Home » politics
Move over, Cap’n Jack Sparrow, you’ve met your match! Ol’ Fuzzywig has now committed international piracy by seizing an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast.
Is it full of gold doubloons? Or possibly silver from the Cerro Rico of Bolivia? No, me buckos, it is full of all kinds of grief for our Presidente, who now has to be worried about being called to the International Court at the Hague to answer for his crimes.
Every day, a new outrage!
We might not be very good at solving problems in our economy, but we are great at inventing flashy terms that keep us from facing the problem. I can express the problem with an anecdote from my past. When I started working for an accounting firm in 1992, I went out to eat lunch in Westwood Village with my co-workers. We tried and usually succeeded in limiting the cost to $5.00 or less. A third of a century later, the cost of lunch has risen sixfold to approximately $30.00.
And what makes it worse, the food is nowhere near as good as it used to be.
Politicians talk of flattening the inflation rate. But even if they do so, the damage has been done. No one talks about rolling back prices. By relentlessly concentrating on the present day, they are ignoring the fact that the problem we are facing is not “affordability,” but poverty.
And this is what threatens the Trump administration. Our biggest danger is not our borders with our neighbors, but what we ourselves do (or neglect to do) within those borders.
The President can say that he has reduced inflation over a carefully selected stretch of time, but he has done nothing to enable the people who voted for him (and, more particularly, those who didn’t) to live better. Now he thinks that cash giveaways are the answer, even when the amount stated is too low. If your costs will balloon by $5,000 over the next year, what good will $2,000 do? Will he have to repeat the giveaway next year?
And given the present administration’s known problems dispensing cash, I foresee new opportunities for fraudsters.
I know that talking about economics is boring. Just consider this: When I retired in 2018, I thought I had enough in my pension that tide me over for 10-15 years. It didn’t. Next month, I will have to look into getting public assistance.
The White House in Ruins 1814
I don’t like writing about politics, but not to react at all to what is happening to my country would be to suppress my fears and my rage at the second presidential term of Donald Trump, or, as I call it, the Revenge Tour.
With the shutdown of all government functions that our president doesn’t like—in effect, most of them—our nation is being diminished day by day. Here is what I see happening until the Devil takes the man:
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
HE UNITE STATE F AMERIC
E UNIT STAT AMERI
UNI STA AMER
UN ST AME
N S AM
A
[NOTHING]
At present, flights are being delayed or canceled by 10%. Perhaps in a few days, it will be 20% How long before it becomes 100%
I am angry that ignorant voters could become a majority and unravel everything that made this country great. I can see it all now: Venezuela, Somalia, Myanmar, Haiti, and us. Ugh!
The Original (and Still Current) Logo of Cracker Barrel
The current occupant of the White House is a man with wide-ranging opinions and talents. (Snicker!) When Cracker Barrel wanted to change its logo, the Trumpster weighed in and set nyet! In addition to [mis]governing a large democracy, he also plans to take change of the 2028 Olympics in his favorite city (Los Angeles) and strike back at anyone who doesn’t like him.
I fully expect to go to the supermarket one day and find empty shelves which contained foodstuffs not liked by our presidente. The meat department will be all fried chicken and hamburgers. Fruits and vegetables? What are those?
Perhaps he will step in to break the engagement between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Not that he likes either of them: It’s just that they don’t deserve to be happy together. How could they be if they don’t like him? Mr. Likeability-in-Chief.
This presidency is a slow motion nightmare that just keeps going on and on and on …
Roman Emperor Nero (AD 37-68)
Much as I dislike writing about politics, I have recently noticed some strange resemblances between the current occupant of the White House and the Roman Emperor Nero:
Actors. Nero appeared before the Roman public as a poet, musician, and charioteer; while our president was famed as the actor in a reality TV show called “The Apprentice.”
Wrecking. Nero purportedly burned down a large part of Rome so he could build a gigantic palace for himself called the domus aureus, “The Golden House.” Our president is destroying the institutions of government that he feels do not benefit billionaires like himself.
Praetorian Guard. Nero was murdered by his own Praetorian Guard. Our president, on the other hand, is developing his own Praetorian Guard called ICE. To date, they have not murdered him.
Low-Class Supporters. The provision of “bread and circuses” to the Roman masses made Nero popular among lower class denizens of Rome. Whereas the persecution of various minorities is popular among the red-hatted MAGA supporters of our president.
So far, our current president has not directly ordered any of his family murdered, but if I were Melania, Donald Junior, or Eric, I would not sleep well of nights.
Entrance to Louisiana’s State Penitentiary at Angola
Located in West Feliciana Parish is Louisiana’s fearful Angola State Penitentiary. And within that penitentiary, by far the worst place to be incarcerated was the Red Hat Cell Block, which also contained the state’s electric chair, known as “Gruesome Gertie,” which was used for 87 executions between 1956 and 1991.
The Red Hat Cell Block was named after the red painted straw hats the inmates wore when working on the prison farm. It contained thirty cells that were 3 × 6 feet (0.91 meters × 1.8 meters), with a single window near the ceiling that was 1 foot square (0.3 meters square). Inmates slept on an iron bunk without any mattress. Temperatures frequently soared to slow oven levels; and the cells were infested with rats and other vermin. There was no toilet: prisoners had to eliminate in a bucket that was emptied each morning.
Naturally, most of the inmates of the cell block were non-whites. And, needless to say, even prisoners on death row in Angola had it better.
Why am I describing such a terrible place? It is because I am becoming increasingly of the role that racism has played in the history of our country—a history which many Americans are trying to whitewash.
It goes all the way back to the Constitution of the United States. In an article by Steven Mintz entitled “Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery,” it states:
The word “slave” does not appear in the Constitution. The framers consciously avoided the word, recognizing that it would sully the document. Nevertheless, slavery received important protections in the Constitution. The notorious three-fifths clause—which counted three-fifths of a state’s slave population in apportioning representation—gave the South extra representation in the House of Representatives and extra votes in the Electoral College. Thomas Jefferson would have lost the election of 1800 if not for the Three-fifths Compromise. The Constitution also prohibited Congress from outlawing the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years. A fugitive slave clause required the return of runaway slaves to their owners. The Constitution gave the federal government the power to put down domestic rebellions, including slave insurrections.
Lest we pat ourselves on the back for not being Southerners, I have seen enough in Cleveland and Los Angeles in my time to feel a deep sense of shame. How many decades, how many centuries must pass before the blot of slavery and racism are wiped out?
“The Tower of Babel” by Peter Bruegel the Elder
When I used to write ads for the software company whose director of corporate communications I was, I was always running afoul of management, who always insisted that I put a positive spin on every point I made. Anything that could possibly be seen to be negative was to be avoided at all costs.
Being a bit negative is a part of my Hungarian heritage. When your country is on one of the two main invasion paths into Europe (the other being Poland), you can’t help a certain amount of negativity. It’s part of our nature.
I feel there is something wrong about always being positive. It tends to encourage the persons on the other end to be passive and accepting. Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, writing in The Captive Mind, a book about why people accepted the promises and lies about Communism, quotes an earlier Polish novel from the 1920s:
In this story, Central Europeans facing the prospect of being overrun by unidentified Asiatic hordes pop a little pill [the pill of Murti-Bing] which relieves them of fear and anxiety; buoyed by its effects, they not only accept their new rulers but are positively happy to receive them.
In an article entitled “Murti-Bing Conservatism” written for The American Conservative, Rod Dreher develops this idea:
For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.
This is why people who have no financial or status tied up in protecting abuse of corruption within an institution can nevertheless be expected to rally around that institution and its leaders. Those who tell the truth threaten their Murti-Bing pill supply, and therefore their sense of order and well-being. To them, better that a few victims must be made to suffer rather than the entire community be forced to wean itself from Murti-Bing.
In the United States, we are facing a similar situation today—all the way from the opposite end of the political spectrum. It is not Communism that is the cause, but Trumpism. Millions of voters who are either ignorant or disingenuous choose to believe that water runs uphill and that the current President is spouting truth when in actuality he is lying like a rug.
I recommend that anyone interested in what happens to this country read Milosz’s The Captive Mind. It is by far the best book about Communism I have ever read.
Oh, and the Tower of Babel? That’s what happens when our sense of reality has become so fragmented that our society begins to fracture.
Notes for Those Attempting to Flee the U.S. of A.
After the November 5th election, many voters are considering the possibilities of becoming an expatriate in a country where the next President (hopefully) could not touch them. After the recent threats to Mexico and Canada, this may not work.
There are two possibilities for a safe passage away from the Trumpster Dumpster. First, choose a country that the next President does not know exists. Here are a number of possibilities:
To provide an extra level of safety from MAGA-hatted provocateurs, select one of the above countries marked with an asterisk (*). These are countries it is not likely the next President would be able to pronounce correctly enough to be understood.
This will be my last election-related post for a while. Not because I am satisfied with the Trump dictatorship, but because my own personal happiness depends on a positive response to bad government. Most countries go through bad spells, and it was inevitable that, over a long lifetime like my own, I would encounter it at some point.
I am reminded of a quote from Russian Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky: “If one is fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore….”
Well, I am some 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean. I do live in the provinces, so to speak, compared to New York City or Washington, DC. And I am becoming increasingly aloof, especially when someone tries to engage me in a political discussion.
Times like these call for a more creative inner life. I will spend more time reading, meditating, and watching classic old movies. And much less time watching late night comics or news on TV. Also, most important, I will spend more time with my friends.
You can probably guess by the above image for whom I probably voted. Hint: He/She is not a resident of Mar-a-Lardo.
Tarnmoor 
You must be logged in to post a comment.