Paul Edwards has a entertaining style of apocalyptic prose. He writes this screedy piece in Counterpunch, but you can feel his frustration directed toward a political system engineered to maintain the plutocratic status-quo.
“Well, partly, yes. Hillary, for what she’s worth, swore nobody liked him or wanted to work with him. Bernie, in spite of his age, is not a Santa figure, not a holly, jolly old Burl Ives hologram. He wouldn’t appear beaming from a Norman Rockwell print. He’s got crust; sober sincerity; little humor and a load of gravitas, none of which infantile America–addled with toon bunnies, ninja turtles, and cuddly bears selling shit–can love. He wants you to think, and act on your self-interest, and you don’t want to do that, most of you.
After generations of skewed, bent political indoctrination, and relentless propagandizing by the poisonous, amoral Capitalist schlockmeisters who own this country and the world, most Democrats have accepted the fact that others–smarter, richer, higher up–should make their key decisions.
The hold of that induced ignorance and cognitive paralysis is greatest on those subjected to it longest: the over-60s, retired, and aged, who matured before cracks yawned in The Empire’s catechism during Watergate to show the sleazy thugs blighting American lives behind the official bullshit curtain. These are the political Walking Dead, The Impenetrables, Old Believers who carry in their DNA the incurable virus of pre-Vietnam Exceptionalism, and who will go to their graves rigid with mummified Democrat orthodoxy.
Then there’s the mass of middle-aged Democrat faithful, that slow-witted, moderate, mushy center, native home of Mr. Jones who, as Grace Slick sang, knew something was happening but didn’t know what it was. These are the passive ones–American “Good Germans”–who have punched in, consumed, and looked away as the US War Machine blew up and bled the backward, baffled Muslim world in its lust for oil, gas and brute hegemony. They are uneasy with suppressed guilt, fearful of any real aspirations, and they yearn for the safety of braindead serfdom under lullabying masters.
Then, bafflingly, comes the bulk of black Democrats, a category truly hard to fathom. Of course, it’s clear that black misleadership in Congress is just a whoring toy of the DNC. They hold their Uncle Tom forts by piously bullshitting their own abused people while betraying them, complicit with the likes of Biden, whose Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act fueled the lethal racism of our black stalag system. The notion that blacks have a true friend in the Senator from MBNA, the very cartoon of a phony, smarmy, jive honky liberal, is sadly mistaken but, pathetically, the hustled line up time and again to be crassly sold this evil, cynical screw job. As with organized Labor, Dems feel no obligation to black Americans. They count them a captive race who demand no reward for slavish loyalty.
For these sets of stagnant souls, the wonder is that the roaring wildfire of damning fact lit by the courage of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, that incinerated the camouflage of this utterly corrupt, incorrigibly vicious Empire has sparked no fury in their calcified hearts.
And so the grotesque Marche Slave winds on its lugubrious, pathetic way toward the funeral pyre of its own making, while the Dem engineers of this self-immolation bask in idiot bliss. They truly believe they’ve won; that in eliminating Sanders and his sane, humane goals, and annointing the vacuous, amoral, cognitively impaired charlatan, Biden, they’ll flush the detested Sick Beast from his lair and control the National Security State alone again. It’s a deep collective delusion founded on balked egos, impotent fury, and wilful blindness to all that the time requires.
But, then, when were Democrats ever proactive for what American people needed? Even in the halcyon days of FDR, that humane conservative–for such he truly was–had to urge Berle, Ickes and Tugwell to “make me do it” before pushing his great socio-economic measures through Congress for the sustaining benefit of working Americans that made him a political giant.
In this perilous hour for the country, for Democrats to pawn off on their bedrock faithful–indoctrinated, automatistic, and hoodwinked as they are–a mediocre, ditzy, blithering, old Cold Warrior as the gladiator who will face and take out The Beast is bald lunacy and surefire political seppuku.”
3 comments
March 26, 2020 at 6:36 am
Bob Browning
Great article: the US scene in a nutshell and describing 9.5 out of 10 of my (old whiteys) contemporaries. I would conclude though that the Dem party bosses don’t care or expect to win since their neo- liberal policies are currently rolling along and they are willing to wait four years for their turn.
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March 26, 2020 at 9:17 am
makagutu
It seems to me that the Dems have no desire to win that they would rather front the old faces despite all the noise the progressives (?) make
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March 27, 2020 at 7:16 am
bleatmop
Now that Biden is the defacto DNC presidential candidate the only thing that is certain is that Trump has won the 2020 POTUS contest. He will win, he will win more votes that Biden, and he will win more electoral college votes that perhaps anyone has ever won in modern history. To anyone who thinks I am wrong I can respond with one letter to make my point.
W
(pronounced Dubyah)
Need I say more?
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