Medicare For All Meets Kafka

*Updated below.

Although 70 percent of Americans now favor Medicare For All, the Knowledge Class is warning us to hold our horses for at least another couple of decades, by which time many of the uninsured and underinsured will be prematurely and conveniently dead. If climate change doesn't get us, untreated disease and despair should do the job in the efficient manner so beloved of the neoliberal thought collective.

That's because Medicare For All doesn't really mean Medicare For All. None of the various and sundry Democratic (read: Gentry Party) proposals has the aim of providing immediate relief to the tens of millions of people who lack coverage. On the contrary. There is no sense of crisis in any of them. With perhaps one exception, the proposals are incremental at best and purely profit-driven at worst. Even Bernie Sanders is only proposing an initial Medicare buy-in beginning at age 55. This is negotiating from a position of apologetic weakness, with the ultimate victory possibly being a compromise of getting Medicare by aged 60 rather than from birth.

Rather than honestly admitting this to the 70 percent, or 200 million (and counting) people who want government sponsored single payer health insurance, not a few of the politicians and corporate-funded think tanks claiming to favor Medicare For All are actually adamantly opposed to it. They just can't come right out and say it, lest their popularity suffer and their greedy inhumanity be exposed. They cannot acknowledge that their real constituents are corporations and wealthy people, who equate universal health coverage with an actual plague, and who are used to getting what they want from their servants in government and the media.

 So instead, Democrats are falling back on the tried and true Kafka-esque method. They'll talk and they'll talk and they'll talk, and they'll gaslight us and guilt-trip us over Single Payer's "winners and losers," and they'll warn us about the costs and the dangers of achieving health care as a basic human right. And the Republicans will get to do their part by accusing these neoliberal corporatists of being Marxists-Leninists-Socialists. 

And the technocrats will draw up their dozens and dozens of colorful pie charts to aid in the glazing-over of the eye and the melting of the mind. Everybody will become so exhausted and confused, the hope is, that Medicare For All will eventually die of its own wonkitude. (For the merest hint of the assaults yet to come, refer if you dare to the latest Vox explainer.)

This was the theme that Franz Kafka explored in most of his writing, in the economically depressed years between World War I and the rise of fascism. Even the most mundane tasks are fraught with such unnecessarily complex difficulties that they never are completed. Since there is no such thing as a simple problem, there can never be a solution. True to his own philosophy, Kafka didn't even complete several of his own stories, and even ordered that most of his work be burned upon his premature death. Thankfully his friend and executor, Max Brod, did not honor this request.

The only reason that (unlike the neoliberal wonk class) Kafka is not a complete downer, and remains popular nearly a century after his death, is that he had a wicked and humorous sense of the absurd, a sense that (making the neoliberal wonk class quake in fear and loathing) we ordinary slobs are all in this together and that our condition is pretty much universal.

This solidarity and unity are the exact opposite of what the political duopoly mean when they long for the good old bipartisan days, when Democrats and Republicans supposedly got along so well. To them, everybody must be divided between conservative and liberal, or more recently, between rural- deplorable and urban-enlightened. It's the main reason why they are so flummoxed by the Gilets Jaunes ("Yellow Vests") movement in France. Here are ordinary people acting, not out of ideology or identity, but in recognition that this is a class war, and it's global. They're emerging from their ordained isolation, and their unified anger is absolutely terrifying the ruling class.  

Well, sort of terrifying them. French President Emanuel Macron hasn't gone so far as to repeal his infamous repeal of the wealth tax. He is doing an imitation of his friend and early booster Barack Obama by calling in the "fat cats" (les chats grosses) for a friendly gross chat in the Elysee Palace and mildly "browbeating" them into a voluntary relinquishment of a smidgen of their obscene profits to their employees. Whether, like the duplicitous Obama, Macron also claimed he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks, is not known. 

But back to Kafka. The pretend-architects of a "Medicare For All" simulacrum are like the doorkeeper in his fable Before the Law. The supplicant (let's say it's for health care coverage) is told that he can't gain admittance just quite yet, but that if he's reasonable and patient, it's possible that he'll be allowed in later. As a gesture of good faith,  he's even allowed a glimpse inside. And as he peers into the hope and brightness, 

The doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him."

The supplicant wheedles, bribes and begs, and the doorkeeper teases and promises. Only at the very end, when the seeker is near death, does the doorkeeper inform him that nobody could ever be admitted because "the gate was made only for you. And now I am going to shut it."

The moral of this story, as I see it, is that the various wonky policy proposals for Medicare For All are about as artificial as the neoliberal architects who are fashioning them. 

So enough of waiting for politicians to do the right thing. If we want entree to social and economic justice, we have to storm the gates and above all, reject the neoliberal dictum that we're lone economic consumers who must be in constant competition both with ourselves and with others in order to "succeed" in this best of all possible worlds.

But we are already being skillfully and subtly discouraged by the Explainers. If it took the Vox policy wonks (with the help of funding from investors NBC Universal and private equity giant General Atlantic) one whole month to read through all the "Medicare For All" proposals, the subliminal message is, it will take you ordinary people at least twice as long to try and make sense of it all. Meanwhile, they'll allow you to peer in to the turgid brightness for the time it takes to read their "explainer" piece and wade through the complexity of its myriad charts and graphs - if you can even make it through to the end. I could not.

But the basic gist is that if you like your plan you can keep your plan (sound familiar?), especially if you have employer-based insurance. It would be terrible, for example, if your boss were to lose his tax breaks on your premiums because you were selfish enough to enroll in government-sponsored health insurance.

Dash away, dash away, dash away all.

And the fraught, impossible choices? There's Medicare Buy-In For All, and Medicare Extra For All, and Medicare X, and the Choice Act, and Healthy America, and Medicaid Buy-In on the convoluted imaginary menu. Of course, Vox warns, buying into Medicaid doesn't translate into receiving actual care, since it would reimburse doctors at much lower rates than private insurance "typically" pays. 

Other "universal" plans charted and explained by Vox appear to be nothing more than Obamacare with new labels attached to them.

Bait-and-switch is exactly how this eternal Kafkaesque game is played. All of these plans totally sidestep the reality that wealth inequality is the fundamental public health crisis of our time. Forty million Americans live below the official poverty line, and at least half the population are just a paycheck away from outright destitution.

As Dr. Michael Fine lays out in his book Health Care Revolt, Americans spent about 30 percent of total household income on health care and health insurance in 2017 - or about as much as we are expected to pay for housing. That is about $11,000 for every man, woman and child. Of that money, between $1 and $2 trillion is being skimmed off the top by the "market" as pure profit. Fine writes:

It's estimated that by 2025 we'll be spending 50 percent of household income on health insurance and medical services. By 2032, we will spend an estimated 100 percent of the average family income on health care. I hope you understand how that will work, because I don't. Neither does any economist. Think climate change is a threat to our planet? It is but many believe that climate change will take fifty to a hundred years to destroy the planet.  Health care is on track to destroy our economy and our nation within fifteen years.

Donald Trump is not the only denialist in this Kafka-esque mix. 

Franz Kafka also had a prescient thing or two to say about Trump's precious Wall, which I've written about in a previous post. The whole idea of the Wall, just like the Democrats' unnecessarily convoluted health care proposals, is that it will always be "a work in progress" and not something we should ever expect our leaders to actually complete. Gaps and holes are always essential if they are to keep us hoping, dreaming... and compliantly fearful.

They hate it when ordinary people poke holes in their manufactured holes.

*Update, 12/15. Well, isn't this convenient. On the very eve of this year's Obamacare enrollment period deadline, a federal judge from Texas has struck down the entire "Affordable" Care Act, declaring it unconstitutional. Judge Reed O'Connor also happens to an appointee of the newly-sanctified George W. Bush and is a member of the reactionary Federalist Society. Will Michelle Obama still love Junior "to death" and continue accepting candy from him at celebrity funerals after what his appointees and pals continue to do to her husband's precious legacy?

Anyway, here's my comment on the New York Times op-ed on the matter:

While we await the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court, what better time than now for Democrats to take the Medicare For All campaign up a notch or ten?

Look at this ruling as a blessing in disguise. The lucky 20 million or so Americans who have coverage under the ACA are not going to lose it right away, if ever, and meanwhile, the 30 million who have virtually no coverage at all will gain the additional clout to convince their reps that government-sponsored single payer insurance, from cradle to grave, is the only thing that will prevent these cruel and frivolous rulings in the future.

Just let the Supreme Court uphold this insane decision. Just watch the GOP sink when/if their voters are kicked to the curb.

Democratic leaders should finally be learning that negotiating with Republicans to the extent of adopting an actual GOP scheme (from the conservative Heritage Foundation) is not only a crazy strategy, it keeps giving ammunition to the experts who believe -- correctly, in my view -- that requiring citizens to purchase "product" from an essentially predatory cartel of private insurers is the wrong way to go about covering people. These companies skim trillions off the top of US medical care expenditures, making this country's market-based system the most costly and least effective in the civilized world. Better to require everybody to pay taxes, according to their means, to truly cover everybody. The reactionary judges won't have a leg to stand on.

The Wall Plus Russiagate Equals Distraction

Donald Trump is rattled about the Mueller investigation. Therefore, the Democrats colluded with him on Tuesday to change the subject from his legal woes to The Wall and the usual pre-Christmas government shutdown threats. The only thing they have to fear is that their marketing of Fear to the rabble is less successful than it used to be.

So Trump once again played his grotesquely seductive spider part to perfection as he sent his always-irresistible invitation to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to join him in his sticky oval-shaped web of a parlor.

The House Speaker-in-waiting and the Senate Majority Leader played their own supporting roles reasonably well, mawkishly casting their desperate gazes and pleadings toward the whirring TV cameras in the room as often as they directed them at their arachnoid host. 

Vice President Mike Pence had even less of a supporting role, because his non-speaking function as Chief Toady consisted entirely of swiveling his little white metronome of a head at the Democrats to Trump and then back again. To his credit, though, he was able to maintain a stolid manspreading pose throughout the skit that had him glued in the chair next to his more voluble manspreading boss. 

I don't know who was in charge of the sound system for this latest episode of the Trump Reality TV show, but somebody certainly neglected to give Pelosi a proper working microphone. Trump boomed out his incoherence, and even Chuck came through loud and clear as he vied with Trump for the opportunity to interrupt Nancy at every turn. Pelosi sounded like she was talking through a mask of cotton wool as she wonkishly and patiently and ineffectually attempted to lecture Trump on the mechanics of legislation.

It was a performance designed to show Trump at his bullying superior best next to the schoolmarm persona dreaded by many an American male even long after he's escaped the physical classroom. Trump succeeded mightily in showcasing the Democratic leaders as the hapless weaklings they are. Schumer was reduced to sputtering that Trump had lost two states, when he should have used his TV time to wax indignant over the very xenophobic idea of a Wall to keep out refugees and immigrants.

For her part, Pelosi carefully saved her (strategically leaked) anti-Trump vitriol until after the meeting, when it would be least effective. If only she had questioned his manhood right to his manspreading corpus and right to his sneering face, then it might actually have meant something. 

But that's not what Democrats do. They portray themselves as emotionally and intellectually superior victims in a futile attempt to create some space between GOP corruption and Democratic corruption. The maintenance of their smugness is more important to them than, say, agitating for Medicare for all and a federal jobs program. 

The Wall and the Shutdown of Doom episode momentarily deflected attention away from Trump's legal woes for the space of one more Trump-orchestrated 24 hour news cycle. With the corporate media and their talking heads so busily talking among themselves about impeachment and Oval Office manners and the "unprecedented" bicker-fest among America's top political leaders, there simply have not been enough resources left to cover matters of more pressing concern to the ordinary people who have been co-opted into giving these chronically weak people their very powerful jobs.

There certainly hasn't been enough time to cover the immensely popular Yellow Vests movement in France, other than for the occasional editorial bemoaning of President Emanuel Macron's imperialistic style and his failure to tamp down the discontent as ably and as glibly as his neoliberal pro-bank American counterpart, Barack Obama, so recently did.  

The Peeved Aggrieved Bereaved Club

It's getting so divisive out there that liberal commentators can't even tweet out their innocuous accolades for war criminal George H.W. Bush without the Twitter trolls making their lives a living hell.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times has even written a column about the "obituary wars" between those who come to innocently praise Bush and those who come to crankily point to his many faults and crimes while his freshly embalmed body is still indecently at room temperature.

On Twitter over the weekend, the television writer Bryan Behar did something unconscionable.
He praised George H.W. Bush.
The former president had just died. In Behar’s view, it was a moment to recognize any merit in the man and his legacy.
Many of his followers disagreed. They depended on Behar for righteous liberal passion, which left no room for such Bush-flattering adjectives and phrases as “good,” “decent” and “a life of dignity.” How dare Behar lavish them on a man who leaned on the despicable Willie Horton ad, who nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, who did too little in the face of AIDS, whose privilege often blinded him to need.

They lashed out at Behar. They unfollowed him. And they demonstrated the transcendent curse of these tribal times: Americans’  diminishing inability to hold two thoughts at once.

I'm surprised that Bruni didn't blame Russian trolls for sowing such divisions among the rabble. But it's early hagiographic days yet. And to give Bruni credit, he at least admitted that his own Saturday column in praise of Bush 41 was just a tad over the top.

But rather than cast too much opprobrium on himself and his fellow liberal Bush fan club members, he casts opprobrium on people who, unlike Bush, are totally lacking in class and the ability to project bullshit with a smarmy smile and crocodile tears. Meanwhile, we should allow all the cyber-mourners to pseudo-grieve in peace and safety.  Just because Behar had written a boilerplate condolence tweet praising Bush's goodness and his dignity and his patriotism didn't mean he was endorsing the points of blight on Bush's record, for cryin' out loud. Now all those haters are making him feel so terribly bad about himself, don't you see.

Grief-shaming is the new slut-shaming.

Lanny Davis, the Clinton lawyer who now represents Donald Trump consigliere Michael Cohen, is among the outraged, tweeting: "Any follower who dropped @bryanbehar for his kind words about this great and good man President George H.W. Bush reflects the worst there is in today’s politics. They only show affinity for the politics or hate reflected by @realDonaldTrump

Since writing my own post on Saturday to mark Poppy's entrance into the void, I let off some additional steam in the Times comments sections, which at least initially were rife with liberal praise for Bush. I felt compelled to throw a little acid on the sickening hagiography emanating like rivers of rancid honey from the Paper of Record. Although nobody accused me of liking or even being Trump as a result, the most common epithet hurled in my direction by Times readers was "churlish." One troll worried I might show up at his wake to cast opprobrium on his life. Unfortunately, he posted under a pseudonym, so I have no way of knowing whether the many funerals that I crash in order to deliver my unseemly diatribes against the Dead will ever find the right target. Sad.  

But for the past couple of days, I've been striving to ignore the nonstop pageantry, with its star-studded cast of blood-soaked ruling class racketeers coming together to cry, laugh, share candy, hug each other or snub each other, and take selfies. I keep thinking back to Ronald Reagan's week-long funeral in June 2004, when I was confined to the prison of a hospital bed and tortured by the wall-to-wall coverage. Shutting off the TV was next to impossible, because the remote kept falling on the floor and I didn't want to keep calling the nurses to deal with my TV dilemma when they had more pressing emergencies to address.

So now that I have the physical freedom to avoid such things, I do so with gusto. It also helps enormously that I cancelled cable several months ago.

With Bush 41's funeral and burial lasting only a day or two more, we can hopefully bury the Obituary Wars right along with the actual Bush body. Until it starts all over again. I am predicting Henry Kissinger to top the charts at the next Hagiography Hit Parade. Sadly, I give Dick Cheney, whose young transplanted heart remains helplessly trapped and beating in his aged body, a couple more years at least. Is anybody wondering, as I tastelessly am, what the movers and shakers will do when it comes time to bury Trump? It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the liberal class to rehabilitate him, assuming of course that we still have a civilization in another few climate-changed decades.

George H.W. Bush is being effusively praised for remaining such a calm, collected, polite, serene old gentleman in the long dull decades of his post-presidency, much admired by the Aggrieved Club for his uncommon avowal of having achieved much peace and happiness in his life. His self-satisfaction is something all of us should emulate, apparently.

To which psychopathic mindset the late critical theorist Theodor Adorno replied in his Minima Moralia book of aphorisms:

A newspaper obituary for a businessman once contained the words: 'The breadth of his conscience vied with the kindness of his heart.' The blunder committed by the bereaved in the elevated language reserved for such purposes, the inadvertent admission that the kind-hearted deceased had lacked a conscience, expedites the funeral procession by the shortest route to the land of truth. If a man of advanced years is praised for his exceptional serenity, his life can be assumed to to comprise a succession of infamies. He has rid himself of the habit of getting excited. Breadth of conscience is passed off as magnaminity, all-forgiving because all-too-understanding. The quid pro quo between one's guilt and that of others, is resolved in favor of whoever has come off best. After so long a life one quite loses the capacity to distinguish who has done what harm to whom. In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. The blackguard presents himself as a victim of injustice: if you only knew, young man, what life is like. But those conspicuous midway through life by an exceptional kindness are usually drawing advances on such serenity. He who does not malign does not live serenely but with a peculiarly chaste hardness and intolerance. Lacking appropriate objects, his love can scarcely express itself except by hatred of the inappropriate, in which admittedly he comes to resemble what he hates. The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

This insight makes the statement about Bush from Barack and Michelle Obama seem all the more creepily revealing: "America has lost a patriot and humble servant in George Herbert Walker Bush. While our hearts are heavy today, they are also filled with gratitude. Our thoughts are with the entire Bush family tonight - and all who were inspired by George and Barbara's example."

Their hearts are weighted down with big, chaste, hard boulders of appreciation for the way that Bush bequeathed unchallenged unitary executive powers to all his Oval Office successors and the well-monetized life that comes after "public" service to the oligarchy. They look in the mirror and they see George and Barbara reflected right back at them. It's a tiny club, and we ain't in it. Thank God.

****

Here are few of my recent Times comments. The first, directed toward Frank Bruni's column, is mainly a critique of Twitter itself, because I was already suffering from churlish anti-grief exhaustion:

Tweets are not exactly the ideal venue for conveying nuance. And that goes for outpourings of grief and pseudo-grief, reactions to the outpourings, and revisions of the outpourings by the original (now a victim of gaslighting) tweeter, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

 I never tweet. For one thing, you can't ever take back what you might have written in haste. I'm also sick of reading tweets, especially when they are gratuitously and regularly inserted into every otherwise thoughtful and nuanced article, including this one.

Why do people feel so obligated to tweet, anyway? This is an addictive (and might I say lazy) form of communication, which seems to reward the sender more than it serves to share views with the hordes of unknown recipients out there in cyberspace. Studies have shown that the Tweeter receives a satisfying jolt of dopamine for every new "like," follower, retweet and "x number of people are talking about this!"

Twitter is absolutely tailor-made for the dangerous either-or/ us vs. them, "you're an idiot and I'm not" synaptic brain-bursts that pass for political discourse and even basic thought these days. It's also tailor-made for the limited vocabulary of President Thumbs, which is all the more reason to boycott it.

That said, you simply cannot be president of this historically violent country without accumulating gallons of blood on your hands. So much of the "grief" for Bush seems so utterly platitudinous and obligatory and downright clubby.

I also commented on Maureen Dowd's weird and allegedly touching post-mortem, in which she casts herself as the main character in a decades-long madcap flirtatious relationship with Poppy Bush. I kind of sensed something like this was coming, given the maudlin pre-mortem hagiography she'd already penned about the man three years ago. (see my previous post.) Read her whole column, or just get the mawkish gist of it from the title: "The Patrician President and the Reporterette: A Screwball Story."

My published response:

This column can be interpreted on two different levels. First, it's the heartwarming story of how a journalist with working class roots forged a decades-spanning "screwball" relationship with one of the most powerful men on earth. Cue Hepburn and Tracy and the popcorn and the hankies.

Second, it's a case study of the mechanics of "access journalism." The D.C. press corps (up until the rise of Trump, that is) have long acted more as stenographers for the powerful rather than their adversaries, who act in the public interest. Thus, the very brief paragraph buried within this otherwise hagiographic piece that has Maureen Dowd "recoiling" at some of Poppy's racist and sexist behavior, before she is able to sweep them under the memory rug and wax rhapsodic about how this basically decent patrician gentleman deigned to let the "reporterette" into his rarefied world with all that flirtatious banter and gift exchanges and meals.

She dismisses the horrible things he did with the stock phrase that sycophants commonly use to excuse the powerful: "he wasn't perfect."

And most forgivable of all, he wasn't like Trump. He had class, he had manners, he had the upbringing to know how to protect his privilege with self-deprecation and jokes. Dowd "afflicted" Bush, but not too hard, and not too seriously. The subtext of this piece is that Poppy had her wrapped around his little finger while allowing her to believe that he was wrapped around hers.

George H.W. Bush Has Entered the Void

And has almost - almost! - replaced Donald Trump and his scandals as the number one topic of discussion among the corporate media resistance fighters. You see, although Trump's publicists put out the obligatory statement mourning the Passing of Poppy, media outlets are scrambling to broadcast the time when Trump mocked this beloved elder statesman. See here and here to get the handwringing drift of the manufactured outrage.

Thank goodness Trump didn't mock Bush's wartime exploits as he did John McCain's. Otherwise he might have been barred from attending another star-studded funeral. The Bush affair promises to be even more clubby than normal, because the midterms have also recently entered the Void, and all the Duopolists have been unleashed to revel in a veritable frenzy of plutocratic bonhomie.

The gist of the liberal class's Poppy obituaries are in the vein of "I didn't always agree with his politics, but boy, what a great and totally classy human being!" Even the unflattering comparisons of Bush Jr. with his poor beleaguered father that were standard fare during the reign of the son are a thing of the past, now that Dubya has been fully rehabilitated by the freedom fighters of the Democratic Party and their military-surveillance complex partners. They don't even care that Bush the Younger recently stumped for reactionary Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who got his own political start stumping for Junior and giving torture his legal rubber stamp.

The accolades for Bush the Elder already rival those for John McCain for mawkish bipartisanship. There will surely be yet another achingly tender and funny moment between Junior and Michelle Obama at the funeral. What will the headline event be this time? A hokey dance routine, like the one they performed at a memorial for slain Dallas police officers? The sentimental sharing of a cough drop. like at the McCain extravaganza? Brace yourselves for a chill up the spine or a lurch in the stomach, depending upon your class status, your political party, or your healthy independent ability to detect phoniness whenever you see it. 

Meanwhile, insert the boilerplate hagiography here:

Luckily for most hagiographers, the death of the 94-year-old Bush has been expected for so long that the obituaries were written well in advance of the event. A reverent book-length obituary by Jon Meacham, complete with a jacket blurb written by Poppy himself, was published way back in 2015. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. long a favorite journalist of the elder Bush, then wrote fawning review of the fawning biography, urging the former president to "not go gentle, man, into that good night," while expressing her awed gratitude that he'd finally broken from tradition and criticized the architects of his son's misbegotten Iraq invasion - if not the son himself - as "iron asses."

And H.W. staunchly held on for three more years. Whether he went gently or whether he went aggressively is not yet known.* Nor is it known whether, like his late wife Barbara and his late colleague McCain, he had nobly decided to end extraordinary medical treatment as a gesture of aristocratic heroism.

Like so many other crass people, I wrote my own premature Bush eulogy years ago. This was in response to the aforementioned Dowd pre-mortem:

I think I'll give Meacham's bio a pass. That the publisher's blurb brags that he was granted unique access to all Poppy's and Bar's diaries as well as to their august doddering selves should be your first clue to run for the hills. Your second clue is that Poppy is openly shilling for what smells like a shameless hagiography*. 

The fact is that a corrupt scion like W can only grow out of a corrupt family tree. An oil-rich Skull and Bones river oozes right through the thought-free realm that shelters this whole misbegotten dynasty.
Unmentioned in the cheap Freudian analyses about obscenely rich fathers and sons is the fact that Poppy himself never could have clawed his way to the top without the help of the Ford administration's Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

Although Poppy followed the grand Bush family tradition of being woefully underqualified, they orchestrated his appointment to head the CIA as a cynical means of pushing back against the Church Committee. Once there, Poppy accomplished such feats as destroying all the records of the CIA's hideous mind control experiments. He helped the Neocon cabal give birth to their whole criminal enterprise 40 years ago. They enriched the military-industrial complex by falsely hyping Soviet threats, just as they would later falsely hype the Iraq threat.

They always were asses, iron or otherwise.

Intelligence failure is built right into the Bush DNA.

They deserve neither biographies nor therapy. They deserve indictments.

(addendum) Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets, posits that the Meacham bio is a huge cover-up. That most people will neither buy it nor read it matters not. The reviews are in, and they're glowing. Baker offers exhaustive evidence in his own book that, far from being the mild-mannered virtuous statesman of legend, Bush the Elder has been up to his eyeballs in intrigue and corruption and dirty political tricks his entire life. It was Poppy, for example, who gave Karl Rove his first big break. Baker even suggests a Bush-as-CIA spook connection, through various degrees of separation, with the Kennedy assassination. Yikes. Needless to say, his book was almost universally trashed by the establishment media when it was published, via that tried and true technique called "gaslighting the author." (See: Seymour Hersh.)

And for Poppy's direct role in delaying the release of the Iran hostages, through illegal deal-making with the culprits, to swing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, read the late Robert Parry's Trick Or Treason. (His Consortium News site is also republishing some of his investigative pieces related to Bush Sr.)

  These conveniently forgotten episodes in American presidential history make candidate Donald Trump's flubbed bribery scheme to build a luxury hotel in Moscow look downright benign.

* Update. He went gently. Peter Baker of the New York Times, whom I hereby nominate for a Pulitzer in the category of shameless hagiography, has the blow-by-blow. Poppy apparently started going downhill right after former Secretary of State James Baker took him out for oysters on the half shell two weeks ago. Baker was also present at the end, when he tenderly rubbed his friend's feet to the accompaniment of a live professional opera singer.

Methods To the Political Madness

The blockbuster story of the week (in my opinion) is that Rhode Island students have filed a federal lawsuit charging that their public school system's failure to provide them with basic instruction in government and civics is a direct violation of their Constitutional rights as American citizens. 

Donald Trump certainly isn't the only overlord who "loves the poorly educated," and who has a vested interest in keeping the population dumbed down and perpetually ignorant and apathetic, and even beginning to die off at an alarming new rate.

Indeed, you have to search very hard to find the New York Times article on this important legal challenge to our two-tiered, class and race-based education system. The legal relief sought by the plaintiffs is simply acknowledgment that a liberal education is a basic human right.  It is probably no accident that the story is buried under the usual avalanche of All Trump Scandals, All the Time, alongside the usual near-hysterical demands for social media censorship of freelance political discourse, and the drumbeats for war on Russia and China.

As a matter of fact, one of the plaintiffs in the Rhode Island lawsuit complains that of the two "social studies" courses she did take during high school, the only things she remembers learning about were America's relentless wars. She didn't learn about the three branches of government, or about how to judge political candidates. She simply wants to "know what I don't know."

The case is riding a wave of bipartisan anxiety about a national lack of civic engagement and knowledge, from voter participation rates that are among the lowest in the developed world to pervasive disinformation on social media.Fewer than half the states hold schools accountable for teaching civics, according to a review in 2016 by the Education Commission of the States. Only 23 percent of American eighth graders were proficient in civics on the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that included questions on the Constitution and the roles of the various branches of government.Rhode Island does not require schools to offer courses in government or civics, does not require standardized tests in those subjects or in history, and does not provide training for teachers in civics, the lawsuit says.

When our "bipartisan" politicians can't even agree to pass gun control legislation to keep weapons out of schools, can we really expect these oligarchy-beholden lawmakers to mandate the teaching of civics and critical thinking skills in the nation's public school classrooms? Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for one, would rather arm teachers with guns than arm them with the resources and training to turn America's youth into thinking adults with the basic skills to detect political fraudulence and double-talk whenever they hear it. 

The Rhode Island lawsuit faces a tough road, especially if the case ends up in the arch-conservative Supreme Court. Ironically, as the Times reports, it was an opinion written by Justice Lewis Powell, of infamous "corporate memo" fame, that may provide the opening for a positive decision. He sided with the dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall in writing that "educational inequality might rise to the level of a constitutional violation if it prevented students from exercising their right to speak and to vote.'"

Ironically (or not) the Times and the consolidated corporate media at large themselves make it hard, if not impossible, for the educated and non-educated alike to exercise their rights to stay informed and educated. Even if poor students are gifted with free copies of the Paper of Record as part of a new civics lexicon, their learning will be largely be limited to what Trump is tweeting about today, or what new scandal has embroiled him and his gene pool.

There is a method to the madness of the Trump era.

In the latest psychotic episode, students of all ages and backgrounds learned that Trump's lawyer pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a caper involving a new Trump luxury tower in Moscow, a doomed real estate/attempted bribery deal that was in the works at the same time that Trump was an active presidential candidate.

We learned that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is nevertheless persisting in his own real estate negotiations with Trump for a big beautiful bipartisan wall to keep immigrants out.

Just because Trump is a dangerous xenophobe doesn't mean that xenophobia doesn't still deserve its proper place in the cruel Neoliberal World Order. Hillary Clinton delivered her own psychotic civics lecture to Europe recently, warning them to keep out the refugees from the wars that she herself had  voted for or even directly instigated -- lest more Trump-like demagogues rear their ugly racist heads in response to those utterly deplorable racist populations.

Trump, meanwhile, is calling the Mueller investigation a "fake witch hunt."

  This is an example of the chronic double-think strategy beloved of authoritarian leaders. If he really thought the probe was unfair, he would not have inserted the word "fake" before witch hunt. Taken literally, the phrase would mean that it is not a true witch hunt at all, but a legitimate investigation. Trump's own definition of witch hunt is any normal criminal investigation against him, his family and associates. It lays bare his belief that criminal investigations of criminals are bogus on their face and that habitual criminals like him should be immune from the penal code. He thinks that double negatives are a net positive for him.

Besides, "fake" is one of the most overused words in his limited vocabulary. All news which paints him in a bad light - and that is at least 99% of all news about Donald Trump - is fake by definition. But, using classic double-think strategy, he isn't complaining too much. He still craves the media and makes himself regularly and enthusiastically available for interviews and press conferences. 

Of course, this does not mean that all bad news about Trump is itself honest and fact-based. The recent Guardian piece, for example, claiming that convicted fraudster and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met secretly in broad daylight with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on several occasions is already falling apart at its anonymously-sourced seams. Therefore a former CIA operative who now writes satirical fiction published a bizarre piece in Politico defending the Guardian journalists who wrote the story. These reporters are such great professionals, the former CIA spook writes, that they were obviously just the latest hapless victims of Russian disinformation fraud.

So you can see that the current epidemic of Doublethink is not just limited to Trump. The message of the Politico article is similarly self-contradictory. The reporters are both smart and incredibly stupid at the exact same time. How were they to know that Trump himself could very well be the planter of the hit piece, or at least the co-planter, along with Putin? 

And it's a fake-real war. It allows Donald Trump to control every news cycle, and it allows lazy corporate journalists to grandstand and showboat as martyrs and resistance fighters.

Linguist Ruth Wodak, who has written extensively about the rhetoric of ultra-right authoritarianism in Europe, exposes the traditional collusion between outright fascism and its collaborator, neoliberalism, which Bertram Gross has called "friendly fascism" - or corporatism attempting to disguise itself with a democratic mask. 

Trump and the media are fake enemies who feed off one another and become richer through the construction of their never-ending political soap opera. Each dances to the same tune. Trump is alternately predator and victim, and the corporate media, themselves sponsored by the predatory lords of unfettered capitalism and unlimited war, can posture as victims while the Oligarchy as a whole gets a free pass. The new role of the media is not afflicting the comfortable, but afflicting Trump.

It allows them to spread his toxic message of xenophobia while pretending to wash their hands of their own complicity and collusion. It allows right-wing liberals like Hillary Clinton to sell xenophobia within a kinder, gentler "friendly fascism" discourse and cast blame upon both the refugees of her wars and the ordinary people who have been taught to be frightened of the "Other" who subsequently flee those wars. Trump allows people like her to appear calm and reasonable as they spread much the same kind of propaganda.

Whether it's the latest in a long series of personal scandals or crimes, or whether it's just the latest ignorant, racist tweet, there is a method to the Trump-Media madness and collusion.

Ruth Wodak described how this formula operates within Austria's right-wing Freedom Party, originally made up of both former Nazis and liberals and formed with the direct help of occupying American forces after World War II as a counterweight against - you guessed it - Russia.

The dynamic consists of several stages: the scandal is first denied; then, once some evidence is produced, the scandal is redefined and equated with entirely different phenomena. Predictably, the provocateurs then claim the right to freedom of speech for themselves, as a justificatory strategy. Such utterances immediately trigger another debate - unrelated to the original scandal - about freedom of speech and political correctness. Simultaneously, victimhood is claimed by the original provocateur and the event is dramatized and exaggerated. This leads to the construction of a conspiracy - somebody must be 'pulling the strings' against the original producer of the scandal and scapegoats...  are quickly discovered." Eventually and possibly a 'quasi-apology' might follow to straighten out the 'misunderstanding'... and the entire process starts all over again."

We can cite example after example of how Trump faithfully follows the fascistic playbook.

Perhaps most memorable is the scandal of Trump pronouncing that "there are good people on both sides" after the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. When an uproar ensued, he offered a canned quasi-apology condemning ultra-right violence. He quickly followed that up with his own outrage when people began calling for the removal of Confederate statues, leading to further inflammatory rhetoric by Trump against "socialist Democrats."

Just like the abusive husband who tells his wife that she "made him do it, " Trump is a master of reversing the dichotomy between victim and perpetrator. He has made turning the tables on his accusers something of an art form. Confronted about white nationalism by a Black reporter, Yamiche Alcindor, at a recent news conference, he attacked her personally and called her question "racist." 

From the transcript:

Alcindor: “On the campaign trail, you called yourself a ‘nationalist.’ Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists. Now people are also saying…”
Trump: “I don’t know why you say that, that is such a racist question.”
Alcindor: “There are some people who are saying that the Republican Party is now supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric.”
Trump: “Oh, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that. Why do I have my highest poll numbers ever with African-Americans? Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African-Americans? That’s such a racist question.”
[Alcindor tries to speak.]
Trump: “Honestly, I know you have it written down and everything. Let me tell you, that is a racist question.”

This is the classic ultra-right technique of transforming those who have traditionally been targets of oppression into oppressors themselves. His behavior at the press conference was a not-so-subtle dog-whistle to his base of supporters, who have been programmed into diverting their own very real anxieties and victimization at the hands of neoliberalism onto their own fellow human beings.

His skilled victim-perpetrator reversal technique extends to what J.E. Richardson calls "calculated ambivalence." His fans receive the message that violence against the Other is O.K. and he is still able to wash his hands of culpability when someone takes matters into his own hands, and shoots Black people in a grocery store or slaughters Jews as they worship in their synagogue. He rails against "Mexican rapists," firing up the crowd at one of his campaign rallies and in the same breath "assumes that some of them are very good people." This strategy of self-contradiction is nothing new under the ultra-right rhetorical sun.

It works both for him and for the #Resistance, Inc. Duopolists who jointly serve the oligarchs. The constant lathering, rinsing and repeating of Trumpian scandals and utterances leaves the media with no time and little space to cover issues of immediate concern to ordinary people and increasing popular demands for policies like debt-free college and universal single payer health care coverage. It allows a lawsuit by students demanding a basic education to fall through the cracks.

The inspiring story of one group of students and teachers fighting back against the ignorance imposed upon regular people by the ruling class is all too easily ignored. The fewer people who are able to read about it and hear about it, the less is the likelihood that they will ever be inspired by it and urged to emulate it with their own lawsuits and protests and sit-down strikes and boycotts.

We have met the enemy, and it is them... the oligarchy and its political and media lackeys. The common wisdom that most people are willfully and deplorably ignorant is itself fake news. Being scared stupid is not the same thing as being stupid. 

Meanwhile, for your civic educational pleasure, here's a detailed analysis of Trumpian language courtesy of Ruth Wodak.  

United In Exile

With about eight dynasties now possessing as much money as half the entire world's population combined, it is impossible to ignore the fact that extreme wealth inequality is antithetical to the health and future of humanity and every other living thing on earth. 

Despite the dystopian title - American Nightmare - of his latest book, cultural critic and prolific author Henry Giroux thinks that with a combined regimen of education and organization, we might still overthrow neoliberal fascism, of which the Donald Trump administration is only the most recent and most noxious end-product. He writes: 

There is certainly something to be learned from older, proven tactics including using education to create a revolution in consciousness and values, and using broad-based alliances to create the conditions for mass disruptions such as the general strike. These tactics combine theory, consciousness, and practice as a part of a strategy to dismantle the complex workings of the death-dealing machinery of casino capitalism and its recent intensification under the Trump administration. Certainly, one of the most powerful tools of oppression is convincing people that the oppressive conditions they experience are normal and cannot be changed. The ideology of normalization functions to prevent any understanding of the larger systemic forces of oppression by insisting that all problems are individually based and ultimately a matter of individual character and responsibility.

Evidence abounds all over the world that oppressed people are no longer convinced. Workers in European Amazon fulfillment centers walked off the job during the peak of the Christmas buying season over the weekend, and citizens of France are demonstrating all over their country against a new punishing diesel fuel tax. Migrants from Central America defied a tear gas assault by Trump's military forces at the Mexico-US border, bringing anew their own message of democratic defiance and courage to the world at large.

Meanwhile, back in the US capitol, House Speaker-in-Waiting Nancy Pelosi took to the pay-walled pages of the Amazon Empire's Washington Post mouthpiece in yet another attempt to convince the oppressed that her plutocratic Congress is in their corner.

But her words can't help but betray that the Democratic Party's toothless new "restoring democracy" legislation is simply more sugar-coating of the continued oppression of ordinary people by the Amazon-America League of Oligarchs. She follows the neoliberal playbook of diagnosing the lethal cancer and then prescribing band-aids to keep it nicely hidden. The "big tells" are highlighted in my bold.

(First, here's the obligatory big brave honest and carefully nitpicked "feel your pain" admission of some of the horror oppressing us): For far too long, big-money and corporate special interests have undermined the will of the people and subverted policymaking in Washington — enabling soaring health-care costs and prescription drug prices, undermining clean air and clean water for our children, and blocking long-overdue wage increases for hard-working Americans. 

(Now comes the standard laundry list of bromides and placebos) So let’s rein in the unaccountable “dark money” unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by requiring all political organizations to disclose their donors and by shutting down the shell game of big-money donations to super PACs. We must also empower hard-working Americans in our democracy by building a 21st-century campaign-finance system — combining small-donor incentives and matching support — to increase and multiply the power of small donors. Wealthy special interests shouldn’t be able to buy more influence than the workers, consumers and families who should be our priority in Washington.

The solutions offered by neoliberals for what they themselves have wrought are aspirational at best and devious at worst. Pelosi doesn't want to outlaw money in politics, she merely wants to "rein it in" and encourage more oppressed voters to donate as a way for the wealthy to be inspired to give (more) in kind. She merely wants to pretend to "level" the playing field by strewing it with cold hard cash from all classes, in order to give our de facto oligarchy the fig leaf of egalitarianism. Your dollar and their million dollars are all the same color and it naturally follows that you, too, can be as influential as they are. But tellingly, she gives discriminatory priority only to those "hard-working" people who still have the power to consume more stuff from Amazon fulfillment centers. There is no mention of the poor and near-poor, who now account for at least half the population. When you consider the fact that fully two-thirds of Americans don't even have a couple of hundred bucks stashed away for a household emergency, the methods by which experts measure poverty in this country become ever more ludicrous.

Pelosi concludes:

And with a system that works for the people, we will deliver policy outcomes that make life better for all Americans: We will lower health-care costs and out-of-control prices for prescription drugs. We will rebuild the United States’ infrastructure, raise the minimum wage and put leverage back in the hands of workers and consumers. We will finally advance common-sense, bipartisan solutions to prevent gun violence. We will confront discrimination with the Equality Act , pass the Dream Act to protect the patriotic young undocumented immigrants who came here as children, and take the first step toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Translation: there will be no single payer, Medicare For All legislation coming from her party, despite the fact that more than 90% of registered Democrats are in favor of it, and nearly half of registered Republicans are, making for a combined 70% favorability factor. You might save a few bucks on your drugs, but that's as far as they'll go.

 The dreaded "common-sense bipartisan solutions" to prevent gun violence do not actually translate into banning gun ownership and assault weapons manufacture, or drastically diminishing America's violent role as the biggest arms dealer on the planet. It doesn't translate into government-subsidized medical and surgical care for gunshot victims.

 Democrats will timidly "confront" discrimination and only "take the first step" on immigration reform. There will be no more talk of abolishing ICE and protesting Trump's pediatric concentration camps at the border. The midterm election campaigns are over.

I asked Henry Giroux whether his opinion of Democrats has changed at all since his book was published last summer, in light of their recent takeover of the House of Representatives, and their self-advertised nouveau-progressivism. 

 "I think the hard line against both parties that the book takes still holds true, and is an antidote to people like Jason Stanley and others who rail against fascist politics but still push a misguided faith in liberal politics and the two party system," he replied in an email. "This is the dreadful political and moral hangover that gets them reviews in the press."  

Nancy Pelosi is, of course, only one of the zombie characters in our collective American Nightmare. She will likely continue as House leader, because the right-wing Blue Dogs and "New" Democrats currently posturing as her foes actually do make her look "progressive" by comparison. She is an integral part of what Henry Giroux calls "America's shopworn legacy of 'habitual optimism,' one that substitutes a cheery, empty, Disney-like dreamscape for any viable notion of utopian possibility. The Disney dreamscape evacuates hope of any substantive meaning. It attempts to undercut a radical utopian element in the conceptual apparatus of hope that speaks to the possibility of a democratic future very different from the authoritarian past or present."

He continues:

Trump's unapologetic authoritarianism has prompted Democratic Party members and the liberal elite to position themselves as the only model of organized resistance. It is difficult not to see their alleged moral outrage and faux resistance as both comedic and hypocritical in light of the role these centrist liberals have played in the past forty years - subverting democracy and throwing the working class and people of color under the bus."

But as I mentioned above, people are emerging from underneath that bus. The fact that the vast majority of us live in exile does not also mean that we are squashed into helpless pulp by the machinery of capitalism on crack.

Henry Giroux sounds an alarm tinged with optimism in the last chapter of his American Nightmare, in which he explores the notion of Democracy in Exile.

We ourselves, he writes, must be 

(A) counterforce and remedy to the Jacksonian intolerance, violence, expulsion, and racism of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Trumpism as a nationalist movement drifting in plain sight from plutocracy and authoritarian nepotism to fascism. Democracy in exile is the space in which people, families, networks, and communities fight back. It unites the promise of insurrectional political engagement with the creation of expansive new manifestations of justice - social, economic, environmental. 

Spaces for democracies in exile include churches and homes and cities and counties which give sanctuary to refugees and undocumented migrants facing deportation. Henry Giroux explains that

Such cities and counties, and a host of diverse public spheres, function as parallel structures that create alternative modes of communication, social relations, education, health care and cultural work, including popular music, social media, the performing arts, and literature. These spaces are what Vaclav Benda has called a 'parallel polis' which brings pressure on official structures, implements new modes of pedagogical resistance, and provides the basis for organizing larger day-to-day protests and more organized and sustainable social movements.

We have to crawl out from beneath that neoliberal nightmare bus, hoist ourselves up, and start talking to each other, finding common ground and reclaiming our humanity. We have to start somewhere, despite how small and puny our efforts might seem to us in the beginning. We have to keep in mind that what we fight against - neoliberal financialized capitalism and its resultant oligarchic power structure - is a small-minded ideology fostered by greedy, small-minded people who have to tell us constant lies to maintain their increasingly shaky grasp on power. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Our annual sardonic holiday tradition: