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aldous huxley
Slogan Voters - The Road to Political Masochism
Make America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, and Lock Her Up!
Jun 06, 2018
Nearly a year and a half into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to hold his base and maintain an approval rating of around 40% - close to the same percentage he polled at just after his inauguration. Let's try to figure out why.
It can't be because he lies as a matter of daily routine. It can't be because he's giving away our store to big business - engaging in crony capitalism, creating more tax loopholes for corporations, shredding corporate crime enforcement, knowingly exposing Americans to more toxic pollution, committing more business fraud, adding more hazards to the workplace, cutting access to health insurance, and thereby making America dread again.
It can't be because he's taking your tax dollars away from repairing your infrastructure back home - schools, public transit, bridges, highways, airports, power grids, drinking water systems, etc., and pouring money into the bloated Pentagon budget beyond what even the Generals requested. (The huge "infrastructure project" he promised has yet to be proposed to Congress.)
It can't be because he is soiling our society's moral and ethical fabric and breaking the Golden Rule. (Trump is a peerless Oval Office bully, lashing out against the weak, powerless and defenseless.)
It can't be because he is openly holding onto his business interests and enriching himself from foreign vendors in unconstitutional ways, violating the Emoluments Clause (cases challenging his personal gains while in office are now in federal court).
Maybe it is because he is expediently against a woman's right to choose and common-sense gun regulation, selects corporatist judges, and keeps saying he loves his country (what politician doesn't?).
President Trump's words and deeds have not changed the minds of 40 percent of people polled. What else is going on here?
One answer is Slogan Voters. I've spoken to many people who are still for Trump despite all of his lies and misdeeds. They don't pay much attention to politics. When they do, they reveal themselves as Slogan Voters. They are content with Trump's rhetoric and rarely look beneath the surface at the details. That is, they are not bothered by being fact-deprived in political matters.
Here is what they tell me: They hate Hillary. They like Trump. They repeat the three slogans: Make America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, and Lock Her Up! Over and over again.
When I politely ask whether they are specifically aware of what Trump and his heads of departments and agencies are doing, they draw a blank. They explain that President Trump is shaking up Washington and draining the swamp. They believe that's the reason why he generates such an uproar from the swamp-dwellers. In a bizarre way, the more outrageously false and nutty Trump's tweets and actions are, the more these people feel that all the outrage is because he is draining the swamp and the swamp is lashing back at him.
Unless someone comes up with a secret key to awaken the minds of Trump's Slogan Voters, the best response is to draw some of the more than 100 million eligible non-voters to the polls for the crucial November elections.Slogan Voters stress their belief in self-made men and women. They are often college-educated. They are not seen as bigots by their co-workers. They believe if you fail at something, it's your own fault.
They agree there are bad things going on in government, but it's not Trump's fault. Their reaction to bad things that are openly, brazenly, and admittedly Trump's fault - such as shutting down a consumer agency designed to stop Wall Street and the financial/credit industry from cheating you, crashing the economy, or crippling environmental health protections -- is: It's all part of draining the swamp.
Trump has become homeostatic -- whatever goes around, comes around to his advantage for the Slogan Voters. Evidence against Trump is turned around to justify Trump. More than anyone else, Trump has understood this and fed these strange conclusions by inattentive minds.
What would the eminent philosopher of science, Aldous Huxley, think now? He said in 1927: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." But they do for Trump and his Slogan Voters. He creates his own web of delusion, and his supporters say he is draining the swamp and making America great again.
It wouldn't matter a whit were they to receive critical articles, books, DVDs, or even Trump's own self-contradictory words and record through the years. Recall his boastful sugarcoating as his giant casinos went bankrupt while he profitably escaped their draining impacts on others (e.g. the employees and unpaid contractors he hired to build them).
Unless someone comes up with a secret key to awaken the minds of Trump's Slogan Voters, the best response is to draw some of the more than 100 million eligible non-voters to the polls for the crucial November elections. There are far more than enough votes to surpass the choices of the Trump Slogan Voters for the Congressional races.
One thing you have to credit these Slogan Voters for: THEY VOTE!!
Yeah, "Making America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, and Lock Her Up!"
Not Even Orwell or Huxley Could Have Imagined 'Totalitarian' Threat Posed by Facebook and Google, Warns Soros
Billionaire investor says there is serious threat of tech giants and authoritarian states teaming up to "bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance."
Jan 26, 2018
In addition to warning that U.S. President Donald Trump represents an immense "danger" to civilization, billionaire George Soros used the spotlight of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday to urge the international community to take seriously the threats posed by Facebook and Google, which he said could ultimately spawn "a web of totalitarian control" if they are not reined in.
"They claim they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations."
--George Soros
Particularly alarming, Soros said, is the prospect of Facebook and Google--which he scathingly deemed a "menace" to society--teaming up with "authoritarian states" to "bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance."
Such "unholy marriages" could result in a strain of authoritarianism "the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined," the billionaire investor cautioned.
Soros went on to compare the tech giants' impact on the internet--and social media in particular--to the effects of fossil fuel giants on the environment.
"Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment," Soros said, warning that the days of internet monopolies like Facebook and Google "are numbered."
"They claim they are merely distributing information," Soros added of the tech giants that are frequently denounced by critics of corporate power for abusing their market dominance. "But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access."
If tech companies are permitted to retain overwhelming control over information, "far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy" could result, Soros concluded.
"The power to shape people's attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies," Soros said. "It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called 'the freedom of mind.' There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it."
Below is a short clip of Soros's speech. Read his full remarks here.
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What Was Verifiably Great About America: Fragments of a Memoir Set To A Musical Soundtrack
The music tells a story, but that doesn't mean it will end well
Dec 17, 2017
Having been born in a coal and steel company town but destiny delivered, as an adult, to reside, during extended intervals, in the East and West Coast cities of Los Angeles and New York City, and, at present, the continent of Europe, I have come to conclude, people born into situations providing economic advantage, both liberals and conservatives alike, experience difficulty, more often than not, envisaging the lives of those born into a labouring class existence. Worse, a wilful obtuseness, in combination with a supercilious posture is, all too often, evinced, by reflex, towards those scorned as "hillbillies," "trailer trash," and "genetic retreads."
"That is what Woody meant by, 'This machine kills fascists.' His music and that of other inspired troubadours kills the soul-dead ideology of fascism with the life-vivifying veracity of truth."
Among groups possessing economic advantage, a lack of curiosity prevails as to the nature of the lives of individuals who have spent their lifetime subjected to the life-defying tyrannies of full-spectrum, company town capitalism. Life circumstances, under the present, neoliberal order, that are, in all but rare cases, intractable; wherein, the meagre and fraught with economic instability livelihoods earned as a mine, mill, factory worker, and, in the service industry economy in the US wage and debt slave archipelago of fast food outlets, Big Box retailers and Dollar Discount stores, and as a domestic worker, presents, for the vast majority of workers, the degrading, anxiety-inducing option of submitting to low pay, no benefits, long hours of tedious, vastly under-compensated labor or facing homelessness and hunger.
I was born in the foothills of Appalachia. I know, bones to brain, the painful plight of the labouring class. I will go so far as to say, the transforming, I would even suggest, redemptive element, in my life was a house stocked with books and an indomitable yearning to seek out the music indigenous to the region.
My family, later, moved to the then small, Piedmont region city of Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly thereafter, in the living room of a musician, science fiction writer, and general Beat polymath my father had befriended, I swooned--was, I suspect, transformed--when a guest in the home (where a young Bob Dylan used to crash when in Atlanta--which was, at the time, a rundown, mafia-owned apartment house but where, decades earlier, Margaret Mitchell had penned Gone With The Wind--North Georgia-born folksinger and activist Hedy West played her most famous song, "500 Miles Away from Home" also known as "Railroaders' Lament."
During childhood, a period of life in which one is transmigrating through a wilderness of archetypes, for me, the experience of being in West's presence felt as if I had been transported to glens and gardens inhabited by a veritable muse.
In the year, 1970, in the summer I turned 14, in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia, the Allman Brothers, among other bands, would perform free, impromptu concerts for a tie-dye-clad, reefer-reeking, bell-bottoms-caressing-the-Georgia-red-dirt gatherings of "freaks"--which was the preferred tribalist term, as opposed to the media-created, socially pejorative--hippies ... which, when bandied among counterculture insiders, was generally applied ironically.
Although the park was located only a few miles from my family's home, undertaking the trip presented a degree of peril. To make one's way to the park included traversing a tough, in-town, White working class neighborhood (now a gentrified into soul-sucking blandness, yuppie enclave) where, from the perspective of its denizens, their world, and all they held in reverence and reference, was under siege.
And, although inchoate, their animus was instantly distilled, simply upon a glimpse of the untamed tresses of a singular, thin of wrist, dirty hippie, commie faggot--whose mere presence was considered an affront to their pomade-crowned, muscle car-thundering parcel of redneck paradise.
Accordingly, the locals were pledged to do their part to fight the scourge ... by increasing their intake of PBRs and Jack Daniels, and, upon sight of said dirty hippie interlopers, bestowing ass-stompings -- and for no-extra-charge--involuntary haircuts upon errant longhairs caught in their midst.
Yet as the era progressed, the savage dance between hippie freak and redneck belligerent changed in tone and tempo, an extemporaneous type of metaphysical jujitsu occurred, in which the predator was subdued and seduced by the prey ... as if by cultural contact buzz, redneck fury yielded to counterculture insouciance.
"When the individual feels, the community reels" --Aldous Huxley
Briefly, this was the anatomy of the seduction: In their pursuit of fleeing freaks into the park, the young males of the cracker tribe happened upon a few of the things of this vast and vivid world even more compelling than the possibility of ass-kicking ... in the form of attractive young women.
Yet to the young men, the hippie sphinxes, sirens, waifs and gypsy queens were baffling, unapproachable; these women were less than taken by their greasy, pompadoured forelocks and aggressive bearing.
In short, and to appropriate the parlance of the era, the hippie chicks didn't get off on these young men's "bad vibes ... it, like, really harshed their high."
But these great, great grandsons of the Lost Cause proved much more malleable in countenance than the ossified in memory, now enshrined in marble statuary, of their confederate forefathers.
Consequently, a kind of cracker Lysistrata started to unfold. The pomade lacquer faded from stiff pompadours, yielding to lank, draping locks of hippie plumage. The habit of rebel bellicosity was sublimated into an avidity to "boogie." The zealots of ass-kicking became the acolytes of acid and devotees of the gospels of kicking back and getting down.
As time passed, on weekends, as the Allman Brothers preached Sunday sermons vis-a-vis guitar and drum solos, these newly minted freaks could be found in positions of repose and reflection upon the grassy hills of the park, eating Orange Sunshine and drawling, "aw mahn, Dwayne's guitar is shootin' sparks into mah brain..."
Or as Marcel Proust put it, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes."
If the US is great in any regard, it is not because of the psychotic belief in its own exceptionalism or its risible grandiosity involving the claim to be the one and only "indispensable nation." Conversely, its best quality is evinced in the voices of the country's economically bereft rabble, as expressed in the blues, in jazz, folk, country/western, and hip hop music, in which the powerless find a voice that moves the heart by inducing the soul to be able to penetrate the thick walls of shame that the class-based capitalist prison state imposes on the laboring class.
Waylon Jennings rendition of Billy Joe Shaver's outlaw country classic, and its Cracker Zen philosophy of: The more adept one becomes at growing down--even composting--one's pride, ego, pretensions, and careerist striving the richer the soil of the soul grows.
(Billy Joe Shaver's mother, eight months pregnant with him, was severely beaten by her husband and left for dead in a ditch. Later spotted labouring in the scorching heat of an east Texas cotton field, a child harness to her back, young Billy at her side, by a recruiter for local honky-tonks scouting the area to fill waitress positions. Shaver's red-haired mother's good looks proved providential for exposing him to venues of country/western music.)
The early 1980s. I am attempting to navigate, and failing on a psychical basis, the vales and canyons of Los Angeles. It is the advent of the Reagan years. The idiot stare of the encompassing dome of the LA sky is too much for my Appalachian Hill country psyche. There is no green-on-green canopy to filter the relentless sheen of sunlight. It renders me manic, angst-ridden, and sleepless.
The damp evening air envelops one at sundown in LA. It gets damn cold. A clinging chill wafts from the Pacific Ocean. But the phenomenon is not weather related; instead, the cold is the embrace of the ghosts of the dead dreams of the city's inhabitants.
X captures in tone and limns in lyric the effects of the atomised LA landscape upon my besieged psyche... I slouch in the direction of The Whiskey to catch them.
This song, by Elizabeth Cotten, here, interpreted by Rhiannon Giddens, seems to me, concerns the type of release borne of lament, whereas one has lost everything and made every attempt to right oneself with circumstance and fate but to no avail. Every worldly possession is in hock...but destitution has not been dodged.
Oh Lordy me, didn't I shake sugaree
Everything I got is done and pawned
Everything I got is done and pawned
Yet a stark, painfully beautiful, indomitable truth rises up from the soul. I am still here. My voice still rises heavenward. The deathless heart of my song endures in the face of misfortune and grief.
Wallace Stevens captures the sentiment in verse: Excerpted from his poem: A Weak Mind in the Mountains:
Yet there was a man within me
Could have risen to the clouds,
Could have touched these winds,
Bent and broken them down,
Could have stood up sharply in the sky.
One can imitate, with virtuoso precision, musical and poetic technique--but the verities garnered from life lived cannot be counterfeited, no matter how perfect the mimicry. The performance will remain at surface level.
Conversely, as is the case with Roscoe Holcomb, the sublimity of his exquisite rawness arrives from the authenticity of his experience. Listening, at least in my case to his Appalachian cadences, causes my wounded heart to bleed lambent light.
As I write these words, it has been dark for hours here in Munich, Germany, as, collectively, we, in the Northern Hemisphere trudge into the long, dark nights of the dying year. Short daylight hours, haunted with grim and grisly news. Our era, lit up but not illuminated, by twenty four/seven artificial light. Perpetual media distractions at our finger tips. Nature banished. Communal experience atomised.
We attempt to grieve, but remain empty, by means of the same Mephistophelian illusion that has left us estranged from the beating heart of earthly life. Conversely, the US blues/gospel/folk tradition captures the cadences of grief wrought by the knowledge of the vastness of creation, within which unfolds the tragic dance between the fragility of human life and the reality of ever present human folly.
This ballad by the Carter Family defines the form and reveals what has been scoured away by Mephistophelian light. (As a general rule, songs about trains are about anything but trains.)
Pete Seeger, a few years before his death, told me and a small group of others this anecdote about he and Woody Guthrie. The two of them were playing a gig for striking coal miners, deep in the Ozarks. Because no one present could afford babysitters, the union hall was filled with women and small children. A short time into their performance, a squad of large, brutal company goons, wearing long coats concealing clubs and other weapons, entered the hall.
Pete inquired of Woody as to how they should respond. Woody told him to keep playing, and play for all they were worth, which they did. They continued their show and no trouble came to pass that night. Afterwards, one of the members of the goon squad approached Woody and Pete and confessed to them. "We came here to bust up the meeting. But what was going on was not what we were told. You seem like good people."
Pete related, Woody, much taken with the declaration, returned to their quarters and wrote his song Union Maid, in a single sitting. That is what Woody meant by, "This machine kills fascists." His music and that of other inspired troubadours kills the soul-dead ideology of fascism with the life-vivifying veracity of truth.
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