Something Happening Here

It is difficult for me to understand how it is only now becoming apparent to most Americans that everything that we all took for granted about our country and about our lives has been stolen. Isn't it odd that ONLY NOW are we beginning to see pundits from the left and right agreeing that that Minneapolis policeman straight up murdered George Floyd? Even Judge Jeanine isn't going for this one. She shed a tear! Even Rush Limbo says hold up a minute! I'm not sure about this one!

This new era of high-quality smart phone video has given us all a front row seat to some of the clampdown's abominations. All of the beatings, and the forced confessions (George Whitmore Jr.), and the frame-ups (Rubin Carter), and the planned murders (Fred Hampton), once took place well hidden from the voters' prying eyes. Now we have a crystal clear video of that policeman casually keeping his knee on George's windpipe, carefully shifting it off for short periods to allow George to breath a little, pleading for his life, saying that he can't breath, thus proving that he could breath, so that when he finally asphyxiated, which was obviously the plan, the cops could use his statements of “I can't breath!” as evidence that he could breath, even as we could watch as poor George was slowly choked to death over the course of the eight minutes of video, which the cops casually allowed the bystander to take! Amazing! Then the video showed George's body being taken away, head flopping like a rag doll, dead as a door nail. They were so sure that they could get away with murder that they allowed evidence to be gathered in real time against them! From whence springs such confidence? It springs from decades of getting away with murder, that's where.

That's only the beginning of the changes that we have watched quietly without interfering, and police brutality is only the most visible of them this week. We've lost many of our freedoms, and much of our prosperity. I've been over this ground many times here on the blog, and I've been the private Cassandra to friends and family for almost fifty years now. Since 1975, I'd say. Before that I had been too young for most of that time, and after 1968 I had combat fatigue and gave up the news, gave up caring in fact, for many years. I was again ready for action by the late 1970s, and the government gave me plenty to complain about on a regular basis.

Oh, the militarization of our local police forces, the proliferation of new Federal police entities (like ICE, etc.), the death of the right-to-counsel, ever broader government search-and-seizure powers, I've grown tired of making this list. The degradation of labor laws and New Deal social assistance programs alone should have made a lot more people mad. (I'd say, “social insurance,” or “social leveling,” or “social fairness,” but that's just me.) Didn't people like the weekend? Weren't vacations nice? Didn't you think that time-and-a-half for hours worked over forty in one week was nice? Do you remember when all, that's ALL, hospitals and medical insurance programs were non-profit? When for most people, getting sick wasn't as utterly terrifying as it is today? It was that way up to the mid-1970s. Raise your hand if you remember when rich people paid their fair share of taxes! They were still rich, too. It didn't seem to hurt them much.

Cleaner air! Cleaner water! I just wanted to throw that in.

It would be lovely if more people realized that most of these things were brought to us by Democrats, with some bi-partisan assistance with the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. Beyond those couple of instances, the Republican party has been devoting itself heart and soul to the clampdown since the 1920s. They gave us the Great Depression with their loose banking and securities laws; they tried at least twice to get rid of Franklin Roosevelt by coup-de-etat, having lined up popular generals for installation in the White House; they did their damnedest to prevent America from preparing in any meaningful way for World War II; they obstructed programs that were necessary to win WWII. To beat the Democrats they finally resorted to running Dwight Eisenhower, about whom they were less than enthusiastic. The old far-right called Ike a communist! The 1960s brought Nixon to the forefront of the Republican party, and I will leave you to your own terrible memories of Nixon. We all have them, don't be ashamed. Let it out. A two-minute-hate!

After that the Democrats were asleep at the switch, or co-opted by threats or money, or blackmailed, or something, because they really dropped the ball, and have continued dropping it until this very day.

This week hundreds of thousands of people are out peacefully demonstrating their horror and opposition to the kind of police violence that we see constantly against black Americans. Joining them are various interstate groups of anarchists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and militia types who just like to raise hell. Those few are out to break windows and start fires with the full intention of provoking violent police reactions, which are delivered enthusiastically almost instantly. Those police, looking like something out of a dystopian police-state movie from 1965, like Soylent Green or Robocop, cheerfully accept any excuse to start randomly firing tear-gas canisters and shooting reporters with rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds. Children getting hurt? That's the parents fault for bringing them to a peaceful demonstration. President Rage Machine is doing nothing helpful, as usual. There was a demonstration near the White House, so the Prez went down to the bunker to watch some TV, snack on some KFC, and fire off 150 Tweets a day at nothing in particular. (Fake News! It was only 146 Tweets yesterday!)

After three years of President Comb-Over, even the Banana Republics of the world are laughing at us. They're laughing at all of us, and we all deserve it, too. Who else can we blame it on? We handed Trump and McConnell and Pompeo and the rest of these pirates the keys to the kingdom.

The prosperous fully-industrialized countries of the world are laughing too, when they have time. Mostly, they're busy working together on the shared problems of the world, an exercise that until recently was generally led by the United States. Now they don't even bother calling us. No one in Washington is interested in anything but abrogating treaties or complaining about foreigners. There's nobody left in the State Department anyway, except Mike Pompeo and his prayer group, and many countries haven't had an American ambassador for years. The only American presence in the world now is military, wondering what their mission is and looking over their shoulders to check for the COVID-19.

COVID-19! Most of us, all of us, everywhere, are wondering what will destroy our happiness first: the virus itself, or the associated economic collapse? The only ones that are doing well in these perilous times are the billionaires, especially the super-billionaires. They have seen their fortunes rise exponentially. This phenomenon will make a lot of our problems worse. The growth of monopoly power; the number and wealth of idiot legacies (the foolish children of the deceased super-billionaires); the percentage of rental housing units in the hands of a few hyper-wealthy individuals, usually in the form of “investment groups.”

But at least we can enjoy this new bipartisan bitching and moaning. This is something new, and it's worth getting excited about. For two decades we have become accustomed to liberals/Democrats complaining about certain things, and conservatives/Republicans complaining about a completely different set of things. That created a chasm over which no one could reach to shake hands on anything. If a Democrat said that she liked apple pie, the Republicans, as one, would scream, “cherry pie! Johnny Appleseed was a socialist!” But if Judge Jeanine and I can agree that that cop killed George Floyd intentionally and maliciously, that, dear readers, is progress.

Maybe we can all move forward to agree on certain other obvious things, like the importance of fair elections, or all citizens working together for a better country, or that it helps America to remain in close contact with the world and work together with our allies on large scale problems.

That idea is so crazy that it just might work.