Forgetting Our Great National Obsession

Man, do I ever feel faux-guilty. I was so busy watching and worrying over Hurricane Irma (when I wasn't shallowly and obsessively writing about Hillary and Ivanka, that is) that I completely, utterly forgot that yesterday was the anniversary of 9/11. I didn't realize the importance of the date until I switched on the local news last night. Usually they lead off with a gory highway pileup, or the latest grievous assault on (or theft of) a religious statue in the Bronx. But the minute I heard that solemn tolling bell soundtrack, I knew exactly what I had missed.

It was like the recurring nightmare I used to have as a struggling single mother: I'd either forgotten about Halloween, and my kids were the only ones in the school without costumes, or even worse, the kids woke up to a bare Christmas tree because Mom had forgotten to play Santa. Maybe a psychologist out there can interpret these anxiety dreams for me. Because truth be told, I still sometimes have them. even though my children have been adults for years.

I wasn't always so remiss about 9/11 on this blog. Without going through the archives, I'm pretty sure I've posted something inappropriate about it on all the requisite dates. Since I am a day late and a dollar short, I'll just offer up the following 9/11 anecdote before following up with a reprise of one of my older posts.

You might have read that our esteemed governor, Andrew Cuomo, has faced some criticism for yanking hundreds of New York State police troopers away from their normal patrols in order for them to stand around at the airports and train stations as actors in National Security Terror Theater. (The media has had to file Freedom of Information requests to get the specifics on this public relations gimmick, such as the $26 million cost overrun in the state police budget.)

A state trooper I know was one of those assigned to Grand Central recently. Before going to their assigned posts, however, his detail's first order of business was a special guided tour of the 9/11 memorial and museum at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. He told me that the objective was to get the troopers in the right emotional and patriotic frames of mind as they sussed out potential terrorists waiting in line for a train to Albany or a flight to Boise. Oh, and it was for Cuomo to look Oval Office-ready and for passengers to feel either safe or intimidated, as the case may be. The trooper told me he'd personally found the whole experience very weird, particularly the required museum tour. His main function turned out to be posing for selfies with out-of-state tourists.

On that note, here's a piece I wrote three years ago, to mark the opening of the 9/11 museum in 2014:

Atrocity Exhibition in the Gilded Age

It could always be worse, I suppose. At least they're not selling the "Twisted Metal" series of X-rated video games in the September 11 Memorial Museum gift shop. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a 9/11 souvenir shop. It will open its doors next week, to coincide with the grand opening of our Great National Shrine to Terror, appropriately located just blocks away from that other terror enclave known as Wall Street in lower Manhattan.

A dedication gala reserved for a class-spanning cavalcade of potentates, politicians, CEOs, corporate sponsors, emergency personnel and survivors was being held today.

But back to shopping. Among the mementos on sale are adorable search and rescue dog plushies. They're euphemistally being  labeled "rescue" animals for Disneyfication-of-atrocity purposes, due to their rapid redeployment as cadaver dogs after the tower collapses. 

And since the 9/11 gift shop is an equal opportunity purveyor, the puppies are available in both black Lab and yellow Lab. 

  The selection doesn't end with toys. For fashionistas anxious to show off their somberness for all the folks back home, the "Darkness" clothing label is offering a special line of tee-shirts and hoodies. This couture is not recommended for wearing upon dark skin, especially in Florida* and wherever the NYPD is on patrol.

And for those hopelessly romantic death-denialists out there, there's a wide variety of "Survivor Tree" jewelry, named after the oak tree damaged in the attacks and nursed back to health by some volunteer horticulturists.

  Finally,don't forget your WTC Map & Memorial Tote Bag. For only $20, you'll have a sturdy place to stash your 9/11 plushies, earrings, mug, cap, cell phone cover, mousepad, magnets, keychains and a wide variety of 9/11 Christmas ornaments.

Are you worried that the commercialization of one of the most horrific crimes in history might be too intense for the sensitive shopper?  Well, you can ease yourselves. Because all proceeds will be used for the outrageously expensive upkeep of the 9/11 Museum itself. You see, the multimillion-dollar tax deductible predatory loans investments from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and virtually all of corporate America apparently are not enough to keep Terror alive, year after year, for all eternity.

 And heaven forbid that any proceeds are used to give away tickets to those New Yorkers who can't afford the $24 price of admission. The indigent population in the Wealth Disparity Capital of the World will get nothing. The ailing, poisoned first responders of 9/11 will not be seeing any additional proceeds either, despite the fact that their badges and insignia are being honored as religious artifacts and sold at high markups in the gift shop.

To be totally fair, though, Museum directors are not charging admission to children. They also don't recommend attendance by children under the age of 10. The exhibits are that disturbing.

If you can't or won't visit the glorified crime scene, you can still order 9/11 stuff from the gift shop website. And should your merchandise arrive in a mangled condition, there's a 45-day window for returns or refunds. Your complete satisfaction is their goal.

But, I digress from the sanctity of this surreal occasion.

In the 9/11 museum itself, the thrills will be muted, and open displays of  enjoyment will not be tolerated. Taking a cue from peep show culture, long-suppressed graphic video and audio of human beings in the act of death will be only available for discreet viewing in private rooms. Similarly, the unidentified human remains newly arrived from the city morgue for museum interment will be hidden from rubber-neckers who cannot prove that they are immediate family. Fetishists will have to be satisfied using their limited imaginations as they ponder the grotesque tableaux of mangled fire trucks, orphaned shoes, melted girders, and other relics and artifacts of mass murder. The mausoleum within the museum is off-limits to mere gawkers.

And J.G. Ballard must be rolling in his grave.

The late novelist actually presaged the 9/11 museum and the dystopian decadence of the 21st century Gilded Age in his fiction. His novel "The Atrocity Exhibition" included a controversial short story called "Crash". The plot, such as it is, takes place amidst a museum display of horrendous car crash memorabilia.

"All over the world," Ballard wrote, "major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized in its most digestible form."

Unlike the glitzy 9/11 shrine, we never do find out whether Ballard's atrocity exhibition of gruesome relics is real, or whether it's simply a figment of the protagonist's psychotic imagination.  First published in Great Britain in 1970, the book was considered so disgusting that copies were soon yanked from store shelves and destroyed. The pre-9/11 world apparently was not yet ready for science fiction pornography.

The late Christopher Hitchens described Ballard as a "catastrophist" who specialized in "dark materials," (as in the 9/11 Boutique "Darkness" clothing line) his inspiration flowing in a straight line from Jonathan Swift. In his review of Ballard's short story collection, Hitchens wrote:

Another early story (though not represented here: the claim of this volume to be “complete” is somewhat deceptive) in something of the same style, “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” ignited a ridiculous fuss in the very news rags whose ghoulish coverage of her life Ballard was intending to satirize. Randolph Churchill led the charge, demanding punishment for the tiny magazine that printed it. This “modest proposal” furnishes one of many clues to a spring of Ballard’s inspiration, which is fairly obviously the work of Jonathan Swift. In 1964 he even wrote an ultra-macabre story, “The Drowned Giant,” which tells of what happens when the corpse of a beautiful but gigantic man washes ashore on a beach “five miles to the north-west of the city.” The local Lilliputians find cheap but inventive ways of desecrating and disfiguring the body before cutting it up for souvenirs and finally rendering it down in big vats. One might characterize this as the microcosmically ideal Ballard fantasy, in that it partakes of the surreal—the “Gulliver” being represented as a huge flesh statue based on the work of Praxiteles—as well as of the Freudian: “as if the mutilation of this motionless colossus had released a sudden flood of repressed spite.” In the pattern of many other stories, the narrator adopts the tone of a pathologist dictating a detached report of gross anatomy. A single phrase, colossal wreck, is a borrowing from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which may be the closest that Ballard ever came to a concession to the Romantic school.

 Another and nearer literary source is provided by the name—Traven—of the solitary character in “The Terminal Beach.” This is one of two tales—the other being “One Afternoon at Utah Beach”—in which Ballard makes an imaginarium out of the ruined scapes of World War II. Like his modern but vacant cities full of ghostly tower blocks (he is obsessed with towers of all sorts) and abandoned swimming pools, the Pacific and Atlantic beaches, still covered by concrete blocks and bunkers, furnish the ideal setting for a Ballardian wasteland. The beach in the first story has the additional advantage of having been the site of an annihilating nuclear test. The revenant shapes of long-dead Japanese and Germans are allowed a pitiless flicker before their extinction.

 It was such an innocent time, that Pre-9/11 Era. And then Everything Changed (TM). We were speed-read the Shock Doctrine. The NSA revved up into high gear. The Bill of Rights crashed and burned and became a relic practically overnight. (all except the Second Amendment, which immediately began consuming the other nine, course by voracious course.)

Disaster Capitalism ran wild.

 “Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us. Nothing can change who we are as Americans.” -- Barack Obama, 9/11 Museum dedication.

 “The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on its shroud." -- J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.
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* This was a reference to the murder of Trayvon Martin in the "stand your ground" Sunshine State. He was shot to death by neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman because he was wearing a hoodie while walking while black.

Ivanka: DOTUS or DOOFUS?

Ivanka Trump has been in a fashion quandary lately. What designer costume should she be today: Daughter Of Oligarch Fuming Under Siege (DOOFUS), or Daughter Of The United States (DOTUS)?

Ever since her doting daddy dissed the Dreamers, and banned transgender people from the military, Ivanka had been forced into semi-hiding. It was no longer safe for her to turn her exclusive Washington neighborhood into her own private catwalk, because the neighbors were all out there protesting. There hadn't been a front page spread about her latest outfit in The Daily Mail for at least a week. (Not that I'd been keeping count, mind you, but it suddenly dawned on me that their breathless fashion, hair, and makeup coverage, complete with the tasteful price-tags attached to everything for our resentful pleasure, were suddenly gone.)

So you can imagine my relief when Ivanka and her male model husband Jared Kushner reappeared on the Kalorama catwalk Saturday to go out for another fashion jog in their fashion togs. They were a perfect match in "somber" gray to show their solidarity with those victims of Hurricane Irma who might have lost their third vacation home in Naples or on Marco Island. DOTUS even wore color-coordinated gray/black sneakers to offset her gray leggings, with just the right trimming of black funereal mesh and a spiffy black Secret Service cap to match her security detail. Even her Daddy was happy to coordinate, bragging that "We're prepared at the very highest levels!"

 Jogging the Jarvanka Way

DOTUS unfortunately regressed into DOOFUS style (in coordination with Labor Day) when her one feeble claim to liberalism - "empowering" working women - took a powder. She disabused us of the media-marketed notion that she was some kind of moral force keeping Daddy's worst instincts at bay when she chirpily announced that the female wage equity she espouses sadly does not apply to the women who work directly for her Daddy in the White House. Also, she totally agrees with the overturning of the Obama rule which ostensibly forces CEOs to reveal male/female pay disparity.This fashion faux pas has elicited all the pout-rage you'd expect from the mainstream media market. They hate it whenever their groupthink narrative is challenged.

As a reward for loyally succumbing to Daddy, Ivanka was released from her East Coast bubble and allowed to accompany Daddy to North Dakota for another one of his pseudo-populist rallies. Because if they can't appreciate her in the Beltway, there's always still the Heartland to charm and fool and dazzle.

And even more sadly, her planned trip to China, where she is adored as the Great White Capitalist Goddess of Glamor and Virtuous Greed, had to be cancelled. I suppose we can blame it all on unfashionable North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, and Daddy's lecturing China about their need to do more to contain him.

But lest you feel too betrayed or let down, you will be happy to know that the umbel never falls too far from the hemlock - because DOTUS still tweets. She is particularly fond of sending out her very special thoughts and prayers, if not her actual Self, to wherever climate change disasters strike. She is also very busy maintaining her website, which is neatly divided into the categories which are most pressing and important to struggling, desperate people: Style, Work, Home, Play, Travel, Wise Words and Shop. So your only quandary is which category to relish first.

"How to be present for your family when you travel all the time" immediately piqued my interest, so I proceeded to relish without another thought. (The site will do that to you, so caveat emptor)

Ivanka, or maybe an underling just pretending to be Ivanka, interviewed an ESPN personality named Jenna Mayo, who has boldly missed Thanksgiving with her family for the last eight years in a row.  How much more empowering does it get than that? The trick is to be absent and present at the exact same moment in time through the magical powers of selfishness and marketing and hypnosis - and let's not forget that old standby: the infliction of tons and tons of maternal guilt. In her preferred new position as DOTUS, Ivanka adds just the right buzzwords so necessary to put an identitarian neoliberal sheen on things:

Working hard in a male-dominant industry, Jenna has always aspired to set an example for women and girls that they should not be intimidated to choose a career in which they’re the minority. As a wife and now mom of two, Jenna manages to invest in both her family and work at the same time—even when she’s on the road.
“People want to feel loved, valued, missed and important,” Jenna says. “When I’m away, I want to make sure my husband and kids feel that. It’s my responsibility as a wife and a mom.”

When you're a member of the Trump crowd, your most important narcissistic concern is to make sure that other people understand that you and your interests are always more important than other people's needs. What better way to sell narcissism as a virtue than to make sure it starts right in the bosom of your own family?

According to DOTUS, there are no five stages of grief to manage in kids who miss their absentee moms. There are instead five ways to bolster your own ego by pretending to care about your needy spouse and offspring.

1. Follow the "Love Languages": leave notes for the children. Stock the fridge to show solidarity with your selfless husband's life of service. Be careful about giving too many gifts to the kids, though - otherwise you might spoil them. Quality time and physical caresses can always be accomplished in the intervals between trips. You'll have them absolutely begging for it!

2. Be in touch daily: use Face Time in lieu of the Beanie Babies that Daddy used to bring you after all his business trips. Naturally, your own particular mother was always at home, taking care of you, and later trying to unload your worthless Beanie Babies as a way of tax-deductible charitable giving to unseen poor children during Christmas-time.

3. Get creative: whenever you go on TV, hold up up a sign that says "I Love Kale." You cleverly think that the all-important TV audience will thereby see you as a caring, hands-on mother whose family's nutrition is her top priority, even though you're a busy, famous star. It will make your kids so grateful that you are not at home. Also, be sure to send your son pictures of all the planes and trains that you get to ride on. (because despite your crusade of empowering women, your own daughter apparently would not be empowered by such things.)

4. Leave notes: be very original and be repetitive in a Goebbelsian kind of way. Write  "I love you" over and over and over again. Leave these notes, along with your favorite Bible quotes, in their lunchboxes or backpacks. And they will be both embarrassed and grateful that you are not at home.

5. Always give your neglected loved ones something to look forward to. Schedule date night with your husband around your own hyperactive schedule. Pretend that Monday morning is really Saturday night. He'll never know! He will appreciate you for it, as he glumly sits at home and pines for you and is not out having an affair. 

And always remember to never forget that Ivanka is the good Trump whose main accomplishment in life is to make you glad that you're not a rich ignorant asshole like Daddy.

This guy can't even manage his own website, let alone talk without making the hand gesture that matches his mouth that matches his you-know-what.

Hillary Storms Onward

Poor Hillary Clinton can't catch a break.

Just when she was all set to claim entitlement to saturation media coverage of the latest version of her life, a hurricane named Irma is sucking it all up instead. Irma even has the nerve to totally crush Florida, which Hillary also memorably lost to her favorite stalker, Donald J. Trump. Didn't Irma get the message that there's a special place in hell for women who don't support other women? So Irma is either a Bernie-bro, a Putin troll, a James Comey FBI entrapment schemer, an Anthony Weiner sexting partner, or a Wikileaks dumpster fire that got way out of control.

Or probably all of the above. The important thing is that if something inconveniences Hillary Clinton, nobody else - not the homeless, the jobless, the drowned -  could possibly ever hope to reach the level of her sublime victimhood.

I don't plan on reading Hillary's book when it officially comes out. But judging from reviews of deliberately leaked copies, it is a nauseating combination of political revenge porn and self-pity. Not a good look. As a matter of fact, the speculative parodic review I already wrote concerning What the Hell Happened pales in comparison to the real thing. I was half-kidding when I predicted that she would also blame Obama for her loss. But she really goes there, chiding him for not abusing his office by hijacking the airwaves to deliver a  fear-mongering address about Russian interference in her coronation. 

She outlines numerous instances when she wanted to do something, but her handlers wouldn't let her. Her instincts and her intellect lost out every single time. Donald Trump was literally breathing down her neck on national television during a debate and she had to force herself to smile like a docile lady and keep quiet. She wanted to lash out at James Comey after he called her illegal email set-up "careless" but she had to keep quiet. Yada yada yada. She actually still cedes power to white male supremacy while pretending to fight against it even as she struggled to represent white male supremacy as the very first First Lady ever to ride her husband's coattails to the Oval Office.

Not a good look for someone who claims to have such unprecedented qualifications for leadership. Hillary was not and never will be a feminist with the courage of her own convictions.  

As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, "when a woman is named or elected to a position of power, she still represents the patriarchy; the lot of her female subjects/constituents/employees doesn't automatically improve. A queen (or a president) is not a woman first and foremost - she is an institution."

 A Clintonian restoration, with its neoliberal, plutocrat-friendly agenda, would have done little or nothing to elevate working class women.

De Beauvoir could have been forecasting Hillary's faux feminism, her sense of "it's my turn" aggrieved entitlement, and her current blame-game antics when she observed nearly 70 years ago:

She was promised compensations, she was assured that if she abdicated her opportunities into the hands of the man, they would be returned to her a hundredfold, and she considers herself duped; she accuses the whole masculine universe; resentment is the other side of dependence; when one gives everything, one never receives enough in return.

The snippet in Hillary's memoir which I find the most interesting and troublesome, though, was her claim that she was actually napping on Election Night as the returns came in. This is not a good look for a potential president who needs to stay awake and alert during critical national and international moments. Forget the 3 a.m. phone call. This dame couldn't even last past 9 p.m.

Was she hitting the bottle? She seems to admit, every chance she gets, that she does love her Chardonnay.

Was she on some other medications? Did Wolf Blitzer's stentorian CNN babble render her unconscious? Was she simply bored?

Perhaps she was just getting caught up on her beauty sleep in order to look her best at the Javits Center coronation gala. Perhaps she was lying about her election night snooze altogether.

I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. As Hillary herself famously scoffed about Benghazi, what difference at this point, does it make?

What I do know is that Hillary Clinton must be a bit short on the excessive cash needed to maintain herself and Bill and Chelsea and the grandkids in their lifestyles. Why else would she charge thousands of dollars for tickets to her book tour appearances? Most authors are only too happy to sign autographs for the price of just the book, score a few unpaid interviews, and then call it a tour.

But where there is chutzpah and where there are globs of money to be made, there is life in the old gal yet. So along with the book tour comes the political campaign to keep the centrist Democratic Party dream alive. Somebody's got to stand up against the growing anti-capitalist chorus for Single Payer health insurance, after all. So it might as well be Hillary. If she can't destroy something good, then what good is she?  She already managed to destroy the possibility for universal coverage once, during her husband's administration, so who says she can't try, try again?

I got an email from her just today, slugged "re: bravery" as though I were part of some ongoing trendy, insidery discussion. Hillary being Hillary, of course, she had the gall and the bad taste to immediately use the name of murdered Charlottesville activist Heather Heyer as a means to suck money off someone else's courageous dead body. In coordination with her book tour, Clinton is using her political action slush fund to "fight back" against the very hate and divisiveness which her tortured new memoir absolutely wallows in and perpetuates!

"Some days, it feels like the work left to do is insurmountable," she writes in the spammy email, probably typed out between exhausting sips of Chardonnay. "But if I've learned anything, it's that those (sic,hic) are the days we need each other* more than ever. That's one of the reasons we created Onward Together: to support smart, passionate activists who know what needs to be done and could use a little of our help to get there."

If you think Hillary Clinton would ever have given a dime to smart, passionate Bernie Sanders supporter Heather Heyer or any other anti-fascist, then I've got a ghostwritten memoir to sell you. Of course, what she really wants is money for her collapsed little eye-wall of  functionaries and campaign operatives, who are now doing such amazing work as collating maudlin quotes from other functionaries in a clunky new propaganda website called Verrit. (rhymes with Ferret.) 

Read the fine print: Hillary's slush fund will do nothing to make ordinary people's lives better today, or even tomorrow. It is classic neoliberal claptrap, a purely aspirational and intentionally vague public relations gimmick:

Onward Together works to build a brighter future for generations to come by supporting groups that encourage people to organize in their communities or run for office."

 Translation: give Hillary Clinton money to pay Clinton people a fraction of this money to inspire volunteer Clinton people to support other unpaid Clinton people. And if you're very lucky, some amazing shards of shattered glass ceiling might even eventually trickle down to your grandkids after you're long dead.

The designated grift sweepstakes winner for today is a group called Run For Something, (the hills?) which is designed to suck up money for only "good and necessary" causes, defined as winning more seats for centrist Democrats who are not in the Bernie Medicare For All Brigade. Oh and to get you even more inspired, click here to score a ticket to one of Hillary's own upcoming pity party/revenge porn appearances!

And while you're breathlessly waiting to see Hillary in the flesh, she suggests that you also do your mental health part and show your class solidarity by attending Broadway shows.

I've been fortunate enough (wealthy enough)  to see quite a bit of theater - if you get the chance to see Come From Away on Broadway, take it."

 By "you," she obviously doesn't mean people on fixed or low or no incomes. She means only those fellow Fortunates with enough disposable income to afford the three-figure price of admission to a hit Broadway show. Just by this suggestion alone, Hillary gives her own whole show away. Her appeal is both geographically and financially limited to the Acela Corridor/Wall Street and Silicon Valley/Hollywood.

But in her book, she nevertheless persists in claiming not to understand why her approval ratings stand even below those of her favorite stalker. It must be on account of her XX chromosomes and the vast, right wing He-Man Woman Haters Club. What other explanation could there possibly be?

Then again, this troubling confusion is probably understandable from a woman who says that her favorite reading material is mystery novels. She is a cozy closed-room puzzle unto herself, in dire need of an emergency dose of Hercule Poirot-level little gray cells to help her in the fine art of honest self-examination.

The hoped-for whirlwind of a comeback from a comeback from a defeat is barreling toward some mighty cold waters in the form of dismay from her fellow Democrats. Her book might be storming sales lists on Amazon this week, but all forecasts point to a rapid weakening to classic tropical depression status in the overstock bin.

But there will always be fine wine from Hillary's Zazzle collection. At only $6.65 a bottle, even the deplorables can feel the Clinton glow and afford to drown their sorrows with the Hillary Signature Star, Woman's Place White House, or Love Trumps Hate Heart (?) labels.

*oppressed wealthy elite donors of the superior knowledge class who couldn't care less about those annoying and demanding purists in the bottom 90%.

Detainees, Disposables, and DACA

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, famous for his long history of racism and xenophobia, was only too happy to give cover to Boss Trump Tuesday as he announced the end of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals).

But compassionate sadist that he is, Sessions added that the Death to Dreamers agenda won't be enforced until March, which should give Congress more than (ahem) enough time to do right by the 800,000 people who suddenly find themselves plunked back on the deportation list after being given a respite by the Obama administration. 

The relief granted to the important Latino voting bloc by the former president in an election year (2012) was never designed to be long-lasting. It was largely a result of the immense pressure from immigrant activists who threatened to withhold their votes from the Democratic incumbent unless he put his mouth where his money was. So he picked up his pen and he did the right pragmatic thing.

But, neoliberal stickler for boot-strapperism that he was, Obama made sure that signing up for DACA wouldn't be a walk in the park for the young immigrants. They had to jump through quite a few hoops. First, they couldn't have irresponsibly been born either too soon or too late. Anybody younger than 15 and older than 31 was out of luck. This is because the recipients of his selective mercy had to be either prime fodder for military service or smart enough to be in school full-time or lucky enough to have a job. They also had to have the financial wherewithal to pay a hefty fee for their temporary amnesty. Applications would languish for at least three suspenseful months. And most important, they had to come out of the shadows and admit their illegal status to the government.

So now that Trump's merciless brutality has collided with Obama's brutal mercy, the former president has bravely taken to Facebook to type out his displeasure. It's cruel, he says, to punish these young people who were unwittingly brought to this country by their irresponsible parents (read: sneaky immigrants with heavy accents who have probably not "assimilated".) Nowhere in his maudlin message does Obama explore the reasons why the parents entered the country with their kids in the first place. But that's not his point. His point is dog-whistling the message that some unqualified people still have to be sent a message. Mercy does have its limits, after all.

And therein lies my problem with DACA. It separates  "good" immigrants from "bad" immigrants, just as the "deserving" poor are artificially separated by policy-makers from the "undeserving" poor as an excuse to slash social programs. The liberal media's love affair with Dreamers, as they are dreamily known, helps paper over such horrendous realities as the private prisons where mother and child refugees from Central American government and gang violence are indefinitely detained pending court hearings on their refugee applications.

Rather than grant those detainees a reprieve, right before leaving office Obama made a prisoner exchange deal with the Australian prime minister, involving about more than a thousand Latino migrants currently being held in a US-controlled prison in Costa Rica, and and an equal number of Asian migrants, jailed on a couple of islands in the Pacific Ocean and in Papua New Guinea. These politicians were playing their own cruel game of international musical chairs with disposable human lives, forcing refugees to move even more many thousands of miles away from friends and relatives to gain their alleged freedom. "Transportation" of prisoners, as occurred in the bleak and brutal times of Charles Dickens, is alive and well.

The inmates of the Dickensian Berks County Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, remain incarcerated for months or even years, pending deportation back to their violence-ridden native countries. They're not included in the Australian/American human refuse swap, probably for fear of any more untoward publicity, such as that arising from the mothers' hunger strike last year. The strike ended only when ICE officials threatened to yank small children away from their desperate parents.

That episode in the annals of American mercy was largely ignored by media. Not so, however, was the story of Donald Trump's crude, rude, and dishonest attempt to renege on Obama's "dumb" deal with Australia - before he eventually went along with it. Or did he?

It seems that the globalized swap of human bodies is running into a roadblock. Trump officials who arrived on the Australian gulag at Nauru in July to "vet" refugees abruptly up and left after only three days of interviews. From Reuters:

“The U.S. deal looks more and more doubtful,” Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said. “The U.S. deal was never the solution the Australian government pretended it to be.”

Former U.S. President Barack Obama agreed a deal with Australia late last year to offer refuge to up to 1,250 asylum seekers, a deal the Trump administration said it would only honor to maintain a strong relationship with Australia and then only on condition that refugees satisfied strict checks.

In exchange, Australia has pledged to take Central American refugees from a center in Costa Rica, where the United States has taken in a larger number of people in recent years.

The swap is designed, in part, to help Australia close both Manus and Nauru, which are expensive to run and have been widely criticized by the United Nations and others over treatment of detainees.

To be fair to Obama, whose administration deported a record number of immigrants before the Latino voting population forced him to change course, he at least was seen as trying to expand DACA in 2015 in order to include the parents of Dreamers in the temporary amnesty scheme. But mercilessly brutal Texas officials sued and won, and the administration's subsequent appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court, resulted in a non-decision. And thus does the game of musical chairs with human lives continue unabated. The people in power are always loath to ever let any divide-and-conquer opportunity go to waste. The wielding of fear and resentment is their most valuable weapon.

 Sessions, for his own part, didn't waste the opportunity Tuesday to again spew the canard that "illegals" are invading our country to steal such wonderful jobs as picking fruit and washing dishes from "real" Americans. (No matter that the Dreamers are mostly educated and "assimilated" - for all intents and purposes, already naturalized citizens.)

As soon as Trump was elected on his anti-immigration platform, the American Civil Liberties Union began advising potential DACA applicants to think twice before signing up, and to also consult with an immigration attorney before doing so. Even under Obama, there were always risks to signing up as a Dreamer. An eventual rude awakening was a given.

But if, as some people hope and predict, the feckless Trump will never actually enforce his decision on DACA absent any congressional action (he will humanely "revisit" the issue in six months), the announcement still serves the purpose of absolutely terrorizing 800,000 potential deportees and their families. Thankfully, they learned how to organize a long time ago. They are visible, and therefore they will ultimately be victorious.

In all likelihood, his threat to the Dreamers is just the stick Trump needs to get Congress to appropriate billions of dollars for his never-ending Nightmare Wall.

***

Update: Due to the nature (downright nasty as in "deport yourself back to Mexico!" to "I'm a progressive, and certainly not a racist, but..."  of comments submitted in the past 24 hours, I've had no choice but to shut down this function for this particular piece.

I've noticed that such websites as Truthout and Naked Capitalism have done away with reader comments on all their articles entirely in recent weeks. and I hope I'm not forced to do likewise. But it's getting uglier than usual out here in cyberspace. Hate speech is not the same thing as free speech. I don't have to tolerate it, and neither should anyone else.

Norma Rae Revisited

One of the last Hollywood films to unabashedly showcase working class activism was released in 1979, on the very eve of the Reagan era neoliberalism that, in the coming decades, would effectively destroy the American labor movement.

Norma Rae, which won Sally Field her first Oscar for her portrayal of the title character, is based on real-life labor organizer Crystal Lee Sutton and the ultimately successful struggle of workers to unionize a J.P. Stevens textile plant in 1974. Despite many details, as well as dialogue lifted almost verbatim from a New York Times article about Sutton, (then known as Crystal Lee Jordan) the film bears the usual "this is a work of fiction and any connection to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental" disclaimer in the closing credits. As a result, Sutton herself never saw a dime from the film, which became a major box office hit. In that regard, too, it very much presaged the brutal backlash against working people that was to come.

Still, the movie stands out for its realism, from the pro-labor dialogue, to the cross-racial worker solidarity portrayed, right down to the depressing, paint-peeling company-owned abodes of the mill workers, who at the time represented nearly one third of the population of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. (Since the movie was shot in Alabama, no actual factory workers were needed as extras, of course.) Another irony is that the producer, 20th Century Fox, only forked out money for the film because it was drowning in record profits from the first edition of the Star Wars franchise, the escapist fantasy for the ages.

Another hint of the neoliberal swing from labor politics to the identity-driven politics to come was the film's marketing as a feminist story rather than a class story. Labor historian Jefferson Cowie writes that although class solidarity and worker solidarity were, in fact, the underlying themes of Norma Rae, "one of the most important aspects of the film is the subtle way that both individualism and feminism subtly trump workerism in the film. Rather than creating a solid foundation for the merging of gender and class, as (director Martin) Ritt had hoped for, this film was backed and marketed as a woman's picture. Like all Hollywood productions, the film focused on the rising consciousness of the lead heroine at the expense of the rest of the workers' efforts. Crystal Lee found this so problematic that she came close to suing Martin Ritt and launching a competing narrative of the events in collaboration with the Academy-award winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. The narration of political uplift also became the center of the marketing strategy."

The promotional poster, in fact, features a perky Sally Field, arms outstretched like a cheerleader, looking carefree and happy in skintight designer jeans, which were soon to be branded in department stores as "Norma Rae Work n Class Jeans!" 

The only trouble is that this triumphal image never happened in the actual movie, let alone in real life. Crystal Lee herself no longer worked at the minimum wage (then about $3 an hour) job at the textile mill she had helped to organize. This is the original advertising poster, which Fox distribution and marketing executives nixed as being too dangerously close to real working class angst:

In the movie trailer, the excited voice-over gushes: "Norma Rae is a survivor and for the first time in her life she has the chance to become something more - a winner!" 

This tripe not only presaged the neoliberal era, it presaged neoliberalism's ultimate excrescence - the win-at-any-cost persona and propaganda of our current pseudo-populist president, Donald J. Trump. Not for nothing were the anti-union mill owners of the South also among the most generous right-wing funders of the Republican Party. From Henry P. Liefermann's gut-wrenching Times article, which inspired the film:

 The industry, from floor sweeper to chairman of the board, reaches everywhere in the South. Senators such as Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, Herman Talmadge, governors such as John West, Terry Sanford and Jimmy Carter started their campaigns with the mill vote. Roger Milliken of Deering‐Milliken mills, the world's third largest, was one of Richard Nixon's finance chairmen in 1968 (as well as one of the John Birch Society's directors in 1962). It was the souls of the mill hands Billy Graham began with—he has gone on to Presidents and the world, they to such as the Great Speckled Bird Baptist Church in Greenville, S. C.

Mill hands are the bedrock of the Deep South's economy, religion, politics, industry. They are also the lowest paid industrial workers in the South and the nation. Their average income is $6,000 a year before any deductions; their average work day includes 20 minutes for lunch and two 10‐minute rest breaks; their average work week is six days, including a scheduled day of overtime; their average hourly wage of $2.79 is 35 cents less than the Southern average and $1.22 an hour below the national average for industrial workers, and their wholly non‐average life is plagued by alcohol, sex, violence and an image of themselves as deserving no better than what they get.

These mill workers got sick manufacturing high-end bedding for the rich and fulfilling contracts for damask tablecloths for the entire chain of luxury Hilton hotels.  And, Liefferman wrote, mill workers were even encouraged to bring their children to work in order to learn the trade.

Now, of course, much of this manufacturing work for what Forbes aptly calls Carl Icahn's "Undercover Empire" is increasingly offshored to workers, paid even less than Crystal and her pre-union co-workers were, to get sick as they manufacture Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren and Disney and Izod sheets and towels and clothing.
 
Crystal Lee Sutton would die of a brain tumor in 2009 at age 68, having escaped the brown lung disease which prematurely claimed the lives of so many of her former co-workers and generations of members of her own extended family.

The Roanoke Rapids, NC mill where she'd worked and agitated had shut its doors six years previously, in 2003, eventually becoming subsumed in the WestPoint-Stevens conglomerate, which itself was taken over in bankruptcy by corporate raider (and Trump adviser) Carl Icahn, who continues to live long and prosper despite his felony record. As recounted in The Encylopedia of Forlorn Places, the building where Sutton and her co-workers fought for and gained their rights has fallen into disrepair, while many other factories of its kind were quickly demolished for fear of too many people remembering history.


The penultimate scene in the film version, in which the newly-fired and defiant Norma Rae jumps up on a table happened just that way in real life. For the first time in generations, the whole plant went quiet.

Crystal Lee returned to her work table to pick up her purse. Suddenly she pulled out a sheet of cardboard, and with her black marker lettered on it, “UNION.” She climbed on her table and slowly began to turn, holding the sign high so the side hemmers, terry hemmers, terry cutters and packers could see what she had written.

That's what she was doing when Drewery Beale came to get her, found her on the table, angry, afraid, close to tears, holding her “UNION” sign. Later that night Chief Beale would take Crystal Lee to jail, book her on disorderly‐conduct charges, and the union organizers would came to bail her out. Weeks later the charges would be dropped, her firing taken before the N.L.R.B. by the union, and she would be on unemployment, the family living only on Cookie Jordan's salary.

That mill might be falling down today, but Crystal Lee's memory lives on, especially at Allemance Community College, where a museum has been established in her memory. 

Crystal, Thinking

 ***

Norma Rae is currently available on the Filmstruck streaming platform, which is also showcasing several other rarely aired labor films this month, including Salt of the Earth, about striking New Mexico mine workers, and Barbara Koppleman's iconic Harlan County USA.

GOP Stupidly Asks If We Want Socialized Healthcare

For some reason, the National Republican Campaign Committee sent me a "flash poll" the other day, asking "Do You Want a Government Takeover of Healthcare, Yes or No?" (They obviously don't read this blog.)

The first time I pressed Yes, all I got was one of those annoying error messages, the bland equivalent of a "Danger Danger, Will Robinson, Does Not Compute!" warning siren. Nevertheless, I persisted, and after a couple more tries, I finally got my "vote" counted. (I think.) I know, I know, it was nothing but a ham-fisted push poll to get more money and gin up more resentment by Have-Not white people against Have-Not brown and black people. But nasty person that I am, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to mess even briefly with their race-baiting algorithms. It felt therapeutic for all of five minutes.

Naturally, they want to warn their base that the corporate Democratic Party has been completely taken over by Bernie Sanders in the dead of night, and that his Medicare for All bill has a fantastic chance of passing, and that the luxuriously appointed medical suites of the rich are about to turn into Siberian forced labor camps.

"The leftist dream is gaining more traction with the Democratic Party every day. Even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agrees it should be on the table. We need to let these extreme leftist Democrats like Schumer and Bernie know that Americans refuse to support a single payer health system," the email hilariously warned.

Just a few points:

-The Republicans need the Democrats as much as the Democrats need the Republicans. GOP hyperbole against such Wall Street extremists as Schumer saves the Democrats themselves the trouble of bashing the real left wing, which does not naturally reside within the Democratic Party.

-Something being "on the table" is politician-speak for an appetizer made out of such fake ingredients as thin air.

-The majority of Americans do, in fact, now support single payer government health coverage. Of course, the GOP's own twisted definition of "American" is the white, the whole white, and nothing but the white - or more specifically, the party's wealthy clients and donors. They're banking on the base being willing to starve or die for the plutocracy rather than see black and brown people score a trip to the doctor. "Let them eat resentment" just about sums up the Republican platform.

-Although Bernie Sanders has yet to release his long-promised Medicare for All legislation, the word is that it will be far less inclusive than John Conyers's HR 676, which now has the support ("on the table") of the majority of House Democrats. 

According to Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Plan, Sanders is instead going the Barack Obama sellout route by offering to compromise with the privateers and the profiteers as a totally unnecessary and weak starting point in reform negotiations. Sanders is walking the tenuous line between serving the citizens of this country and serving his Senate colleagues in the exclusive millionaires' club to which they all belong.

Flowers writes:

When it comes to the healthcare crisis, the smallest incremental step is National Improved Medicare for All. That will create the system and the cost savings needed to provide universal comprehensive coverage. Throughout history, every movement for social transformation has been told that it is asking for too much. When the single payer movement is told that it must compromise, that is no different. The movement is demanding a proven solution to the healthcare crisis, and anything less will not work.

You can write to Sanders here. With any luck and with any human decency, he will take your concerns and your pain a lot more seriously than the Republicans and the Wall Street Democrats currently do. And keep in mind, of course, that he is no populist savior; like all politicians, he is a mere instrument and a public servant. All the billionaire donations in the world do not translate into actual votes, as Hillary Clinton could very ruefully tell him.

With so many people now taking matters into their own hands and offering their own powerful helping hands in flood-ravaged Houston, what better time than now to build on this newfound solidarity? People of all ethnicities and skin colors and classes are proving that we're all in this together, that we can sink or we can swim together, and that class and race have always been mutually intertwined.

Before the catastrophic flooding, we'd already been taking the first important step: a widespread recognition, in the wake of Charlottesville, of the racist/oppressive/militaristic American past and how it has evolved seamlessly into the neo-feudal present of the most extreme wealth inequality in modern history.

We have a choice: we can use this crisis to become a more humane country, or we can allow the privateers and the profiteers to use it as just one more excuse to crush people into ever deeper levels of submission.

Carpe diem.

Taken At the Flood

The waters in Texas were still rising, and thousands of people were still stranded or worse, but it's never too soon for the disaster capitalists of the plutonomy to begin licking their chops over all the potential windfall profits they can take from the thousand-year storm known as Harvey.

If New Orleans could privatize its entire public school system after Hurricane Katrina, just imagine the possibilities for the fifth largest metro area in the country. Houston, which boomed on climate-changing oil in the first place, can surely reinvent itself once the flood waters subside and all the disposable people - like the homeless, the old, the immigrant, and the unemployed - are but misty water-colored memories. 

Look on the bright side, advise the financiers and economists who dished on the future of south Texas to the New York Times. This epic flood is just a glitch in the never-ending march of progress!  Sure, there will be a temporary hiatus in Houston's economic "recovery" - dividends for the rich gained in large part from an orgy of pollution, deregulation policies not conducive to public safety, and ever-stagnating wages.

 The Houston metropolitan area, the nation’s fifth largest, accounted for 2.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product as of 2015, and that figure is almost certainly higher today. A good amount of that comes from trade: Texas accounts for about half of petroleum and gas exports, along with about a fifth of chemical exports.

But what about the billions of dollars in property damage and the fact that many of the storm's victims lack flood insurance? Not to worry. People have short memories, and pretty soon they'll be flocking back to town, escaping the cold winters and looking to buy or rent still relatively affordable homes.  An added Texas bonus: no state income tax. And Houston has no pesky zoning rules. 

But if other disasters are a guide, much of that lost potential will be diverted for now and made up later, through money spent on cleanup and rebuilding.

Moreover, factories and refineries are rarely running at full capacity, and as they come back online they can ramp up production to meet the backlogs that accrue. “Businesses have stockpiles and the ability to catch up,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics, a consulting firm.

This is rule number one of market neoliberalism: never let a serious crisis go to waste.

 As the floodwaters drain away and Texas shifts to clean-up mode, followed by a mammoth effort to replace what was lost, the daily modes of commerce will shift but not stop. Disruptions, displacement and property damage are quickly followed by federal aid and insurance checks.

 This is rule number two of neoliberalism: whenever things go terribly, terribly wrong because policy-makers have put profits over people, always look forward and never look back. No matter what happens to the little people, it will always be the best of all possible worlds for the obscenely rich. All they care about is the deluge of money sure to come their way as they suck up billions in dollars in no-bid government contracts to, when they're not lining their own pockets, construct even more shoddy dwellings at no personal cost to themselves and at much cost to the poor people left behind.

Disasters are just so cool:

In fact, when natural disasters do show up in economic data it is usually as a small growth bump a few months after the storm, when rebuilding accelerates and insurance checks are cut.

One might think that the scale of the damage would give future home buyers some pause. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, for instance, investors and homeowners had big questions about property values in coastal New York and New Jersey.

But thanks to boosterism by the likes of unindicted BridgeGate Governor Chris Christie, and the cornering of the property market by private equity sharks, real estate prices are booming. And it's during those manufactured, periodic crises known as government shutdowns that the vultures can really swoop down. When the beaches are closed to the public because of alleged lack of public funds, the rich and the powerful can still enjoy them with impunity. That's just what Chris Christie and his clan did this past July. These people no longer even care what the public thinks of them, of course, because their approval ratings were in the toilet to begin with. 

The predatory capitalist class is just taking a tip from Shakespeare's Brutus, who cynically remarked back in the day: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Or, as one financial wag put it about a millennium later in Citigroup's infamous study of the New Plutonomy:  "A rising tide lifts all yachts." 

***
To my readers in Texas: all my good wishes go out to you. This feels very personal to me. I lived for an extended period in Houston and have made frequent visits to Austin and the Hill Country, where I also have family. We went through some pretty severe record flooding here in the Hudson Valley of New York in 2011, in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene. But it was not even remotely close to what Texans are experiencing. I can only imagine what you must be going through.

To everybody else: please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or the charity of your choice.(see comments below.)