Into the Woods

Any time the make-believe right-wing world is imploding, which is a lot these days, I like to go to the Drudge Report to see how they’re spinning it. Just last week, for example, everyone in the right-wing bubble just knew that Wikileaks was going to release some stuff that would absolutely destroy Hillary once and for all. Instead they got a Wikileaks infomercial trying to raise money for Wikileaks. It was hilarious.

Drudge Report flopped around all day today trying to figure out what to do with the Trump meltdown. Finally they got a headline in the Wall Street Journal that was suitable for Drudgers. I’ve reproduced it below.

Is there an equivalence? Is the Drudge view of the world equally real? Sometimes it takes months and even years for the right-wing delusions spread by the right-wing media to fly apart. It this case, it will take, at most, exactly one month. Let us count the days.

Tabloid media aside, here’s what New York Times readers are seeing. Let’s revisit these headlines on Nov. 9.

P.S. What was it you were saying about Bill and Hillary? For the last twenty years?

Jobs — but no lives and not much education

One consequence of our dumb-as-rocks political and media culture is that the pig circus intentionally distracts us from talking about things that matter. To her credit, Hillary Clinton has proposed a plan for making it possible for young people to attend public univerities debt-free. As for Donald Trump, the scam of Trump University (now defunct, of course) tells you all you need to know. To Donald Trump, young people are just a natural resource to be exploited for profit. As for the voters, the mean and ugly me-first issues of old white people are dominating the 2016 presidential election — when we even talk about reality at all.

If you asked a hundred random Americans to name in one word what young people today need most, probably “jobs” is the answered you’d get most. That’s the centrist answer. The liberal answer probably would be “educations.” And the right-wing answer probably would be “Jesus.”

If you asked me, I’d do my best to come up with a more radical answer. How about lives for what young people need? We Americans rarely think beyond earning and consumption. We train people to be cogs in the economy and to be submissive citizens (which is part of what religion is for).

Thus I was intrigued this morning, while making my daily check of the Irish Times web site, to come across a story saying that the European Union is considering giving all 18-year-olds an InterRail pass so that they can explore Europe and expand their cultural horizons. An advocate of the idea said, “But the fact is that a lot of people and especially young people do not get to travel as much and explore Europe first hand and so they go to Front National and join right wing parties.”

I live in a poor, rural county politically dominated by Republicans and culturally dominated by nasty little white churches. Our young people pay a huge price not only for the poverty, but also for the small-mindedness and the hatreds instilled by the Republican Party and by the churches. The smartest of our young people leave for college and never come back. Many leave for dead-end jobs in urban areas and never come back. Though a very few black sheep buck the process, most succumb to the various forms of impoverishment that make them pretty much just like their parents — ignorant, Republican, racist, primed for resentment, and completely unequipped for a life in the 21st Century world.

Sometimes, standing with liberal friends and observing these local young people at events such as outdoor music festivals, I notice their lack of social skill, the early onset of obesity and bad health, the total lack of vitality and style, the dying-inside looks on their faces, and I feel sorry for them. More than once I’ve said something like, “If only we could give them a passport and send them on a trip to Copenhagen. They’d never vote Republican again.” Yes. And it also would bring us some cultural rethinking and cultural renewal. And we probably should send them to France as well to learn about food.

But small-mindedness and small-heartedness, of course (preferably with a wall around us), are exactly what Republicans and white preachers want in their customers — empty, dead-end lives of work and consumption. A vote for Trump is the only outlet for anger and for the shame of failure. A Confederate flag in a trashed yard is the only source of pride, except maybe for a big pickup truck.

There are vast amounts of money in this country. It continues to flow up to the rich. The rich, of course, invest heavily in their young — tomorrow’s 1 percent. As for everyone else, forty-five percent of 25-year-olds are in debt. The net worth of 35-year-olds averages one month of expenses. Shouldn’t we be talking about this?

P.S. Eventually, as older generations die off, all wealth, of course, is transferred to the young. A study in 2000 for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that 92 percent of Americans will receive no inheritance at all. Of the 8 percent who inherit something, half of them will inherit less that $25,000. Only 1.7 percent of the population stand to inherit more than $50,000. This is how oligarchies and aristocracies are built and sustained. The Republican Party wants to make this much worse by eliminating inheritance taxes on the super-rich. It has been two years now since Thomas Piketty told us pretty much everything we need to know about inequality. But what are we talking about? Overweight beauty queens and Bill Clinton’s infidelities. And our low-investment young people, like older white failures, can’t really follow a conversation that’s more complicated than that.

I’m afraid that this book may make some pretty scary reading in the weeks before this election. But many other Americans will be reading this book right now, and we might as well band together for mutual support and discussion.

The photograph, by the way, was taken in the rubble of a textile mill in Madison-Mayodan, North Carolina, shortly after I picked up the book at the post office.

From the introduction:

“We Germans were liberated from Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off,” Eberhard Jäckel concluded in a lecture in 1979, adding: “Hitler will always be with us, with those who survived, those who came afterwards and even those yet to be born. He is present — not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of.”

Blurry losers from a lost world watching Fox News and sagely repeating Republican talking points, the morning after the debate

Y’all knew that a rant was coming today, didn’t you?

First, here’s my prediction for the debate, from an email to a friend a couple of hours before the debate started:

Two things that give me hope about tonight…

Ailes will have prepped Trump to appeal to the 30 percent. Everyone else will be disgusted.

This debate — like the impressively intelligent Hillary Clinton — went right over the heads of a large portion of the American public. Hillary talked about important and urgent issues that are never mentioned in the right-wing media, which panders to people who have no idea what government is for or what government does in the 21st Century and wouldn’t be able to understand if you told them. There was a funny story in the New York Times about words that were used during the debate that sent many debate-watchers to online dictionaries, including stamina, temperament, cyber, “stop and frisk,” and braggadocio.

Trump supporters, in short, can’t even follow a conversation about what’s involved in being president of the United States, let alone have a useful opinion on the subject. And yet they can vote. Much worse, there are so many of them that a large and highly profitable segment of the media industry arose to feed and flatter their stupidity and to manipulate their votes for the Republican Party.

I was truly touched when Hillary Clinton spoke to those people outside the United States who have a very hard time understanding how Americans can be so ignorant and so vile, and how an orange clown like Donald Trump could be within a few percentage points of being president of the United States.

To all the readers of this blog in Europe and other civilized places, I apologize for us Americans. Those of us with two or more neurons to rub together are doing everything we can not only to stop Donald Trump’s election but also to hasten the burial of the rotting corpse of the Republican Party. And if you happen to see Rupert Murdoch’s sons at a party in London or Melbourne, please plead with them to clean up Fox News with a water cannon and to start all over again, in reality this time.

About the photo at the top of this post: I had to go to the post office and stopped for lunch, since my political commitments cut into my cooking time these days. I sat down at an empty counter, not knowing that I had invaded the place where old white Republicans meet for lunch and to watch Fox News. Suddenly I was surrounded. They coughed a lot and were full of germs. I thought about moving, not so much to not have to listen to them, but to get away from the bad health and the germs. Their Social Security and Medicare bills must be such a burden on taxpayers! (Except of course to rich people like Trump who are smart and don’t pay taxes.) But I stayed so as not to appear rude, and, believe it or not, I listened to their outpouring of horse shit and ignorance through my entire lunch without saying a word. As I told a friend yesterday in email, I sometimes wish for a magic spell that would transport Acorn Abbey from the godforsaken Republican-infested Bible Belt to a quiet little dell in the Scottish Highlands. But normally I don’t deal with these people. There are deep woods between the abbey and them, and no one gets past the owls, crows, squirrels, rabbits, raccoon, bears, and white deer that guard this place against those who don’t know the password.

This morning in my news-reading routine, I came across this video made by the Raleigh News & Observer. Deborah Ross, a Democrat who is running for the United States Senate from North Carolina against Republican Richard Burr, had met with the newspaper’s editorial board and was asked to talk to the camera about her vision for North Carolina. I was delighted to see that, 20 seconds into the video, she mentions Stokes County and the rally at which it was my privilege to introduce her.

As for the voice of sanity, I hope you’ll watch the video and let Deborah Ross speak for herself. Here’s a link to the video.

The voice of sanity and reason is such a quiet voice. It doesn’t rudely swindle us of our attention the way propaganda does, with noise, threats, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories designed to deceive us.

After the right-wing media can no longer sustain the delusion, people gradually come to their senses. But by then the damage is done.

In my lifetime, the most terrifying period in American history was early 2003, when the Bush administration was selling the Iraq war to the American people. Those of us who stayed sane during that epidemic of war fever and lust for violence learned several lessons then, all very frightening:

Lesson 1: The Republican Party has no principles. It will lie and deceive to whatever degree is necessary to get its way or to try to swing elections.

Lesson 2: The right-wing media (Fox News and right-wing media stars such as Rush Limbaugh) have made a science of whipping the lowest elements of the American population into a state of rage and delusion that teeters right on the edge of violence.

Lesson 3: When the mass delusion of right-wingers has spread to a certain percentage of the population, the mainstream media are forced to cover it. This amplifies everything.

Lesson 4: If you see 2003 support for, and opposition to, the Iraq war as a good indicator, then about 72 percent of the American population (see chart above) are susceptible to the mass delusions and psychic epidemics that the right-wing media create to gets its way. Only 22 percent of the population are fully capable of remaining sober and rational when the right-wing media pull out all the stops and force the mainstream media to follow along.

It’s 2016, and it’s happening again. The Republican Party is using its rage machine, as we knew it would, in the 2016 election. The mainstream media are following along. A year ago, smart folks on the left and right would have assumed that a ludicrous fringe character like Donald Trump could appeal to not much more than 30 percent of the population. But smart folks were wrong, because they forgot what the right-wing media machine can do. And, as in 2003, the mainstream media are forced to cover the story lines that are required in the right-wing media to get the attention of the right-wing base.

The mass insanity at present is nowhere near the 72 percent level that the right wing achieved in 2003 when Republicans were selling the Iraq war. Trump’s level of support is somewhere around 41 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 46. Still, that is terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. It’s still not over. The epidemic might weaken, but it also could continue to spread.

Each morning I cringe as I go through my daily routine of checking news sites. Trump and the media are still talking about birtherism. Trump’s agenda would add $5.3 trillion to the federal debt. Trump is under “concentrated Satanic attack,” some preacher says. No one including House Republicans cares if Trump uses foundation money to buy himself gifts or to pay bribes. Trump’s entire family proves itself to be morally deranged and psychologically cracked. And yet six more weeks of all this remains before the Nov. 8 election. One of the things that the right-wing media knows is that it must continue to top itself in order to keep attracting attention and keep the hysteria going. I am trying to brace myself for the October surprise.