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On the Distortions and Distractions of the Democratic National Circus
In the crazy, refracted light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can simultaneously be part of the administration sending billions of dollars of weaponry to the IDF, and also grieve for those innocents crushed under Gazan rubble.
Aug 27, 2024
I suffered through much of the three nights of non-reality programming called the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I watched nearly the whole fucking thing—the jugglers, acrobats, gladiator contests, cock fighting, and the dancers too. I sat mesmerized by an unlimited bounty of bread and circus offerings—lions and Christians, tight-rope walkers and card tricks—I might have been the only person on Earth to view pretty much the entire presentation.
Not exactly the whole thing—I walked my dog, checked baseball scores, spaced out and thought strange things, leafed through my brand new copy of
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson—but I came back to the DNC like a musician circling back to a particular theme or motif. And what a spectacular and awful show it was!
It resembled an extended commercial, an infomercial, perhaps, but it also seemed a bit like a funeral where people shuffle to the podium to convey memories that have been denuded of objective content—at a funeral no one wants to hear about DUI arrests and domestic battery, we only want the good stuff about how the departed climbed a tree and saved a kitten.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was given a magnificent send off to the land beyond the sun. We walked away knowing that she is a saintly woman at worst, and the daughter of God sent to save us at best. We heard not mere praise, but blessings, confessions, tears, and astonishment interspersed with tunes from Stevie Wonder, Pink, John Legend, and Sheila E! But what kind of funeral concludes with the deceased in the flesh, telling her own story? And what a story she told, being born into the almost Calcutta-style poverty of the Berkeley flats.
In the physically impossible dreamscape of DNC fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zoo keeper with a bucket of meat entering a cage of famished tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change.
I know something about the mean streets of West Berkeley myself, having lived on Channing Way between Bonar and Browning for over a decade. On the flat plains of Berkeley homes now can be purchased—if you are goddamn lucky—for a hair under a million dollars. But I lived there in the 80s and 90s and Kamala would have been long gone by the time my wife and I moved to the west coast.
The Berkeley flats (as I experienced them 40 years ago) cannot be placed in the usual system of class categories, for Berkeley existed just outside the normal boundaries of our four-dimensional universe. It simultaneously exhibited working class, middle class, and upper-middle class features in some bizarre overlapping glitch of the matrix. On our block lived two doctors, a factory foreman, a preschool teacher, a single grandmother on public assistance, and the proprietor of a crack house. Kamala, in her DNC acceptance speech, attempted to pass herself off as a onetime lower-middle class child oppressed by the disrespect endured by her parents—two immigrants of color.
Kamala wowed us all with social class contortions in which a family headed by two academics with doctorates can be passed off as the embodiment of disadvantage. In the DNC rhetoric of the day, we heard nothing of class, but only about race and immigration status. We were expected to be shocked that Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, somehow, against all odds, excelled in school and went on to elite law schools.
Of course, this is the American myth that corrupts our national soul—the idea that we live in a meritocratic democracy in which all the layers of status reflect pure work ethic, and privilege has no part in the outcome (you know—the meritocracy in which Donald Trump became a self-made man). I would have had so much more respect for Kamala Harris if she had looked the nation in the eye and said:
I was born with two silver spoons in my mouth and you probably were not. My parents each held doctorates and high positions in the worlds of research and academia, and yours most likely have less than a bachelor's diploma. Still, despite having had encouragement to study hard and succeed every day of my childhood, I do my best to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a family that owned no books, and I try to put myself in the shoes of someone forced to muddle through school with no guidance and no expectations. Of course, that is not easy for me, because my hyper educated parents made it almost impossible to envision what it might be like to feel that you are a stranger in school. But I will do my best to step outside myself and wear your five-year-old Nikes.
In the fun-house mirrors of American political theater, one has to know that every moment of election programming amounts to a pile of bullshit. In the crazy, refracted light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can simultaneously be part of the administration sending billions of dollars of weaponry to the IDF, and also grieve for those tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands according to The Lancet) of innocents crushed under Gazan rubble. In the physically impossible dreamscape of DNC fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zoo keeper with a bucket of meat entering a cage of famished tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change.
With all the trapeze artists, ballet dancers, and magicians beguiling us with feats of virtuosity, two things remained conspicuously absent at the DNC convention—a voice representing the agony of Palestinians and Kamala's father. I had assumed that professor of economics, Donald Harris, must be long dead, but a quick run to Wikipedia proved that he still resides on our planet. Is Dr. Harris Kamala's Mary Trump—the alienated family member in charge of family skeletons? If so, he bears witness oddly in silence and does not forcefully deposit his obscure secrets in public as does Dr. Mary Trump. Does his absence speak of something ominous? Mary Trump lets loose her family secrets with no inhibition and little enlightenment. She tells us nothing about her putrid uncle that we don't already know.
But even more concerning, in a circus promising to lift all of humanity out of the muck of discouragement and horror, the failure of the directors and producers of the DNC extravaganza to produce a solitary, sympathetic Palestinian voice cannot be dismissed as an oversight. The blue honchos who must have meticulously agonized about a Palestinian speaker willing to say a reassuring word to amputate Kamala Harris from our doubts about her role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza—they all somehow came up with bupkis.
In an affair of mass manipulation, that must have cost the price of a nuclear delivery system, the DNC could not clear the one very low bar that absolutely needed to be stepped over. Millions of people waited futilely to hear that Kamala Harris would depart from President Joe Biden over the matter of supplying bombs to continue a genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians.
The great fear that many potential voters have is this: Behind the opaque curtain, the Wizard of Oz wears a Donald Trump puppet on one hand, and a Kamala Harris puppet on the other. A vote for either is a vote for more war, beefed up police spending, a military budget big enough to attack every inhabited planet within a hundred light years, and a vote to burn every drop of fossil fuel still buried in the lithosphere. Every vote is a vote for Oz.
There is another narrative, that I can't completely dismiss—that Donald Trump is a monster that makes every run-of-the-mill genocidaire into a comparative Fred Rogers. It may be that we have a choice between something murderously cold hearted and destructive and something much, much worse. Trump gives me the creeps in a way that Kamala Harris does not, but that may just be my own paranoid distortions. I worry about falling into a pond and coming face to face with a basking salt water crocodile wearing an orange wig.
Noam Chomsky called Trump the most dangerous person in human history, or something to that effect. How much longer do we kick the can down the road with the right-wing Democrats wearing their FDR masks, knowing that we get no universal healthcare, no safety net, endless war and CO2? Most of the people that I know agree with Chomsky and will be voting for Harris. I don't hold that against them. Trump scares the shit out of most people with an intact set of wits.
We live in a time of irreconcilable truths: Donald Trump is a putrid psychopath with no more internal complexity than a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I am not convinced that she feels real pain.
Maybe the choice is whether or not to admit that we have no choice. Welcome to America.
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Class Struggle and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The US claims to honor his memory, even as it defiles his dreams.
Jan 16, 2023
On this, the national holiday named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ajamu Baraka tweeted:
The U.S. should drop its' commemoration of Dr. King's birthday because there is no relationship between (the) Dr. King the Black freedom movement created (and the) violent, warmongering U.S.
“The King birthday is a colonialist expropriation that should be rejected,” Baraka added. That is a discussion and a decision for Black people, not me, but I will say this: It’s hard to deny that the forces Dr. King condemned are trying to colonize his legacy and exploit for their own selfish ends. But try as they may, they must never succeed. His memory is a country of the mind that must always remain free.
Over a decade ago, when there were fewer Left voices on the internet, I used my perch at the Huffington Post to honor Dr. King’s truly radical voice in my own small way. The celebrities I mentioned are forgotten and the economic numbers have shifted, but Dr. King’s words ring even truer now than they did in 2011. Wiser voices than mine, with more visibility and more right to the King legacy, are available to us now. (It did occur to me in 2018 that Dr. King would have knelt with Colin Kaepernick.)
I would commend the following quote to those political opportunists who accuse leftists of being race-blind in order to deny the economic strangulation of the working class:
“The unemployed, poverty-stricken white man must be made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro. Together, they could exert massive pressure on the government to get jobs for all. Together they could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all people for the good of all.”
That form of organizing was once known as ‘class struggle.’
Then there's this: “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth." Wealth inequality soared after bank criminals crashed the economy in 2008, but the grotesquely unequal United States of 2011 looks like a socialist paradise compared to today’s world of accelerated class theft.
And this: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Those triplets have grown up to Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “Machines and computers” manipulate our society, our politics, and our economy to further enrich the billionaire class. Drones and missiles continue to endanger our planet. The “property rights” of the few – from rental properties to pharmaceutical patents – kill thousands of people daily.
Dr. King also said, “Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance.” Never were those words truer. When members of both party add tens of billions to the Pentagon’s already-bloated budget request, words like “alacrity” and “generosity” are genteel descriptions. They throw lavish gifts at the feet of the generals like courtiers pursuing the monarch’s favor. It’s like watching a gang boss reward an underling with a sack of cash for a murder well done. “Here, get yerself somethin’ nice ...”
"Of all the forms of inequality,” Dr. King said in 1966, “injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” What would he say of today’s corporate-driven healthcare, where hedge funds buy up medical practices, private insurers profit from public illness, pandemic victims go untreated, and Wall Street erodes Medicare with a program that is an “Advantage” only to investors?
A few more quotes to ponder before the holiday comes to a close:
“The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”
“[W]e are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism…. There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… “
“In a sense, you could say we’re involved in the class struggle.”
The government, along with most of the nation, claims to honor his memory while defiling his dreams. They have turned a living soul into an idol. It may be shaped like a human being, but it makes a sound like desert wind blowing through the hollow body of a golden calf.
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