The End Of Politics

There was a time when I did a lot more writing about politics. I had so much material in the can that last year I put the posts that I liked into book form and self-published it.* This blog started out in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, and at first I hardly wrote about politics at all. I remember thinking that there was little room left for my two-cents, because so many talented journalists were already doing a great job of covering politics. It was the way that white America reacted to the election of a black man as president that made me angry enough to address the issues that were presenting themselves. Angry in a way that I was not seeing from the talented journalists. I was angry in a direct, forceful way. Obama's presidency saw the resurrection of proud, unalloyed, pure racism in America. Racism of the entitled, white-supremacist old school, racism in a form that had been marginalized in the 1970s. Marginalized, but not destroyed.

The black president brought it all back out into the open. While social media lit up with Photoshops of Obama as a witch-doctor, or a monkey, and white people got busy explaining that they had nothing against Obama being black, they just opposed his policies. “How dare you call me a racist! I just oppose Obama's policies.” We heard that all the time.

Many white Americans, many more than you would think, have always had the feeling that, given a chance, American blacks would kill all white people in their beds. This is been true since the first curious white people in Charleston loitered around the pier to watch the unloading of the first African slaves back in the 17^th Century. White people's fear of those African slaves only got worse as their numbers increased. This fear was exacerbated over hundreds of years of the brutality, rape, and degradation of slavery, followed by the Klan and Jim Crow, segregation, lynching, discrimination, and the casual murder of black Americans by police. The worse white people treated our blacks, the more afraid the whites became. “How,” they reasoned, “could the Africans not want to kill us all? My God, look how we treat them!” White Americans are still terrified, in their deepest hearts and souls, of the righteous vengeance that must be in the secret plans of black Americans. The black president raised this fear level to “vivid.” It's all very silly, of course.

So I started to write about politics, and racism, and the intersection of those things in the Age of Obama.

Those eight years were also when the Republican party, sensing weakness in the Democrats and in the minds of people in general, moved in for the kill. They announced, unashamedly, that their only goal was to make Obama a one-term president, explaining that they would not be cooperating with Democrats or Obama on any subject at all under any circumstances. They threw out the rules and the traditions of Washington politics and practiced only the politics of total war. It was an exciting time. I disagreed with many of the actions taken by President Obama, and with many of the programs that were allowed to continue unchecked during his presidency (mass surveillance of Americans; acts of drone warfare overseas; etc.). But what was he supposed to do? He was nominally in charge of the Executive Branch of the government, but he had very little political support. The rest of the Democratic party was cowering over in a corner someplace, and the courts were becoming unreliable. I still think that Obama did a very good job, all things considered. And there is no argument that he has never been associated with any scandals, political, sexual, or otherwise. He was and remains a good man, and it is a national disgrace that that simple statement of truth will draw vicious responses from many white Americans, to this day.

Anyone hoping that things would calm down a bit with the election of a new, almost certainly white, president, was bitterly disappointed. Oh, we got a white man, that much is true. We got a walking political cartoon of a white man, representing chaos in the tableau. Nothing at all has calmed down, and the chaos only grows day by day. I wrote a little about Trumpian politics early on, but it quickly became too much for me. Just trying to keep up with the daily fusillade of lies and self-aggrandizing bullshit became unmanageable almost immediately.

I considered keeping a diary of Trump's insane acts and utterances, but that would have been an almost impossible amount of work, and all deeply depressing. The only interesting part of Trump's presidency has been the slow process of Republicans recognizing this Coo Coo** in their midst and jumping ship, mostly by retirement. This process has been accelerating here in the year 2020. COVID-19, and Trump's disastrous non-response to the pandemic, have gotten a lot of Americans killed. To make matters worse, the long term project of militarizing our police forces intersected with Trump's encouragement of racial animosity. This caused a serious uptick in the numbers of police killings of black Americans. That, dear reader, is a rubber band that must eventually snap, and snap it has. The frequency and the casual nature of these murders reached critical mass just as the whole population ran out of patience with the virus and Trump's daily carnival of stupid. Anyone paying attention could see that the whole purpose of government had become the further enrichment of the billionaire class and the tight control of the working population by any harsh measures necessary. Not that Trump was doing these things, he lacks the intellectual rigor to understand what's going on and he lacks the energy and discipline to do that much work. No, this new form of government that now controls us was brought about by the Mitch McConnells of the world, the Tom Cottons. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who is sick of all of the phony Christians waiting in the wings to take over when Trump flies too close to the sun, people like Mike Pompeo, Betsy DeVos, Bill Barr, and Mike Pence. They have plans that are becoming visible, and people have begun to notice.

Let's see, we need a precipitating event. Who'll volunteer? Some nameless convenience store clerk in Minneapolis reported to the police that a man had just passed what the clerk believed to be a counterfeit $20 note. The man was located without delay, and he fit the bill nicely. A large, powerfully built man, what, about 6' 4”? 220 pounds or so? Very dark skin. Yes, he'll do nicely. He cooperates fully with the police, and there are no reports of his resisting them in their pursuit of their duties. No, it's just a matter of four police roughing him up, putting him in a car and ganging up on him, then dragging him out of the car and throwing him to the ground, and then three of the policemen kneeling on his back and, more importantly, on his windpipe.

The whole thing was clearly captured on three smart phone videos. One video shows the officer's knee on the man's neck. The officer looks into the camera, not arrogantly, but seeming bored. He has his left hand in his pocket. His knee is on the man's windpipe. The officer periodically moves his knee off of the man's windpipe, and during these intervals the man says, “I can't breathe!” One or twice he says, “mama!” Always the officer moves his knee back onto the man's windpipe and the talking stops, because the man can't breathe. Ultimately, the man becomes non-responsive. The officer's knee was on his neck for over eight minutes; for the final two minutes or so, the man was inert. An ambulance arrived, and paramedics move the man onto a gurney. His head flops around like a rag doll. He is clearly dead. They get him into the ambulance and leave the scene. The man was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Are we enraged yet? Why yes, we are. You may recall that the law is my training. I am a California lawyer in good standing (inactive), and I've been teaching law for thirteen years. I watch this wonderfully clear video, and I see first degree murder. The police privilege does not apply, because the officer was well outside of his authority, and committing a crime. Homicide comes in many forms, the worst of which is first degree murder, which is “the intentional, unprivileged, premeditated killing of a human being.” This case, to me, hinges on the formation of the intent to kill and the premeditation of the murder. One of the videos shows both things very clearly. The officer knows that he is choking the life out of the man, because he sometimes moves his knee off of the man's windpipe to allow him to breathe. By doing this, the officer serves his purpose by allowing the man to speak, thus proving that he can breathe. Then he intentionally cuts off the man's air again. This process is quite deliberate, and obvious. He repeated this over and over again, looking at the young woman taking the video. He was creating a record, in that video, proving, he thought, that he didn't kill the guy, because obviously he could breathe. He could speak!

The man's name was George Floyd. The $20 bill was real.

This snapped the rubber band. Not only for the black community, but for most white Americans as well. I'm not the only one who has been infuriated by this police behavior, all over the country, for decades now. This egregious act caused spontaneous demonstrations, followed by larger, planned demonstrations, mostly peaceful, which were universally met by militarized police overreacting, attacking people with “less” lethal rubber bullets, pepper balls, tear gas, bean-bag rounds, flash/ bang grenades, and what-all else. By now there are countless videos of police rioting and attacking peaceful demonstrators like they were a fortification on D-Day. The video of the police in Buffalo attacking a lone, elderly man, and knocking him to the ground is particularly affecting to me. I'm an elderly man myself, and I'm the type who would go over to the police if I had a reasonable question. I'd be stupid enough to feel safe doing that, because I'm an unarmed old white man, nobody's afraid of me, are they? The old man in the video seems to be asking the officers a question. They take a step and bang him with their riot-shields. He totters back a step or two and then falls like a tree, right on the back of his head. He lies there motionless with a pool of blood forming under his head. Even a couple of the cops were shocked, and moved to provide aid, but they are hustled forward with the gang to go on to more mischief, one imagines.

This is not acceptable. I hope that my brothers in the law launch a torrent of law suits against all of these municipalities, states, private contractors, and political entities. Minneapolis, Buffalo, D.C., the whole perverted lot of them. This police rioting is not acceptable. The torrent of law suits should be as huge as the waves in Waimea Bay.

Do you remember Trump's ridiculous claim that the world had laughed at America during the Obama years, but they weren't going to laugh at us anymore? Could any prediction have gone more horribly wrong? The world, as it turns out, rather liked Obama. He treated them with civility, and approached them in a spirit of cooperation and respect. The world, it is now clear, is currently looking at Trump as a comical figure whom it is best for them to avoid all together. More ominously, the world is now looking at America as an unreliable partner and a dangerous, unpredictable presence on the world scene. Unreliable, and kind of crazy, with all of the guns, and its military covering the globe, and the over-armed police attacking its own civilians with such gusto. I live overseas, and you can take my word for it: these police riots are being televised on the news around the world, and people are shocked.

We are on the verge of becoming just another in a long list of failed states. Our politics has not only failed us, it has resorted to threatening us with bodily harm if we fail to toe the new line. Within one year we will know if this has been the end of American politics. I'm afraid to think about what comes next.

*Political Rants: Lefty Vitriol in the Age of Obama and Trump, Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WKF3L95

Special price: 99 cents!

**Coo-Coo. A “brood parasite.” A type of bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species, who then unknowingly hatch the eggs and raise the chicks. Trump is the brood parasite, hatched in the nest of Republicans, who are now realizing that their little darling is not a Robin like them, but a coo-coo.