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Us From America? Posted By John Wight On September 30, 2016 _at_ 1:57 am In
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[image: Photo By Mike Mozart | CC BY 2.0]
hoto By Mike Mozart | CC BY 2.0
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The first US presidential debate did not reveal anything new when it came
to either candidate. Instead it merely confirmed that Donald Trump is a
slobbering megalomaniac who should be kept away from political office in
the same way a three-year-old child is kept away from a box of matches. A
poster boy for unfettered capitalism, he is a man so divorced from reality
— and, with it, his own humanity —that every word that leaves his mouth
comes over as a cry for help.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is a natural born killer, a passionate disciple
of US exceptionalism who believes there is no country that can’t be
improved with a shower of cruise and tomahawk missiles. She and her husband
come as a package of liberal opportunism who have made their way through
speaking left and acting right. The fruits of this opportunism are mass
incarceration, the entrenchment of Wall Street as the golden temple of the
US economy, and perpetual war and regime change overseas. When Farrakhan
described Hillary as a “wicked woman” he couldn’t have been more right.
Christopher Hitchens said it even better when he observed, “She and her
husband haven’t met a foreign political donor they don’t like and haven’t
taken from.”
Such is the parlous quality of both candidates for an office which, even in
its better years, is synonymous with war crimes and crimes against
humanity, it is tempting to conclude that we’re fucked. I say this as a
non-American given that the occupant of the White House is a matter of
grave importance for a world by now grown weary of Washington’s vast and
ongoing experiment in democracy, along with the moral sickness which fuels
its untrammeled power and the doctrine of ‘destroying the village in order
to save it’ that has long underpinned its foreign policy.
It begs the question of who will save us from America?
Writing these words while visiting Hollywood, a part of the world I know
well having previously lived here, I am struck by the ocean of broken
humanity that fills its mythical gilded streets. Anyone who believes that
America is a classless society need only take his or herself over here to
realize how utterly wrong they are. Indeed, after just one day not only
will they be assured that there is no more a society defined by class than
US society, but that every minute of a every day a fierce class war is
raging in its towns and cities, with up to now only one side in this war,
the 99 percent, taking all the punches and doing all the bleeding.
Across America the abandonment of the poor, the downtrodden and the sick to
their fate in service to the rich has been so brutal and cruel that its
human consequences given new meaning to Fanon’s *The Wretched of the Earth*.
America’s poor are a colonized people, be assured, which is why Malcolm’s
assertion that, “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you
don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo,” remains one of his most
cogent.
Yet as much as I loathe America for the scale of injustice, brutality, and
mendacity that informs its treatment of the poor at home and abroad, hope
arrives in the tremendous litany of rebels, dissidents, and
counter-hegemonic movements which the country has produced in response.
Oppression breeds resistance and throughout US history there has been
fierce resistance against overwhelming odds — Sitting Bull, Nat Turner,
Denmark Vesey, the San Patricios, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Mother
Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade, MLK, Malcolm X, SNCC, the Panthers, anti-Vietnam War movement,
Cesar Chavez, and on and on.
Each of them, along with the movements they led or were a part of, were
sustained by the same fierce moral outrage at the injustice they
experienced and witnessed being inflicted in the name of progress and might
is right. Many people experience at some level and point this burning sense
of moral outrage at the injustice that defines the world they live in. The
difference arises between those who learn to make their peace with it and
those who refuse to make their peace with it – who instead choose to
grapple with this monster in what they know before they start will be a
losing fight.
This is the human condition at its most inspiring, the willingness to fight
even while knowing you can’t win. But, then, such a reductive and one
dimensional interpretation of victory has no place when we understand
history as a river that flows without end and not a monument separating it
into neat and tidy chapters, as in a book. Fighting is winning and winning
is fighting in a struggle that will continue so long as injustice continues.
The race for the White House is a race for power engaged in by those
Chaplin famously described as “machine men (and women) with machine minds
and machine hearts.” It is a contest between two representatives of a
psychopathic ruling class for the keys to a kingdom of despair. But lest
they allow themselves to become smug and complacent as they wallow in lives
of privilege and decadence, they should hark the words of Crazy Horse,
spoken days before he died while resisting imprisonment. “The Red Nation
shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world; a world
filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations; a world longing
for light again.”
Amen.
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Received on Mon Oct 10 2016 - 22:25:50 EDT