Why You Need Donald Trump, Says the Liberal

“A slight feverishness might deceive a person, but when it has developed into a point when a genuine fever is raging it will extract an admission that something is wrong even from a tough and hardened individual.”

— Seneca, Letter LIII, Letters from a Stoic

Here he comes. The raging orange thermometer for America’s fat ass. You were sweating the election, you vomited on election night, and the inauguration has you bracing for four years of despair. He’s going after healthcare. He’s attacking a woman’s right to choose. Deregulating and destroying protections. Making Obama, who quietly expanded arms sales, troops overseas and financial structures for the capitalist machine, seem like a pimp-mode Gandhi. Shine on you liberal diamond.

Here comes a man whose election predicts the tremendous fever rising in our ailing nation, an onset of something latent and terrible we’ve either chosen to ignore or failed to see. He’s been outrageous from the outset, a reality TV president made champion to a nation of swaggering bullies and cozy ideologues. Here’s an avatar I say we deserve. A perfect example of America’s values encapsulated in one atavistic asshole. Outsiders say: “Stupid Americans, I didn’t think they could sink that low.” We say: “I never conceived this possible.” This discrepancy in perception is what I want to talk about. A phenomenon some find shocking seems to others as merely incremental.

“What do you think will happen in America now that Trump’s been elected?”

With a degree of detachment, I speculate that we’ll one day all be as familial orangutans, related to our impending leader like much of China is to Genghis Khan, looking backwards towards these early days with the incredulity shown by Charlton Heston in the final scenes of Planet of the Apes. I jest. Really, this whole rock will be on fire before that comes to pass.

It’s not going to be different in days to come, only more blatant. More accelerated. Trump never claimed to be a politician, only a shameless capitalist. Many applaud him for it. But now the duplicity typical of lifetime politicians is lacking, as is any comforting ambiguity. A bold and irresponsible rhetoric is set to ring true. Huge neoconservative milestones will be achieved during his presidency. Ethics committees, environmental standards, civil liberties have a playdate with the dinosaurs. Healthcare is set to implode. The Supreme Court will become a reactionary thinktank.

I’d like to pretend we’re on the verge of a time akin to the 60’s, ready to stick it to the man and prevail upon what’s right. I’d accept a precursory echo to the French Revolution, but again I think that’s optimistic. We’ve been sitting for too long. We can’t stand up yet. We’ve taking it lying down for decades. But, as Robin Williams told us in Good Will Hunting: “It’s not your fault.”

We live in a liberal culture. For better or for worse, liberalism is the tolerance of tolerance. This means that Neo Nazism exists alongside freedom of speech. We like liberalism because it allows us to feel like we’re in control — and nice people to boot — but it only works when we’re not under the Nazi party. We the People have always enjoyed the perception of voicing our opinion, being heard, changing the course of history. We fantasize about liberty before death. That goodness prevails. We love our sassy extroverts who win and take all. Sometimes A-types run amok and dominate the social order. Saying something stupid loudly trumps saying something smart without style. But hey, we live in a liberal time, humans have their preferences. These choices are our own, organic.

Or are they? Where has this notion of tolerance taken our political system? Because I bet you feel pretty politically isolated from the notion of American democracy at this time. Why do we feel isolated? Because you and rest of the general population recognize that organized institutions do not reflect your concerns or needs. You do not feel that you’re being told truth by media. You might see more more of leaders, sure, but you know ever less of what they do; presidential elections seem removed from choice. And thus, you feel disenfranchised from participating meaningfully in the political system. We’ve tolerated to an irreversible extreme. It’s like we’re caught in a machine now, on a track. For this compliance, we’re delivered a man who symbolizes unbelievable bigotry and bristling disregard. He refuses to play politic, so the curtain’s pulled back. The cogs and pulleys at work in Oz are coming into focus. We’re scared of what we see in his demeanor. But this machine and this mentality have existed at our nation’s core for some 400 years.

We must come to see that what we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that that can live with it’s conscious. — MLK

This country can’t live with its conscious because it’s paradoxically divided by what’s supposed to unite us most: the American dream. Living with integrity gets muddied up in the fantasy of what we wish we could become. We want to be wealthy, to win the hard-work lottery, to live the lie that we can be anything we want should we try hard enough. Some get lucky, some will win big, some will startup and sell out. But the stats remain the same. Most of us will live in abject normality. 99% of us anyways.

This country was founded by white male landowners in search of new land to own. Here they were free from taxation, free to perpetrate their mindset. They sought religious tolerance. They discovered total freedom. So they wrote loftily and at length about such liberties, taking notably exception with the ⅗ human blacks and the women who shared their beds. Oh, and the laborers. Yes, the poor who built their grand new visionary kingdom were deprived of rights as well, were defrauded of opportunities, shackled by indebted servitude, conscripted into armed conflict routinely to defend against Natives or rival whites capitalists, oftentimes forced to kill in order to get a crust of bread to survive (read: the glorious, unified Revolutionary War). If you conceived of early America as egalitarian, land of free home of the brave, you’re perception is misaligned, though it arrives through any sanctioned text curriculum.

The poor died and suffered en masse under the new America’s’ guiding principle of economics. Humanitarian sentiments were scarce, unlike the numerous laws protecting private property and her fortunate owners from attacks. Manifest destiny, or white right, pushed new America from the east coast into a new continent of profitability. Free market forces enslaved the first African to cut sugarcane. Free market forces made the poor whites rise up violently against the early colonialist out of deprived need. Free market forces drove the ruling elite to create the middle class, that cushion of a populace sufficiently deceived to think that they could become upper class, but still interacting closely with the (various) poor enough to buffer their violent natural responses to economic degradations. These new “bougie” people would factor strongly into politics, wishful thinking in tow, eyes bent upwards to the WASP elite, and easily manipulated by their wish to ascend. This was the start of the American dream. The myth of upward mobility for everyone was the seminal move towards suppressing class warfare. Horatio Algiers, eat your heart out.

(To read the text that exposes these and many other inconvenient truths, click here).

Now, you might not recall this from your history books. Take heart, you’re forgetful. You don’t recall these truths because they weren’t printed. The bloody and contested start to this otherwise sanctimoniously presented nation is omitted for effect. For example, Texas schools (to this day) are making strides to remove much of the history surrounding slavery from public school textbooks. McGraw Hill, the nation’s preeminent textbook publisher, has no qualms with reprinting millions upon millions of histories fresh for Texan braincases. After all, that bottom line and the investor’s right to a profit trumps any moral compass. Even one that points true north.

Now let’s pause and take stock. White male landowners are still in power, laws protecting personal privacy and reducing taxation still dominate. Six of the top Fortune 500 companies own 75% of the US GDP. The internationally rich get richer and everyone else gets gamed by banking trickeries so confoundingly derivative that wizards need training wheels. Minorities and poor still squabble amongst themselves for scraps, fighting like rats at the bottom of the barrel.

“I think that we are getting together to support each other as a community because this is a big loss. This election has set us back and has definitely shown the world that we are not as advanced as we claim we are.” — Andrea Garcia, interviewed by CNN

Calling our system advanced is an admirable sentiment, though one seemingly expressed from underneath a very large rock. Infant mortality rates, education, public health: we rank low. 75% of our people don’t hold a college degree. 68% of FOX news viewers believe reverse racism to be a prominent issue affecting their lives today. And for the 60 million voters who voted for Trump, mostly the white working class, advancement isn’t what’s being asked for, it’s basic employment. While cosmopolitans and liberals like to rail on white trash, the antagonism from poor whites towards minorities is understandable, though not excusable. Poor minorities take poor white jobs. Jobs and a way to life have been disappearing for years now. Does the redneck harken back to a better time? Yes, but perhaps only to when his family could survive off a blue collar job. Scarcity brings out the worst in us all.

Some love Trump because he’s not a politician, but he’s still a rich man. When he says “Make America Great Again,” he’s not set on bringing us all up. He’ll continue to wage war on American labor because it returns a profit. Rock-bottom wages have been stagnant since the 70s. Labor unions have been largely destroyed. Quite popular in the early 1900s, the socialists and communists movements which once stood firm against degradations of the modern worker, have been destroyed and discredited. Once common labor strikes for better conditions, wages, and benefits are history. The “pampered” American worker now expects a job without advocacy, protections, insurance, benefits, leave, stability or negotiating power. Like a lead noose, the bottom line of capitalism drags us downward. Why is the richest nation on earth incapable or careless of providing a quality standard of living for it’s people?

“Government is the shadow of business cast over society.” — John Dewey

Or any people, for that matter. They say gentleness is the greatest form of strength. Well, we didn’t get that memo. Terrorism for economics is our foreign policy, yet we ride forth under the aegis of democracy. Boom-boom-boom go the war drums. Patriotisms are contrived. ‘We’re all in it together. We all will benefit’ goes the convenient message. ‘We must protect our interests,’ it’s said. The oldest lie in our country is that our interests are their interests. In this pseudo-democracy, the policymakers are not the people, nor do they represent the people. What serves the 1% does not benefit the 99%. Here or at home. Ask any foreign nation with resources we want and they’ll tell you that wholesale destruction and destabilization are American values. First world prominence and lifestyle arrived from standing upon the backs of the helpless, our nation’s disproportionate wealth enforceable only by a weapons-grade greed of the highest caliber.

But these violent actions must not come to light, lest our exalted image deteriorate. Filipinos died by hundreds of thousands during the Spanish American War. Rape and murder and motherless children were left to show for a US influence intent upon oil, tin, rubber, bananas — pineapples too. We took all as ours and left the once peaceful land with a US lapdog dictator.

In 1975, our previously installed Indonesian government would attack East Timor. The oil-rich island just north of Australia fell under siege and suffered atrocities that recall Hitler. The Ford and Carter administrations would provide and increase arms sales throughout the genocide that would peak in 1978. After the invasion began, coverage in the US and Canada dropped to zero. 250,000 Timorese died. And no one heard about it.

In contrast, the world was outraged by Pol-Pot and the massacres of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This story was newsworthy, blasted forth as evidence of inconceivable savagery in our enemies. Yet between 1973 and 1975, the CIA would covertly and concurrently bomb the Cambodian countryside. American airmen killed some 600,000 people, a tally that would exceed 1 million after the infrastructure fell apart and starvation set in. Yet this went unreported in the media, the result of the presiding administration’s insidious efforts to control public opinion. Our war crimes don’t exist when it comes to making a profit or it doesn’t fit the American ideal.

Look upon our works ye mortals, and despair.

(Click here for a stirring documentary as to how and why such truths go unseen and unheard).

(Source)

“We Americans are all cuckoos. We make our homes in the nests of other birds.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

We pretend to be regal eagles, but war like hawks and live as cuckoos. Our foreign policy is to keep our eggs in the nest of others, systematically advancing upon foreign livelihoods. Sounds crazy enough, right? Well the cuckoo’s actually dubbed crazy for it’s monotonous call, which remains unchanged for it’s whole life. We define insanity is performing the same action and expecting a different result, so Holmes’s metaphor suits our deranged nation well. Orwell knew it as he wrote 1984, how doublespeak and obfuscating language would neuter any hope for change. Today, the 24-hour news feed further envelopes us in American nationalism, while keeping most citizens completely unawares of the basic realities of who, what, why, and how things could be different. We feel unhinged from what should be — but can see now way out. But what’s repeated often eventually enough becomes true. We hear the same lies, bemoan the same shit on a different day, debate this week’s moot point, progressively become more frustrated with each iteration. Yet we expect a different outcome? We cuckoos cry for peace and progress while set to fly over the next bloody battlefield. I for one am ready for a swansong.

What does that sound like? Like this song right here…

“mass confusion, spoonfed to the blind/ serves now to define, our cold society…from which we’ll rise…”

Why do you need Donald Trump? Because he’s the painful reminder that the country’s sick and not getting any better. He’s the obvious reference to a undeniably broken system, an audit to our national character (in case we hadn’t seen it clearly before). Spread the word like an antibody: your government is not upholding its end of the bargain. The inaugural man is symptomatic of a society that values greed above life, foreign and domestic.

“Whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of existence, they are more than values to be treasured, they may be essential to survival.” — Noam Chomsky

So as the fever rises in the body politic, I encourage you to consider how nothing has changed significantly since yesteryear or today. Your fears are new, real, valid — sure — and regular folks have lots to lose. But America has always been a bully. A perfect exemplar now holds the oval office. He’s advancing the same agenda that’s always unfolded: make more money for the banks, the elites, the 1%. Now that you see how bad things can get, your responsibility is to reconsider the conditions of this so-called society

To reclaim the right path we need the hidden facts. Facts you don’t know. Facts omitted from your primary education, yet would fill many sets of encyclopedia. Facts that incite anger and action. So arm yourself with information. Arm your friends, arm your family. Take up and reinvent the second amendment to defend yourself against the tyranny of propaganda. For without a weapon, how will you fight for what you believe?

Because I do hope you’re willing to fight back. Now, I can’t tell you to quit your job and occupy everything or throw away responsibilities in favor of a molotov cocktail. As much as I’d love to, it wouldn’t be effective. Progress builds slowly and collectively. Indeed, one person never accomplished anything alone. Even MLK was just an eloquent spokesman for the bestirred sentiments of millions. We can and we will redirect our terrible course. Natural law dictates that persistence and hard work create new realities. You’ll will know when.

For now … I ask you to consume. Easy, right? Consume truth and knowledge. I’ll remind you that, during the election, 19% of Democrat-tilted articles and 40% of the conservative sources of online material were found to be false. That Rupert Murdoch owns both VICE and National Geographic. It’s time to skip the easy way out, overlook mass media and news porn blogs. Instead, go to libraries. Read certified histories and develop a conscious perspective from outside the canon that’s long promoted our well-informed ignorance. Consume books. Work up your appetite for change.

Then I vote we eat the 1%.

PS — Here’s a reading list that informed the piece. If you appreciated this, you’ll love what you find here.

Howard Zinn — The People’s History of the United States (Book)

Oliver Stone — The Untold History of America (Showtime Series)

Noam Chomsky — Manufacturing Consent (Documentary / Book)

Michael Moore — Where to Invade Next (Film)