Off With Their Heads

 What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

While the American punditocracy is busy deciding which insipid courtier won the vice presidential debate  - was the "pivotal moment" the fly resting on Mike Pence's stiff white coif, or was it Kamala Harris bragging about all the generals and reactionary Republicans who are backing Joe Biden? - the rest of the country is wondering when the hell they'll be getting more Covid-19 relief.

As aristocratic scolds like Michelle Obama love to remind us all day and every day, our job as citizens is not to make strident demands for guaranteed health care, housing and food. It is to Vote for a more "soothing" Joe Biden as if our lives depended on it, even more than we depend on food, health and shelter. Because choosing a third party candidate, such as a Green, who supports universal health coverage and a pro-environment, antiwar agenda would just be, Mrs. Obama chided this week, simply "throwing away your vote."

That statement pretty much tells you what the country is really for. And it ain't for you. What is an election for, after all, but for the lesser people to give the quadrennial stamp of legitimacy to a cabal of princes and wolves?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also made it absolutely and chillingly plain this week that her priority is not restoring the nation's actual people to health, but to restore her exiled Democratic Party to power. Sending those $1200 relief checks to people struggling to pay their bills would only make Donald the Usurper look good, the same way that Henry VIII tried to make himself look good 500 years ago by handing out baskets of leftover food to the poor at Christmastime.

That was a monarchy and this is a democracy, by golly, so Madam Speaker is not about to stoop to Noblesse Oblige - not when she views the deliberate withholding of direct cash aid to hundreds of millions of people as just the right hook to get them out there to vote. And they say King Donald is the demented one, the way he cut off the desultory-at-best negotiations on pandemic relief between her and Treasury Chancellor Steve Mnuchin in a fit of steroid-enhanced pique.

But since wealthy people still have to get around their playground of an exploited planet, Pelosi and Mnuchin were reported to be feverishly working on a stand-alone bailout of the polluting airline industry. Airline stocks soared anew as these two courtier/oligarchs renewed their negotiations. This was despite the fact that Pelosi had previously denounced negotiating Covid relief in such separate, limited packages, because "they (the party currently in power) don’t want to put food on the table and rent in the pockets of the American people, crush the virus, support our heroes, and the rest.”

Because here's the thing. Stand-alone stimulus checks sent out to needy Americans would bear Donald Trump's name on them, and could conceivably garner him extra votes. It's much better, Pelosi insinuated, to draw out the mass hardship for several more weeks or months to achieve the noble goal of Joe Biden winning the election.  If Nancy Pelosi can make enough people too hungry, homeless, terrified, desperate or disgusted to follow Michelle Obama's hectoring advice to get out there and vote, then at least they won't be voting for Donald Trump.

(Update: As I was writing this article, Pelosi had flip-flopped - once again - to calling for a broader stimulus package, including checks. I believe that this topsy-turvy negotiation process is mainly theater, to keep us properly gaslit as we wait in suspense for the barest kind of relief, and then both sides can declare victory.)

 When you hear them warn that "everything is at stake" in this election, maybe they can make you forget about the big juicy steak you can't afford.

What Pelosi and the Democrats are essentially saying is that American children going to bed hungry or families getting evicted for just a little teensy while longer is certainly better than having Trump in the White House for another four whole horrible years. Let them eat Biden, who promised his Wall Street donors that under his rule, "nothing would fundamentally change." 

This is being sold as a choice that we can all believe in.

 As the Red Queen lectured Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared to which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

Because the United States, ranking first or near-first in the world in Covid cases, despite having the most expensive health care system in the world, is not the "slow country" which the Red Queen scoffed at, nor is it even (not quite yet anyway) among the "shithole countries" that King Donald sneered it.

"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place," she lectured to the panting, befuddled Alice."If you want to get somewhere else, you have to run twice as fast." 

 

And political courtiers talking fast and folksily (yet wolfishly) out of both sides of their mouths is also an absolute must if the princely enterprise that is America can continue to thrive, and so that the political courtiers can fulfill the great American meritocratic dream of one day becoming full-fledged princes and media moguls themselves.

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."

(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.