Reprieve

I just put off a nasty medical procedure for a month so Liz and I can pop out for a little pre-holiday getaway before next week’s trip to Key West. It’s not an easy life, but damn it, somebody’s got to do it.

Anyway, I started feeling guilty about not writing, as it seems to really improve my wellbeing and that of those around me. That said, here goes.

It’s hard to rant about politics with the new guy at the helm, but what a cosmic shitstorm the kid has inherited. It’s got to feel like Bush handed him the controls to a plane on fire and parachuted out. And the engines are dead. And it’s headed for Manhattan. And the flight attendants are throwing food at him. And the radio is out. Poor bastard.

The economy isn’t as fun to forecast now that a few mainstream types have caught on. The vast majority seem to be oblivious and seriously underestimate the length and depths that this thing will go to. Strikes and riots have broken out in Greece, Latvia, Iceland, France, Britain and Russia.

It seems inevitable that it happens here, but as friend and colleague Eric Janszen notes at iTulip.com, “Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion -- From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, argues that Americans have been beaten down to a degree that they're now a pacified population, largely willing to accept any economic outrage its elites impose on them.

In a 2005 interview with AlterNet, Ames said the "slave mentality" is stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere, "in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion."
Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren't as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias ... you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it's pointless to rebel.”

That’s a hell of a thing for a country born of revolution, ruled by the wealthy and terrified that the proles will bone up on their history and throw another one. The irony of the right wing’s claims of “class warfare” when discussing taxes the rich will seem all too evident when men in suits driving new Mercedes AMG are dragged from their cars and beaten in the streets by armies of the unemployed, disenfranchised and hungry.

Bob Marley said it so well, “A hungry mob is an angry mob.”

The conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this, but it looks like coincidence that the local police departments have been militarized in the name of “Homeland Security” (Is it just me or does that phrase somehow smell Nazi?) It’s harder than going up against club swinging Chicago cops like in Lincoln Park in 1968. This time, they’ve got night visions, automatic weapons and body armor. It’s going to have to get really ugly before it gets really ugly.

(Notice in the picture that the local sherriff's new vehicle has armored gun ports. Who would they be firing at?)