IN THE SKY: Postscript
There is a children's book I loved, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs." Republicans make that storyline seem more likely." - Jerry Feist
According to Wikipedia, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett, was one of the ‘Top 100 Picture Books’ of all time in a poll by School Library Journal. First published in 1978 by Atheneum Books, it is now published by Simon & Schuster. A Sony Pictures Animation based on the book was produced in 2009. The storyline Feist referred to in the prelude quote is set in a little town called Chewandswallow, where the sky provided free food for the inhabitants. For a long time food conveniently reigned from the sky three times a day at breakfast, lunch and dinner. As the book explains: “There were no food stores in the town of Chewandswallow. They didn’t need any. The sky supplied all the food they could possibly want…everything that everyone ate came from the sky…Life for the townspeople was delicious until the weather took a turn for the worse.”
Instead of three meals a day falling from the sky, the food grew in size and the inhabitants witnessed a day when nothing fell from the sky but Gorgonzola cheese, another day ruined by a pea soup fog and still another with a tomato tornado. And so it went. Among other horrors, there was a hurricane of bread and hard rolls, and a storm of pancakes with a downpour of maple syrup. It got to the point where the Sanitation Department couldn’t handle the mess. “Everyone feared for their lives,” the book explains. “They couldn’t go outside most of the time. Many houses had been badly damaged by giant meatballs.” The picture in the Chewandswallow Digest with the “Bowel Movers” van stuck in a snarl of traffic and spaghetti on Lower Intestine Street said it all! Eventually the “weather” got so bad the residents of Chewandswallow decided to leave and set sail for a new land on rafts made of giant peanut butter sandwiches on stale bread.
Like my friend Jerry Feist, I appreciated the metaphor this charming book’s storyline might suggest about America’s current political divide, especially as evidenced by the fascist GOP assault on Democracy. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs begins with a description of the good life in Chewandswallow, serving as a (stretched) metaphor for the long period of pleasant political weather that marked how things were here in the U.S.A. during the years of the “liberal consensus,” when “Conservative Republicans accepted, albeit grudgingly, the important elements of the ‘liberal’ New Deal domestic philosophy,” as Godfrey Hodgson succinctly frames the period. As Wikipedia reports, “For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant paradigm in American politics, peaking with the landslide victory of Lyndon Baines Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and the passage of Great Society legislation.”
Unfortunately, akin to events in Chewandswallow, ominous clouds began to gather in earnest, in America’s case precipitated by the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Cloudy skies dominated the forecast throughout the Reagan presidency and the ensuing Bush and Obama years, with storms erupting from time to time, releasing a few meatballs here and there, but nothing catastrophic. Then suddenly, when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the sky dumped a flood of meatballs on the people of America with a vengeance. As in the Chewandswallow catastrophe, chaos ruled, as the Republican Party declared class war on the citizenry with its anti-democratic tactics and domestic terrorist policies. Even with Trump, the spiciest meatball of them all, now out of office, his baleful influence continues to cause unhappiness and dissension throughout the land. But unlike the people of Chewandswallow, the citizens of the United States have nowhere to move to, other than the planet Mars, perhaps, courtesy of Elon Musk’s Quixotic fleet of SpaceX Starships.
During Trump’s egregiously dysfunctional years in office, the GOP abandoned the principles of Democracy and the Rule of Law as a toxic fog of mendacity and stupidity rolled into the already foggy Swamp in Washington, D.C. and remains to paralyze the processes of democratic governance to this day. The hardball strategy of the Republicans, following the lead of the twice-impeached Donald J. Trump, is to attack the Democrats with outright lies, bureaucratic interference and relentless propaganda that seeks to demonize democratic government structures and norms designed to support the rule of law and protect citizens from corporate malfeasance. Leading the charge is a group of 70 House Republicans who propose to extend tax cuts enacted during the Trump Administration that favor corporations and the ultra wealthy while hypocritically claiming concerns about the deficit. Such giveaways would force cuts to critical social programs such as Medicare and Social Security while increasing the deficit by trillions of dollars. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the Trump era tax measure would total $2.2 trillion by 2032.
But the GOP war on the American people is only one ingredient in the recipe for disaster concocted by the Capitalist Ruling Class. The “meatballs” that fall upon us today, crushing Democracy and the Rule of Law in their wake, represent the dark forces beyond the partisanship circus in the Swamp that have hijacked the systems of power derived from the Constitution to promote the common good and establish Justice. “The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious mouth pieces in the media and academia,” are the real “meatballs” identified by Chris Hedges in his speech at the Rage Against The War Machine rally in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, February 19, 2023, and they are “illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins. Prove this truth, as Julian (Assange) did, and you are crucified.”
Also complicit in this war on truth are the fascist rightwing media outlets such as Fox News that promote Trump’s Big Lie about Biden stealing the 2020 election knowing full well that it was a ruse. Emails presented as evidence in a recent lawsuit against Fox News Channel by Dominion Voting Machines exposed this “inconvenient” truth. “Dominion has obtained a trove of emails and texts that demonstrate that Fox’s ‘news anchors’ did not believe the ‘Big Lie’ they promoted relentlessly after Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden,” writes Robert Hubbell in Today’s Edition Newsletter, February 18, 2023. “Having proof that the Fox anchors do not believe their lies can reduce the natural outrage we experience in reaction to those statements. But knowing that they contrive to prove those lies, despite their contempt for Trump and his followers, is even more maddening. Their actions are depraved. The First Amendment should provide no harbor for Fox News. It is a fraud, a criminal enterprise, and a threat to democracy.”
Indeed, Fox News and its associate outlets are reprehensible, but they are not the only agents of Republican mendacity. The Democrats are complicit in this charade as well. Members of both parties, with few exceptions, qualify as bona fide “meatballs” of capitalist greed, the economic system that drives everything that happens in the Swamp that the demagogue Trump had so disingenuously promised to drain. As Paul Street points out in his February 17, 2023 Substack report The Horrors of Capitalism, “Eighty-six House Democrats were right to reject the insane United States House of Representatives resolution that denounced the alleged horrors of socialism two weeks ago.” But unfortunately, they represent a minority. Street also noted that “Partly out of fear and no doubt out of significant ideological agreement on socialism’s supposed evil, 109 House Democrats signed on with the Neo-McCarthyite “Horrors of Socialism” resolution.”
What’s really tragic about the denunciation of socialism on the part of our corporate-controlled representatives in Washington is their failure to address the reality that brought the overarching issue to the table that matters most: the prospect of Armageddon brought on by the insane, extractive resource exploitation of the capitalist economy. The American power elite in its rabid quest to serve the goals of Empire are missing the most important power play of all—the one that acknowledges the threat the globalist capitalist system poses to all life on the planet. “How about (even less likely),” suggests Paul Street, “a resolution that goes deeper and takes on the Horrors of Capitalism—of the system that produces fascism by rendering bourgeois politicians’ pretenses of democracy ever more transparently inauthentic and useless at the same time that it generates multiple and endless crises requiring big government intervention? Yes, the horror of the system whose ruling class will always select big revanchist, fractionally divisive, and repressive government over big democratic, solidaristic, and liberating big government serving the common good. The system that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has quite properly called ‘irredeemable.’” In his January 24, 2023 Substack report Kill Capitalism Before it Kills US, Street presents a wealth of compelling evidence that Capitalism has to go—or else. Read this excellent piece on The Paul Street Report, here.
Street’s cogent denunciation of capitalism makes it clear that eco-socialism is the only option humanity now has for a livable future. Other wise, “meatballs” will be the only item on the menu and they won’t be the kind you can chew and swallow. “It’s an existential necessity to escape from four apocalyptic horseman produced by capitalism:,” writes Street, “war (now potentially nuclear), pandemicide, fascism, and (last but not least since there’s no common good, social justice, and popular sovereignty on a dead planet) ecocide. It’s what’s required to put humanity on the path to liberation from all oppression and material ecological and epidemiological collapse. It’s the bridge to a world beyond class rule, oppression and environmental ruin.”
Meanwhile, back in the ring at the political wrestling matches, it looks like Jerry Feist’s prognostication in the subtitle is right on the money—Republicans have indeed “made the storyline more likely.” On February 19, 2023, “meatballs” made the news again in a big way when The Guardian reported that “Donald Trump road-tested a new nickname for his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination by claiming he wouldn’t use it, saying he would ‘never call’ Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, “Meatball Ron.” The Guardian also noted CBS Late Show host Steven Colbert’s reaction to the report. “Oooh, I do not like how much I love that,” Colbert said in a monolog this week, calling the ‘Meatball Ron’ nickname “so dumb and accurate.”
Hey, if the sobriquet fits, why not use, Donald? You’ve got nothing to lose but the presidency.