Sorry. I had to get away for a little bit. Easter is not my season, but I had no desire to rain on anyone’s faith support system. Suffice it to say that it does not have the same effect on me, so I thought I’d sit it out, for everyone’s sake.
Great news today though! The Dictatorship has been established! The President informed us today at his rally that the powers of the President are essentially unlimited in the presence of a national disaster. VP Mike Pence was asked if he agreed. Guess what he said? He is so proud to be serving our Potentate.
He was asked by what authority he thought he would open the country to business. The answer: his! There is no longer any other authority. The question seemed absurd to Dear Leader. Quote: “The Federal government has absolute power.”
Be very afraid people. This was a vision of dystopia unlike anything we have ever seen. Nixon tried to hide what he was doing. He, in a documented diminished state of mind, knew this wasn’t what you made press conferences about. This was secret stuff. Hidden tapes, that sort of thing. The President not only believes he is in complete control of our country, having absolute power, and so comfortable with that idea and that the people will accept him as the only authority in their lives that he is not only not hiding it, he’s announcing it. If anyone thinks they have a say in the direction of the country they need to trim their sails. They will find that authority has been usurped.
This is a crossroads in American history. The wealthy are looking at the Covid-19 pandemic as an economic crisis. Trump’s big money pals are mistakenly confident that they are beyond the reaches of infection between the ease of isolation for them and the easy access to any medical care they could possibly need. That will kill a few of them, but like all of us most of them will not pay the ultimate price. The privilege of that lifestyle will convince the survivors in the gated communities that this was never a big deal in the first place. The only priority is getting the money moving again in the same direction it has always moved. Up. Get the stores open, the warehouses fulfilling, the restaurants serving. Sure, some will die, but you can’t keep it shut down forever, right? Gotta take the risk sometime, so let’s go!
But the one’s that have to actually take those risks, the rank and file, they aren’t so sure. They are the ones that get sick, have no leave to help them when they do, and occaisionally die for the cause. But it isn’t their cause. They are cogs in a bigger wheel, and those gears leave scraps to scramble for while taking the bulk of the winnings to a protected and privileged few. This has been revealed like never before. People, average human beings with normal jobs they scrape by on, are emerging as the essential element of an economy they don’t participate in. They may be so many in number that they don’t have faces to the Masters, but without them the whole shitty mess comes to an abrupt halt.
Open up! Go back to work! This country wasn’t built to be closed!
But now the people want to know What’s In It For Us? Don’t ask me to bleed red, white and blue. Don’t ask me to be a martyr for the American Way. Don’t unilaterally decide that the people have been conscribed into an army to fight a war that is not ours. We have to be finally included in the wealth of the behemoth that is the United States.
If you want me to die for a cause, make it my cause.
The President has made the economy the cause. That is what we are fighting to save, maintain, protect. How much damage to the economy are people worth? One of the heavyweights in the right wing mediasphere, Bill O’Reilly, wants to make sure that people keep this in perspective. Most of the people who are dying were on their last legs anyway.
News flash. All these folks you want to send into the fire without a hose were fighting the economy the GOP has developed over the last 40 years, have no interest in defending it, protecting it, dying for it. They want to matter, with pay, with benefits, with health care, with all the things this current economy denies them with no justification for it other than greed. We had very rich people in the 50s and 60s, but they were taxed to a degree that it made it prudent to invest in their businesses, their people, and by doing so creating a middle class that was enormous and safe and comfortable. Other problems abounded, this is not to suggest a utopia, but the economy helped to distribute the enormous wealth we had at that time to a greater percentage of the people and in a more equitable way.
It all changed in 1980.
Since then, the people have been the enemy. They have been attacked with brutality economically and the disasters that started with the Savings and Loan implosion in the mid 80s, the canary in the coal mine, came fast and furious ever since. “Greed is good” we were famously instructed in the movie Wall Street, and though the movie was attempting to be an instructive parable, most people watching were pulling for the young broker on the way up, not the righteous avenger willing to sacrifice it all.
Greed got the Savings and Loan gang. Greed invented trickle-down theory that stole all the money. Greed drove deregulation, opening banking to very sophisticated criminals, brilliant minds twisted into highly developed economic assassins at places like the Harvard Business School, our brightest and best, reinvented into monsters. The tech bubble burst, then housing, then banking, and all of them have a single seed, a universal cancer that those responsible shared.
Greed.
Greed has a cheerleader. Donald John Trump personifies it and he has become a hero to many, not in spite of this characteristic, but because of it. For most of the public this 40 year experiment in greed has been aspirational by design, making opulence look like something to covet, the power great enough to no longer care about anyone else was the holy grail. They made shows about it so you could watch it. By coveting the behaviors they are elevated to something of value. The excesses were sold as what was possible in America, while the means of pursuing it were being stripped away piece by piece. Someone had to tell you what happened on “Rich Housewives…” because you were at your second job.
It’s getting to a point where we accept him as potentate, which is what he announced today, or we don’t.
His pronouncement today demands a response, an official one, an unequivocal one. Congress should be appalled and rise up on its atrophied hind legs and be counted. Bi-partisan pushback against such an outrageous assault on the separation of powers should be quick and vehement.
This is the moment. Governors are starting to form their own coalitions of states to act in concert with neighbors to reduce the competitive nature that is forced upon them because of the President’s plan of not having a plan. Regional-states forming within the State to protect themselves from the State. They are realizing they are on their own in this. He is not an ally to them. He is the President. They are not. Start from there.
That is the essence of todays TV appearance. “I’m the President. That’s the proof.” “I have absolute power.”
I am not a big conspiracy guy. Ok, a little bit, but mostly no. But this feels like the start of a putsch. Today’s words took me back to February of 2017 when Stephen Miller, very influencial in the reich as its lead proponent for white nationalism, said in an interview on Face the Nation that “… the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” That’s pretty categorical. Was it prophetic? Will we question it, or will we fold with little resistance, compliant in our fear and ignorance? Will we give him our country, our idea of a nation without a king, of a government of, by and for the people?
That’s what is at stake right now, and we have to decide who we will be.
Are the trains running on time?
Will that be enough for you?