostlya sham to begin with, a way to substitute nice words for policies for the greater public good. It's the same thing as the USAID acronym falsely implying all these decades that it is a charity rather than first and foremost a regime-change CIA cutout and a tool for corporate plunder abroad. 

The only good thing you can say about all this manufactured chaos is that it's ripping the facade of democracy into a million tiny shreds.

You can have democracy or you can have billionaires. But you cannot have both. So let's go full Aristotle. Let the catapulting of the fat cats into deepest outer space begin!

Update on the Update

I'd meant to be back in action by now, but fate intervened. Without going into too much detail, I skipped the atrial ablation and went straight to a permanent pacemaker. It seemed my heart rate had beome so dangerously low (40-50) that it was actually "pausing" at times to the point where I felt dizzy and faint. I blame this on my underlying cardiac condition, the various meds designed to regulate heart rhythm, and, of course, the sight of Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute.

Other than some soreness since Friday's procedure, I am feeling so much better now that enough blood and oxygen are reaching my brain and other body parts. (Don't even get me started on my Kafkaesque journey  through the medical industrial complex!)

I just want to reassure everybody that I am still alive if not yet kicking. Above all, thanks to all of you for your kind well-wishes.

Needless to say, there is plenty to write about these days and I have plenty of ideas jelling around in my oxygen-rich brain.

Stay tuned, and thank you again for your support!

Blog Update

 Just a heeds-up to my readers that posts will be intermittent at best for the next little while. I have been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and was hospitalized during Christmas week, put on meds and scheduled for a procedure called atrial ablation mid-month. I am feeling pretty good other than being very tired.

Please continue to submit comments if you feel so inclined. Or if you wish to contact me privately you can email me at herecomestrouble665@gmail. com.

Thanks for your patience. I hope to be back making trouble soon. Happy New Year to all!