Putting a bullet to the head of "America": November 8th, 2016

It is as gray and rainy in Northeast Pennsylvania this morning as befits the desolation of my mood. 

I ricochet between slack-jawed paralysis and an outrage that makes bloodless white-knuckled balls of my fists. 

The latter is better.

I reached out my front door to pick up my newspaper, and it occurred to me that I am now afraid of my neighbors. 

I'm afraid, and anyone who values reason should be, of anyone--everyone--who voted for Donald Trump.

They have elected the darling of the white supremacist, the Ku Klux Klan--the idolator of the lynch mob.

They have chosen a war-loving fascist whose "America First!" betokens an country with no place for civil discourse, for dissent, for self-reflection, or for humility.

They have deemed fit for the most powerful office of the land a man who regards half the human population as disposable fuckable toys.

They have chosen to condemn women who'd seek abortions to "some form of punishment" or hemorrhage.
 
They have authorized to speak for us a man who thinks reckless bravado signifies strength, that flag-wrapped warheads demonstrate patriotism, and who dog-whistles the "law and order" of the loaded gun.

They have chosen torture as a legitimate form of negotiation.

They have chosen surveillance, repression, paranoia, and that bitter flavor of institutionalized violence that would as soon eat its own entrails as acknowledge the humanity of "the other."

They have chosen the xenophobic white patriarchy of the "America" of the Commerce Clause, Citizens United, and the Panama Papers.

They have elected to privatize and commodify everything.

They have chosen that polite euphemism called a "trade war," you know--that "deal-making" that will make us nostalgic for the Transpacific Partnership's gentler kinder rape of the developing world.  

They have embraced that stinking religious bigotry that burns down the "other's" place of worship in the name of their vengeful god.

Ironic, they bill themselves as "Constitutionalists," but personify bottomless civic illiteracy.

More ironic, they'll burn down the house that is their own country to "Make America Great, again." 

They cannot tell the difference between a tabloid story about alien abduction and the science of anything-at-all, and they choose the former because it's more salacious. 

Their country is an episode of Jerry Springer: blowing it up is a reasonable solution to boredom.

We'll wring our hands about how this election reflects the "discontent of the hard-working white laboring classes," how the collapse of the manufacturing base has blighted this silent majority, compelling them to vote for change.

Bull shit to that. 

Economic hardship needn't seek scapegoats. It can unionize. It had heroes in decent human beings like Bernie Sanders. And they chose hatred instead.

And this time these folks didn't have to go looking for others to blame: Trump gave to every white man regardless his fortunes license to  invert the facts of history and see himself as a victim--a newly recruited soldier in the Great White Army ready to build The Wall.

Truth is--Trump has grabbed every white male sucker who voted for him by the pussy. But that warm little squeeze will quickly become a stone-cold vice once the euphoria starts to wear off. 

All but the whitest and wealthiest will be fucked. For Donald Trump is a liar of the most cancerous sort. He lies to himself. And then he lies to you. And then you wait for things to get better. They won't. 

That white nationalist may be patting himself on the back this morning,  smacking his wife on the ass and telling her to like it. 

But thinking he's won the lottery isn't going to bring back even one manufacturing job.

It's not going to put more coal in the ground.

It's not going to bring a single multinational corporation to heal. 

Nope. And the turgid greasy resentment he already feels is just going to fester once he figures that out.

Morning in America:

Hate. Crimes.

Rape.

Homophobia.

The militarization of everything.

The celebration of willful ignorance.

The gutting of public education in the name of "choice."

The deterioration of the last thin threads of civil public discourse.

Emergency room healthcare for those who cannot afford to be rimmed by health insurance profiteers.

Elderly folks who die held hostage by pharmaceutical companies.

Indigenous peoples whose lands and artifacts are ground-up by the backhoes of the fossil fuel behemoths.

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee

The continuation of a two-party system that makes a mockery of democracy.  

The debauchery of the United State's Supreme Court.

Global disbelief.


And worst of all:

To elect a megalomaniacal Troglodyte like Donald J. Trump is like hurling a Molotov Cocktail at the planet.

Global warming needs no accelerant.


Wendy Lynne Lee

Capitalism, Human Welfare, and the Healthcare Debate: Death--American Style

10.17.09

To the Editor,

Among the most disturbing features of our current political landscape, exemplified by the tea-baggers, the birthers, the secessionists, the H1N1 vaccine-as-mind-control conspiracy-mongers, and other “patriots,” is the extent to which craving short-term gain—Obama-out-of-office-at-any-cost—drives the willingness to adopt beliefs that are not merely wrong-headed, but profoundly self-defeating.

The healthcare debate could not illustrate this any more clearly: we’re not merely willing to sell out our un/underinsured fellows to disease and death, we’re apparently willing to take the risk that we could end up among them just for the sake of opposing a public option.

The same “patriots” who condemn Obama for “cutting” their Medicare would apparently let their neighbor’s children die for lack of access to the care these “patriots” take as entitled. This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it’s perversity. Cynically exploiting the rhetoric of “free choice,” the “health” insurance industry has so successfully suckered the tea-partiers that they can be counted on to attend fake grassroots events and rally against their own interests—even their interest in living. Every placard heralding “freedom” may as well be heralding suffering and death, every endorsement of the “free market” a pitch for rationing-healthcare-by-the-mega-profits-of-Cigna-and-company. Why? Because the defeat of the public option is a win for an industry whose profits have increased by 416% over the last decade by denying coverage, refusing to pay claims, and by dropping sick people from their roles—after raping them of their hard-earned dollars.

What the tea-partiers don’t get is that the same tactics they’ve so effectively deployed against those who’d resist their ideological swill is now—through ignorance-exploiting-stealth—being deployed to insure that they, many of whom are among the most economically vulnerable, stand on the side of the super-wealthy. Quite the coup. All the “health” insurance promotion arms had to do was use the magic words “socialism,” “communism,” or “government controlled,” through their Republican Party propaganda channel—FOX—and the paranoid “patriot”-sheeple fall in lock-step—behind their pied pipers, Beck, Hannity, Malkin, O’Reilly, right off the cliff. Death is apparently OK with them so long as we get rid of a black democratic president.

Unconvinced? Offended? Think the “free market” is on your side? Check out Rendell’s Republican budget. He cuts funding for the Department of Public Welfare, discards a possible severance tax on natural gas drilling, cuts the Department of Environmental Protection 27%, and opens state park land to drilling. Who benefits? The “health” insurance analogues in the energy industry, corporations like Cabot whose suspension for environmental violations has been lifted, and White Pines who has “the state’s go-ahead to accept radioactive sludge” from natural gas drilling.

However willfully blind we are to the connection between environmental destruction and human health, the writing’s on the wall: capitalist enterprise cares nothing whatever for human welfare. Indeed, the very corporations who exercise the most power over life and death—HEALTH insurance—actively work to deny the services PAID FOR by the people who hold their policies. This IS insurance—an insurance of death. Corporations like Cabot, Cigna, Aetna, Humana, White Pines, Exxon, AIG, Citibank, and on and on have so effectively exploited the fear of “socialism” and the racist hatred of Obama that we’re willing to sacrifice our health and the environment it depends on in order to realize what? The freedom to die from untreated disease? The freedom to watch others reap the profits of environmental obliteration?

So long as Obama’s not reelected, and we get to go down waving the flag, I guess so.

Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
580 words.

It's not about "Socialism," It's About Racism

8.13.09

To the Editor,

I read with despair John-Eric Koslosky’s PE-article about the Socrates’ Café discussion over whether “socialism” is a “dirty word.” It has become so—despite the fact that much of what’s essential to our republic is socialized. How many of us could make intelligent election-decisions without public education? Where would many elderly, ill, intellectually disabled, or poor families be without Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security? What about public libraries, roads, parks, CHIP? Would we enjoy even some protection against corporate greed, pollution, and labor-exploitation without government regulation?

Would Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “though the will of the majority in all cases is to prevail…the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression” be realizable without the equal representation that defines socialism’s inherently democratic character?

The answer’s “no.”

Yet we’re apparently so comfortable taking for granted the benefits of socialism that we pretend that they’re gifts from God or features of nature. However loudly Patriot’s Voice members insist that it’s an “excuse ideology,” or that the founders would have rejected these essential institutions, that the PV had a town park for their party is a benefit of “a political system in which the means of production are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles,” AKA: SOCIALISM (Encarta). Could they have hosted the party at a privately owned park? Only if its owner were a Confederate Flag vendor or Cleon Skousen, “one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fanaticist…about secret conspiracies…to impose a one world government” (www.salon.com, 3.17.09)—and writer of “The 5000 Year Leap,” Runyon’s gift to Mayor Knorr.

So what drives the fanatical-right to call Obama’s health care plan “socialist”? NONE of their claims are true, and many are crazy fear-mongering nonsense. FALSE: that the plan includes euthanasia, “death panels,” rationing, diminished access for veterans, disadvantage for small businesses, forcing people to forfeit insurance, or that the HNN1 vaccine’s an extermination conspiracy.

It’s FALSE that “medical research…would become political.” Indeed, it’s refreshing to have an administration that finally takes science seriously and understands that the foundation of a democracy is its PEOPLE, not the profits of its Blackwater, etc. cronies.

Health care isn’t a commodity like a car or a house because health is not merely something desirable; it’s a necessary condition for the exercise of our human rights, hence health care must be accounted among the most basic of these.

The far right’s opposition to health care reform isn’t, in fact, about health care. It’s about Obama and the willingness to resort to ANY strategy to weaken him.

Why?

Obama’s black.

Substitute “black” for “socialist” and you’ve the truth about the Tea Parties, the “Birthers,” the corporate-sponsored town hall harangues, Palin’s psychotic “tweets,” and Glenn Beck’s Neo-Birchers. This isn’t to say you can’t disagree with Obama without being a racist.

I do.

I think we should go single-payer and get the insurance/pharmaceutical vultures out of health care entirely. The least we can do is provide a public option, and a little competition for those 46 million uninsured Americans.

The current “controversy” isn’t for a minute about “free” markets, Constitutions—or the dangers of “socialism.” It’s about FOX-and-friends “real” American: White, far-right, and nationalistic; it’s about how desperate Republicans are to regain power.

The Neo-Birchean tea-baggers would rather let people suffer from lack of access to a doctor than have a black president in the Whitehouse. But they wouldn’t for a second give up their own health insurance or Social Security.

Hypocrites all.

Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
595 words.