Image by Clay Banks.
Ancient Greek mythology warns of the siren songs. Homer’s Odyssey depicted the sirens, beautiful bird-women who would croon out to sailors. The sailors couldn’t resist the seductive sounds even when they knew the calls were lethal. They would leap off their ships and drown while trying to swim to the melodies or crash their ships on the shore while navigating in their direction.
Think of someone who has been warned by her doctor to eat healthy foods but who gets hungry on a road trip and can’t resist pulling off to get a burger and fries after seeing a McDonalds’ next to an exit.
Homer orders his crew to put wax in their ears so they can’t hear the tune. He ties himself to his ship so that he is forced to ignore the sirens.
There are plenty of deadly sirens in contemporary American life but few are as powerful as the savagely time-staggered big money corporate crafted narrow spectrum major party big media candidate-centered “quadrennial [electoral] extravaganzas” — Noam Chomsky’s term — that are sold to the masses as “politics,” the only politics that matters. Chomsky’s good friend Howard Zinn elaborated on what he called “The Election Madness” four extravaganzas ago, as Obamania spread across the land:
“A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones. Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy…This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls …The Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable. Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections? The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry…. Even in the so-called left periodicals,…there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates.”
Notice how the ongoing US-backed Zio-fascist genocide in Gaza has been kicked to the curb of public attention and discussion by the all-engrossing presidential candidate stories of July 2024. The same goes for the lethal heat produced by the capitalogenic climate catastrophe, for the continuing senseless inter-imperialist slaughter in Ukraine (courtesy of the USA and Russia), deepening humanitarian crises in Africa and Haiti, and for much more terrible to contemplate.
We just experienced the hottest two days in recorded history. Israel just killed dozens more Palestinian children with US-made munitions. The real Palestinian death toll in Gaza is likely around 167,000. Famine is spreading across vast swaths of sub-Saharan Africa. Tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians are reported to be amputees. White US police and security guards continue to murder Black people with impunity four years after the George Floyd Rebellion. Another “red” state (Iowa) has implemented an abortion ban.
…Yes, but who cares? It’s the candidate-centered presidential “election frenzy” that sucks up all the air in the room, that preoccupies the mass political mind, courtesy of the corporate telescreens. “Oh my God, Trump almost got killed. Wow, Trump gave another crazy endless speech. Say, Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance isn’t really Appalachian. Hey, Vance once called Trump ‘America’s Hitler’ [accurately enough]. Holy shit, Biden quit! Damn, Kamala is raising millions. She’s dancing with little kids. She’s as much South Asian as Black. Hillary endorsed her!”
While millions are “transfixed” by and “glued to” the highly personalized and citizen-“marginalizing” propaganda of the major party candidate spectacle, the system of capitalism-imperialism continues to exploit and oppress humanity while turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber and pushing us ever closer to global nuclear war. Neither of the major party presidential candidates selected in advance for ordinary US-Americans by their nation’s ruling class would ever make any serious criticism or even acknowledgement of the underlying class dictatorship of imperial capital, which happens to be canceling all prospects for a decent future.
It is in this context that I think the dismal dollar Democrats’ recent and rapid shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris was a brilliant move not just for her party but for the US capitalist ruling class and system. The dreadful 2024 presidential contest between two narcissistic and decrepit white male brutes was symbolically instructive. It evoked mass dread over the dystopian denouement of a viciously racist, classist, sexist, imperialist, and ecocidal social and political system that had vomited up the sick choice between jelly-brained “Genocide Joe” and the malignant fascist Dona’ “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump. On the “left,” among the more decent and non-fascist parts of the US population, Biden had a way of turning folks beyond that great “coffin of class consciousness” (the late left historian Alan Dawley) that is the Minority Rule, right-tilted US elections system.
When I recently wore a t-shirt bearing the revolutionary communist slogan “No Fascist Trump, No Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System’s Gotta Go!” in bright blue Iowa City, numerous folks gave me a thumbs up and engaged with me on…well, the system.
The Kamala coronation has changed the situation. It’s not just that the slogan has lost much of its luster with Biden’s stand down. We’ll find new slogans. The real problem is that the Harris candidacy has juiced up the seductive power of the American bourgeois-electoral sirens in ways that are pulling untold masses away from thinking about radical system change and back into the paralyzing quicksand of Zinn’s “election madness” with big notes of spurious identitarian (race, gender, and age) harmony.
As usual the leftish liberal filmmaker and siren song (and fast-food) sucker Michael Moore is a perfect channeler of the great American electoral affliction. He has responded to the big money Harris ascendancy with predictable accolades, informing his Substack readers that they now have a reason to pull out of “deep despair” and get “jolted off your sofa.”
Never mind that the former prosecutor Harris is a full-on imperial neoliberal in the ruling class Clinton-Obama-Citigroup mode who rose to power based on a curious California combination: liberal identity politics and the advance of racist mass incarceration in the name of “law and order.” (I will never forget how Harris came to a 2015 “Chicago ideas conference” to openly mock progressives as childish protesters who foolishly wanted to move tax dollars from mass imprisonment to public education – imagine? She chided “the left” for not empathizing with her and her millionaire white husband for having to “put three locks on our door.”) It’s not for nothing that the Bay Area Black Lives movement nicknamed her “Kopmala.”[1]
(None of which will stop the Republifascists from identifying her as “radical Left,” of course).
Come on, Michael. Capitalism-imperialism the system – to which Harris is deeply allegiant – is more than enough reason to jump off one’s sofa and into action, with the understanding that action means a hell of a lot more than making marks once every four years next to the names of candidates selected in advance for you by concentrated wealth and power!
Besides breathing new life into “the election frenzy,” Harris is an alluring double identitarian (race ala Obama and gender ala Hillary) shame card to deploy against those who dare to oppose the deadly American System. Her race and gender will be used by the late bourgeois-democratic wing of the US ruling class and its allies to tar as racist and/or sexist those of us who accurately point out that Harris is herself an agent of imperial genocide and eco-exterminism as well as a longtime leader in racist mass incarceration. Radicals who get it that the “real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial matters” (e.g. the race and/or gender and/or sexual identity/orientation of a political candidate or television personality or women’s basketball star) is “the radical reconstruction of society itself” – to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in his final essay – were accused by Democrats of racism for having the basic decency to point out that Barack “The Empire’s New Clothes” Obama was a ruling class imperialist candidate and president. Radicals who got King’s point were accused by Democrats of sexism for having the decency to point out that Hillary Clinton was a ruling class imperialist candidate. With “Kopmala” Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, radicals speaking and acting in the spirit of Dr. King’s final essay will be accused by Democrats of racism AND sexism at one and the same time for pointing out that the Democrats’ presidential candidate is a ruling class imperialist candidate.
Decent folks need to tune out the sirens and plan and organize for two key tasks ahead:
+1. Mass resistance and popular self-defense during at least two likely post-election scenarios: Adolf Trump and the Republifascists’ refusal to acknowledge and permit a Democratic/Harris victory or a Trump victory followed by a reign of retributionist terror, repression, “mass deportation,” increased racist police shootings, etc..
+2. A revolutionary movement to finally get us beyond a system that has hatched a new fascism and brought humanity to the brink of environmental and/or military/nuclear self-destruction while consigning billions of human beings to abject material and cultural poverty.
Postscript
We can and need to do so much better than savagely time-staggered bourgeois electoral affliction. Here is a curious entry from the French intellectual Jean Guehenno’s brilliant diary of life in France under the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime: “October 25, 1942: Conversation with P…and M: we agree that the return of the Republic seems assured, inevitable: it never seemed more beautiful, and the moronic traitors of Vichy are making it more beautiful every day. But P…tells us he’s afraid that nothing has changed, and electoral politics will continue to preclude great projects and long-term plans.” J Guehenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris (Oxford University Press, p. 179, emphasis added). The bourgeois election cycles are a form of political and societal quicksand.
Endnote/Appendix
+1. A Chicago area comrade recently posted this on “social” media:
‘This is what you’re voting for. I will never be bullied into voting for the lesser of 2 evils when we’re hurling towards fascism either way. Here’s the list of all links on Kamala Harris’s lovely record:
1) As California AG she defended State Death Penalty Laws; She “urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a lower court decision invalidating the state’s death penalty.” https://www.kcra.com/…/kamala-harris-defends…/6418496
2) In 2015 she blocked gender reassignment surgery for a transgender prison inmate https://www.latimes.com/…/la-me-ff-prison-board…
3) She’s a firm proponent of civil asset forfeiture even before charges are filed. See:
https://www.wsj.com/…/cops-and-robbers-all-rolled-into…
https://www.montereyherald.com/…/luis-alejo-kamala…/
4) In 2010 a judge declared that Harris had violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information on a police lab technician, and the judge said that Harris “was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings” https://www.sfgate.com/…/Judge-rips-Harris-office-for…
5) Despite “over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by Mnuchin’s bank,” Harris refused to prosecute OneWest and CEO Steve Mnuchin for criminal conduct. Mnuchin donated $2,000 to her senate campaign – the ONLY campaign to which he donated. https://theintercept.com/…/kamala-harris-fails-to…/
https://www.rollcall.com/…/harris-was-the-only-democrat…
6) As a California DA. Harris pushed for a statewide law to charge parents with misdemeanors if their children play truant – a law that specially targeting low-income families. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/…/SD-California-Attorney…
7) Harris resisted efforts to have her office investigate police killings
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/…/Mario-Woods-Family-Urges…
8) Harris opposed efforts to reform three strikes policy disproportionately affecting black men. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23strikes-t.html
9) Harris worked to keep an innocent man in jail even after he served a decade in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. http://media.scpr.org/doc…/2012/08/20/51084767_copy.pdf… Huffington
10) Harris defended a prosecuting attorney who inserted a false confession into an interrogation transcript. https://www.usatoday.com/…/justice-honesty…/24611623/
11) Harris fought a Supreme Court ruling, fighting to oppose the release of nonviolent prisoners. https://www.latimes.com/…/la-me-ff-federal-judges-order… When the Court decided that “California’s overcrowded prisons represented cruel and unusual punishment,” Attorney General Harris resisted. https://reason.com/…/kamala-harris-is-not-smart-on-crime
12) Harris refused to back marijuana legalization while jailing black men for it. https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/…/kamala-harris…
13) Harris opposed police body cameras. https://www.sacbee.com/…/capitol…/article22451643.html
14) Harris defended a murder conviction even though it was shown that her office had presented false testimony https://www.nytimes.com/…/kamala-harris-criminal…
15): “Kamala Harris Is Everything the Establishment Wants in a Politician”: https://www.truthdig.com/…/kamala-harris-is-everything…/’
