It’s been a rough few days for the Bernie Sanders supporters (of which, in full disclosure, I considered myself to be one of). It’s not like we didn’t know better–that the road could end here. Lots of nifty quotes are out there full of warnings-of course, the ever popular: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Audre Lorde) or the more obscure “That Debbie Wasserman Schultz is one corrupt mother-fucker” (Lao Tzu). I do think Bernie probably just kept to his word. He said he would back the winner when he entered this thing, and he is old-fashioned enough to have done just that. He probably feels comfort with this safe path, like he feels in a good pair of sensible Rockports that have been properly applied with a 1971 shoehorn made of quality steel (not that plastic crap they use these days). Or the comfort found from a well functioning bowel, proud with common-sense fiber.
Okay, maybe I’m a little raw about his endorsement and failure to go rogue. I’ll stop the old man jokes. So while he sips his Postum (the hot beverage with warm memories), we are left to ourselves, trying to decide what all of this means. Many of us would consider such a verbal declaration of preemptive endorsement to be null and void in the presence of clear fraud, but hey, I guess Bernie didn’t feel that way. That…. or it is like the best tweet I saw about it indicating Bernie was perhaps too afraid not to back Clinton as he drives by himself often.
Thomas Frank does a wonderful job, as usual, pointing out that the “left” ignores the actual “LEFT” at its own peril. But I think all of this is certainly not going to sway anyone in the corridors of power. Frank can argue his points with pure, unadulterated common sense, but it is more important topoliticians to implement the relentless march to a fully realized neoliberal world as their corporate overlords demand. It may be tolerable to lose some elections rather than give anything to the left. Don’t let anyone fool you, barring a meteor strike that hits all the right people, TPP will be implemented no matter who is elected. It will probably be voted in prior to the election in some shady and secretive manner. You’ll hear Congress is getting together for some sort of recipe exchange, and the next thing you know, you have no legal recourse when your Kia incinerates your lower extremities on an afternoon drive. It’s a shame that the word neoliberal sounds so benign, not at all what it really is. Perhaps the proles would worry more if that philosophy were termed Slow Death of Your Soul and Body for International Corporate Enrichment. They were clever to use that first term. They have excellent wordsmiths (liars).
So now we find ourselves with a contest that many are examining to see who will cause us the least physical harm as we live out our days. If we consider the rule of thumb ….you know, it’s that saying that springs from a quaint method that was used to decide if it was okay to beat your wife with a certain diameter stick…..if the stick was wider than your thumb, it was frowned upon for you to beat the wife with…….so using this digit diameter frame of reference we should probably elect Donald Trump. Just kidding, I hate that swaggering narcissist, even if he has a small, non-threatening thumb diameter. I keep wondering if his tax returns just show a net worth of something like $5.27 and a deduction for the dependent that lives on his head.
So where am I going with all of this? I live in a state that always goes with the Republicans, so my vote won’t be anything but a tiny blip of protest (I am planning on voting for Jill Stein if she is on the ballot here). And all of the jokes aside, it is going to take a lot of Sanders’ supporters some time to heal up (as opposed to heel as the Clinton campaign prefers). This was an overwhelmingly decent group of people who had a pure and clear desire to make things better. It was that simple. Granted, Sanders did not really speak a huge amount to Empire—he wasn’t perfect by any means, but he spoke truths that resonated with many. There are an enormous amount of disenfranchised individuals, and many of them are locked out of the DNC (literally locked out as of this writing). I don’t see any future with either of the major parties for anyone but the settled and comfortable, a group dwindling in number by the day. The rest of us will have to look elsewhere, and find tools that don’t belong to the master.
