As the agent of Pest Control arrives to address the infestation, Themis, the Goddess of Justice in Greek mythology waits patiently out of sight. But, perhaps her demeanor is too stoical in view of the damage the “narcissistic assholes” continue to relentlessly inflict on our beleaguered heroine, Pacha Mama. To wit: As Kenny Stancil writes on Common Dreams, November 21, 2022, “Despite mountains of iron-clad evidence that extracting and burning more coal, oil and gas will exacerbate deadly planetary heating, negotiations at the United Nations COP 27 climate conference failed yet again to directly confront the fossil fuel industry whose insatiable quest for profits is putting the future of humanity in jeopardy.” In fact, as Stancil further points out, “Hundreds of corporations are planning to expand dirty energy production in the coming years,” making the 1.5C temperature goal that would prevent further climate damage impossible to meet.
In disappointing news on the domestic political front, “narcissistic assholes” continue to rule. Progress in the ongoing effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for his crimes stalled yet again when US Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to appoint a special counsel to further investigate Trump rather than indict him now based on a plethora of evidence of his “marauding narcissistic assholism,” the character defect that has enabled his numerous, well documented and proven criminal violations of the laws of the land. Adding insult to the injury wrought on the integrity of democracy by the DOJ’s refusal to act, the King Baby has announced that he will run for president again in 2024. The upshot of all this is that as the tragedy of the Trumplican Party’s assault on democracy unfolds and the frustration mounts on the climate crisis front, it appears that mere mortals are incapable of managing their own lives with wisdom and compassion, necessitating the intervention of a higher power.
Talk is cheap, as the saying goes, and everybody knows that action speaks louder than words, a truth dramatically evidenced in the the concerted effort of voters in the recent midterms when they rallied around the tattered banner of Democracy and reduced the pundits’ predicted “Red Wave” to a trickle, taking an important step in the right direction, right?
“Nope,” says Paul Street in his November 3, 2022 Substack report, “not under a bourgeois democracy, American Style, wherein unlimited campaign funding by dark money billionaires is viewed as ‘free speech,’ where presidents aren’t elected by a popular vote, where presidential elections are reduced to a handful of contested states, where the God-like Supreme Court is absurdly far to the right of the populace, and where California and Wyoming both have two representatives in the powerful upper chamber of Congress despite the fact the former state is home to nearly forty million people and the latter one is home to less than six hundred thousand folks.” Street got it wrong about the outcome in the midterms in predicting a Red Wave, but his analysis of the root problem is right on the money and worth quoting at length. The crux of the matter and the most compelling reason for a cosmic intervention a la Mr. Fish is the nauseating state of the current two-party political system comprised of so called “Liberals” and “Conservatives.”
“ ‘Conservative’ does not adequately capture (GOP) politics anymore,” writes Street. “They are white supremacist arch-authoritarian radicals now. The GOP has become an essentially neofascist party exhibiting numerous core characteristics of fascism, including the embrace of political violence, militant and vengeful ‘palingenetic nationalism,’ savage white supremacism and nationalism, political eliminationism paramiltarism, conspiratorialism, hyper-patriarchy, cultism, anti-intellectualism, paranoid anti-socialism and a readiness to trash previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and rule of law.”
Street also details the shortcomings of the Democrats with devastating accuracy as, “a capitalist party that only pretends to care about the real needs of working people. The Democrats have consistently aligned with their big corporate and financial backers to prevent the passage of comprehensive labor law reform and the introduction of universal free public health insurance for all. They have not advanced the genuinely progressive taxation required to seriously challenge the massive over-concentration of wealth in the United States (so extreme that the top tenth of the upper 1% has more wealth than the bottom 90% here.) They have not made serious efforts to re-legalize union organizing and restore the labor movement to its once central place in American workplaces, communities, and politics. They do not move to carve into the nation’s massive military-industrial and imperial budget—the Pentagon system that eats up more than half of US federal discretionary spending while transferring wealth to high-tech ‘defense’ (empire) corporations. They do not understand the giant social investment required to meet the needs of the nation’s mostly working-class residents. They are currently helping lead the world to precipices of thermonuclear and environmental collapses that will solve the working class’s problems by ending life on Earth.”
In the dire situation described by Street, voting is a waste of time, leaving a massive grassroots revolt as the only viable option for substantive change left on the table, a solution that will require an equally massive realignment of capitalist society with ecological reality. The process starts with the understanding, that as David Suzuki famously said, “We all live downstream.” When people experience the truth of that point, things will start to get better. The situation reminds me of the Whole Earth Catalog days and Stewart Brand’s quip about calling the supplements to the catalog The Don’t Piss Against the Wind Newsletter. Alas, the alternative press of Brand’s era failed to rally the populace to embrace an ecological view and what Trump accurately labeled the “Lame Stream Media” has succeeded in brainwashing the masses to continue to consume more useless crap for the benefit of investors. I’m amazed at the number of people I meet who don’t have a clue about the UN COP conferences or the CO2 emissions goals that need to be met to avert Armageddon, thanks to a media industry that now exclusively serves the interests of money and power rather than truth and justice.
As for the political gridlock in the Swamp and the DOJ’s decision not to prosecute Trump, I recently commented on Robert Hubbell’s site that instead of trying to “ignore the GOP circus that is coming to town”as a result of the midterm elections in the House of Representatives, as he suggested, how about we go on the offensive with a vengeance and drive that shit show out of town in a concerted effort to rid the body politic of the Republican Party as now organized around the malignant Trump by applying the rule of law with greater vigor than has been the case so far. It should be clear by now that our erstwhile president and the army of MAGAs that serve his cause are illegitimate and a clear and present danger to democracy. In the words of Florida GOP activist Mac Stipanovich, as reported in the Financial Times newspaper, “The business model for the Republican Party is stoking outrage, creating fear and then exploiting that fear.” Stipanovich’s statement describes a paradigm of governance that’s a far cry from the sacred charter elected officials are sworn to uphold in the civic life of a democratic nation. According to the Constitution, they are empowered by law to govern on behalf of the common good, not to waste legislative resources on mendacious maneuvers designed to assuage the pathological frustrations of a miscreant narcissist.
In the eyes of those who love democracy and abhor the nation’s recent descent into fascism and codependency, it’s been clear for years that a chastisement is in order. Throughout the history of mankind when things got this bad, Nemesis, the Goddess of retribution against those who succumbed to hubris, appears on stage to inflict vengeance on the “narcissistic assholes,” for their evil deeds. In the face of Chalmers Johnson’s ominous warning that the imperial global marauder America has now become in pursuit of Empire, “will probably maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it…History teaches us that the capacity of things to get worse is limitless,” writes Johnson. “Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end.”
Facilitating that outcome is apparently the driving motive of the GOP as the Party of Trump now maliciously seeks to totally destroy the crumbling structures of democratic government and install fascists in the citadels of power. Meanwhile, the Democrats offer tepid verbal protests, but little substantive resistance on behalf of the working classes as the machinery of congress relentlessly grinds on for the benefit of the wealthy and the corporate oligarchy lurking in the shadows. A handful of billionaires seem to recognize that it will soon be game over if things don’t change, but offer only whacky, selfish solutions to the dilemma, such as escaping to other planets after this one has been totally trashed. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galatic Holdings, Inc., Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp lead the field in these quixotic endeavors. The looniest of all may be Elon Musk’s plans to blast off to Mars and establish a self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet, a goal that the newly anointed Twitt-in-Chief contends is necessary to ensure the survival of the human species.
“Narcissistic assholes” like Musk don’t appear to be interested in more down-to-Earth solutions to humanity’s climate crisis, such as wise stewardship of the beautiful planet we already inhabit, and he has plenty of allies in the political realm who seem to support his extreme views of the future prospects for Homo sapiens. Speaking as a citizen of the beleaguered Republic I once took a constitutional oath to protect and defend, here’s an alternative view for consideration. Perhaps we could apply the old-fashioned values of caring and compassion for each other and for non-human species that are our kin as well, and truly “conserve” the precious God-given resources we now enjoy by dismantling the monstrous authoritarian plutocracy driving us to ruin, replacing it with a system the Framers deemed more worthy, specifically a democratic government in which its leaders derived “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
For example, instead of worrying about limiting the size of government and cutting social benefits, perhaps so called “conservatives” should be working to create a government informed by the ecological view and dedicated to serving the common good. Just a thought, but one that might take the pressure off the planet and obviate the need for Draconian “pest control” measures on Mother Nature’s part. Given the present tendency of the people’s representatives in the Swamp to make decisions based on ideological theory, conspiratorial, paranoid speculation and wishful thinking instead of peer-reviewed evidence, it seems quixotic to expect that they will govern in a manor that respects ecological necessities, let alone the fundamental needs of the people. But such a prospect is, after all, aligned with common sense, based on the moral framework that laid the foundation for American democracy in the first place, the seminal idea that the purpose of government is to support the well being of the governed community of citizens, the core principle of social justice codified in the Preamble to the Constitution— “to form a more perfect Union, Establish Justice, ensure Domestic Tranquility, provide for the Common Defense, promote the General welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
Critical challenges/problems identified + viable solutions presented = an excellent piece of writing that is spot on. Thank you.