Guns, Fetuses, and For-Profit Health Insurance

 What could be more important during this dangerous pandemic and its ensuing mass human misery and despair than the topics in the title of this post?

 

Thus far in the Senate's Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, this trifecta of partisan wedge issues has reigned supreme. With the showboating and grilling not even reaching the midpoint as of this writing, I suppose we can still hold out hope that one lone legislator comes out and asks Barrett for her initial visceral reaction to meeting Donald Trump in the flesh for the first time. Given that she has coyly refused to commit to recusing herself on his likely legal challenge to Joe Bidens predicted landslide victory, I doubt she'll be giving even the slightest hint of any human reaction. Not even in the unlikely event that a senile Judiciary Committee member veers off script and blurts it right out. As of Tuesday, Dianne Feinstein, 87, was living back in the 1950s, haunted by anecdotal memories of her peers' back-alley abortions. She is afraid that era will come back in the event of a Barrett confirmation, because Roe v Wade is not yet, according to Barrett, a "super precedent" exempt from overturning. Of course, the nominee will not say whether or not she'd vote to overturn it because she reassuringly won't be "queen of the world" with the power to overturn anything until and unless a challenge "winds its way" up to the highest court.

With corporate lawyers and oligarchs controlling all three branches of the US government, I just cannot not get the image of side-winding slithery snakes in suits out of my head.

 I was actually waiting for one of the inquisitors to press Barrett on the unseemliness of holding the first day of this rushed hearing on Columbus Day, a national holiday whose symbolism is integral to the culture wars which artificially separate the Republicans from the Democrats. To hear Trump's GOP tell it, any defacing or tear-downs of statues of the invaders, slave-owners and ethnic cleansers of yore is not to be tolerated. So why were they conducting government business on such a sacred day when all good patriots should be marching to honor Columbus and battling all those Woke Antifa hordes in our midst? Since Columbus was bankrolled by good Catholics and Inquisitors Ferdinand and Isabella,  somebody at least could have asked her if the Columbus Day session had offended her religious sensibilities.

Instead, the Republicans on the panel can't shut up about the Democrats attacking her Catholicism (which they aren't) and the Democrats telling one maudlin story after the other about the lucky people whose lives and bank accounts were saved by the Affordable Care Act. These heartbreaking stories are designed to instill guilt into a woman who has already experienced a whole lifetime of absorbing Catholic guilt, and who uses the so-called Ginsburg rule of never disclosing to the public what she thinks about any issue with which she might be confronted as a Supreme. This convenient unwritten rule gives her and other judicial nominees an easy out that mere mortals can never get away with in a job interview. If past writings and deeds are revealed, the nominees can easily dismiss them as the writings and deeds of a private citizen. We are supposed to believe that once judges don their magical black robes, they magically strip themselves of prejudices, not to mention their very fallible humanity.

Is anybody buying this nonsense?

Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois broke ranks for a bit when he challenged Barrett on a recent dissenting opinion in which she argued that a convicted felon's right to own a gun is a Second Amendment right, whereas the stripping of the voting rights of convicted felons is a matter for individual states to decide. Just as she was holding forth like a twisted pretzel on the rights of states to bar ex-cons from voting, but claiming that a mere fraudster should be entitled to bear arms, C-Span broke away from this important and interesting exchange to cover the pro-forma convening of the (empty) lower House.

The House was not actually meeting to discuss anything so mundane as Covid relief, or how to combat Donald Trump's ominous plans to "monitor" polling places on Election Day. But C-Span had to do its own patriotic duty of filming the solemn pounding of the gavel. And then everybody went to lunch. And then I took the opportunity to write this quick blog post before getting back to the depressing Senate spectacle.

Eric Levitz has an interesting piece at New York magazine which discusses the "Constitutional originalism" embraced by Barrett and her hard-right mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. This legal principle is nothing but a smokescreen for conservative hypocrisy. It's impossible, Levitz writes, to fall back on a "strict" reading of the Constitution because its wording was always made deliberately vague.

When justices claim the authority to determine the unequivocal meaning of a phrase at a given point in history, they are not demonstrating judicial humility but supreme arrogance. The farcical nature of the originalist enterprise was made plain in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller. Then, Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens each produced their own historical monograph on the Second Amendment’s contemporary meaning, which arrived at antithetical conclusions that just so happened to line up perfectly with each jurist’s ideological tendency. The opinions nevertheless had one thing in common: Both were poorly regarded by actual historians.

Barrett did give one clue during Tuesday morning's session on how she squares her professional legal life with her religious life. After arriving at a decision that might be hurtful to a human being, she testified, she then asks herself how she would feel if, for example, it was her own child bearing the brunt of it. If she concludes that her decision was still a fair one no matter how injurious to this hypothetical child of hers, then her conscience is entirely clear. She has proven to her own satisfaction that she was in the right. She not only examines her conscience, she cross-examines her conscience. And she never has to look back. Second-guessing herself is apparently not part of her repertoire.

This courage of her own convictions is so absolutely and rigidly righteous, it should scare people.

And both the Democrats and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were glowing in their effusive praise of how well-behaved and how quiet  six of her children were, sitting behind her in the audience. (The seventh, a boy with Down Syndrome, was left at home, but was very excited to see Mom on television, she said.)

Somebody should ask her how she feels about Trump's penchant for making fun of disabled people.

There are plenty more smart,  qualified and well-credentialed people just like Amy Coney Barrett waiting in the right wings, ready and willing and able to challenge Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or another conservative neoliberal Democrat in 2024.

If you think, correctly, that Trump is a menace, then just try to imagine a Trump with a high IQ who knows when to keep his or her mouth shut while sowing conscience-free chaos.

Off With Their Heads

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

-- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vote for the Lesser Greater Nonsense!

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

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

 

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

Covid and Capitalism On Steroids

 Leave it to Donald Trump to equate his truncated hospital stay with a post-doc residency in infectious diseases. His malignant narcissism, turbocharged with a euphoric regimen of the powerful steroid Dexamethasone, led him to boast he'd learned so much about Covid that he discharged himself from the hospital after only four days. Armed with that false sense of well-being supplied by the drug, he is using his disease as germ warfare, infecting all who come into his path with his toxic spittle and "don't worry be happy" cant. And that includes his own teenage son, assuming that he is not already sick.

Trump was in full S.O.B. (shortness of breath) mode as he went huffing and puffing up to the White House balcony on Monday night for his Mussolini photo op and campaign ad.

 

 He is getting back to work even if it kills him and everybody around him, not to mention the legions of his mask-averse fans who worship him like a god. And not to mention the untold numbers of people who will continue to sicken and die of disease and despair, thanks to his continuing reign of ignorance and terror. 

The White House has been literally transformed into a pest-house.

The heavy-duty steroid that he's on is commonly reserved for those with severe symptoms of Covid-19. I suspect that his compliant physicians dosed him with it not so much for therapeutic purposes, but because it does such a good job of masking symptoms. I have witnessed just what this drug can do when my husband, suffering in the last stages of Multiple Myeloma, was prescribed it.  With only weeks left to live,  this normally responsible and sane man felt so good he decided it would be a great idea to use our house as collateral to purchase a BMW, which he would then race professionally on the world circuit. To say that this drug instills a false and even psychotic sense of well-being is a vast understatement. 

Trump was already psychologically damaged. And he has the nuclear codes. And nobody seems capable of saying No to him. Forget about him not being out of the woods for another week to ten days. The whole world is in more danger than ever with this steroid-addled, ratings-addicted tyrant on the loose.

One commentator compared his balcony scene to Michael Jackson dangling his infant son out of a hotel window. I had also been thinking of Michael Jackson, but more in relation to his likewise being so rich and powerful that he was able to hire a compliant doctor to administer anesthesia to help him sleep. That turned out to be the ultimate in insomnia cures.

Trump, who has reportedly never slept much thanks to imbibing a dozen Diet Cokes a day, just got his own compliant doctors to feed his permanent sub-manic state with a psychosis-inducing stimulant.

Meanwhile, as The Washington Post reported this week, more than $2.3 trillion allocated through the grotesquely named CARES Act was injected into the big bloated coffers of corporations and individual oligarchs that were never required to prove either immediate need or future adverse impact from the pandemic. Nor were they required to promise they would keep their workers on their payrolls.

Contrast this with the bargain Band-Aid and the crumbling tablet of expiring aspirin of the cruelly temporary unemployment supplements and one-time-only $1200 "stimulus" checks tossed out by a bipartisan Congress to the tens of millions of people who are suffering the most.

 It was a massive dose of financial steroids for the rich and the ethically unhealthy, allowing the pandemic itself to rage on and on, and get even worse. 

The Trump presidency is emblematic of our entire terminally diseased capitalistic system, which needs euthanasia much more than it requires any more of the wasted therapy that ends up hurting the whole world.

Don't just take my word for it. Pope Francis has issued a perfectly-timed encyclical, inspired by his namesake saint of Assisi, with the anti-capitalist and anti-war theme of Fraternity and Social Friendship. This paragraph takes direct aim at Trumpism:

The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people’s lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.

But the Pope doesn't let the neoliberal system of government and the discourse-controlling corporate media which produced Trump off the hook either:

 The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of "spillover" or "trickle"-- without using the name-- as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged "spillover" does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at "promoting an economy that favours productive diversity and business creativity" and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, "without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist." The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, "we must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need."

Sick Etiquette, Or Speaking Ill of the Ill

Some of the same people who just the other day were accusing Donald Trump of personally killing tens of thousands of people with Covid-19 today are falling all over themselves to wish this mass murderer and the worst criminal in the history of humanity a speedy recovery from his own bout with the virus.

The less hypocritical among them are, at least, lopping off the requisite "Prayers" from their get-well tweets, sending only their ambiguous generic Thoughts. That way, they can leave the interpretation of their mental processes to the imagination of the audience. They can have their politically correct cake and eat it too.

Twitter, meanwhile, has banned all tweets that hope for the death of Trump. One must not speak ill of the ill, at least not until he or she is safely buried. This especially goes for those rude Lefties. The elite centrist #Resistance fighters of the plutocracy have proven once again that they hate the Left more than they hate Trump, when they sanctimoniously chide us not to wish ill upon the criminal ill, with whom they are absolutely complicit.

The quality of Trump's continuing existence remains a mystery. Given the way he's always pumped up his health, virility and stamina, the White House's official statement that he has a slight fever and cough can probably be interpreted as "pneumonia and on a ventilator."

I imagine that if Trump is not on a ventilator or at death's door, then he is being a very difficult patient indeed. According to the divorce testimony of ex-wife Ivana, he was in so much pain after his scalp reduction surgery that he raped her in a fit of rage. He also reportedly called his cosmetic surgeon and threatened to kill him - but only after not paying his bill, suing him, and destroying his practice.

So I hope that Walter Reed and its medical staff are all current on their malpractice insurance premiums. Just that one experimental "monoclonal antibody cocktail"  that Trump is reportedly chugging or having injected into his veins has Lawsuit written all over it.

Assuming that Trump does die, despite all the experimental drugs and all the Thoughts and Prayers being spewed his way by his oligarchic peers, we will also be sternly advised not to gloat or celebrate.

Moms Mabley once quipped, "They say you shouldn't say nothing about the dead unless it's good. He's dead. Good!" But you know what? She then proceeded to eventually die herself. Let that be a lesson to all you Lefties getting distastefully happy because the Most Dangerous Threat to Democracy in Our Lifetime may be hovering close to death.

 There is a decent interval which must be observed before the trashing of dead master criminals can begin afresh. They say it's out of respect for the surviving crime family members. But it's also a superstition thing, a cultural taboo dating back to pre-Enlightenment times.  You just never know how long the ghost will linger around the neighborhood before realizing that it is well and truly dead and finally goes gently into the Great Beyond. And in the pettlly vengeful Trump's case, that waiting-around lingering period might be longer than normal, given how he allegedly will refuse to leave the White House even if he loses the election. Plus, it's getting uncomfortably close to Halloween.

I imagine that just as they did when he dropped his very first big bombs, unleashing "fire and fury like the world as never seen" then more than one pundit will gush on the day of his funeral (after he was finally taken off life support for his low grade fever): "Trump has at last shown the world that he is presidential."

George Bush will share another piece of candy with Michelle Obama. Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump will kiss and make up and become best friends again. President Kamala Harris, who took over when Uncle Joe became shockingly incapacitated when he "caught cold" the day after his election, will prove her presidential solidarity by dropping a few more bombs and imposing new economic sanctions on another poor country with socialistic tendencies.

Am I getting too inappropriately ahead of myself?

Even if Trump does make a complete recovery thanks to the magic of magical thinking, prayer, designer drugs and concierge medical care, I don't believe that either he or his party will be one bit chastened. If anything, he will tout his return to health as proof that the virus is no worse than the common cold. He will market himself as the bullish hero for the cause of White Male Herd Immunity and Survival of the Fittest. 

When the elites hypocritically wish for a speedy Trump recovery, what they're really wishing for is the protection of their own Status Quo.  When their New York Times editorial board pleads "Get Well, Mr. President," it is for reasons of their own financial and hegemonic security. Apparently, a dysfunctional bedridden Trump will unleash even more "chaos" on the world than the functional Trump has unleashed thus far!

In times of crisis, the public looks to the president for reassurance and guidance. What happens when he is at the heart of that crisis? Public confidence plummets, and tensions rise. Global markets are shaken. Foreign adversaries search for ways to exploit the uncertainty.

Translation: #Russiagate, or the foisting of blame on any manufactured adversary for the social unrest caused by the massive economic inequality engendered by the American ruling class itself, will die over their dead bodies. To keep their dream alive, they must keep their Trump Frankenstein monster alive until they can replace him with a more attractive model more willing to do their bidding with a smile and a smirk and a bushel full of platitudes.

Debate & Switch, Crash & Burn

Lots of people feared that the first presidential "debate" between our two designated right-wing codgers would end up being a train wreck. But nobody could ever have expected a reenactment of the Hindenburg disaster. That Nazi airship blew up in 1937 New Jersey, whereas the more modern fascist version exploded in Ohio on Tuesday night.

If you were still naively operating under the assumption that we have even the merest vestige of a functioning democracy left, than Tuesday night's spectacle starring human dirigible Donald Trump (with a largely muted walk-on assist from Joe Biden) should have permanently disabused you of that quaint notion.

The commentary running through many an aghast head as the grisly event streamed into millions of foreclosure-prone American homes went something like this:  (h/t Herb Morrison)

"Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here. I... I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it's completely a mess of smoking wreckage. And everybody can't hardly breathe. It's hard, it's crazy. Honestly, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it.... This is the worst thing I've ever witnessed!"

The gasbag blimp known as Donald Trump has been blowing things up for quite awhile now, both verbally and operationally. And since his wreckage will be raining down upon the earth far into the future. the phrase "Oh, the humanity" can't even begin to describe what we witnessed on Tuesday night. For as much as we thought that we were steeled by the last three and a half years of Trumpism, could anything have prepared us for an American president publicly calling on the crypto-fascist Proud Boys militia to "stand back and stand by?" He also urged his ad hoc troops to converge on the nation's polling places on Election Day to monitor balloting and, presumably, to accost voters who look or act suspiciously un-American. Presumably, these volunteer monitor-militias will also be fully armed. Presumably, the very thought of armed freelance election monitors will also keep enough people away from the polls to even affect the outcome.

It's no wonder that Trump wants all the schools to reopen in the middle of a pandemic. Without schools, young people cannot be properly indoctrinated by his proposed Patriotism re-education curriculum. Without the monitoring custodial function which classrooms provide, students might even start to wake up and realize that their leaders in both parties are making a real botch of things.

If they watched the Tuesday night debate debacle, however, they are probably already realizing it.

If anything can finally terrify Undecideds or Stay-At-Homes into voting for the detritus known as Joe Biden, it was Tuesday night's dirigible disaster. Maybe we can pick through the wreckage and salvage something. Although, with such "gaffes" as Biden's indignant insistence  that he has "nothing against" Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett because she seems like "a very fine person" Biden does sort of evoke Trump's own infamous remark that "there are very fine people on both sides" of the racist/anti-racist divide.

Biden's disavowal of the Green New Deal, and his admission that his "public option" in health care coverage would just be a means-tested renaming of Medicaid, that he is more prone to starting a war with Russia than "Putin's puppy" is, that he repeated discredited CIA propaganda about Russia putting a bounty on the American invaders and occupiers of Afghanistan, and that he said all of these "reassuring" things with his beady eyes squinting straight through the camera at the terrified viewers at home, might still make some of those annoying  "purists"  out there continue to refuse to find their sustenance in a toxic landfill.

Here's what Biden said about the bait and switch of a "public option":

 "It’s only for those people who are so poor they qualify for Medicaid they can get that free in most States, except Governors who want to deny people who are poor Medicaid. Anyone who qualifies for Medicaid would automatically be enrolled in the public option. The vast majority of the American people would still not be in that option." (my bold.)

Translation: the option is not only restrictive, it is every bit as mandatory as a law requiring people living high on the hog of the minimum wage or reduced unemployment benefits to buy a Bronze plan which they can never afford to use because of obscenely high deductibles and co-pays.

Since cutting off Trump's microphone as he lit his own poisoned gas on fire apparently was not part of the plan by the ratings and profit-hungry corporate media outlets which created Trump in the first place, they will forge right ahead in their unending game of disaster-feasting:

"And, I - I've... lost my breath several times during this exciting moment here. Will you pardon me just a moment? I'm not going to stop talking.... I'm just going to swallow several times until I can keep on."

 

 

Amy Coney Barrett's Communistic Tendencies

Someone should alert Donald Trump that the ethos of People of Praise, the Christian group which counts his newest Supreme Court nominee as a member, bears an uncanny resemblance to the core principles of communism. Maybe then he'd think twice about constantly and ridiculously hurling the Socialist/Marxist epithet at the corporate Democrats in an effort to deflect attention from their mutual capitalistic agenda. Who knows? He could even end up withdrawing  Coney Barrett's name from nomination. People of Praise does not, for example, embrace the odious Prosperity Gospel beloved of GOP cultists, who count greed not only as a Christian virtue but as an addendum to the original Ten Commandments.

Somebody should also alert the media conglomerate about this oversight so they may start calling Trump out on it. In an alternate universe, it might even reach the point that the capitalist class accused Trump and his nominee of both heresy and hypocrisy for ignoring the fact that Coney Barrett's group solidly adheres to the original socialistic radicalism of Jesus even as she herself professes public fealty to the Pantheon of Constitutional Originalists. This dual belief system simply does not compute.

Of course, I jest. Because the Narrative chosen by the liberal press is that People of Praise is a scary, "secretive" cult that directly inspired Margaret Atwood's dystopian The Handmaid's Tale novel about forced fecundity in a misogynistic theocratic American society. That neither of these things is true doesn't seem to matter.

According to The Guardian:

Interviews with experts who have studied charismatic Christian groups such as People of Praise, and with former members of the group, plus a review of the group’s own literature, reveal an organization that appears to dominate some members’ everyday lives, in which so-called “heads” – or spiritual advisers – make big life decisions, and in which members are expected to financially support one another. Married women – such as Barrett – count their husbands as their “heads” and all members are expected to donate 5% of their income to the organization.

 The group emerged out of the Catholic charismatic movement of the late 1960s, which blended Catholicism and Protestant Pentecostalism – Catholics and Protestants are both members – and adopted practices like speaking in tongues. The group’s literature shows communal living is also encouraged, at least among unmarried members, as is the sharing of finances between households.

The People of Praise website states that "We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community. Those early believers put their lives and their possessions in common, and there were no needy persons among them."

Now, compare that redistributionist radicalism to the old-school secular communism that once thrived right here in the Land of the Free.

 In Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, one former leader  explains how the party was organized in his poor Depression-era New York City neighborhood:

 As for the individual Communist at the branch level, four-fifths of the time he  followed Party directives, one-fifth of the time he was on his own; on his own he was supposed to respond to whatever happened in the course of a day in the neighborhood... "if there was a tenant conviction, or a sick comrade,  or if he was needed to join a picket line, or canvas during an election. Or if the neighborhood needed a traffic light, or a shopkeeper was having trouble with the Fire Department. You know, just like the neighborhood Democratic Party would have operated - only we always got there first."

The branch members' other duties consisted of contributing a week's wages to the Party once a year, selling the Daily Worker and running off weekly leaflets.

People of Praise is religious, Communism is traditionally secular. Both embrace the spirit of community and both also have operated under varying degrees of rigidity and control, as do most organizations.

Amy Coney Barrett said that she admires the life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I hope that at her confirmation hearing she is also asked about the life and legacy of fellow Catholic lay-person and anarchist Dorothy Day, who herself had undergone an abortion before converting to the Catholic faith and spending her life in social activism and constantly "pricking the consciences" of the Establishment regarding war, inequality, and labor rights.  I hope, that in light of the fact that Coney Barrett has previously vowed for religious reasons to recuse herself in capital punishment cases, that she will also have enough of a conscience to recuse herself in Supreme Court cases concerning contraception and Roe v Wade. 

But her history of siding with corporations and oligarchs over the needs of ordinary people is troubling, to say the least. She's like Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, in that regard. He also tithes and generously helps members of his own insular community in tandem with getting rich, through private equity, by indebting businesses before destroying them and insisting that godless "corporations are people, my friend."

It is the fine art of holding two opposing ethical positions in one's mind at the same time, and thus being able to sleep well at night. Trump will also easily cancel out every kind of conservative hypocrisy whenever it suits him, just so long as it serves the purpose of shielding his own.

But it doesn't hurt to try to rattle their rigid, complacent, carefully compartmentalized little brains every once in a while, does it?

And we must always have faith. If you do happen to pray, then you might beseech the almighty to allow Amy Coney Barrett to follow in the footsteps of Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor, who at a relatively young age resigned from the nation's highest court in order to care for her sick husband. It was the ethical thing to do.

Of course, since she was succeeded by the arch-conservative Samuel Alito in the Bush Jr. administration, we should also always be very careful about what we pray and wish for.

Pick Your Fascism

Since the pandemic is transforming the traditional Election Day into Election Season with early mail-in balloting, the Establishment's' Get Out the Vote campaign is more strident than ever.

These last few weeks of Decision 2020 feel like being swept along in a turgid stream of elite consciousness. As hard as we try to swim against the tide of the Most Consequential Election in the history of humanity, the more they try to drown us with their voter-shaming - when they're not mentally electrocuting us with their jolts of nuclear-powered gaslight.

I didn't know whether to gulp for air or melt down into an abject puddle when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry and Meghan) deigned to inform me, from the rustic grounds of their $14 million California estate, that I am allowed to "make my voice heard." 

I must use my voice to check a box to prove that I matter, Meghan nattered.

Voting will prove that I hate hatred enough to elect one of their own in order maintain "our values." And here I was, too lazy and ignorant to even realize that the magical festival of Quadrannius has finally arrived! It is that special time that comes only once every four years, when the oligarchs and celebrities go all noblesse oblige  to wake up the citizens from the cynicism and the apathy that their bitter pills have created. If we do not give them the degree of legitimacy with which to feed us even more of their bitter pills for the next four years, then they'll end up looking like the quacks they are instead of the healers they want to resemble.

To press the point home, Harry was not above playing  the guilt-tripping, gaslighting card. Give 'em hell, Harry! He reminded us with his Voice that we regular people are even more important and privileged than he is. Because as a royal personage, he has been dreadfully disenfranchised for his whole adult life!

Bertram Gross  warned 40 years ago of the "Friendly Fascism" that was taking over this country and the rest of the advanced free world. Although the parts of the book dealing with the then-bugaboos of Soviet communism and "stagflation" are dated, he was remarkably prescient about the slow, boiling-frog-death of representative democracy via an insidious corporate/oligarchic coup.

The "F" word has finally come out of the elite closet with the victory of Donald Trump. But that is only because he is an "unfriendly" fascist who rules with a sneer and a scowl instead of with the simper and the smile which has been fooling some of the people most of the time, or at least most of the people some of the time, as the frog-water simmered. Whenever the bath threatened to boil over and wake up the comatose frogs, friendly-looking presidents like Barack Obama added the requisite dose of cool charm to augment the glow of the gaslight.

Donald Trump, of course, is only adding salt to the water and gasoline to the fire. He is riling people up when they should be narcotized. He is not using what Gross called Triplespeak: the political propaganda technique comprised of "myth, jargon and confidential straight talk."

Gross wrote:

"Unlike Orwell's doublethink and newspeak, triplespeak is not part of any overall plan. It merely develops as a logical outcome of the Establishment;s maturation, an essential element of the tightening of oligarchic control."

Without myths like American exceptionalism, democracy  and the founding pioneer spirit, rulers cannot maintain order and support at the lower and middle levels of the Establishment. Jargon is required to justify the power and secrecy and violence of the military/surveillance state. Straight talk is the ploy used by elites to explain why secrecy is needed in the first place, or blather about the brutal hard truth of why social programs must be cut.

Trump, the damaged epitome of immaturity, rails against the surveillance state when it is used by his fellow elites against him. He calls vaunted military heroes "chumps and losers," while the more proper pols glorify their deaths as "the ultimate sacrifice." He directly foments violence, dispensing with all the obfuscatory jargon about human rights and morality which masks the friendly fascism his peers have striven so mightily to perfect.

And therefore, establishment media outlets are manically selling Wokeness in a valiant effort to arouse us just long enough to care about electing Joe Biden - before they put us (along with the street protests they are so eagerly covering) to sleep again, once the danger to their legitimacy passes.

Why else would celebrities and political elites be co-opting the police murder of Breonna Taylor, who lingered in obscurity until the televised murder of George Floyd made her the newest symbol of the moment? Why would the liberal establishment be able to so blithely ignore Obama's drone murders and mass deportations and police crackdowns on the Occupy movement, but now decry Trump's xenophobia and flouting of the Constitution?

It's all about the language, of course. Trump does not, as Gross's friendlier fascists do, "take over the symbols of opposition groups" and make them his own.  As the opposite of Trump's nihilistic shtick, Bertram Gross shares the secret ingredients of the friendly fascist recipe:

"Peace, equality, black power, women's rights, the Constitution, for example,are prominent in the sloganry justifying increased armament, oligarchic wealth, institutionalized white and male supremacy, and the subversion of constitutional rights."

The reason that I hope Joe Biden wins (although, with the luxury of living in a non-battleground state, I don't plan to vote for either him or Trump), is that he is often so miserably inept himself at putting a friendly face on the fascism that long preceded Trump. His campaign has had to walk back his constant stream of "gaffes" almost as often as Trump's handlers have to do damage control on his. Biden wouldn't ever be able to fool enough the people enough of the time, no matter how hard Bernie Sanders and MSNBC try to prop him, and more importantly, the Democratic Party, up.

Biden's immediate reaction, for example, to the no-bill grand jury exoneration of the Louisville SWAT team that gunned down Breonna Taylor was to warn protesters against destroying property.

And as the media very well knows, Trump can never be goaded into saying he'd accept a peaceful transition to power if he loses. Such an admission runs counter to every narcissistic fiber of his damaged being.  We'll probably be hearing Republican disclaimers of his face-saving threats from now until January and beyond, should he lose to Biden.

The first canned battle of these two snarling, smirking geriatric right-wingers will, at least, be an entertaining ratings bonanza of epic WWF proportions.

May our voices of derision finally be heard by the voter-shaming concern trolls. May our feet plod to the polls (or the mailbox) before they race right back to the streets, no matter which of these reactionary characters mounts to an ever more discredited platform of power.