An Essential Albeit Belated Rage

Millions of unseen people of color at home and abroad have been fighting American fascism, alone, for years now and so I think it’s instructive, if not essential, to look back before we move forward.

Today’s rage is justified. It’s the proper reaction; our moral imperative in order to constrain the despotism of an illegitimate oligarchy and protect the vulnerable that now stand in the crosshairs of a virulent strain of right-wing populism, emboldened by of ascendancy of one Donald J. Trump.

But, as Michael Oman-Reagan astutely opined:

“Consider the horrible possibility that Trump isn’t a harbinger of possible horrors to come, but a reflection of the nation as it has been.”

Let us recall that…

Obama, a democrat, deported 2.1 million non-white people, more than all US presidents in the 20th century combined and we said or did nothing.

Obama, a democrat, sold more weapons to fascist states — invariably used to slaughter and oppress non-white people — than any president since World War II (while shedding tears over gun control at home) and we said or did nothing.

Obama, a democrat (and Nobel peace prize recipient), has effectively normalized war — illegally and perpetually bombing seven countries over his tenure with no end in sight or intelligible end game to speak of — leading to the death, destitution, and displacement of more Muslims since the Crusades and we said or did nothing.

Obama, a democrat, institutionalized the greatest expansion of presidential power in history which he enthusiastically used to extra-judiciously drone, rendition, and continue torturing thousands of non-white individuals with impunity, and we said or did nothing.

Obama, a democrat, also rubber stamped the institutionalization of an illegal surveillance apparatus — which disproportionally targeted minorities — so pervasive it would’ve made Goebbels jealous and we said or did nothing.

Obama, a democrat, in a naked supplication to elite power, has sentenced whistleblowers to 31 times the jail time of all prior American presidents combined — many of whom were attempting to divulge criminal activity by the State — the victims of which were, again, overwhelmingly non-white and again, we said or did nothing.

Obama, a democrat, paid nothing but lip service to the largest prison strike in US history, (many of whom still in cages due to the overtly racist 1994 Omnibus crime bill enacted by Bill but wholeheartedly endorsed by HRC), the desecration of ancestral Native American lands for profit, pandemic police brutality, and the ‘most brazen corporate power grab in American history’ which would, among many other awful things, undercut any attempt at preventing an ecological and environmental apocalypse ending civilization as we know it and we effectively… well, you get it.

And, as a side note, it’s also worth noting that Bill Clinton, a democrat, militarized the Mexican border and erected an categorically catastrophic wall, in essence identical to the one we regularly lampoon Trump for — on one side a desert sea of skeletons, the other an overflowing prison, in both of which lie thousands of Mexicans fleeing the predictable devastation left in the wake of our insidious trade policies.

But only now we riot…

Today it’s #NotMyPresident but for the past 8 years it’s effectively been #NotMyProblem.

Is the behavior of our ‘benevolent’ incumbent really any less repugnant than the mere rhetoric of our president-elect? Why now?

Is it simply because we elected someone whose racist rhetoric may very well mirror the substance of their policy? Someone who doesn’t hide their white supremacy?

I’m sorry to break it to you but white supremacy is as American as apple pie, sewn into the constitutional fabric of this oligopoly, a near presidential prerequisite, the sugar which has made a lot of nasty policy palatable to the public for centuries.

With Trump the primary difference is, unlike his contemporaries, he wears it on his sleeve. Historically, it was less explicit, invariably massaged into policies only to be whitewashed by a media that, intoxicated by access and prestige, long ago stopped functioning as a check to power, instead serving as a mouthpiece for it.

This is, for example, how Hillary Clinton can, in violation of international law, riding a slew of pretexts we now know to be absolutely fabricated, turn the most prosperous nation in Africa into an absolute warfucked-wasteland-cum-crucible for an entire alphabet soup of Islamic extremists sparking a massive refugee crisis, while gloating about its leader being publicly sodomized and executed on network television like the sociopath she is with nary a critical word from the press. (Note: For what it’s worth, Gaddafi’s fatal crimes were attempting to sell oil in non-US currency and provide cheap loans to developing African countries — thereby subverting the power of the dollar and IMF respectively — but I digress).

If we can honestly assimilate even a fraction of the human and civil rights abuses disproportionately imposed upon non-whites by Democrats over the past 8 years and think it doesn’t warrant the same level of vitriol, activism, and protest that has been on display across the country for the past 48 hours then not only do we need to come to terms with our leaders’ racism and whiteness, but our own as well.

Until we can recalibrate our moral compass and expand our tent to include all human beings we don’t stand a chance of navigating our way through the wicked water we’re about to enter. We’ll drown, and we’ll deserve to.

Whether we like it or not, Americans are denizens of the most powerful empire this world has ever seen and with great power comes great responsibility, a responsibility to protect the human rights of not only the minorities within our borders but billions abroad whom are impacted, in many cases fatally, by the unchecked military and economic power we’ve abrogated to, and refuse to divest from, the elites in their self-serving pursuit of power and profit.

And so, considering Hillary Clinton has either endorsed, architected, or asserted her desire to continue all the odious policy enumerated above, take a second to meditate on how billions abroad — many of whom probably ruled by a Trump-like fascist figure whom we arm and support — would have felt watching 60 million Americans masturbate to their magnificence as we proudly elevate her, a racist, unrepentant war criminal, to a position of peerless power (though the fundamentally undemocratic, wildly insecure, exercise we call the US presidential elections).

So mourn today, but mourn for them too as they have and will continue to live with that fear that I shudder to think most minorities in the US awoke to today. As global citizens, our fight is, and always will be shared.

As Chris Hedges eloquently stated in a speech a few days before the election in Philadelphia:

… you stand with all of the oppressed — people of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murder — or you stand with none of the oppressed.

The loser liberal punditry has already begun Operation Obfuscation, ginning up myriad reasons for this embarrassing Democratic defeat: “uneducated whites”, “racists”, Russia, misogynists, James Comey, third parties, the far left, blah fuckin’ blah.

At no point will they turn the mirror toward themselves, unable to come to terms with the simple truth: That they, in a self-serving, Hail Mary attempt at the status quo, recklessly gambled the security and well being of 300M Americans by cannibalizing their best while promoting Trump in order to run one of the most unlikable candidates ever - an entitled establishment insider when populist rage was demanding anything but.

And in the end, that’s primarily what America elected, not necessarily Trump, but “anything but”.

I surely didn’t want Trump to win, but if there is one solace I’ll take from the appointment of this troglodyte (and the mountain of satanic shit he’s about to shovel into his cabinet), it’s that it’ll hopefully engender more Americans than ever to remain vigilant in perpetuity, applying a level of scrutiny, skepticism, and pressure on our government that has been absent for way too long, allowing us to possibly get to the root of what ails us. A truly radical vigilance that — regardless of what the the liberal milquetoast media would have you believe — quickly would have dissipated under a Democratic regime, contented by the blue flag in the White House lawn and Hillary’s exceptional “experience”.

So yea, let’s fucking smash him, let’s organize, let’s get educated, introspective, and let’s fight. But know that if our fight begins and ends with DJT we’re doomed to fail because he is a mere symptom of the rot, the structural inequity — sown by both parties and the racist, xenophobic, neoliberal bourgeois establishment they represent — that catalyzes forces of fascism and conditions for figures like Trump to resonate so effortlessly with the masses.

We need to transcend partisan politics and smash it all: The war machine, immigration, police state, spying, racists, neoliberal violence, whiteness, drones, the duopoly, all of it, with the concomitant compassion for the millions of unseen and unheard POC at home and billions abroad that have been at war — with the evil that underpins and predates Trump — for a very, very long time now. Their ultimate fear not that things would necessarily get worse under a Trump presidency but that nothing would change.