“It’s a bed and a bathroom. A place for the end.” Simple lyrics to a current song about missed opportunities and an impending sterile, perhaps forgotten death; I hear that line relentlessly when I see Trump oozing around the griftosphere of his oval office or Mar-a-Lago, wherever—the kind of places that could be advertised on realtor.com as having “ample narcissistic supply along with 24 bathrooms” that kind of thing. This America: a place of despotism, nepotism, and plumbism (it’s a word…… Flint knows). It’s always been this of course–the recent hand-wringing of those not so touched by manifest destiny realizing and processing the anxiety of “First They Came” and actually imagining their circle in one of those categories. Of course, first they came for the tribe that wasn’t us, they came for the unbelievers, they came for those occupying the land desired and on and on. Now it is down to them coming for anyone….any group that doesn’t foster uninhibited plunder. They might not murder you (then again they might in the case of those in the way of petro profits)–but they might just distract and discredit your views to the point that you are defanged as a voice of dissent. The result is the same, erasure of the individual. And this allows the pillaging of the earth, all the inhabitants. Trump is just the ham-handed (tiny ham hands, of course, the little bitty fetal pigs in your 9th grade science class)–but yeah, he’s the ham-handed and unavoidable bloated corpse that is rampant capitalism’s end gasps. This is the end game of it all. This is the unraveling of even pretense. Now it’s time to claw out of their muck.
The Democrats are not mounting an appropriate defense against this man because they are the partner, the accomplice that won’t step on a limb that might break. They’d rather stay on that limb despite the tree being cut down by loggers from a temporary company that hasn’t trained their employees well. But the company doesn’t have to pay workers comp. insurance–so it’s all good in corporate America. It’s difficult to go against your benefactors, the groups that have benefited from all the work that has factored into “the rising productivity of the American worker”. Those graphs you see with one line rising steadily, but one line not rising at all in tandem (hint: the one that shows how hard it is to pay your bills).
The most popular politician at this time is one Bernie Sanders, a man that I think would be a good start. I don’t understand his motives for continuing to work within the Democratic party; I suspect an old-school mentality. The sad part is that his old school was a PS in Brooklyn—but he is up against those who went to different types of old schools, ones like Harvard and Yale. I am guessing they have some secret techniques to crush the PS kids even– those in their 70’s. Secrets whispered while drinking out of Geronimo’s skull? But he follows their rules, all the same. Unless he breaks from this, he is nothing but a tease. The Democrats are lousy with those entrenched neoliberals who wouldn’t be able to tell you why someone with insurance and a job might not go to receive preventative medical care (hint: no money for deductibles, no method to pay for the pharmaceutical company CEO’s penchant for profit so large that it turns into power.). They can speak of a flowery poverty that they profess a desire to help, but it is as fake ultimately as Trump’s pre-election appeals to the working class. He simply won them over because he told them an Idiocracy-esque “I know shit’s bad right now.” Hillary Clinton persisted and with living fire responded……“things are just nifty”. Okay, maybe there was no fire, and it was sort of tepid, I guess. She didn’t even validate the essential truth of their lives, hence Trump. Of course the unspoken part of his message after “I know shit’s bad right now” would be….and it’s only going to get much worse because I will loot the fuck out of this place. It’s my nature. I will appoint every radical who believes in Galt’s Gulch, and they will systematically dismantle all that protects you from becoming a little orphan saying “please sir, I want some more” in regard to reproductive rights, literacy, and the ability to retire before age 147. And they will gleefully tell you NO, because it is for your own good, and also builds character, by that they mean their bottom lines.
I’m not looking for a miracle in the Democratic party; I’m not looking for Donald Trump to find his inner honest populist underneath that belly pannus. The only option to turn this place into something other than a bed and bathroom, a place for the end, is to fully realize the extent of damage that our separation with each other causes. It’s in the entrenched powers best interest for us to continue seeing each other as competitors in the petri dish. Something to outgrow and consume. Like it or not, we’re joined at the roots like an Aspen grove, and what happens to one happens to all. And the web includes all, the plants, the air. The notion of separation is an illusion. You’re taking in the breath of all those before, the iron in your hemoglobin forged in a star who knows how long ago (well, someone probably knows like an astronomer, but I don’t know). It’s a nebulous way of trying to say that those steering the whole of us into the abyss are not the majority. The answers won’t come from ownership and brutality. That’s been the way of all recorded history and will record our end if not stopped. If there’s a chance of anything other than extinction it can only spring from empathy and the casting away of a blind acceptance of hierarchy. Here’s a joke for anarchists that I saw the other day: “Why did the anarchist not get awarded his phD? Because he had no masters.) But anyway…the future is as open as our minds can imagine; the trouble is that all of our minds are tied up in the minute and those in power want it that way. They will allow small rebellion (like a Kardashian handing out Pepsi to defuse a protest). Let’s emerge from this slumber and this crushing solitude. We have a garden, a paradise—the ability to love. This is not a bed and bathroom, not a place for the end.