Strife is to the wicked as water is to the sea
The power of the gun and of money have gathered in frightening alliance to subdue collective light of the soul and of the mind of humanity. Such is the tenor of our times.
Many who continue reading will misconstrue this piece as an apology for President Trump. You would have misread my words and wasted your time. Trump is an indigestible morsel. However, the troubles that afflict the world are of a larger dimension and come from a well deeper that this single man, no matter how brutish he may be. Trump is but a sign of the times, an augur of harsh things to come less we rectify how important things are decided and done.
To believe media attacks against Donald Trump is to be deceived by half, which in this instance, is synonymous with being deceived on the whole. Trump is a man of coarse ideas and animal disposition. He deserves to be criticized for the folly of his policies and actions. But the same charges can be levied with equal severity against most of his political opponents in the American leadership establishment.
You would be the victim of an intricate deceit to believe those who most vociferously attack him would be significantly better in guiding America and influencing world events. Trump is genuinely bad news; sadly, his rivals in the American establishment are substantially no better.
The media and establishment Democrats focus on Trump’s silly tweets and abrasive public persona. As such, they blinker you with a false equation; that his darkness means they are light. But their light is as false as his darkness is true. They fume that his tweets and comments are setting the world on fire and belittling America’s presidency. They would deceive you into believing style is weightier than substance, that air is heavier than stone.
To them an inane tweet chastising the media is more harmful to the world than a president ordering aerial strikes that kill thousands of innocent civilians by the month in the half dozen nations troubled by the American penchant to drop bombs on a wholesale basis. In Syria alone, American strikes kill an average of 500 civilians monthly. For the American elite, these deaths matter not at all when compared to Trump lampooning media houses for inaccurate reportage.
These people ferment with self-righteous indignation at Trump muddying their reputations. Yet, they cheer these distance massacres. As such, their real vocation is that of the hypocrite. Where there is hypocrisy, there is also evil. Their unequal reactions to Trump tweets and their government’s slaughter of innocents suggests a moral barrenness that should unsettle us if we maintain even a scant nexus to humane compassion. Trump may be slinging mud for the wrong reasons but he tosses much of it in the right direction. Their deeds are more soiled than any dirt Trump has hurled their way.
They question not the role of America in extinguishing the light of peoples and entire societies in faraway lands that pose no threat to American existence. They implicitly cohere to a wicked conviction that killing innocent people is inherent to the presidency. For them, the American president must be a person of such moral flagrance that he commerces in wholesale massacre in pursuit of undefined interests not vital to national security. They then hail the president as the leader of the free world.
In recent years, the American president has been less a heroic figure and more a glorified butcher, a perpetrator of war crimes who revels in gratuitous evil veiled essential justice. For a flicker of a moment prior to the elections, candidate Trump suggested he would depart from this tradition. He lied. President Trump has embraced the tradition of bringing unnecessary death to others; this is simply integral to the presidential job description – murder and destruction in pursuit of a freer, more democratic world that never seems to come to pass despite increasing violence done in chase of it. In short, Trump does not care enough about others to do the difficult work required to amend that job description.
After ordering a drone strike a few years ago, President Obama joked he was getting good at this “killing thing.” He seemed untroubled that he had ordered the deaths of thousands of harmless women and children during his tenure. Hillary Clinton giggled and joked when told Qaddafi had been sodomized then executed. None of this was deemed to signal derangement or indecorous temperament. Yet, great umbrage is taken at Trump’s tweets. His messages may make some uncomfortable but they have yet been confirmed to have proven fatal to human life. To the imperious mind, murder is to be countenanced without reservation but a misspoken or indelicate word is grievous indeed. This is perverse.
That people like Obama and Clinton, and Bush before them, so cravenly embraced violence abroad and social indifference at home made the emergence of Trump inevitable. He is but the least groomed member of the cult of American leadership led astray by their thirst for power and their overindulgent resort to violent means to obtain wicked ends.
Trump exposes the corrosion in American democracy. If ever America was the archetypal democracy, it forfeited that mantle years ago. No matter how old and well-grounded a nation’s democracy, there always exists elitists and fascists who would brutally impale democracy if given the chance. 9/11 provided the opportunity of the ages. Draping what they always wanted to do in the cloak of patriotism and security, they began erecting the evil of their choosing. They created a surveillance capacity that now monitors every telephone call in and out America and most other electronic transmissions. In doing so, they have whittled down the constitutional prohibition against unreasonable search into something more honored by its breach then by obedience thereto.
They have ballooned an already bloated military machine. Such a monstrous instrumentality must be in constant use lest it collapses of its own irrationality or turns to consume its maker. Master becomes servant. The war machine has been set against nations that have done nothing against America. Their sole crime had been to follow the logic of their own interests instead of the dictates of Washington. Such governments have been listed for extermination. Any American who questions the new militarism and loss of democracy is ridiculed as naïve. If he insists in asserting his freedom of opinion, he will be colored with the scarlet letter of seditious guilt.
We have stumbled upon the crux of the matter. America is not a fecund democracy. It is a dictatorship of ideas travelling under democratic forms and institutions. The news media is controlled by a few major corporations. Reporting is skewed to favor the community of corporate interests, not the interests of the community. People are not regarded in the main. What the company wants is the higher order. A second, informal constitution has covertly supplanted the formal, more renowned document. The preamble to the first constitution began “We the people,” Today’s operative constitution begins “We the corporations and the few who own them.”
Most Americans favor a nationalized health care system as other developed nations have. If America functioned as a democracy, most politicians would advance this objective because it is both practical and publicly desirable. However, few politicians dare. To support this position is to wave goodbye to the corporate money so vital to party politics. The objectives of the two major parties are not to answer the people’s needs. The parties’ prime objective is to obtain enough donor funds to enable candidates to campaign for office and to allow party leaders into the club of the moneyed elite. Even if they lose elections, they still win so long as the funding continues. Plutocracy rules. Democracy laments.
Consequently, Americans are told the only choices are the byzantine Obamacare and what can before it. Trump seeks a return to the old way. The corporate establishment restricts debate to these two false choices. Why? Choose either; the establishment still profits similarly. For the elite it is win-win. For the people, lose-lose. Thus, health care encourages relatively little debate compared to the storm brewing over childish Trump tweets and allegations of collusion with Russia.
The media hysteria over Russia should trouble everyone; these antics presage the further reduction of democracy and the possible approach of more needless war. Trump is a traditional right-wing elitist on domestic policy. Thus, the media gives him mostly a free pass on his unjust policies. They berate him on style and the true reason for that is his slight deviation on foreign policy.
The American war elite, which includes almost every political institution and major figure in Washington, targets Russia and Iran in that order. Trump departed from this. Coming into office, he was fixated on Iran but wanted a cozy time with Moscow. The elite would not tolerate this slight amendment. Russia had the effrontery to checkmate American designs in Ukraine and Syria. For this compound wrong, Russia tops the list of nations to be disciplined if not utterly crushed.
Not a career political insider, Trump was unaware the decision to maul Russia had already been made by a permanent elite more powerful than any occupant of the White House. Putin had to be taught a lesson so that Russia might never again interfere with American global designs.
To scare Trump off Russia, the fable of Russian hacking and of Trump collusion became the primary fare of corporate media. Every trick has been deployed to get people to believe this as an article of faith. The media has concluded Russia hacked the election because they were ordered by their bosses to publish this canard.
It is said Russia hacked the Democratic Party computers. However, no federal agency has examined the computers. The conclusion of hacking comes from private firm. Coincidentally, that firm is headed by a Russian who detests Putin. The firm was already found to have lodged a false claim of Russian hacking against the Ukrainian military last year. That on such an important question American intelligence agencies would accept the findings of a private firm agency with a known bias against Russia begs many questions. There is no wisdom in this.
The American media and intelligence agencies take this firm’s word as gospel not because it is true but because believing it will excuse the wrongs they seek to unleash in the name of global peace and order.
The American media reported that Russia hacked the French election. French agencies openly contradicted the report. Still, American media harps on alleged Russian election hacking. Foul play occurred in the election but the true foul was cooked in the very kitchen of the American establishment. Purported statements from disaffected members of the Clinton campaign suggest the Russia hacking story was invented to cover what was a devastating blow to Clinton and the bulk of the establishment.
Both Democratic and Republican establishment sided with Clinton yet she lost. That she ran a horrid campaign could not be the final verdict. That would give too much legitimacy to Trump and also show the trick they played had boomeranged against them. These masters of the universe had outsmarted themselves. More so than losing to Trump, they were beaten by their arrogance. They invented the narrative of a stolen election to conceal the truer account that theirs had been a plot to engineer the outcome that had gone terribly awry. The collusion was not between Trump and Russia.
The real collusion was the overlapping connections between the Clinton faction of the establishment and the corporate media.
There is a credible body of evidence indicating that media houses purposefully gave an inordinate free coverage to Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson during the Republican primaries. The reason was not that the trio was imminently newsworthy. The rationale was more sordid. It had been decided to elevate these men because they were perceived as the weakest rivals to Clinton among the herd of Republican candidates. The calculation was that Clinton would have a far easier time in a one-on-one election against one of the three than against someone like Ohio Governor John Kasich.
Thus, Trump became the beneficiary of billions of dollars in free media coverage. Ironically, this turned out to be the biggest self-inflicted wound in American political history. Clinton and her allies concocted their own poison. The undisciplined bronco Clinton and the establishment selected as their pace horse beat them down the stretch.
Neither they nor Clinton accurately weighed the anger of the electorate. Trump spoke to the feelings of enough people. Meanwhile enough people recognized the artificiality of Clinton. They knew she only spoke for the big and powerful. Although Trump was one of the elite, he forged with some voters an intimate, visceral connection alien to Clinton’s aloofness. Clinton and the media joined to handicap the election in her favor. She still lost. That which is fated not to be, shall not be.
The evidence of Clinton collusion with the media is more substantial than that of Trump collusion with Russia. While in neither instance is there sufficient evidence to sway a court of law, it remains odd that the collusion with the stronger evidence remains swept beneath the carpet while the weaker case is depicted as fully proven.
Stung by their self-injury, the media and establishment have determined to get Trump to behave or topple him. Trump has responded by fighting the media while trying to satisfy the military, which is a portion of the power structure that even this political novice came to quickly understand is stronger than he. Trump’s strategy is to secure his possession by getting the elite’s strong muscle, the military and the conservative factions of law enforcement, on his side.
Trump flails at the corporate media every chance he gets. This makes him look undignified. He cares less. Dignity was never his strong suit. Meanwhile, he has pulled the media into a street brawl where they too look grimy. The media has stuck its head in his snare. Their reportage of him is too subjective and overtly prejudicial. If they were objective professionals, they would have maintained some decorum and objectivity. They go after Trump with tooth and claw bared.
In that Trump was always a reduced commodity, his ability to trick the media to descend to his level means he has won the larger war against them. Surely, they will win future battles and skirmishes against him because of his excessive nature and lack of coherence when faced with complex issues. However, he has caused them to reveal that they are not in the profession of impartial journalism but are but the hired larynx of a section of the American elite. This is a good thing for it will help people identify those critical places where American democracy is in need of the greatest repair. This will be one of the sparse, unintended benefits of a Trump presidency.
The dangers of his presidency far exceed any contemplated benefits. The man is a bully; thus he is also a coward. Faced with the reality that the vast array of the American political structure wants to bend Russia to its will, Trump has shown that he will not stand against this even though he knows confrontation with Russia is wrong and reckless. Thus, he has shifted from his position of befriending Russia. To satisfy the power structure and hopefully secure its acquiesce to his administration, he moves to be-foe Russia.
Syria is the flashpoint of probable collision as is Ukraine to a lesser extent. That America has perturbed the delicate nuclear balance by partially surrounding Russia’s western borders with antiballistic missile systems cannot be ignored. That the crass Trump is perhaps slightly more restrained in his militarism than many who pass as America’s best statesmen sings to the lunacy of our times and to a gross defect in American political thought. The world is being pushed to toward war by men too blind and arrogant to see that their desire to rule everything is what has buried past empires.
The actions they think will expand their empire may bury it. We pray that they will not ignite generalized war in the process. In a world being hurled by such a dynamic, the least of our worries are Trump’s tweets – better to suffer imperfect tweets than perfected war.
