Making Amerika Grate Again

Donald Trump doesn't read, and he is such a lousy speller that he can't even get through 140 Twitter characters without attaking (sic) the inteligence (sic) of the average person. So it should come as no surprise that he would want everyone else in the country to rise to the level of his own incompetence. 

In his militantly capitalistic crusade to make Amerika grate again and hate again, he aims to turn the federal Department of Education into the Bureau of Planned Ignorance. He has thus chosen a more incompetent (though much richer) person than himself to implement the transformation.  But since even Donald Trump must realize deep within his lizard brain that Betsy DeVos is an intellectual looser (sic) as well as a woman, he has provided her with her own special reverse amanuensis to help her complete the destruction.

You didn't really expect her to do any actual work in her new job, did you?  After all, she and her family have already donated a cool $2.25 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, and another $900,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She herself reached in to her deep pockets and personally gave a combined $1 million bribe to 21 of the Republican senators who voted for her confirmation on Tuesday.

But more about her manly ensis, one Jerry Falwell, Jr. He was Trump's first pick to kill public education, but he turned down the job in order to enjoy the continuous freedom to grift public funds and to game the federally guaranteed  loan program for his own Liberty University students. He is one of the country's leading deans of the Church of Getting Wealthy With Jesus, a/k/a The Moral Majority.

Like Trump and Betsy DeVos, he inherited his wealth directly from his daddy. Like them, he'd spent a lot of time bribing politicians to do his bidding before finally figuring he could just cut out the corrupt middleman and screw the public all by himself. And he won't even need to be confirmed by the Senate before he becomes the de facto dis-education commissioner!

That's because Trump appointed him to lead a task force whose sole purpose is to divert public money from public schools and funnel it into private institutions... like Liberty University. Since Betsy DeVos herself has no experience in education, Falwell will not in fact be taking much, if any, dictation from her. He'll be doing all the diktating. 

Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Falwell manfully and humbly boasted that his task-master force "will be a big help to her and do some of the work for her."

Forget George W. Bush's pathetic question, "Is our children learning yet?" Because Jerry Junior's mantra is going to be "Is our children hating yet?" Just in case those godless librul courts do overturn Trump's travel ban on Muslims, Falwell aims to get Amerikan students locked, loaded, and ready. After the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015, he suggested that the kids start packing concealed heat.  “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them,” he fumed at the time with all the rapturous Christian fundamentalism he could muster.

While Amerika's children are reaching for their guns to kill terrorists and grizzly bears, Falwell will do his gosh-darnedest to curb the godless overreach of the federal government at the same time that he's playing God and dictating the moral behavior of young people.

At his own institution, students are not allowed to have "sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman." But given that 65,000 of them take all their courses over the Internet, enforcing this rule must be a truly awesome task for him. So perhaps in his new gig, Falwell can get the 17 recently unified klans of the Inteligence Community (sic) to help him out with his peeping tom duties.
 
Like Trump, Falwell abhors the freedom of the press, especially at Liberty University. When students criticized his endorsement of The Donald last year, Falwell censored the college newspaper and removed a column critical of Trump.

Censorship is already gearing up to be one of the core governing principles of the overreaching Trump regime. When the Senate voted right after Betsy DeVos's confirmation to officially muzzle one of their own -- Elizabeth Warren -- for daring to quote Coretta Scott King's criticism of Attorney General Designate Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, you sort of get the inkling that the rest of us might also be in deep, deep trouble.

There is apparently a rule in the Upper Chamber which forbids members from condemning one another's behavior. That is really kind of quaint, given how the tradition fetishist Senators are so willing to overlook their president's serial assaults on common human decency. But since Trump has proven that hypocrisy is a winning virtue, they'll join him with impunity, rather than bother continuing to pretend-scold him for his serial transgressions. Who can even keep up with them, especially when most of their time is taken up with legalized graft.
 
  Meanwhile, the abysmal treatment by Republicans of Amerika's Progressive Darling is predictably enriching the coffers of the corporate Democratic Party by fomenting yet another bout of hashtag outrage from the base. From the New York Times:

 Immediately, Democrats took up Ms. Warren’s cause, urging on social media for Republicans to “#LetLizSpeak.” Ms. Warren said on Twitter that Mr. McConnell had “silenced Mrs. King’s voice” on the Senate floor, to say nothing of “millions who are afraid & appalled by what’s happening in our country.” Within hours of being shut down on the Senate floor, Ms. Warren read the letter from Mrs. King on Facebook, attracting more than two million views — an audience she would have been unlikely to match on C-Span, if she had been permitted to continue speaking in the chamber.

Enjoy C-Span while you've still got it. (I could take or leave Facebook, myself.) And stock up on those books. Ajit Pai, Donald Trump's nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission, says he wants to take a weed whacker to the FCC. (So there's one more reason, as if you needed any more, to keep gas cans out of the vulgarian hands of the Trump mafia.) And that whacking job of Pai's could also well include the deliberate slowing-down of public information, such as C-Span feeds of congressional sessions. According to press freedom advocate Craig Aaron, Pai "has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue that has come before the FCC during his tenure. He’s never met a mega-merger he didn’t like or a public safeguard he didn’t try to undermine."

Is we detecting a pattern yet?

Cracking Up

An eon ago, when Trump was inaugurated, I wrote that he poses threats to two separate factions: the ruling class, and the rest of us. He threatens the movers and shakers with his big fat unfiltered mouth and he threatens the poor and working class with his cabinet of bloodthirsty military men and bloodthirsty economic terrorists.

Of course, his renegade crusade of disaster capitalism is nothing compared to the gigantic crack in the Antarctic ice shelf, which in a matter of months will spawn the most humongous iceberg ever seen on the planet. Trump is nothing if not a humongous media distraction from this imminent catastrophe.

His latest epic gaffe came over the weekend when Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News pundit who's made a financial killing with his grotesque series of Killing (Lincoln, Jesus, etc) bestsellers, asked him why he's such great pals with a killer like Vladimir Putin. (Never mind that Trump has never actually met Putin; the nightmare of the corporate media-political complex is that Trump isn't sufficiently interested in punishing Russia and killing Putin in the interests of American hegemony.)

Trump's blunt answer, "We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?" immediately sent shock waves through the upper echelons of power, and joy into the hearts of those few remaining critics of unbridled, state-sanctioned American violence and permanent war.

In an unintentionally hilarious editorial, the New York Times today suggested that when America kills people and starts wars and invades countries and imprisons more of its own citizens than anywhere else on earth, it does so out of inherently good intentions. Occasionally, passive mistakes are sometimes made by the unaccountable best and brightest in the humane process of destroying millions of lives.

 Trump, the Worst and the Darkest, has shirked one of his most important presidential duties by failing to tout American exceptionalism and declare the United States immune from the consequences of its own criminal behavior. The man whom they accuse of lying every single minute is suddenly not a good enough liar to suit them:

Asserting the moral and political superiority of the United States over Russia has not traditionally been a difficult maneuver for American presidents. But rather than endorsing American exceptionalism, Mr. Trump seemed to appreciate Mr. Putin’s brutality — which includes bombing civilians in Syria and, his accusers allege, responsibility for a trail of dead political opponents and journalists at home — and suggested America acts the same way.

The Paper of Record insists from one side of its mouth that the Trump administration cease and desist from its serial lying about inaugural crowd sizes, nonexistent massacres on our soil and all manner of "post-truth" atrocities. It then insists from the other side of its mouth that Trump blatantly lie about American war crimes, CIA coups and presidential kill lists. It insists that Trump ignore American brutality throughout the world and instead concentrate on Putin's much more limited brutality in his own oligarchic chunk of real estate.

The Times editorial board proceeds to twist itself into an even more convoluted pretzel:

 There’s no doubt that the United States has made terrible mistakes, like invading Iraq in 2003 and torturing terrorism suspects after Sept. 11. President Barack Obama often drew fire from Republicans for acknowledging the obvious — there are limits to American power and sometimes decisions to employ military force have resulted in “unintended consequences.” American drone strikes against extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, have sometimes killed civilians.

War crimes devolve into mistakes. Bombing people 26,171 times in just the last year alone has had the unintended consequence of making them permanently dead or maimed. All such targets are considered "extremists" due to the fact that they insist on breathing more oxygen that the American Imperium deems them entitled to. And thousands of droned dead civilians are downgraded into "sometimes" things. And this is so unfair, because the previous bomber-in-chief was still blamed by the opposition party for not bombing enough.

 But no American president has done what Mr. Putin has done in silencing nearly all independent media, crushing dissent, snuffing out Russia’s once-incipient democracy, invading Ukraine, interfering in the American election — apparently on Mr. Trump’s behalf — and trying to destabilize Europe. At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results, as when Germany and Japan evolved after World War II from vanquished enemies into trusted, prosperous allies.

Putin kills out of hatred and greed. America kills out of love and concern. As the Times now revises history, even Bush and Cheney wanted nothing more than to spread the goodness of democracy to Iraq, a country that they effectively destroyed, spawning the worst immigration crisis in all of global history. When the Clinton administration deployed its economic sanctions against that same country, Secretary of State Madeline Albright infamously declared that the resulting deaths of half a million children were worth it.

The Times editorial board makes no mention of how the Clinton administration and the "Harvard boys" actually enabled and sometimes personally profited from Russian crony capitalism after the break-up of the Soviet Union.  Among other culprits, Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers literally wrote the book on how to privatize Russia, create a handful of oligarchs, and immiserate the Russian people in the process. Neoliberalism (greed, inc.) has no national boundaries, and the media-political complex wants to keep it that way, despite all the hand-wringing and unfounded allegations of how Putin hijacked "our" election.

The newspaper finally stoops to one of the ruling class's favorite justifications for screwing the rest of us: if it's "bipartisan," then it's like a giant jar of sweet gooey Smuckers preserves -- it's just got to be good:

Mr. Trump’s willingness to kowtow to Mr. Putin in the Fox interview was too much even for the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who rebuked Mr. Trump, called Mr. Putin “a thug” and rejected any equivalence between America and Russia. The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, urged the F.B.I. to investigate Mr. Trump’s finances and personal ties to find out if the Russian government was blackmailing him.

Never mind that there is no evidence, yet, of Trump "kowtowing" to Putin. And the fact that the Washington Consensuals have not yet gotten their hands on Trump's tax returns or other documents to prove their allegations doesn't say much about our vaunted "intelligence community," does it? The longer they fail to produce their smoking gun, the more one suspects that there is no "there" there.

The cracks widen, all over the world, both figuratively and literally.

The Trumps: Neoliberalism's Perfect Distraction

Stop the presses. Donald Trump had the unprecedented gall this week to hang up on the Australian prime minister, right after rudely reneging on Barack Obama's noble promise to accept a token number of people who fled U.S. invasions and bombings only to find themselves imprisoned in a privatized Down Under gulag.

To hear the ruling establishment whine about this Major Incident in the Oval Office, the refugee prisoners might as well not even exist. The big hang-up is all about a shocking breach of etiquette at the heretofore pristine pinnacle of world power. And so begins the daunting task of scapegoating a scapegoating old goat.

By concentrating on the disastrous manners of Donald Trump and his entire clan, the mainstream media deflects attention from the ravages of Disaster Capitalism itself. It's more convenient to instill hate and fear of the new president than it is to examine the forces that produced him and other right-wing populist demagogues like him.

Entirely lost in the conversation about Trump's serial breaches of protocol is the long-standing breach of the social contract. The media, far from being the champions of social and economic justice, are falling all over themselves to scoop each other in the etiquette sweepstakes.

Establishment mouthpiece The Washington Post leads the Miss Manners pack by informing us that Trump is not only rude, he is unnecessarily rude. After all, the new president should be joyfully reveling in his new power, if not metaphorically chain smoking the post-orgasmic cigarettes of the traditional media honeymoon period.

It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief — a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

 Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.

The Post doesn't bother to inform its readers why the refugee crisis has become such a hot-potato issue among staunch and congenial democratic countries. Better for the newspaper and its billionaire owner not to mention that it is the global banking cartel and multinational corporations which have caused so much unprecedented death and injury and disease and famine and infrastructure collapse and despair through endless wars and cruel austerity policies. Millions of people have literally nowhere to go and nowhere to hide because of just one thing: violent American imperialism.

The borderless military-industrial complex, when not letting migrants drown in the oceans or starve to death in flight from their war-torn homes, has been warehousing them in private prisons in such out-of-the-way places as islands off the Australian coast. And the Australian P.M. is in as much of a pickle as Donald Trump, because of all the bad publicity surrounding the subhuman treatment of refugee prisoners by some of the same multinational corporations profiting from wars and austerity and plunder. He wants to play Musical Refugees, offshore some of the human detritus so he won't look so bad to his electorate. His country's cruel private refugee prison system is actually run by Serco, the same multi-tentacled British conglomerate that was awarded $1.25 billion by the Obama administration for the disastrous roll-out of its health insurance marketplace. The company got the contract despite its long history of fraud and incompetence.

But never mind all that pre-Trumpian crony disaster capitalism. Step right up and gaze over here, all you Washington Post consumers - it's Trump, the Rude and Unready!

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

“This is the worst deal ever,” Trump fumed as Turnbull attempted to confirm that the United States would honor its pledge to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center.

Forget the substandard inhumane living conditions endured by Disaster Capitalism's millions of victims. Because the Neoliberal Thought Collective has made them so easy to forget as they concentrate our collective wrath on such a limited man in such an artificially limited fashion.

But just in case you can't forget, please now direct your attention to the Old Goat's wife. Because Melania Trump is committing her own unprecedented breach of etiquette by refusing to move to Washington and play her assigned role as The Good Wife. As New York Times White House correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis tells it, things have gotten so bad that thousands of requests for private tours of the People's House have gone ignored. And worst of all etiquette breaches, they haven't even begun planning for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll yet! Professional concern-trollers are extremely concerned. Those dreaded passive-voice "questions are being raised."

 “She is far behind the curve compared to where modern first ladies have been by the time their husbands are inaugurated, in a quite unprecedented way,” said Myra Gutin, a professor at Rider University who specializes in first ladies. “We are in uncharted territory here.”

No mention of the uncharted territory that so many millions of migrants and refugees and myriad other victims of neoliberal policies are finding themselves trapped in all around this burning, drowning planet. (And just as an aside, the whereabouts of Melania Trump immediately pale in comparison to the revelation that First Ladies Studies seems to be an actual academic discipline.)

If you're not sufficiently incensed at Mrs. Old Goat's ineptitude and selfishness, let's move on to First Daughter Ivanka Trump. She is taking a ton of liberal heat for advertising her brand last weekend at the exact same moment that hundreds of refugees were being detained at the nation's airports.

  USA Today sniffed,

Timing is everything in politics, as French Queen Marie Antoinette learned two centuries ago, and Ivanka Trump was reminded of over the weekend.
"Let them eat cake!" mocked the tweets and Instagram comments on Trump's accounts, after she posted pictures of herself and husband Jared Kushner dressed to the nines — she in a $5,000 silvery gown by Carolina Herrera — just as chaos and protests erupted at international airports over President Trump's just-signed order barring refugees and travelers from some Muslim countries.

It's gotten so bad that Nordstrom's was even forced to discontinue Ivanka's clothing line.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times was especially miffed because Ivanka let her husband Jared Kushner fondle her butt during the photo shoot. "He (adviser Steve Bannon) has a seat on the National Security Council. Kushner has his hand on Ivanka Trump’s seat," Bruni quipped while urging his readership to go ogle the picture.

Last month, feminist writer Jill Filopovic opined in a Times op-ed that Ivanka is practically alone among her wealthy peers and friends (including Chelsea Clinton) for not only being a totally fake feminist, but also a totally dangerous fake feminist. Filopovic, while decrying Ivanka's privilege and her ghost-written parenting advice book for career women, and her disturbing attachment to the Old Goat, also takes a gratuitous neoliberal dig at poorer women, who seem to be reproducing like rabbits without benefit of wedlock:

Unlike in past generations when educated women had a harder time finding partners, today, college-educated women like Ms. Trump are more likely than their working-class counterparts to wed, and also like Ms. Trump, usually delay childbirth until after the wedding. With the fewer financial stressors that come with dual incomes or a single extremely high one these educated couples divorce less often than those with fewer financial resources, despite other findings that both groups have comparable dedication to the marital ideal.

Filopovic of course has no problem with the trickle-down feminism of other neoliberal wives and spawn of wealthy men -- such as Hillary Clinton and Chelsea. So I left a published comment on her annoying and hypocritical screed:

This piece could just have easily been written about Ivanka's friend Chelsea Clinton, had her Mom won.

Chelsea wrote a book too, hers aimed at young people. She urges them to travel the world and and take some time out to get to know the poor. Like Ivanka advising women of her own class, or those aspiring to her heights, Chelsea was addressing versions of herself. She lives in as much of a mirror-bubble as Ivanka and other meritocrats with a conscience.

No wonder that even during the height of the nasty bickering between their parents, both women pledged undying friendship to one other. Class transcends the Duopoly.

There are plenty of highly educated young society matrons in New York and Washington and the West Coast, spewing the same neoliberal hucksterism (Be your own Mommy brand! Be your own entrepreneur! Lean In! Sleep Revolution!) as Ivanka Trump -- who, let's remember, couldn't even vote for Daddy in the New York primary because she'd forgotten to divest from her Democratic party affiliation by the deadline.

 So it's convenient that Ivanka suddenly becomes just the right hook upon which to hang this critique of "fake feminism." Since her father is such a big creep, she's fair game. If she were a real feminist, she would have disowned him years ago. Right?

Anyway, I guess it'll be fun in a gross kind of way watching her try to play Cordelia to Trump's King Lear. All the world's a political stage and we the audience are, as ever, merely being played.

Of course, the lifestyles and coutures and excesses of the Trumps are not that different from the lifestyles of the Clintons -- or the Obamas, who just moved into a mansion two blocks away from Ivanka and her family. The main difference is in the virtue-signalling.

If you must bomb many countries for many decades, and if you must reward yourself and your plutocratic friends and donors with record gains at the expense of the huddled masses who elected you, you also must maintain the proper decorum and use the proper platitudes. Instead of constantly boasting and consuming way too much way too conspicuously, you utter such phrases as "Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" and "When they go low, we go high" and "I am my brother's keeper.org."

When you go on your luxury vacations, you never, but never, post pictures on Instagram. While cavorting on a private island, for example, you discreetly allow the rare casual capture of your cool dad image, complete with flip-flops and a backwards baseball cap. And voila, you will fill the Internet with some of that much-needed joy so seriously lacking in the Trump gene pool. 

You have to combine the fakery with folksiness and flattery and finesse. And the Trumps will never in a million years be able to do folksiness and flattery and finesse. 

Half the country despises them because they're such rich oafs. The other half loves them, because the Trumps prove that if even clueless oafs like them can be successful, then anybody can be successful. Even you. Better an honest huckster than a phony huckster.

Having Your Trump and Eating It Too

Tired of seeing Donald Trump's mug and the mugs of hysterical pundits screaming that Donald Trump is making the sky fall with his every Tweet, I finally called my cable company to cut the cord.

 I told the person on the other end of the line that I only wanted to get rid of the TV portion of my Triple Play Package, whose monthly rate had gradually doubled since I first signed up for it more years ago than I can remember.

I was immediately transferred to the special agent in charge of getting subscribers to change their minds. She asked why I no longer wished to avail myself.

"Two words," I replied. "Donald Trump!"

Of course, since I write for a non-living, I couldn't let it go at just those two words. So I launched into my tirade of news just not being news any more. I want, I said, to be informed, not to be screamed at by corporate stooges telling me I should be spending all my days and all my nights Being Very Afraid of Donald Trump. I not only want to break up with Donald Trump, I want to break up with the entire Trump Terror Franchise.

Plus, since I have a couple of streaming services, cable TV is getting more redundant by the minute.

"You do realize, don't you," the cable rep cautioned, "That the movies you can watch on Pay-Per-View are newer than the ones you can watch on Netflix."

I don't care, I said. I'm still trying to catch up on films that came out 50 years ago. For example, I finally got around to watching "Nothing Sacred" with Carole Lombard for the first time in my life on Sunday night.

Finally realizing that I am indeed one of those people who can actually survive without cable TV, the Special Agent in Charge of Retention relented and offered me a very special secret deal available only to loyal customers like me. I'd get $50 knocked off my monthly bill, keep all my cable TV channels, and as an added bonus, they'd upgrade my Internet service to a higher, more professional speed usually available only to the elite business class.

Great! So why wasn't I offered this deal before, I asked.

The retention agent chuckled knowingly. I seems that I had stupidly failed to read the offer in super tiny print when it first came out in 2011, delivered with my monthly bill (actually, it's more like bi-monthly, since it's on a 21-day cycle.) R-i-i-i-ght, I agreed.

So anyway, an independent contractor of the cable company showed up right on schedule with my new modem. Not that I've scientifically measured the speed with which I can now access all my political fund-raising emails from the various Democratic subsidiaries of Resistance, Inc. or anything, but I honestly can't tell any difference at all. However, since the shiny new modem now sitting under my desk is almost twice the size of the older model, I will be a dutifully happy consumer. I just have to remember to call them back a year from now to re-cancel, before they automatically double my rates again.

So, as they say in the media biz, here's your takeaway: when dealing with your cable company, always behave like Donald Trump. Bluster, complain, meander insanely, and scoff at the pitiful enticements. And then, if you're as lucky, and successful and, like, as smart as me and The Donald, you will win. You will make your checking account balance, if not great again, at least healthy enough to cash in on the latest Buy One Get One Free Doritos deal, and munch merrily away while you consume All Fear, All the Time.

And just as an aside, the next time a cable guy or gal comes to your house, find out if they're directly employed by your "provider" -- which, as often as not, also creates the content as well as delivering it. Since their technicians are increasingly members of the low-paid, no benefit gig economy, please consider giving them a tip on their way out.
 
Meanwhile, the New York Times has some helpful advice on adjusting your media diet in the Age of Trump. Do I need to tell you that an integral part of this therapeutic regimen is to stop visiting Facebook and Twitter and reading blogs like Sardonicky, and instead restrict your consumption to mainstream media outlets -- such as New York Times?

It's because editors are like hospital dieticians whipping up a bland diet. One source for Christopher Mele's piece appreciates editors who "select the top stories and spare him from reading 'the incomplete, incremental, second-rate stuff often published online.'" (translation: anything that criticizes the centrist neoliberal establishment or departs from the official Narrative.)

Too much information in the Age of Trump, warn media experts turned shrinks, is like junk food laced with crack cocaine. It is harmful to your health. The Times quotes one media therapist expert, Dan Gillmor, who suggests a Slow News Movement modeled after the Slow Food Movement. Just because there's an endless selection of news product on the shelves doesn't mean we have to cram our maws with every last bite: 

“We haven’t been asking anything of the news-producing group, namely journalists, who I would strongly argue should be more involved in managing the insane flow of information and misinformation,” he said. “It would be better if we had an approach that said, ‘Calm down.’”

Some of the advice is just common sense. For example, if you made the mistake of watching Donald Trump's prime time Supreme Court Nominee Show on Tuesday night, you probably lost at least some sleep. A cheese is a cheese is a cheese. By any other name it would smell as pungent, especially if you're already prone to acid reflux or the night terrors.

So any day now, Big Pharma will be marketing its psychoactive cornucopia to sufferers of News Fatigue Disorder... in glitzy ads on the Nightly News.

I think I'll just pretend that my cable cord is not still intact and settle down with a good book. I hear that dystopian lit is making quite a comeback, Not only is Orwell's 1984 reportedly already out of stock on Amazon, but Hannah Arendt's weighty Origins of Totalitarianism is also doing a brisk business.

Sweet dreams, everybody.

American Intifada

Intifada: from the Dictionary of Modern Arabic; a "tremor, shudder, or a shiver." Derived from the Arabic root nafada, which means to shake, shake out, dust off, to shake off one's laziness, to have reached the end of, to be finished, to rid oneself of something, to refuse to have anything to do with something, to break with someone." 

There's a whole lot of shaking going on these days. Judging from the mass protests erupting in the first post-inaugural week, millions of people are refusing to have anything to do with the new president. They want to break up with Donald Trump, and with good reason.

Of course, if Barack Obama had instituted a temporary ban on immigration from five out of the seven countries that he's bombed over the past eight years, there probably would have been very few grumblings from liberals. I doubt that protesters in the thousands would have stormed the airports on Saturday, bearing handwritten signs condemning the presidential decree and putting out their own welcome mat for Muslims. I can almost guarantee that this never would have happened, given the liberal apathy over his eight years of both open and secret war on countries with predominately Muslim populations.

For one thing, influential Islamophobic liberal comedian Bill Maher would not have tolerated it. He would have praised Obama for his pragmatism. Elected Democrats would have soothed that it's unfortunately sometimes necessary for scapegoated Others to give up some of their human rights in order that we Americans may feel safe and secure. For another thing, the calculating and nuanced Obama brain trust would have ensured that any protests would be immediately squelched by Homeland Security and local police forces operating out of the same Fusion Centers which tore down the Occupy camps and kept all manner of protests against NATO, corporate party conventions, police brutality and oil pipelines kettled or otherwise contained.

That thousands of people did storm the airports on Saturday in reaction to Donald Trump's now partially stayed draconian travel ban for Muslim refugees, students, workers and immigrants is testament to his own congenital inability to hide his bigotry. As I wrote a couple of months ago, Trump might be just the catalyst we need to start all kinds of protests against wars and presidential drone kill lists. His subtlety, planning skills and propaganda leave a lot to be desired. He doesn't do his atrocious thing behind closed doors, as previous administrations have done with their Friday night news dumps, their secret legal opinions and their secret FISA Court rubber stamps. He doesn't deliver glib, silver-tongued platitudinous speeches. Trump can do nothing but brag and bray about his perfidy, even inviting the media that he purports to loathe into his inner sanctum for atrocity photo-ops. How idiotically proud he looked holding up his executive order banning human beings from entering the US based solely upon their religious beliefs. His signature is as super-sized as his ego.

Trump is not original or smart enough to have to have issued his unconstitutional order right out of the clear blue sky. His action is only the most extreme outcome of decades of cruel American foreign policy toward countries with majority Muslim populations.

Ironically, though, Trump does seem intelligent enough to give credence to the theory of "blowback." By banning travelers from seven countries which the United States has both physically and economically terrorized in recent years, he tacitly admits that their citizens might be feeling a bit irate, especially if one of Obama's predator drones or bombs had vaporized one of their family members - simply because they were acceptable collateral damage, or belonged to Obama's invisible "Disposition Matrix." 

As a matter of fact, Trump was drawing directly upon the Obama Administration's own selection of the countries to be subject to travel restrictions. In 2015, the former president signed into law the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, which required more stringent vetting of travelers from the same seven countries now being singled out by Trump: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya.

Denigrating the Muslim faith has been an American media tradition for many, many decades. As Edward Said noted in Covering Islam, when Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, a lapsed Catholic, blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Muslim terrorism was immediately seized upon by TV networks and newspapers as the likely culprit. 

McVeigh himself had perfected his pathological violence four years earlier, when he'd helped massacre a group of trapped Iraqi soldiers, and taken photographs of their corpses for his own personal collecting pleasure.

After September 11, of course, Muslims became even fairer game. Few people objected when George W. Bush invaded Iraq based not only on the false reports of weapons of mass destruction, but on the widespread false belief that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on our soil. But neither had people objected when, pre-9/11, Bill Clinton bombed a baby formula factory in Somalia and Madeline Albright crowed that 500,000 Iraqi children dying as result of American sanctions was "worth it."

Islamophobia has been drilled into Donald Trump's skull by the media he now pretends to despise every bit as effectively as it has been drilled into the heads of much of the Western news-consuming public. We have been taught to believe that Islam is one all-encompassing culture which regulates every nation in which it is the predominate faith. But just as there is no such thing as a Christian country, there is no such thing a "Muslim country." 

Edward Said wrote of media coverage:

Looming over their work is the slippery concept, to which they constantly allude, of "fundamentalism," a word that has come to be associated almost automatically with Islam, although it has a flourishing, usually elided, relationship with Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. The deliberately created associations between Islam and fundamentalism ensure that the average reader comes to see Islam and fundamentalism as essentially the same thing.

Rarely is "radical Islam" ever even defined in media accounts. If few people realize that Wahhabism is the most right-wing form of Islam, can it be any surprise that a voracious news consumer like Donald Trump would also be so unaware? Can it be any surprise that oil-rich American trading partner and arms purchaser Saudi Arabia, which harbors the largest concentration of Wahhabists, was not on Trump's banned list? After all, Obama brokered the sale of $115 billion worth of arms and training to the Saudis, who are now using them to slaughter those newly-banned and impoverished Yemeni immigrants and refugees. Obama completed 42 separate deals with murderous Saudi autocrats. And suddenly, newly-enraged liberals are out there protesting our new autocratic deal-maker of a president. It's a miracle.

 As far as Trump and many millions of Americans are concerned, Islam is a perfectly acceptable and natural enemy when it resides in Middle East locales which are either lacking in oil resources or are not willing to deal with or kowtow to American power. Islam became the go-to scapegoat and new casus belli for the money-hungry military-industrial complex once the Soviet Union collapsed -- ironically enough, because of its occupation of Afghanistan and the ensuing campaign by CIA-backed jihadists in what non-church-going Ronald Reagan himself called a "holy war."

As chronicled by Karen Armstrong in Fields of Blood, Reagan told a conference of evangelical Christians in 1983 that the Soviet Union was the evil empire, and that Osama bin Laden's mujahadin fighters were the good guys.

Fast forward a decade, post-Soviet collapse, and as Edward Said wrote,"Small surprise that the Sunday New York Times 'Week in Review" headlined January 21, 1996 issue with 'The Red Menace is Gone. Here's Islam.'"

Fast forward two more decades, and the Obama administration began its open secret of an assassination-by-drone crusade against Muslims. It was all done secretly, surgically and politically correctly, because Obama nobly refused to stoop to Trump's level and utter the words "Islamic extremism."

Meanwhile, relentless and unconstitutional police surveillance of Muslims in Trump's Real Estate Empire (the New York metropolitan area) was being staunchly defended by the some of the same liberals who now decry Trump's racist executive order.  Long before Trump goose-stepped into the White House, the FBI was entrapping innocent people of Middle Eastern descent and accusing them, without evidence or with planted evidence, of Islamic terroristic plots.

Obama didn't need to sign an executive order banning a religion. He merely selectively obliterated some of that religion's adherents, with a lot of collaterally-damaged dead women and children on the side. And after he so  graciously bequeathed his killing powers to Trump, the damned orange-haired psychopath had to go and ruin it all with a stupid decree making the longstanding war on Muslims an official act of utter hatred and depravity.

And as Purdue University anthropologist Suad Abdal Khabeer insightfully writes in an Al-Jazeera op-ed, Trump rolled out his anti-Muslim ban to keep his supporters on board while he screws them economically, as well as to scapegoat his predecessors, and to hypocritically deflect attention from his own serial misogyny and the fact that one out of every 20 American women is a victim of domestic partner abuse. Right-wing fundamentalist politicians like Vice President Mike Pence have long opposed the Violence Against Women Act. So Trump dutifully doubled down on the myth of the Arab male as sexual predator:

 Violence against women, honour killings in particular, is cited two times in the draft as something from which the US government is obliged to protect Americans. This specific practice of violence against women has been sutured to Arabs and Muslims in popular conversation. It builds on a broader narrative that Muslim women are oppressed by the men in their lives, their families and the religion they follow, and they need saving - by the US.

So much hypocrisy in Exceptional America. It runs the entire gamut from Democrat to Republican, all the Dorothy Parker-ish way from A to B.
Now that American citizens have gotten shaken up and developed a taste for protesting Trump's illegal banning of refugees among other horrors, and are so incensed at Trump's sexism, maybe they can join the resistance movement at the hideously-named Family Detention Centers. The Obama administration, which  deported far more people than in all previous administrations combined, also began locking migrants up in privatized prisons. More than a score of mother and child refugees from Central America remain illegally detained at one substandard private facility in Berks County, Pennsylvania, despite their court-ordered release. Immigration officials recently threatened hunger-striking mothers with removal of their children if they persisted in their own protest. 

They need our help, but most of all they need our solidarity. 

Civil dissent must go far beyond the person of Donald Trump and far beyond one political party, if our democracy has even a chance of survival. 

Poetry As Resistance

Let's face it, we're not all as limber as the Greenpeace activists who are protesting the Trump administration's war on the planet by climbing up a crane in Washington, D.C. Many of us have neither the time, nor the strength, nor even enough spare cash, to travel from march to protest to sit-in.

Resistance can be boisterous, and it can also be quiet and quietly shared. Since knowledge is power, and reading is the ammunition of that knowledge, what better time than now to just say no to Trumpian "ignorance is strength" and pick up a good book to read for both inspiration and pleasure?

And that brings me to my friend Nan Socolow, a frequent New York Times commentator and also a sometime guest blogger here at Sardonicky.  Her collection of poems, some of which have previously appeared in such publications as Rolling Stone, New Republic and  Washingtonian Magazine, has just been published by Pisgah Press in Asheville, N.C.

Nan Socolow (back jacket cover, Invasive Procedures)

Invasive Procedures, the title of the volume, is an apt one. Her subject matter is as penetrating as her Times commentary, running the gamut from marriage, separation, motherhood, growing old, and intimations of mortality, to the fragility and beauty of our endangered planet and its varied life-forms. She finds humor and meaning even in such mundane tasks as changing the sheets and pondering the patterns in dirty dish water; in short, she takes everyday life and infuses it with unique and insight -- and plenty of startlingly piquant neologisms.

Biting the Bullet

When we reach
the overtime stage of life,
over 70, not the golden years,
there is no bible to tell us
what to expect.

And what to do about
the startling aches and pains
that befall our elderly
wellderly illderly bodies.
So we bite the bullet.

and tough it out
to avoid
the undertaker's
waiting room
heebie-jeebies.

Pulling 14
to 16 hour days
was de rigeur
in our thirties
and forties.

And now
in our overtime
we pay for the
crazy dancing
of those days.

In this vale of tears
weltschmerz and 
sporadic joys
are the coins
of our realm.

 Nan Socolow describes her literary sculpting methods in the introduction to her collection: "A poem is like a chunk of raw marble. I chip away and chip away at the chunk, and it takes form and becomes far smaller and when nothing further can be chipped away--when only the finest essence of a marble scrap is left--that is my poem."

An ardent environmentalist, her love and concern for our planet shine right through the suffocating murk of Donald Trump's unprecedented war on climate science and, as is becoming all too scarily apparent, life itself.

Bodies of Water

Aeons past
before the plates
became continents
when this Earth
was young
bodies of water
encircled
Panagaea.

Now our
blue planet
is a dying zone
a waking
nightmare
pillaged and
plundered,
its watery
places ravaged
by mankind.

Detritus dumped
debris dreck
bottles jars
and enough
plastic to gyre and
gimble and
strangle the 
Pacific wabe.

Bizarre fish
Asian snakehead carps
sea lamprey eels  
with round sucking mouths
and razor sharp
teeth encroach
in the freshwater
Great Lakes and
mighty Mississippi.

Lionfish
from the Indian
and South
Pacific oceans
loosed from 
American aquaria
gauzily dressed
to kill in
fetching saris
swirl en masse
in the Caribbean Sea.  

Pythons, boas
gators lurk in the
marshy sawgrass
of the Everglades,
eyes aslit for innocent
passers-by
to squeeze
and swallow.

The five continents
that were once one
Pangaea, connected
jigsaw puzzle pieces
like the carapace on a
hawksbill's shell
are now apart
and prisoned by
waste waters.

Billions of people
dying for a taste of their birthright
of potable water.
Global warming
climate change
inconvenient truths
of our lives on Earth,
truths denied by
some who buy
and chugalug
clean, birthright water
in billions of little
plastic bottles
that will remain
on Earth
long after
we've gone. 

*****

Invasive Procedures is available for purchase from Amazon.com and also directly from the publisher, Pisgah Press.