I don't think Lake Superior University has come out with its list of breakout Words of the Year yet, but I am placing my own bet on "chaos."
My "Trump Chaos" query got 185 million results from a Google search on Christmas - er, make that Chaosmess - night. Up to then I foolishly thought that I had enjoyed a pretty nice holiday, until I was informed that Trump had spoiled it.
Ripped from the latest headlines:
The Ghost of Trump Chaos Future -- New York Times.
Trump Chaos Pervades Holiday Season -- The Hill.
Michael Moore Says Trump Chaos Makes Him Frightened For the Country -- MSNBC.
Trump Chaos Keeps Finding New Levels -- Bloomberg News.
Donald Trump Ruins the Holidays With Shutdown, Mattis Chaos -- New York Magazine.
Is Trump's Chaos Tornado a Move from the Kremlin's Playbook? -- Vanity Fair. (They're so vain, they want you to think all the bad stuff comes from Russia. At least they had the good taste not to describe it as a Trump Tsunami, in light of the 400-plus people killed in Indonesia, an event which has already slipped well below the Trump Chaos in clicks, views and Likes)
A dangerous contender in the corporate media's overused word of the year contest is "noose" - as in, the noose that's been tightening around the King of Chaos's neck since Inauguration Day, 2017. Donald Trump has a very short, wide, fleshy neck, which seems to have protected him pretty well, till now, from Robert Mueller's very wide net, or more accurately, hangman's lasso.
Since the rope has been tightening for far longer than the hysterical mass chaos has been erupting, the search term "Trump noose" gets a lot more results: more than 3.8 million on Google. Most recently:
The Walls Are Closing In, the Noose Is Tightening -- Washington Examiner. (Will Trump be squashed to death before the strangulation, or during?)
The Noose Is Tightening: Five Takeaways From the Michael Cohen Plea Deal -- CBC. (Is that for here, or to go?)
Rob Reiner Says the Noose Is Tightening - Breitbart. (but somehow forgets to mention that we are under Russian attack.)
Legal Noose Tightens Around Trump's Neck - And It's No Hyperbole -- CandidCamera. com (Finally, somebody explains right in the scare headline that it's just a metaphor and not a real piece of rope.)
The chaos got really chaotic and the noose tightened in a veritable frenzy of mass yanking over the past week. That is because for the first name since the Trump election, Chaos is really messing with the sensitive spots of the usually impervious Ruling Class Racketeers. To wit: Trump has made the teensiest effort to stop the permanent state of war by withdrawing 2,000 US troops from Syria. On top of that insult to violent capitalism, he dared criticize the sacrosanct Fed, and the stock market took a dive. How quickly the heretofore serene oligarchs have panicked, right after their record gains from the great Trump Tax Giveaway from earlier in the year. And then there's the Government Shutdown over the Wall. It's been a perfect trifecta of chaos.
Of course, life has always been precarious and chaotic for the poor and working classes, but their plights have not garnered much attention, let alone headlines.
It is so suddenly chaotic out there that congress critters and pundits from both sides of the War Party are reduced to begging a general nicknamed "Mad Dog" - whom Barack Obama once removed from command for being too bloodthirsty - to stay on as one of the last remaining competent adult psychopaths in the Room. Rabies is now more popular than Donald Trump . And why not, since polls also show that root canals are more popular than the congress critters who are slobbering all over James Mattis, a steady patriotic war criminal, who once frothed that "it's fun to kill some people."
It is so chaotic that some corporate news outlets are equally outraged that Trump allegedly spoiled Christmas for a seven-year-old - by opining that belief in Santa Claus was "marginal" for someone her age - as they are that another Guatemalan child migrant died in US custody on Christmas morning. As a matter of fact, The Guardian actually placed these two events in side by side top-of-the-homepage headlines to award them tacit equal importance: Christmas Cheer and Death In Detention.
But let's be fair. Just as the seven-year-old who had the phone chat with Trump later admitted to the press that she has no idea what "marginal" even means, it is also doubtful that Trump himself knows what it means. When he was seven years old, and his teacher tactfully noted on his report card that his performance was marginal at best, he assumed that it was a compliment. Marginal, magical. Same exact thing. He meant to tell the little girl that belief in Santa is simply magical thinking, a skill at which he himself is so marvelously adept.
But lest we forget, there are at least two more dangerous stalking word-horses that only add to the linguistic chaos: coyfeve and smocking gun.
Showing posts with label christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label christmas. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Saturday, December 22, 2018
And a Very Happy Humbug To All
Miserly person that I am, I'm somewhat recycling last year's Christmas gift to my fellow Sardonickists, with just a few Santa-like tweaks to the side of the nose to make this post seem all new and shiny.
I wrote previously, and at some length, that in the good old 19th century days of mass immigration, back when the future Lady Liberty's "give me your tired, your poor" mantra was actually taken literally, Christmas was celebrated by the teeming masses more in the spirit of Halloween than in the current "traditional" version which Charles Dickens made so sentimentally popular with his tale of the miser who suddenly gets "woke" by his nightmares and who salves his conscience by giving his clerk's family one opulent Christmas dinner, one measly raise, and one lousy day off.
Back in the good old days, working class holiday revelers acted like the Gilets Jaunes of France. They assailed the wealthy by wassailing the wealthy in a winter form of Trick or Treat. Give us money and a decent wage and some of your food, or we'll smash things. That unrest spurred the rich propertied classes to bring their own Yuletide revelry behind their bolted doors. They encouraged poor people to follow their example, and just stay the hell home.
Dickens could even be considered the literary precursor of neoliberalism and trickle-down economics. His poverty-stricken, orphaned heroes in his most popular books ultimately prevail. They survive and come out of penury not through the imposition of taxes on the aristocracy, with the upshot of a more equitable society, but in the miraculous discovery of some long-lost aristocratic relative. David Copperfield finds his wealthy aunt, Oliver Twist is rescued by a benevolent gentleman who turns out to be his grandfather, Esther Summerson (one of the few Dickensian female characters who isn't a complete simpering dolt) both inherits a bundle and finds true love despite a smallpox-scarred countenance. Naturally, these lucky few had mothers who were either sluts, improvident, dumb, or all three. The heroes were selfless bootstrappers who overcame adversity through hard work, grit, maybe a little honest theft, and determination -- and long-lost benefactors.
Pip in Great Expectations is somewhat of an outlier in the Dickens canon. He goes through several transformations, from naive child, to snobbish gentleman, to "woke" individual who finally overcomes his snootiness and finds some humanity after discovering that his particular benefactor is a convicted felon. He even gets to marry the benefactor's snooty daughter in the Hollywood film version.
It isn't until Dickens' later novels that he examines wealth inequality and societal injustice. From going to "living happily ever after" upon the acquisition of riches, his characters come to realize that money is no guarantee of a happy life. His last work, Our Mutual Friend, proved unpopular with both the critics and the public because it turned the rags to riches myth right on its head. The family at the center of the book inherits a ton of cash, and misery and vacuity and conspicuous, tasteless consumption ensue.
I used to be a fan, but now I'm just not that into A Christmas Carol, whose moral value to the modern-day wealthy is that it permits them to be stingy and selfish on the other 364 days of the year. The working class as portrayed by the Cratchits were meekly accepting of their lot, as all of us should be. Christmas is still largely an indoor festival, and not just because it's cold outside. And it's that one special time of year for the ruling class to wear their noblesse oblige proudly on their sleeves for the relative minute out of their lives that it takes to play Santa. And then they ostentatiously send the video clips of their good deeds to all the news sites and networks to ensure that the gratefully quiet rabble won't miss even one second of their conspicuous, yet fleeting, beneficence.
Case in point:
And since Barack Obama has always prided himself on his "balanced approach" to inequality, here's Mrs. Claus in a pair of glittery, gaudy $4,000 boots whose material appears to have been prised right off the walls of Trump's Fifth Avenue Versailles palace and then glued directly onto what Victorian writers in the age of Dickens so delicately used to describe as "limbs."
I wrote previously, and at some length, that in the good old 19th century days of mass immigration, back when the future Lady Liberty's "give me your tired, your poor" mantra was actually taken literally, Christmas was celebrated by the teeming masses more in the spirit of Halloween than in the current "traditional" version which Charles Dickens made so sentimentally popular with his tale of the miser who suddenly gets "woke" by his nightmares and who salves his conscience by giving his clerk's family one opulent Christmas dinner, one measly raise, and one lousy day off.
Back in the good old days, working class holiday revelers acted like the Gilets Jaunes of France. They assailed the wealthy by wassailing the wealthy in a winter form of Trick or Treat. Give us money and a decent wage and some of your food, or we'll smash things. That unrest spurred the rich propertied classes to bring their own Yuletide revelry behind their bolted doors. They encouraged poor people to follow their example, and just stay the hell home.
Dickens could even be considered the literary precursor of neoliberalism and trickle-down economics. His poverty-stricken, orphaned heroes in his most popular books ultimately prevail. They survive and come out of penury not through the imposition of taxes on the aristocracy, with the upshot of a more equitable society, but in the miraculous discovery of some long-lost aristocratic relative. David Copperfield finds his wealthy aunt, Oliver Twist is rescued by a benevolent gentleman who turns out to be his grandfather, Esther Summerson (one of the few Dickensian female characters who isn't a complete simpering dolt) both inherits a bundle and finds true love despite a smallpox-scarred countenance. Naturally, these lucky few had mothers who were either sluts, improvident, dumb, or all three. The heroes were selfless bootstrappers who overcame adversity through hard work, grit, maybe a little honest theft, and determination -- and long-lost benefactors.
Pip in Great Expectations is somewhat of an outlier in the Dickens canon. He goes through several transformations, from naive child, to snobbish gentleman, to "woke" individual who finally overcomes his snootiness and finds some humanity after discovering that his particular benefactor is a convicted felon. He even gets to marry the benefactor's snooty daughter in the Hollywood film version.
It isn't until Dickens' later novels that he examines wealth inequality and societal injustice. From going to "living happily ever after" upon the acquisition of riches, his characters come to realize that money is no guarantee of a happy life. His last work, Our Mutual Friend, proved unpopular with both the critics and the public because it turned the rags to riches myth right on its head. The family at the center of the book inherits a ton of cash, and misery and vacuity and conspicuous, tasteless consumption ensue.
I used to be a fan, but now I'm just not that into A Christmas Carol, whose moral value to the modern-day wealthy is that it permits them to be stingy and selfish on the other 364 days of the year. The working class as portrayed by the Cratchits were meekly accepting of their lot, as all of us should be. Christmas is still largely an indoor festival, and not just because it's cold outside. And it's that one special time of year for the ruling class to wear their noblesse oblige proudly on their sleeves for the relative minute out of their lives that it takes to play Santa. And then they ostentatiously send the video clips of their good deeds to all the news sites and networks to ensure that the gratefully quiet rabble won't miss even one second of their conspicuous, yet fleeting, beneficence.
Case in point:
And since Barack Obama has always prided himself on his "balanced approach" to inequality, here's Mrs. Claus in a pair of glittery, gaudy $4,000 boots whose material appears to have been prised right off the walls of Trump's Fifth Avenue Versailles palace and then glued directly onto what Victorian writers in the age of Dickens so delicately used to describe as "limbs."
(Sorry for the Santa redundancy at the end of the above clip, but it was the least gushy and the shortest that I could find from my Google search of this vapid event.)
If this approach still isn't quite balanced enough for you, then do check out Santa Barack's recent visit to a Neocon think tank in Houston, where he shamed a whole roomful of Oil and Gas titans out of $5 million of their polluted cash. Not for sick children, mind you, but to help promote his Mutual Friends in the Neoliberal World Order Club.
The problem of the super-wealthy and the ruling class, folksily lectured Obama to the oligarchs, is that they haven't adapted quickly enough to the mass disaffection of the dispossessed rabble. The elites are just too smug, he smugly remarked, to much appreciative smug laughter and applause from the elite audience. They wouldn't recognize a veiled insult if it hit them like a gentle ocean breeze. Them selfish? They are Thought Leaders whose only goal is to make the world a better place.
God bless us, everyone.
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Classy American Christmas
Yes, Virginia, there was not always a Santa Claus. In the early 19th century, Washington Irving, in the guise of a venerable colonialist of the ruling Knickerbocker dynasty, borrowed the old Dutch legend about Saint Nicholas and re-purposed it into the prototype of the American Santa Claus. A scant hundred years later, Coca-Cola re-purposed the re-purposing, and created the mass market image of Santa that we cherish to this very day - the morbidly obese dude with the snow-white beard and the red suit.
I guess Santa must have imbibed a whole lot of that original cocaine-laced high calorie sugary drink to gain all that weight and still be able to fly as high as a kite all night long. The subliminal message of Coca-Cola, even as it markets its brand to poor third world countries today, is that it's always better to be an unhealthy fat person than to look like the original St. Nick: decrepit, pale, and skeletal.
Although Charles Dickens is regularly credited as the "inventor of Christmas," the modern American version is very much the joint creation of the landed New York gentry, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Our own post-Puritan, modern secular observances started as a public relations/propaganda campaign to get the rabble off the streets, and indoors, and therefore so out of sight and mind that the minority rich, safe within their own mansions, didn't have to give them another thought or another penny.
In the early days of the Republic, Christmas, when it was celebrated at all, was celebrated more like we observe Halloween today. The hoi polloi would roam the streets and bang on the doors of the high and mighty for handouts of food and money. Since the revelers were often drunk and rowdy, this had become a matter of grave concern to the moneyed classes. For one thing, Coca-Cola hadn't even been invented yet, and there was no electricity, let alone TV and Internet. The growing immigrant population couldn't even be trusted to go to the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play without it devolving into a fatal fracas.
The poor, especially the newly-arrived immigrants, had been rioting at Christmas-time practically since the founding of the Republic. Enter Washington Irving a/k/a Dietrich Knickerbocker. This writer, whose Legend of Sleepy Hollow has long been a staple of Halloween in America, actually helped to reverse our fall and winter holidays with his lesser-known Christmas stories. He had the leisure time to write his tales thanks largely to the generous support of his brother-in-law, a wealthy Wall Street financier.
Irving's yuletide yarns centered not around the harsh realities of New York's teeming slums, but around a benevolent, but entirely fictional, English squire who proactively welcomes the whole neighborhood into his Bracebridge Hall manor house before they get the crazy idea of annoyingly begging, not to mention breaking and entering. In the "those were the good old days" fashion so beloved of American myth-makers and modern demagogues, Irving tried to market Noblesse Oblige as a way of denying that hardships even existed in the tenements and sweatshops of New York City. In his own totally non-existent world of the recent European past, the rich and the poor had mingled as one great big happy family. Irving literally invented such legendary Christmas traditions as "The Crowning of the Lord of Misrule" as a more desirable way for exploited and restless working people to hope for the future, to believe in the beneficence of the plutocrats, and to celebrate the Winter Solstice as quietly and as peacefully as their betters. It was the 19th century version of Fake News.
Indeed, the Upper Crustopoly of yesteryear sounds remarkably similar to the 21st century Republican ideologues and liberal philanthrocapitalists and their insincere hectoring of the poor to get out their "culture of dependency" and embrace hard work and damp down their anger and resentment through the occasional entertainments provided to them by their necessarily stern masters.
Irving unctuously wrote,
Irving's literary propaganda was slow to catch on with "the lower orders," however. Either his targeted audience didn't read, or they were too poor to buy his books, because in 1828 the ruling class of New York City was finally forced to officially create a metropolitan Police Department to protect their lives and their property from the mob. Poor people had gone way beyond merely hitting up the aristocrats for food and petty cash at Christmas-time. The were rioting, burning, and looting to protest against gross class inequities. Wars among immigrant factions erupted, including attacks on worshipers as they came out of church. The ruling class essentially reinvented Christmas out of stark nativistic fear of the growing political power of ethnic populations, particularly Irish Catholics.
Santa's co-optation as a jingoistic political prop also proceeded apace. During the Civil War, he was drafted for a psy-ops campaign against the Confederacy. President Lincoln commissioned famed cartoonist Thomas Nast to create a bellicose image of the Right Jolly Old Elf (already having been further modernized by Irving's plutocratic pal Clement Moore in The Night Before Christmas) regaling a group of Union soldiers, an image that was to be distributed en masse in the slave-holding states.
If you thought that Billy Bob Thornton's hilariously perverted portrayal of Bad Santa was extreme, just get a load of Nast's vision of a St. Nick who gives with one hand and kills with the other. As historian Matthew W. Lively describes it,
Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas in America if we didn't get an endless loop of Yuletide TV spots of greetings from the troops in our nearly 1,000 military bases throughout the world to help us appreciate that killing and war happen, even during the Season of Peace. As an added propaganda bonus, theocratic Vice President Mike Pence even put the Christ back in Christmas with his visit to, quite literally, a whole second generation of US soldiers in Afghanistan. They've been there for almost as long as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle was in his 20-year coma.
Meanwhile, good luck to the 21st century gentry as far as getting poor people off the streets back home. Protests and riots might now be in a state of abeyance thanks to the relentless trickle-down, fear-mongering propaganda of the consolidated media-political complex and the country's addiction to electronic gadgets and drugs. But right along with the skyrocketing death rate from opioid abuse, homelessness once again is on the rise in the Homeland. People have taken to the streets not to protest, but because they have nowhere else to live.
More than half a million Americans will be spending Christmas outdoors or in a temporary shelter this year.
But, as Donald Trump's Housing and Urban Development Director Ben "Bootstraps" Carson puts it, "homelessness is not a government problem. It's everybody's problem" - meaning it's nobody's problem, especially not the problem of the pathocratic billionaires who've just received Congressional carte blanche to literally steal the last shriveled apple from the last little child's ragged Christmas stocking.
So despite the booming stock market and record economic "growth" and slightly lower poverty rates and slightly higher average wages, the rent is still too damned high for a lot of people. As reported by The Guardian,
Many are grateful just to have their own tents to live in. Others are going the nostalgic Charlie Brown Christmas route and decorating their pathetic shedding rejected trees with a few donated plastic ornaments. "My boyfriend wants to just put it in a milk crate with a paper bag, but I’m going to make a proper stand for it," one woman said. "I have some fake Christmas presents that I’ll put under it. And if I can somehow manage to make about $10, I can get four strings of battery-operated lights to put around it."
***
Paul Krugman, one of my favorite New York Times pundits, has, for at least the thousandth time, announced that only the Republican side of the Duopoly despises the working class.
Like Rip Van Winkle, he seems to have been asleep during the Age of Obama, in which under a Democratic majority, the top One Percent reaped fully 94% of all the household wealth lost during the 2008 financial collapse. But neoliberal propaganda needs must, so Krugman restricts his class war angst to the GOP's newly-enacted tax bill. He was apparently napping during Obama's own quiet parting gift to America in December 2016: a bailout of Wall Street foreclosure kings turned high-rent private equity landlords.
Krugman fumes:
 |
| Depression-Era Santa With His Handy Whip |
Although Charles Dickens is regularly credited as the "inventor of Christmas," the modern American version is very much the joint creation of the landed New York gentry, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Our own post-Puritan, modern secular observances started as a public relations/propaganda campaign to get the rabble off the streets, and indoors, and therefore so out of sight and mind that the minority rich, safe within their own mansions, didn't have to give them another thought or another penny.
In the early days of the Republic, Christmas, when it was celebrated at all, was celebrated more like we observe Halloween today. The hoi polloi would roam the streets and bang on the doors of the high and mighty for handouts of food and money. Since the revelers were often drunk and rowdy, this had become a matter of grave concern to the moneyed classes. For one thing, Coca-Cola hadn't even been invented yet, and there was no electricity, let alone TV and Internet. The growing immigrant population couldn't even be trusted to go to the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play without it devolving into a fatal fracas.
The poor, especially the newly-arrived immigrants, had been rioting at Christmas-time practically since the founding of the Republic. Enter Washington Irving a/k/a Dietrich Knickerbocker. This writer, whose Legend of Sleepy Hollow has long been a staple of Halloween in America, actually helped to reverse our fall and winter holidays with his lesser-known Christmas stories. He had the leisure time to write his tales thanks largely to the generous support of his brother-in-law, a wealthy Wall Street financier.
Irving's yuletide yarns centered not around the harsh realities of New York's teeming slums, but around a benevolent, but entirely fictional, English squire who proactively welcomes the whole neighborhood into his Bracebridge Hall manor house before they get the crazy idea of annoyingly begging, not to mention breaking and entering. In the "those were the good old days" fashion so beloved of American myth-makers and modern demagogues, Irving tried to market Noblesse Oblige as a way of denying that hardships even existed in the tenements and sweatshops of New York City. In his own totally non-existent world of the recent European past, the rich and the poor had mingled as one great big happy family. Irving literally invented such legendary Christmas traditions as "The Crowning of the Lord of Misrule" as a more desirable way for exploited and restless working people to hope for the future, to believe in the beneficence of the plutocrats, and to celebrate the Winter Solstice as quietly and as peacefully as their betters. It was the 19th century version of Fake News.
Indeed, the Upper Crustopoly of yesteryear sounds remarkably similar to the 21st century Republican ideologues and liberal philanthrocapitalists and their insincere hectoring of the poor to get out their "culture of dependency" and embrace hard work and damp down their anger and resentment through the occasional entertainments provided to them by their necessarily stern masters.
Irving unctuously wrote,
There is something genuine and affectionate in the gaiety of the lower orders, when it is excited by the bounty and familiarity of those above them; the warm glow of gratitude enters into their mirth, and a kind word or a small pleasantry, frankly uttered by a patron, gladdens the heart of the dependent more than oil and wine.
Irving's literary propaganda was slow to catch on with "the lower orders," however. Either his targeted audience didn't read, or they were too poor to buy his books, because in 1828 the ruling class of New York City was finally forced to officially create a metropolitan Police Department to protect their lives and their property from the mob. Poor people had gone way beyond merely hitting up the aristocrats for food and petty cash at Christmas-time. The were rioting, burning, and looting to protest against gross class inequities. Wars among immigrant factions erupted, including attacks on worshipers as they came out of church. The ruling class essentially reinvented Christmas out of stark nativistic fear of the growing political power of ethnic populations, particularly Irish Catholics.
 |
| Astor Place Riot of 1849 |
Santa's co-optation as a jingoistic political prop also proceeded apace. During the Civil War, he was drafted for a psy-ops campaign against the Confederacy. President Lincoln commissioned famed cartoonist Thomas Nast to create a bellicose image of the Right Jolly Old Elf (already having been further modernized by Irving's plutocratic pal Clement Moore in The Night Before Christmas) regaling a group of Union soldiers, an image that was to be distributed en masse in the slave-holding states.
If you thought that Billy Bob Thornton's hilariously perverted portrayal of Bad Santa was extreme, just get a load of Nast's vision of a St. Nick who gives with one hand and kills with the other. As historian Matthew W. Lively describes it,
Nast drew a patriotic Santa dressed in striped pants and a coat covered with stars sitting on his sleigh beneath a waving American flag. Two drummer boys in the foreground of the sketch appear fascinated with a jack-in-the-box toy. One soldier is shown opening his box to find a stocking stuffed with presents, while another soldier holds up the pipe he received as a present. In the background, other soldiers play football, chase a greased boar, and cook Christmas dinner.This was a direct slap in the face to the South, where Alabama, in 1836, had become the very first state to declare Christmas a legal holiday. It did not become a formal national holiday until 1870. Could this North vs. South campaign be the real, albeit forgotten, source of Fox News's perennial War Against the War Against Christmas agit-prop campaign?
More surprisingly, Santa is shown amusing the soldiers by hanging a wooden effigy of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. So no one is mistaken as to its meaning, a text accompanying the drawing notes: “Santa Claus is entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis’s future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly round his neck, and Jeff Davis seems to be kicking very much at such a fate.”
Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas in America if we didn't get an endless loop of Yuletide TV spots of greetings from the troops in our nearly 1,000 military bases throughout the world to help us appreciate that killing and war happen, even during the Season of Peace. As an added propaganda bonus, theocratic Vice President Mike Pence even put the Christ back in Christmas with his visit to, quite literally, a whole second generation of US soldiers in Afghanistan. They've been there for almost as long as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle was in his 20-year coma.
Meanwhile, good luck to the 21st century gentry as far as getting poor people off the streets back home. Protests and riots might now be in a state of abeyance thanks to the relentless trickle-down, fear-mongering propaganda of the consolidated media-political complex and the country's addiction to electronic gadgets and drugs. But right along with the skyrocketing death rate from opioid abuse, homelessness once again is on the rise in the Homeland. People have taken to the streets not to protest, but because they have nowhere else to live.
More than half a million Americans will be spending Christmas outdoors or in a temporary shelter this year.
But, as Donald Trump's Housing and Urban Development Director Ben "Bootstraps" Carson puts it, "homelessness is not a government problem. It's everybody's problem" - meaning it's nobody's problem, especially not the problem of the pathocratic billionaires who've just received Congressional carte blanche to literally steal the last shriveled apple from the last little child's ragged Christmas stocking.
So despite the booming stock market and record economic "growth" and slightly lower poverty rates and slightly higher average wages, the rent is still too damned high for a lot of people. As reported by The Guardian,
There was an increase [in homelessness] of 4.1% in New York. In the west, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento and Oakland all reported surges of varying sizes. Most of the increase across the country is driven by people living in doorways, tents and RVs as opposed to in shelters. People of color are dramatically overrepresented: African Americans make up over one-third of the number.But to make Ben Carson, and actually all of us, feel somewhat guilty about our own less-bad lives, The Guardian is also running a companion piece about how individual homeless people are bravely (or maybe just cynically) counting their meager blessings this year.
In one sense the prevalence of homelessness seems odd, because the national poverty rate has fallen to around the same level as before the recession. Yet homelessness is linked to economic growth. In some of the nation’s more desirable major cities, housing is rapidly appreciating to a point where it is out of reach for lower earners.
Median hourly wages in the US have barely budged for decades, from $16.74 in 1973 to $17.86 in 2016, in terms of 2016 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But in New York, for instance, the hourly wage required to comfortably rent a one-bedroom is $27.29. In Los Angeles, it is $22.98.
Many are grateful just to have their own tents to live in. Others are going the nostalgic Charlie Brown Christmas route and decorating their pathetic shedding rejected trees with a few donated plastic ornaments. "My boyfriend wants to just put it in a milk crate with a paper bag, but I’m going to make a proper stand for it," one woman said. "I have some fake Christmas presents that I’ll put under it. And if I can somehow manage to make about $10, I can get four strings of battery-operated lights to put around it."
***
Paul Krugman, one of my favorite New York Times pundits, has, for at least the thousandth time, announced that only the Republican side of the Duopoly despises the working class.
Like Rip Van Winkle, he seems to have been asleep during the Age of Obama, in which under a Democratic majority, the top One Percent reaped fully 94% of all the household wealth lost during the 2008 financial collapse. But neoliberal propaganda needs must, so Krugman restricts his class war angst to the GOP's newly-enacted tax bill. He was apparently napping during Obama's own quiet parting gift to America in December 2016: a bailout of Wall Street foreclosure kings turned high-rent private equity landlords.
Krugman fumes:
How did they [the GOP] manage to produce this political lemon? Josh Barro argues that Republicans have forgotten how to talk about tax cuts. But I think it runs deeper: Republicans have developed a deep disdain for people who just work for a living, and this disdain shines through everything they do. This is true both on substance – the tax bill heavily favors owners over workers – and in the way they talk about it.My published response:
In a 2011 "Meet the Press," David Gregory gently and gingerly confronted Paul Ryan about his sick desire to cut Medicare, even though 80% of Americans don't want it touched. Then as now, Ryan scoffed in that slimy, earnest way of his.
"Leaders are expected to lead and are expected to change the polls, because that's what the country wants," he actually said.
"Country" and "America" are of course GOP-speak for the top 1%, a/k/a the Donor Class, a/k/a the Owner Class. And Trump goes them one better. "L'Amerique, C'est Moi!" is what he actually means when he says the tax bill is a giant Christmas present to America. That is, if he could speak French - or even English above a fourth grade level.
His pathological greed has made him so ignorant that he probably thinks Noblesse Oblige is one of those foreign terrorist organizations gathering at our precious borders.
When Ryan says the reverse Robin Hood tax package will become more popular over time, what he's really saying is that the actual population will become so demoralized and so weak over time that they won't even have the energy to get mad, let alone respond to polls. Another metaphor for this phenomenon is the frogs slowly dying in a pot of simmering water - although the GOP's culinary method is to set the burner up to an immediate furious boil before they dump us all in for the quickest possible kill.
Joyeux Noel, everybody!
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Wassailing the Wealthy (Redux)
Despite all the toil and strife, dare I hope that there is renewed cause for optimism as 2015 grinds to a close? His name is Bernie Sanders, and he is the first presidential candidate since FDR to burst upon the scene and welcome Wall Street's hatred with open arms. His op-ed demanding financial reform in today's New York Times should have the plutes wailing all the way to the slopes of Aspen, drowning out the polluting noise of their own private Lear Jets.
In the spirit of the (hopefully) coming socialist revolution, here's an expanded and updated version of my Christmas post from last year:
The Christmas season is traditionally the one time of year that we're permitted, even encouraged, to burst forth from our hovels to guilt-trip the rich while spreading joy and fellowship throughout the land.
Key word: traditionally. Because according to government studies, the charity coffers are dwindling and fewer of us are reaching out to our fellow human beings in these hard times. In sixteen out of the twenty categories measured in 2013, the levels of social engagement by Americans have plummeted. People were either too busy working multiple minimum wage jobs, or they were too depressed about their worklessness to feel able to extend themselves. Volunteerism, as well as average household wealth, has dropped precipitously since the Great Meltdown of '08. An estimated two million fewer Americans volunteered last year than they did in 2012.
Besides the actual cost of volunteering (say, reliable transportation) are the increasingly erratic work schedules foisted upon the Precariat by the owner class during this New Abnormal Era. People working insecure crazy hours at Walmart or McDonalds, for example, are less likely to commit to helping and socializing because they never know, from one week to the next, what hours they'll be assigned to work. Increasingly, people no longer feel like they own their own time.
Here's a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the volunteerism rate dropped precipitously during the misbegotten reign of Bush the Younger, recovered somewhat at the onset of Barack Obama's second term, and is now sliding once again:
According to the BLS, volunteerism is now at its lowest point since the agency started keeping statistics in 2002. The rate of "highly educated" volunteers is decreasing more than in any other demographic group.
A survey by Gallup reveals that while charitable giving increased worldwide last year, it fell in the United States, now the wealth disparity capital of the advanced world. The proportion of Americans who reported making a charitable donation decreased from 68% to 63% Nonetheless, the US is still far more generous than most:
Charles Dickens had a description for the narrow-minded charity of the elites. He called it "telescopic philanthropy."
In Bleak House, his satiric masterpiece on social class and greed and the evil that men do, one of the most memorable minor characters is Mrs. Jellyby. In her ostentatious zeal to concern-troll the denizens of a far-away African backwater, she neglects her own home and children. Mrs. Jellyby is the Victorian fictional counterpart of such modern-day philanthrocapitalists as Bill Gates and the Clinton Family, who set their sights on largely foreign, arcane initiatives while the wealth disparity and poverty and misery in their own country are allowed to continue as their own rich selves only grow richer in the process.
Dickens's trenchant definition of this kind of self-serving charity is "rapacious benevolence."
"There were two classes of charitable people," he wrote, "the people who did a little and who made a great deal of noise; the other, who did a great deal and made no noise at all."
Mrs. Pardiggle, another obnoxious character in Bleak House, sounds eerily like the presidential candidate who never tires of boasting how tirelessly she works for "the struggling, the striving, and the successful."
According to her official (auto) biography on the White House website, Hillary Clinton has "worked tirelessly on behalf of children and families" from the time she was a child herself. Her work ethic and stamina are the stuff of legend. Even after falling and breaking her elbow while Secretary of State, she returned to working tirelessly almost immediately. Anybody who doesn't realize that she never spares herself from her grueling schedule just hasn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. She must astonish even herself as she temporarily divests herself from her family's charitable foundation and travels the country, making a Great Noise about how much she cares.
But enough about everyday Americans. What about those everyday benevolent raptors, aka the philanthrocapitalists? What are they up to this season of Yule for the wealthy, gruel for the rest of us?
Says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "The favored charities of the wealthy are gaining in share of the philanthropic economy. The total amount of the money given away by the very wealthy is going up, not because they're giving away a greater share of their income, but because their total wealth itself has grown."
The wealthy are great hiders and hoarders of their record wealth. As well they should be, given that the 80 richest people on earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population combined.
And that brings us to the lost tradition of wassailing: directly accosting and assailing the uber-rich, Bernie Sanders-style, for a share of the pie that they stole right from off our collective windowsill in the dead of night. The modern substitute of representative democracy, in which the politicians we elect to represent us are supposed to tax the rich in order to even the playing field is yet one more tradition now relegated to the scrap heap of the public good.
The custom of orphans and beggars going door to door and serenading the ruling class right where they live dates at least as far back as the third century. The landowners and nobility would briefly open their homes to provide a little warmth, food, and mystery liquid from the Wassail Bowl. The wassail songs themselves were but gentle, good-natured reminders to the rich that 'tis the season for noblesse-obliging.
During times of plague and famine, however, the wassailing tradition would often devolve into armed home invasions, leading to the siege mentality so common among our sensitive ruling elites today. Not that wassailing ever really caught on in Exceptional America anyway, founded as it was on a shiny, right-leaning hill. As a matter of fact, the Pilgrims actually banned the whole celebration of Christmas! Those Puritans we honor at Thanksgiving were the original Bah-Humbugs.
Let's face it: fast forward, almost 400 years, and anybody daring to go on a Wassail Jaunt through the Blackwater-guarded gated communities of the Forbes 400 is really taking his life in his hands.
In early 19th century New York City, the rich and the prominent were very upset when the rabble rabbled during Yule. Gunfire, bread riots, lots of sex and drunkenness and vice sent the privileged behind locked doors, where they've remained ever since. The evolution of Christmas in income-disparate America into insular closed-door gatherings was a direct result of elite paranoia.
In the mid-19th century, just as
unfettered capitalism and the Industrial Revolution were gearing up
with a vengeance, an Englishman named William Henry Husk departed from
the bland God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen feel-goodism and repurposed the
traditional Wassail carol to fit those particular hard times. He might
have titled it "Soaking the Rich at Christmas." It was during this same
magical era that Karl Marx was stirring things up with his revelations
of the capitalist war on labor, and when Charles Dickens was sticking it
to the greedy rich in his popular novels. The Scrooge-like forbears of
the oligarchs of Kochtopia and Walmartistan were just as annoying then
as they are now.
Here's what greeted Ebenezer Robber Baron back in the day:
We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door.
But we are neighbours' children
Whom you have seen before.
Tell that to Congress and the
plutocrats who own the government. Our rulers have once again evoked the
Ayn Rand Who Stole Christmas in order to fill the begging bowls of the
too-rich by draining those of the less fortunate. The coal in recent stockings consisted of food stamp cuts and ending long-term
unemployment insurance. The latest lumps for the Lumpen are pension cuts
and transforming what's left of our savings into gambling chips for
Wall Street casinos.
As Bill Moyers wrote in his eloquent Christmas essay:
Of stretching leather skin
We want a little of your money
To line it well within.
We asked Santa for a tax on high speed trades. This relatively modest surcharge and some relatively modest affordable tax increases on the richest .01% would fund health care, highway improvements and public education. Helping those less fortunate -- now commonly known as the refugees from the middle class -- would help the rich, too. A rising tide lifts all yachts. It's time for some trickle-up. Hell, it's time for a geyser. We ordinary people have been stretched and bled dry enough.
So let's get on with the sarcasm, shall we?
Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth
Bring us out a mouldy cheese
And some of your Christmas loaf.
It's not prime rib we want, but it would be nice if a few banksters went to jail for that subprime mortgage fraud. Just a slab of tainted cheese and some of that rock-hard fruitcake from last year to keep a little flesh on our ribs. A living wage of at least $15 to start would be nice, too. That thin Yule Gruel of platitudes and bootstrap-boosting Randian rhetoric just doesn't do it for us any more.
And while we're waiting for the inevitable revolution, here's one last rich-shaming stanza to tide you over:
Good master and good mistress
While you're sitting by the fire
Pray think of us poor children
Who are wandering in the mire.
Needless to say, this mildly socialistic version of the Wassail Song is probably not being piped through to plutocratic office parties. The various recorded versions still around are heavily bowdlerized. The mouldy cheese is transformed into "tasty" cheese in one rendition. In other version, the money for our purses is reduced to "a few coins." Nor is it likely to be heard on the automated loops of easy listening holiday tunes coming from a corporatized FM radio station studio devoid of any actual human wage-earning DJ. The Christmas music will be cut off precisely at the stroke of midnight on December 26th. That's when the annual mad stampede for the post-holiday sales and binge of gift returns will get underway.
This is not to say that actual Christmas caroling is not still around. You just have to know where to look for it. And look no further than the great American cultural center-cum-New Abnormal town square: the shopping mall. (or Galleria, if you prefer to be elite.) The voices are singing and the bells are ringing to get shoppers in the mood to spend and consume till they drop.
You can even find a modern version of the Wassail Bowl. It's over at the food court, and it's called a self-serve soda machine. And it'll cost you.
Cheers and happy holidays to Sardonickists everywhere!
P.S. And on a lighter note... If Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn ever goes wassailing, it'll probably sound something like this:
In the spirit of the (hopefully) coming socialist revolution, here's an expanded and updated version of my Christmas post from last year:
The Christmas season is traditionally the one time of year that we're permitted, even encouraged, to burst forth from our hovels to guilt-trip the rich while spreading joy and fellowship throughout the land.
Key word: traditionally. Because according to government studies, the charity coffers are dwindling and fewer of us are reaching out to our fellow human beings in these hard times. In sixteen out of the twenty categories measured in 2013, the levels of social engagement by Americans have plummeted. People were either too busy working multiple minimum wage jobs, or they were too depressed about their worklessness to feel able to extend themselves. Volunteerism, as well as average household wealth, has dropped precipitously since the Great Meltdown of '08. An estimated two million fewer Americans volunteered last year than they did in 2012.
Besides the actual cost of volunteering (say, reliable transportation) are the increasingly erratic work schedules foisted upon the Precariat by the owner class during this New Abnormal Era. People working insecure crazy hours at Walmart or McDonalds, for example, are less likely to commit to helping and socializing because they never know, from one week to the next, what hours they'll be assigned to work. Increasingly, people no longer feel like they own their own time.
Here's a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the volunteerism rate dropped precipitously during the misbegotten reign of Bush the Younger, recovered somewhat at the onset of Barack Obama's second term, and is now sliding once again:
According to the BLS, volunteerism is now at its lowest point since the agency started keeping statistics in 2002. The rate of "highly educated" volunteers is decreasing more than in any other demographic group.
A survey by Gallup reveals that while charitable giving increased worldwide last year, it fell in the United States, now the wealth disparity capital of the advanced world. The proportion of Americans who reported making a charitable donation decreased from 68% to 63% Nonetheless, the US is still far more generous than most:
Despite its 12th place rank in giving, the United States retained the index’s designation as the most generous country in the developed world, with relatively high marks in helping strangers (third place) and volunteerism (sixth place).But wait. The professional philanthropy/donor class is becoming ever more selective in its own generosity. The extremely rich are wont to "invest" in places rather than in causes and people, and insist that their charity be tax-deductible. They tend to give to the arts, to medical research (the rich get sick, too) and elite institutions of higher learning. They give to politicians via secretive "charity" slush funds. They give to each other's money-laundering family foundations. They set up charitable LLCs to protect their untaxed wealth. Living, breathing human beings who are not part of one's dynasty are not tax deductible -- they are, however, eminently disposable. Charities such as the Salvation Army and United Way, that give aid more or less directly to the poor, are really hurting this year.
Worldwide, the United States stood second overall behind Myanmar, where, the report says, the traditions of the overwhelmingly predominant Theravada branch of Buddhism lead to high rates of giving and volunteerism. More than 92 percent of Myanmar survey respondents reported donating money.
Charles Dickens had a description for the narrow-minded charity of the elites. He called it "telescopic philanthropy."
In Bleak House, his satiric masterpiece on social class and greed and the evil that men do, one of the most memorable minor characters is Mrs. Jellyby. In her ostentatious zeal to concern-troll the denizens of a far-away African backwater, she neglects her own home and children. Mrs. Jellyby is the Victorian fictional counterpart of such modern-day philanthrocapitalists as Bill Gates and the Clinton Family, who set their sights on largely foreign, arcane initiatives while the wealth disparity and poverty and misery in their own country are allowed to continue as their own rich selves only grow richer in the process.
Dickens's trenchant definition of this kind of self-serving charity is "rapacious benevolence."
"There were two classes of charitable people," he wrote, "the people who did a little and who made a great deal of noise; the other, who did a great deal and made no noise at all."
Mrs. Pardiggle, another obnoxious character in Bleak House, sounds eerily like the presidential candidate who never tires of boasting how tirelessly she works for "the struggling, the striving, and the successful."
"I do not understand what it is to be tired; you cannot tire me if you try!" said Mrs. Pardiggle. "The quantity of exertion (which is no exertion to me), the amount of business (which I regard as nothing), that I go through sometimes astonishes myself. I have seen my young family, and Mr. Pardiggle, quite worn out with witnessing it, when I may truly say I have been as fresh as a lark!"And her staged visits with ordinary folk -- "great shows of moral determination and talking with much volubility" -- are at carefully vetted, focus-grouped events, with the poor people acting as mere props.
"Well, my friends," said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and systematic. "How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you couldn't tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to my word."As Hillary Clinton also said, "It's not easy, it's not easy. And I couldn't do it if I just didn't, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do." And, "everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion."
According to her official (auto) biography on the White House website, Hillary Clinton has "worked tirelessly on behalf of children and families" from the time she was a child herself. Her work ethic and stamina are the stuff of legend. Even after falling and breaking her elbow while Secretary of State, she returned to working tirelessly almost immediately. Anybody who doesn't realize that she never spares herself from her grueling schedule just hasn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. She must astonish even herself as she temporarily divests herself from her family's charitable foundation and travels the country, making a Great Noise about how much she cares.
But enough about everyday Americans. What about those everyday benevolent raptors, aka the philanthrocapitalists? What are they up to this season of Yule for the wealthy, gruel for the rest of us?
Says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "The favored charities of the wealthy are gaining in share of the philanthropic economy. The total amount of the money given away by the very wealthy is going up, not because they're giving away a greater share of their income, but because their total wealth itself has grown."
The wealthy are great hiders and hoarders of their record wealth. As well they should be, given that the 80 richest people on earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world's population combined.
And that brings us to the lost tradition of wassailing: directly accosting and assailing the uber-rich, Bernie Sanders-style, for a share of the pie that they stole right from off our collective windowsill in the dead of night. The modern substitute of representative democracy, in which the politicians we elect to represent us are supposed to tax the rich in order to even the playing field is yet one more tradition now relegated to the scrap heap of the public good.
The custom of orphans and beggars going door to door and serenading the ruling class right where they live dates at least as far back as the third century. The landowners and nobility would briefly open their homes to provide a little warmth, food, and mystery liquid from the Wassail Bowl. The wassail songs themselves were but gentle, good-natured reminders to the rich that 'tis the season for noblesse-obliging.
During times of plague and famine, however, the wassailing tradition would often devolve into armed home invasions, leading to the siege mentality so common among our sensitive ruling elites today. Not that wassailing ever really caught on in Exceptional America anyway, founded as it was on a shiny, right-leaning hill. As a matter of fact, the Pilgrims actually banned the whole celebration of Christmas! Those Puritans we honor at Thanksgiving were the original Bah-Humbugs.
Let's face it: fast forward, almost 400 years, and anybody daring to go on a Wassail Jaunt through the Blackwater-guarded gated communities of the Forbes 400 is really taking his life in his hands.
In early 19th century New York City, the rich and the prominent were very upset when the rabble rabbled during Yule. Gunfire, bread riots, lots of sex and drunkenness and vice sent the privileged behind locked doors, where they've remained ever since. The evolution of Christmas in income-disparate America into insular closed-door gatherings was a direct result of elite paranoia.
 |
| New York City Christmas Riot, 1806 |
Here's what greeted Ebenezer Robber Baron back in the day:
We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door.
But we are neighbours' children
Whom you have seen before.
 |
| Jo the street sweeper from Bleak House (Mervyn Peake) |
As Bill Moyers wrote in his eloquent Christmas essay:
The $1.15 trillion spending bill passed by Congress last Friday and quickly signed by President Obama is just the latest triumph in the plutocratic management of politics that has accelerated since 9/11. As Michael Winship and I described here last Thursday, the bill is a bonanza for the donor class – that powerful combine of corporate executives and superrich individuals whose money drives our electoral process. Within minutes of its passage, congressional leaders of both parties and the president rushed to the television cameras to praise each other for a bipartisan bill that they claimed signaled the end of dysfunction; proof that Washington can work. Mainstream media (including public television and radio), especially the networks and cable channels owned and operated by the conglomerates, didn’t stop to ask: “Yes, but work for whom?” Instead, the anchors acted as amplifiers for official spin — repeating the mantra-of-the-hour that while this is not “a perfect bill,” it does a lot of good things. “But for whom? At what price?” went unasked.We have got a little purse
Of stretching leather skin
We want a little of your money
To line it well within.
We asked Santa for a tax on high speed trades. This relatively modest surcharge and some relatively modest affordable tax increases on the richest .01% would fund health care, highway improvements and public education. Helping those less fortunate -- now commonly known as the refugees from the middle class -- would help the rich, too. A rising tide lifts all yachts. It's time for some trickle-up. Hell, it's time for a geyser. We ordinary people have been stretched and bled dry enough.
So let's get on with the sarcasm, shall we?
Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth
Bring us out a mouldy cheese
And some of your Christmas loaf.
It's not prime rib we want, but it would be nice if a few banksters went to jail for that subprime mortgage fraud. Just a slab of tainted cheese and some of that rock-hard fruitcake from last year to keep a little flesh on our ribs. A living wage of at least $15 to start would be nice, too. That thin Yule Gruel of platitudes and bootstrap-boosting Randian rhetoric just doesn't do it for us any more.
And while we're waiting for the inevitable revolution, here's one last rich-shaming stanza to tide you over:
Good master and good mistress
While you're sitting by the fire
Pray think of us poor children
Who are wandering in the mire.
Needless to say, this mildly socialistic version of the Wassail Song is probably not being piped through to plutocratic office parties. The various recorded versions still around are heavily bowdlerized. The mouldy cheese is transformed into "tasty" cheese in one rendition. In other version, the money for our purses is reduced to "a few coins." Nor is it likely to be heard on the automated loops of easy listening holiday tunes coming from a corporatized FM radio station studio devoid of any actual human wage-earning DJ. The Christmas music will be cut off precisely at the stroke of midnight on December 26th. That's when the annual mad stampede for the post-holiday sales and binge of gift returns will get underway.
This is not to say that actual Christmas caroling is not still around. You just have to know where to look for it. And look no further than the great American cultural center-cum-New Abnormal town square: the shopping mall. (or Galleria, if you prefer to be elite.) The voices are singing and the bells are ringing to get shoppers in the mood to spend and consume till they drop.
You can even find a modern version of the Wassail Bowl. It's over at the food court, and it's called a self-serve soda machine. And it'll cost you.
Cheers and happy holidays to Sardonickists everywhere!
P.S. And on a lighter note... If Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn ever goes wassailing, it'll probably sound something like this:
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