alias Bruce.

The real reason why so many Americans don’t vote.

It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s bitter awareness.

On November 5, the day before the midterm elections central to the continued power and influence of dictator-in-progress President Donald Trump, a Washington Post story went against the dominant narrative about American nonvoters. Instead of offering yet another bewildered eulogy to the lost civic conscience of the more than half of Americans who don’t vote, the Post story let nonvoters from across the country explain, in their own words and in detail, why they chose to refuse their ostensible civic duty in one of the most momentous elections in the nation’s history. For instance:

Charlotte Greenleaf won’t be voting on Tuesday. Neither will anyone else in her family. Never have, never will, she says. It’s not that she’s too busy. Greenleaf, 60, is unemployed and trying to make it on disability benefits, plus the pigs and chickens she raises on a small farm near this scruffy town in central West Virginia. And it’s not that she’s satisfied with how things are. Unhappy with President Trump, she quoted her mother: “If you don’t got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” No, this is why she’s not voting: She figures the country’s leaders are chosen by rich and powerful people far from any place she’s ever been. “My favorite subject in school was history, and I learned that’s how it’s always been,” Greenleaf said. “Politicians just think about themselves.” So she tunes them out: Doesn’t read the news, doesn’t watch it on TV. And most certainly does not vote.

Read the entire Post story. Its importance is not that it blows the cover off some national secret about why people don’t vote, but that it says out loud what is literally a matter of common knowledge to most of we Americans. A good number of the more than half of Americans who elect to not vote — many for their entire lifetimes — do so because they choose to not insult themselves with the sorry pretense of having participatory power over the country’s policy decisions. They may possess or lack formal education; they may have enough money to get by or they may not; they may live in a hamlet in eastern Idaho or on the west side of Manhattan. But what these boycotters all have in common is a deep and often bitter clarity about the fact that the United States, with its flood of corporate campaign money propelling public policy from top to bottom, is not a democracy. So why would they vote when the one shred of civic power many would-be voters feel they possess is to tell big money, in effect, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” This is not a position to mock or to dismiss. It reflects a serious and fierce understanding by which millions of competent adult American nonvoters reach a cogent decision to abstain from the charade.

I am not one of those people. I vote — despite my rage at the corrupt moneyed machinery that runs the nation and controls its major decisions — because the outcomes of voting can mean life or death in people’s real lives and because voting is not incompatible with my determination as a progressive to lay waste to the structural monarchy of money on which modern capitalism rests. The two coexist, and electoral casualties are real and present. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — courtesy of the Electoral College but theoretically preventable had more nonvoters turned out and made it harder for digital interference to ensure a Trump win — has already killed people and will kill and devastate more. In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial win, if it holds, will embolden racial murders and deadly statewide policies on health care, guns, and policing, while Andrew Gillum’s victory there, if it happens, will mollify some of these and lend strength to those who resist them. Ted Cruz’s victory in Texas will buoy racist and fascist attacks, economic savagery, and suffering and death for women denied reproductive rights in that state. Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez’s New York victory has put the fear of progressive outrage into the hearts of cowardly Democrats locally and nationally.

But we betray a huge number of outraged and aware people who refuse to vote — and we weaken our shared clout as a force for overturning this corrupt corporate-funded system of governance — if we trivialize or demonize nonvoters instead of recognizing that many of them are simply expressing, in a different way, the very same things that we want in a society.

This is not about whether or how someone voted in this filtered popularity contest that we call a democracy. This is about voters’ core sense of what serves their interest. Never, ever forget that most Americans, no matter how they act out, ultimately want the same things we progressives want: an end to corporate money in government, a citizen-driven system of single-payer universal health care, and policy that serves the public will rather than private wealth.

That is our greatest strength, and it is our way to ultimately win.

What do you do when your nation is in the hands of a traitorous criminal and his collaborators?

This is not partisan fiction. It isn’t the routine fake outrage of Fox News or yet another algorithmically-designed online whopper. It is the demonstrated factual truth: President Donald Trump, known racist, misogynist encourager of murderous white supremacists, banner of Muslims, and jailer of children ripped from their refugee families, has now capped his criminality by committing actual legally-defined treason: aiding and abetting an attack by a foreign government on the very nation he purports to lead.

On July 16 in Helsinki, standing a few feet away from the threat of President Vladimir Putin, Trump proved to even the most cowardly of his backers —the fleeing Paul Ryan, the concave Mitch McConnell, the whole worthless lot of the Republican leadership — that he as president will serve or betray anyone, any time, in any way that suits his own immediate interest. Especially as he withered under the plutonium stare of an 18-year autocrat — the man who helped to make him president — who very possibly has the means to handily kill Trump if the need arises.

You, like many of us, may see that we are fast running out of mainstream options for dealing with the Trump problem.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the money-trained Democratic leadership know no language for responding to being beaten with a steel bar and left for dead behind a garage. Mainstream reporters, now emboldened to openly use terms like “disgraceful” to describe Trump’s conduct, are straining for words to spur peaceable corrective action in the electorate. Republican leaders, who didn’t figure that their downward slope of moral cave-ins to racism and plutocracy would corner them into siding with a man who is willing to sell out America’s republic of good white people, are responding to Traitor Trump with murmurs of protest, clinging to hope that he will in the coming hours and days rephrase the past 24 hours’ impeachable thoughts.

He might. By the time you read this, Trump, at a safe distance from enforcer Putin, may very well have back-pedaled on his words for the sake of sustaining the state of chaotic demolition that is his best grip on power. What the nation — and the world — lose in coherent thought and understanding of his regime, Trump gains in his ability to maneuver and manipulate. There’s no telling what will happen. That’s the deliberate idea.

Meanwhile, the two fundamentals of Trump Nation continue to be a policy mandate of globally suicidal economic pillage and environmental destruction, and the goaded immorality of a white base too drunk on the lie of regained racial glory to notice the hastening of their own extinction.

So what do we do when our head of state is a real-life monstrous factually-verified criminal willing to sacrifice civilization for power, and a sizable chunk of the state’s enforcers (read: ICE, National Guard troops, police, prison staff, Congress), along with a nasty bloc of voters, have consented to be his collaborators?

One thing is certain: our current American mainstream, safely indoors with its indignant but toothless dissent, offers no answers.

Why Trump is the death of white men as we know them.

Smart people keep saying this but that’s because reality keeps shouting it: Trump is part of nature’s answer to the temporary global authority of white males who have massive treasuries and armies but tiny appendages of social perception.

There Trump is, braggingly brushing what he calls “dandruff” off the shoulder of French president Emmanuel Macron, a younger white male who thinks he can save the burning clubhouse, or at least inherit membership points. There Trump is, making his pear-shaped golf swing at his Florida swamp playground while he brays the planet into incompatibility with human life. There Trump is, lavishing sick job-starved white men with shamelessly wicked promises about coal mines and winning wars and grabbing women by their privates.

I fear it will get worse before it gets better. America, with its 18th-century patrician presumption of noblesse oblige, hasn’t yet had time to create a working model for addressing bad monarchs.

But make no mistake: Trump is the last titanic white man, the final Caucasian male officiate ranting oaths from the lifeboat, the end of the line for a brand of capitalist maleness that is rotting on the shelf in a rapidly-browning and broader-gendered market of humanity.

Every white male who cuts you off on the highway, or who floors his burp-tuned exhaust all the way to the next red light, or who votes to economically screw himself in order to savor a momentary blow at brownness or femaleness, is screaming, “This world is killing who I thought I was, and I don’t want to die.”

That goes with the territory when any animal stakes out unsustainable turf.

Being unaware of the world will kill you every time.

How Do We Get Rid of Trump?

Short of some single-minded soul’s borrowing one of Trump’s insinuations and giving him the Second Amendment treatment – which would place the United States at the mercy of the smarter and more efficiently hateful monster Mike Pence – what will it really take to rid ourselves of the lethal Trump regime?

Like a primordial predator that can kill with its eyes closed, Donald Trump is idiotically expert at destruction. His arsenal of continual chaos is, so far, keeping an entire society’s alleged defenses of due process at bay. Any one of them – the Mueller investigation is a good possibility – could bring him down. But, like any great con man, Trump is a deadly master of distraction and deflection.

So what will it take to rid ourselves of Trump and his terrible reign of supremacist rage?

• Trump voters, even the most demure, will need to own responsibility for having empowered wickedness that they claim to not embrace. It makes no difference that you’re “not a racist” or that you “don’t like the sonofabitch but liked some of his policies” or that you “just wanted somebody to shake things up.” As Charles Blow has said, in effect, if you voted for Trump after hearing the things he said he would do, you are now responsible for his having done them. This is on you, bamboozled white avengers. Own it.

• Liberal-leaning voters need to ditch, once and for all, the corporate incrementalist lie that we can’t risk a flat-out audacious, in-your-face progressive economic and political campaign in the next presidential election. If Trump’s success with a thoroughly phony but blisteringly audacious “the system is rigged” pitch – laced with virulent racism, no less – could win an election but lose the popular vote, a truthfully in-your-face progressive call to jettison what is broken and to champion what is fair in America can only do better. Progressives need to own that. We need to swat away the alleged leadership of the money-wedded Democratic Party. Through our own voicing of what most Americans continually say they need and want – universal health care, an end to big money in politics, higher wages for the non-rich and higher taxes for the rich – we need to rise, in the streets and online and in candidacies, and exert national leadership that the Democratic Party, if it is smart, might then follow.

• I’ll keep saying it: Americans need to redefine normal. “Normal” is not the silence that reporters and money-backed politicians subject us to about the constant atrocities of corporate control over public policy on health and education and policing and war. Normal should be, instead, a very public reckoning on those devastating realities. Trump cashed in on that trauma. Progressives can do far better than that for this country.

Three Compelling Reasons for You to Leave Facebook Now.

1. If you believe in democracy, Facebook is increasingly incompatible with that desire. As you’ve likely seen in the revelations that continue to unfold, Facebook has created a model where very smart people use very smart machine intelligence to selectively filter the information it feeds to you, some of it false, so as to use what they know about you to influence your choices on, say, who should be the next president. Facebook has hidden this misuse of your data and the identities and agendas of those who misuse it. And they’ve done it for money – because the well-targeted lies generate traffic and the traffic boosts revenue. Enjoyers of Facebook – as I once was – shrug at this at our peril. But its reality rivals any nightmare George Orwell might have predicted – because Facebook’s silent commands about what is real feel to us like free choices as we click our way, personally monitored by algorithms at our every turn, through the filtered world it creates for each one of us.

2. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting that you’re too stuck on Facebook to leave, or that you’ll buy the “why bother? It won’t help” line. Zuckerberg and Facebook have been lackadaisical for years about urgent policy changes and improvements in how they handle the veracity and privacy of data. And Zuckerberg, with unbelievable arrogance, has repeatedly refused to testify before a committee of the British Parliament (he has offered instead to send underlings) in the momentous formal investigation into Facebook’s role in spreading disinformation in the run-up to the epic Brexit vote. Facebook could, if it chose to, do plenty to aggressively confront systems that reward false content, abuse user data, and impair transparency. But Zuckerberg seems to feel entitled to duck the unprecedented public crisis of information his company has created. True, this is what we get when we allow a private company to become, in effect, a public utility for our information. But now that we see the result – including its role in who now occupies the White House – are we willing to tolerate that? If you now remain on Facebook, you’re telling Zuckerberg, “Sure.”

3. You can always go back to Facebook if you decide to. Facebook makes it hard to quit and easy to return. Their only proof that you’re willing to leave is when you do. So the one way to ensure that Facebook gives a damn about you and your wishes is to remove yourself from their profit base and tell them why. That, you can bet – as Facebook’s value has fallen amid mistrust from investors and users – will get tech zillionaire Zuckerberg’s attention.

Given the stakes for your personal information and your society, are you really not willing to send Facebook that message?

 

 

Trump is the monster child of white male immunity.

This is tortuously obvious unless you live in a bubble of white male obliviousness, in which case this message, like much of today’s American reality, will escape you.

But despite its having been repeatedly shrieked by gobsmacked commentators of color since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it still needs to be said, again and again: Trump’s presidency itself is ranting, babbling proof of the official immunity of white men to standards of common decency and competency to which people of color, and women, and other non-members of America’s traditional ruling cabal, are held.

To me, as an educated and, most days, civil black American male, each morning that I awaken to Trump’s continued presence in the Oval Office is a hard knee to the gut. It is a wicked daily reminder of the monster baby that white male American power has become after five centuries: foul, infantile, brutally entitled, cluelessly empowered. Like an infant who pumps his fist at his own genius at having been born.

No American president of color would have his or her fitness for office still subject to debate after one month, let alone one year, of boasted sexual assault and proven continual lying and blatant economic conflicts of interest and increasingly unhinged and crude conduct that mocks even the pretense of presidential mettle. Such a disgrace of a president, if brown, would be gone – censured, condemned, impeached – within weeks, if that. Even Barack Obama – who, like many black achievers, brought an exponentially excessive degree of intellect and tact to a job for which far lesser whites are readily accepted – would have immediately been kicked to the curb for even one of the uncounted obscenities that Trump has acted out to date. And even with Obama’s impeccable conduct and qualifications and diction, his very presence as president still brought the racist white-rage constituency back into the streets.

Trump is a mentally ill, abusive, delusional, brazenly racist and misogynist, recklessly dishonest, stupid, corrupt human being who, by virtue of his being white and male and rich and conveniently enraged, won an election via the archaic Electoral College (while still losing the popular vote) in a country where the two corporate parties left the field wide open to any player audacious enough to utter the obvious but forbidden truth that the system is rigged.

And now that very system is up against itself: how does it eject the uncontrollable racist maniac who co-opted hidden white rage, but at the same time continue to deflect the rage of white voters away from the white rich?

It’s as if some greater power is asking white supremacy to fish or cut bait.

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.

Trump's ultimate scam: protecting American whiteness from itself.

I received a link from my friend Aubrey to a piece written by a former resident of Chile remarking on the wicked irony of seeing Americans traumatized by Russian interference in our elections more than 40 years after his own country was ravaged by the bloody toppling of a democratically-elected Chilean government – that of President Salvador Allende – by the American CIA. The writer took no pleasure in the awful observation. But he also refused to spare we Americans the agony of the irony.

It reminds me of this podcast in which a Trump voter voiced her terrible sense of violation at seeing a community of Somali immigrants take over, from her point of view, an entire neighborhood that she and other enraged whites felt they intrinsically owned. She had not a clue about the wicked irony of her bitterness at losing "her" territory in a land where Native Americans know that very experience with far more gruesome familiarity than she will ever fathom.

That is the obscene, comic, tragic absurdity of the consciousness of tens of millions of scared American white voters: Their own tribal legacy on these shores is exactly, and I mean exactly, what they shriek for Trump to defeat in fetishized brown invaders: primitive ignorance, carnivorous violence, savage thievery, amoral entitlement.

It’s all right here in the making of a country that – over its few centuries of incompetent occupation – whiteness momentarily claims as its own.

Keith Schlegel on Trump, words, and language as a bomb at a bus stop.

My colleague and friend Keith Schlegel, a retired university English chair and owner of a baritone voice most guys would go to jail for, wrote and recorded a video reading of the following (I'll share a link when I have it [Update 12/8: video is here]):

 

"Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: "Words, words, words."

 

Well, yes, when we read or speak or listen, that is all we encounter, mere words, which, unlike sticks and stones, can never hurt us, or so we teach children. Hamlet's answer to Polonius is that it doesn't matter what Hamlet reads, that whatever it is is meaningless, that words are meaningless. Yet this play, itself made of words only, shows the meaning, purposes, and effects of words, which include cruelty, since words can hurt very much and not just our feelings about ourselves.

 

Words are in fact a species of action and the result of choice. Words are more than mere words to those who depend upon them to represent something like truth, to inspire us, to console, to teach us. Alas, words can also anger, harm, and, most dangerous of all, deceive.

 

Notwithstanding his claims that he has "great" words, President-elect Trump is pitifully lacking in good words, in accurate words. Is Pakistan really a "fantastic" nation full of "fantastic" people and led by a "fantastic" leader, as Donald Trump has recently said? When he said he "saw" hundreds of Muslims in America celebrate the horror of 9/11, his words were fully as perilous as a bomb thrown into a crowd. More recently, he exchanged words with the president of Taiwan, violating established diplomacy. Examples of irresponsible talk abound from the 2016 campaign, but now that it's over, Americans can and should assert a higher standard of active citizenship that listens, reads, judges, and most of all uses words critically and accurately. No excuses remain.

 

I doubt we can quickly or thoroughly change Mr. Trump's bad habits of careless speech, regardless of who is advising him. Those of us who worry most about the degradation of truth can, however, focus our resistance to the debasing of language. Accordingly, as we make ourselves the loyal opposition, we commit to name every misrepresentation, every unfounded assertion, every flattery of tyrants, every overly-general or unfair accusation. We plan to speak truth to power.

 

Over my decades teaching writing, I never let pass without comment any vague use of the word great. "Do you mean famous? large? powerful? important? good?" I'd comment. To make something "great again" surely first requires understanding what the word great means now and what it meant in the past, and much of the divide we now endure stems from people's not sharing the same meanings for words: in that way, the rise of Trumpism has made clear what before was hidden.

 

I'd be happy to agree that American citizens should try to make America great again if that means to return to the clear humanity of Abraham Lincoln or the hopefulness of a young President Kennedy or to the heroism of the civil rights workers or the sacrifices of American soldiers or indeed the promise of justice that lives in the Constitution, which our Presidents swear to defend in the words of their oath of office. I suspect these are not the values defining "great" of those who even now yell for the President-elect to throw Hillary Clinton in jail, albeit I seriously doubt one in a thousand could even name the supposed crime or explain how any President could exercise such unconstitutional powers. The Presidency is the most powerful office in our nation, but it is also limited in ways that would irritate any despot.

 

Much of the power of the American Presidency lies not in the exercise of force but in the authority and stature of the office such that Presidential words must be attended to. The Presidency is a pulpit (a "bully" one) to do good. This is a truth that President Obama knows well, as his soaring rhetoric has shown. Mr. Trump also gets the point, at least in part: when he tweeted this week attacking Boeing, the stock shares fell precipitously: now that’s power.

 

We do no disservice to our country when we demand high standards in Presidential speech: we show thereby that we honor the office.

The meaning of President Trump, in 100 words:

This (President Donald Trump, with an administrative roster of goons and clowns like Steve Bannon, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, et. al.) is what a country gets after corporate-run decades of making public-interest government a bitter joke, after serving up Hillary Clinton as its best offer, after proving that corporate journalism is useless to actual people, and after suckering white working people into believing that niggerizing others is their only relief from being repeatedly kicked in the head by white bosses.

This is what the U.S.A. gets when it creates an evil mythology for non-rich white people and then breaks it.