alias Bruce.

Here is the good news about Trump.

Since the 24-7 information feed from Western civilization’s fast-disintegrating way of life is disheartening beyond description, here, for you and me, are two facts about Trump of which we can remind ourselves in our daily struggles to both guard our inner lives against his toxicity and shut down his regime for good.

1.) The first, and maybe obvious, piece of good news is that, with few exceptions, people who have associated themselves with Donald Trump in his real estate/media/political career ultimately end up hating him and, often, wanting to hurt him. Like a mob boss with a memory disorder, Trump constantly creates new lethal enemies by simply being himself: a temptingly powerful but utterly crooked operator who will tell anyone anything and deny it the next day. Every month these days, the landscape is crawling with more characters who sold themselves out for Trump only to awaken gasping in swamp graves. Perennial enemies are worse than zombies: you can’t kill all of them.

2.) The second, and more broadly uplifting, good news is that American corporate rule, represented most ruthlessly by the Republicans (although the Democrats follow not too far behind as a timid second), has become so self-destructively greedy that it now has only two remaining plausible pitches it can make to try to dissuade the non-rich from storming the estates of the one percent. One of these last-ditch offerings is Trumped-up fake populism that admits that the system is rigged while offering ravaged post-industrial want-to-be-working people the same old disproven trickle-down lies of lower taxes for the rich and permissiveness toward dirty and rapacious industry. The other is white patriarchal fear and hatred toward women, blacks, browns, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and other targets for the displaced rage of a Caucasian American constituency that has subsisted on a manufactured sense of superiority for centuries. What is nefariously effective about the second option is that it not only distracts angry white people from attacking the rich but also alienates them from the very allies they need in order to have any hope of making America the fair and prosperous place they want it to be.

To be sure, this is one hell of a trap for non-rich Americans of all genders, colors, orientations, and backgrounds.

But it also shows that voracious corporate monarchy is just about out of options for successfully explaining itself to you and me as we pay the price for its suicidal destructiveness.

We can work with that opportunity.

Another back-breaking reason why men can’t let the Democratic Party speak for us.

So now the Democratic Party learns, once again, in an awful but necessary series of exposures, that it has near-zero credibility in pretending to stand up for women.

This time the Designated Kinder Money Party went for the kill against a sickening, misogynist, sitting duck of a target: Roy Moore, a creature who, as a judge, pimped out the Constitution to succor white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hatred, and who, decades ago as an up-and-coming assistant district attorney, reportedly sweet-talked a 14-year-old girl away from her mother in the hallway of a courthouse so he could convince her to secretly meet him away from her home and drive her to a place where he stripped down and fondled her through her underwear before she was able to make it stop. The first time.

Problem is, the Kinder Money Party forgot, as entitled bosses often do, that its own flank was just as vulnerable on matters of gender justice as that of the Republicans. And Republican and pro-Trump operatives recognized – as mercenaries and misanthropes usually do – that the overwhelmingly male Dems, including some of their liberal champions, had, of course, the very same brutal penile boss-male histories rattling in their closets. Hello, Al Franken and John Conyers.    

The supreme irony here is that what now gives Repubs and Trumpists their leverage in catapulting Democratic fellow abusers of women through the windshield is their own Republican, amoral, mercenary willingness to use all available ammunition – including the very crimes of which they themselves are perennially and viciously guilty – to implicate and incapacitate Democrats. Do Steve Bannon and the other bottom feeders who fuel the right-wing political hit-man machinery care in the least about the continued millennia of rape, abuse, and dominance of women by men? Please.

What we have here is one wing of the Male Dominate-Women Club prosecuting another rival wing of that same fraternity because it can.

It's not that it is intrinsically Democratic (or Republican, although the Republican ethos is more hospitable to raw patriarchy) for men to behave this way. It's that it has become part of the literal body politic of the Democratic Party as it has come to exist. In the same way that corporate patronage has become a calmly-accepted given for any national candidate's gaining even a foothold of power in either party.

New Jersey State Senator Diane Allen, R-7th Legislative District, said yesterday on national radio that it will take both determined women and committed men to break this outmoded political lock on gender authority.

Speaking as a man and as a citizen, I'll second that. We progressives can do better than the prison of today’s Democratic Party, whether we create momentum with which it is forced to catch up or we displace it altogether.

The parties of money and legacy may not see any other choices. But the rest of us can.

Laurie Kash's film about the Washington, DC Women's March.

My filmmaker friend and colleague Laurie Kash made this film of the Women's March in Washington DC, January 21, 2017. Full disclosure: I'm in it. Watch it anyway. It is a beautiful portrait of national and global resistance.

 

Start drawing your Trump battle lines. Now.

For those of us in America who have the cushion of assuming a daily life free of being physically kicked in the ass, jailed, blacklisted or fired from our jobs for political reasons, or threatened or worse by goons who do whatever the state pays them to do, it is now time to let go of the illusion.

That kind of normalcy has long been a First World problem. Not anymore.

Our personal American bubbles, within which our opinions don’t endanger our uneventfully going to the store or having company over or exercising our right to free speech, are bursting. Fast. Entire swaths of our population – people who work for entire governmental departments that are suddenly forbidden to talk to the public or to the press(!!), law enforcement officers who are ordered to round up newly targeted populations, journalists who are put on brutal notice for what they can and cannot ask or say, citizens who are forced to accept the possibility of being disappeared into unaccountable “black sites” according to the whims of a regime that makes and enforces its own rules in secret – are being herded, under threat of injury, into a new way of life.

This is me, and you, that I’m talking about. Every day this week in the United States, more corporate supervisors and religious leaders and mayors and teachers and police and janitors and hospital administrators and writers and child care workers and musicians and congresspersons and government administrative workers are treading more carefully, self-editing, yielding ground, backing off, facing an awful and humiliating choice between what is right and what is safe.

If you’re not scared, and if you’re not pissed off beyond belief at having to confront being scared, you’re in denial.

So let go of what you thought the ground rules were for America in 2017. Adjust to what they are.

And choose: in the face of half our population’s being drunk on an intoxicating autocracy, who are you going to be? Right now?

Photos from the Women's March in Washington DC, 1/21/2017

I shot these today at the Women's March in DC.

Videos I shot at the Women's March in Washington DC, 1/21/2017

I shot these videos at today's Women's March in DC. At the latest count more than 500,000 people marched in DC -- double the number that attended the Trump inauguration -- and more than 1 million marched globally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red, blue, and rich: game over.

In the United States, as in most other non-democracies, national politics is a moral sport of the wealthy.

The wealthy players fielded by America’s Red Team feel varying amounts of actual heartfelt care, ranging from the frigidly mercenary to the heatedly passionate, but are for the most part selfishly negative in their agenda. The wealthy players who take the field for the Blue Team are generally more empathic and positive. But both teams’ players perform in a steel-shielded arena where winning or losing may be ecstatic or hurt like hell, may earn roars or ridicule, but won’t affect their personal comfort or lifestyle or that of almost anyone they know.

American presidential and congressional politics, like the NFL or NBA or any other corporate-sponsored contest, is a cage match among fiercely-driven elite gladiators who, regardless of who wins or loses, will all leave the ring rich and surrounded by validators.

That is why Hillary Clinton and the Democrats lost in 2016. That is why mainstream media reporters and pundits have become irrelevant to what Americans feel and believe. Insulated by corporate cash, with its gilded chokehold on who gets to compete for national leadership, the Blue Team has confidently hogged the mainstream “progressive” mic while growing ever more more clueless about what its voters have to say and need to hear. And the Red Team has increasingly cornered itself with the clash between its lunch-bucket rhetoric and its robber baron policy.

So, with the official political podium and official media closed off to angry and hungry voters who have known for decades (for people of color, make that centuries) that this nation and its economy have been broken by its masters, where could people go for attention?

To Twitter. And Facebook. Where, unlike the ruling American news operations and political parties, it is still permissible to truthfully say, “The system is rigged.”

Problem is, competent and decent potential Blue Team leaders were either self-silenced on this built-in function of economic inequality (Clinton), or blocked within the party (Sanders). And Red Team leaders were happy to exploit anger but incapable of blaming the rich for anything. So the field was left wide open for a celebrity demagogue named Donald Trump to declare, with veracity, “The system is rigged” – while lying about everything else and steering white rage toward people of color, women, and Muslims. All while he and his henchmen exploited Twitter’s and Facebook’s vulnerability to fake news and false accusations.

So the kinder corporate Blue Team lost this election because it convinced itself that it understood working people while having barred them from the actual field of play since at least the Reagan years. And the meaner corporate Red Team lost its stature and what was left of its self-respect in its cave-in to Trump’s white faux-populist scam, but in so doing it rode the coattails of his audacity.

And now, with fascism in the wings, the callow wealthy Reds and the outraged wealthy Blues regroup on the field, with as little to lose in their actual lives as before.

But for those who stand to lose everything, the Red and Blue game is over.

If you are willing to hear a West Virginian’s calm explanation for why Trump won the angry white vote, read this.

It is accurate to say that West Virginia attorney JB Akers’ detailed blog, Trump Won and I Don't Understand Why You Don't Understand, is self-promoting for his law practice, uninformed about the diversity and depth of suffering in urban communities, and disingenuous about the continuing appeal of racism and misogyny to non-college-educated white men whose footholds of security and cultural authority have been shattered.

But it is also essential that you read Akers' explanation of why economically shipwrecked white men and women were willing to vote for a cretin like Trump in their desperate hope for some kind of overturning of the status quo.

It is time for our self-defeating bullshit to stop. Pissed-off progressives and people of color need to be smarter than to anoint Trump’s win as a simple expression of white male supremacy and brutality, although Trump used this toxic lure brilliantly in his fake populist pitch. Furious whites who have been left to starve by the Demopublican economy need to be smarter than to treat the Hillary Clinton platform as any real expression of the hungers of progressives and people of color, although the 2016 Clinton campaign aggressively posed its corporate-friendly political jingle as the voice of “change.”

We know better. White people without college educations know when they’ve been scammed for decades by a crew of Senator Silverhairs from both parties. Blacks, Latinos, and other voters of color know when a toothless “Stronger Together” slogan falls short of what it takes to make them surge to the polls to vote their interests.

To be sure, Clinton’s winning the popular vote and still losing the 2016 election has, once again, ripped the scar tissue off the national deformity of the Electoral College. Add to that James Comey’s coerced interference and the unfathomable capabilities of Vladimir Putin’s digital regime and we have an electoral outcome that meets no trustworthy standard.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Hillary Clinton lost what should have been a commanding advantage from the beginning because she and her party were afraid of what angry drowning people on all sides really wanted: a passionate, fearless rebuke of business as usual in the post-Reagan economic state. And Trump was able to dishonestly occupy that turf because the Democrats, in jettisoning Bernie Sanders, abandoned their last claim to it.

That is what happened. That is what we have to face in order to discern what we do next.

Re: being "too angry" about President Donald Trump.

A reader, after seeing my post about Trump’s privileged hypocrisy over Mike Pence’s being booed at Hamilton, observed that she would have re-posted it on Facebook but my message was too angry.

As it happens, I wouldn’t have posted it on Facebook, either, because Facebook, unlike a blog or column, is a chat room intertwined with people’s personal lives. But her comment begs a larger question, which some of we progressives (especially we progressives of color) hear a lot, about our being “too angry” about our nation’s cruelties and injustices, including those of the ascension and incoming regime of Donald Trump.

So, for the record: Not being angry about Trump’s obscenity – and the 400 years of rich white straight male presumption to which it appeals – is a luxury that I do not have. Millions of we black and brown Americans, and disenfranchised white Americans, have been very angry for a long time, with good reason, and it is now long past time for those who have enjoyed a bubble of privileged “normalcy” (by race, gender, orientation, religion, or plain denial) to catch up with the larger reality. The new rich-take-all normal for an increasing swath of suffering white Americans is the old normal for many of the rest of us, and we will not wait to act while those who have been relatively sheltered from these centuries of abuse now fret over how angry they are willing to be.

If now, after all this, is not a time to be angry, what is? America flirts passionately with fascism, in a chilling parallel to the way in which the intelligentsia of 1930s Germany mocked the seemingly ludicrous appeal of the legally-elected Adolf Hitler, but anger would too greatly disturb the daily routines of those who wish it were not so? Imagine how it would sound today to have told fervent anti-fascists during the rise of the Third Reich, “You’re too angry in your opposition to Hitler! Your protests are too inflammatory for me to share them with my friends.”

At a certain point of extremist national change, previous “normal” standards for everyday conversation and political opinion no longer apply, whether those who have been relatively insulated care to acknowledge it or not. Being afraid to be angry about a modern norm of economic and human rights outrages, and clinging instead to mild-mannered Democratic Party business-as-usual prescriptions (Clinton’s “Stronger Together” platform never even came close to addressing the need and desire for deep economic and political change) at a time when many people's lives are falling apart, lost Hillary this election.

Anger – grounded in a righteous love of fairness and of building a better society for one another – is an appropriate and necessary response. Repressing or denying the anger is worse, both for the health of the country and for our personal well-being as people who hunger for better (and who often suffer and die for the privilege, whether through stress-induced illness or selective targeting by police and policy).

Some of us are forced to that recognition sooner than others.

Mike Pence Gets Booed at "Hamilton" and...

...Donald Trump takes offense with a tweet demanding an apology.

So, just to make sure we understand: President-Elect Trump believes that he and his surrogates are entitled to call Mexican immigrants "rapists," to call women "pigs" and "dogs" who you can "grab by the pussy," to claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, to advocate banning Muslims from the country, to insult a military Gold Star family and their self-sacrificing son on religious grounds, to mock disabled people, to validate white supremacists, to encourage violence at his rallies, to call the former secretary of state and his presidential opponent a "nasty woman," and to sneer "they don't look like Indians to me" at Native Americans who challenge his casino interests.

But an audience at a smash musical that touts diversity is not entitled to voice its displeasure at such wanton racism, sexism, and hatred.

To paraphrase that paragon of principle Mitt Romney, this is a textbook example of white male bully delusion. It's an affliction of those taught to inherit the 400-year-old self-image of captor and master: they can dish it out but they can't take it.

Ex-slaveholder, ex-master of women, and ex-majority over brown people are all positions with no future. In today's world they are guaranteed dead-end jobs. And I do mean dead: in the sense of an aging and shrinking white male-dominated demographic that can feel itself shriveling nationally and globally. Within decades its majority in America will be gone, replaced by a thriving predominance of brown people and of white people who are comfortable with difference.

One recent example that will jerk your head back is the testimony, on the seminal radio chronicle This American Life, of economically screwed white Americans who bitterly report, with no sense of historical irony whatsoever, their shock at feeling "their" country and communities occupied by differently-colored newcomers from overseas. Uh, has anybody here looked beyond the white experience to see how their feeling of dispossession is neither unique nor accurate?

But that's the problem with defined whiteness: its world starts and ends with itself. Trump is part of its end, its desperate death throes, its final mythology. The only remaining question is whether the rainbow of humanity as a whole can survive this deadly fiction.

I say we can. You?