Minnesota Burning

I've seen this before. I remember when Martin Luther King was murdered. I remember my father telling us the cleaning woman in his office took him aside and said Mr. Brewster? You'd best go home early, and lock the door. There were fires. There was broken glass. There were cars overturned. In Arlington, Virginia, in the 'Sixties, white people thought they could count on The Coloreds to stay put--in their neighborhood of Hall's Hill, in janitorial positions. Until that day.

There've been so many other times. L.A., over Rodney King. Cincinnati. Ferguson. Baltimore. And on. And on. Nothing changes. It's hard to understand why everything's not on fire all the time. There's been restraint, I tell you.

So when I watched a car being overturned and set on fire in Minneapolis, it was familiar. But there's something different going on now.

Because one thing has been clear for a few years. There are people who want a race war in America. Or any other civil war. And I don't mean the dime-a-dozen racist assholes. They're just pieces. They can be swept off the board at any time and replaced just as fast. It's the rooks and the bishops running this show. They want us to fall apart, to kill each other.

I just don't know why.

I don't even know who they all are. Certainly Russians. They'll jam a wedge into any crack they can find. Vaccination. Guns. Race, for sure. They don't take a side. They take all the sides. It's easy to see why someone like Putin wants our fabric shredded.

The President of the United States wants civil war, too, though, and that's harder to fathom. Perhaps the explanation is simpler than it ought to be. He's an insecure ignoramus with no love for anybody, even his base, but rage lifts him up, fills his sails, tents his shorts. He doesn't respect any American citizen, and black and brown citizens are merely at the bottom of his basket of expendables. He, and the daughter he finds most doable, are the only people he almost cares about. This whole damn thing gives him a little chubby.

But he's also got an entire party behind him. With their own calculations.

Somehow or other, someone is calculating that when America falls apart for good, they'll get all the money. All the rest of the money. I'm not sure how, but I am sure. Are you seeing all those memes about the "right" and "wrong" way to protest? The photos of those nasty people setting fires, the looting? They're designed to be spread far and wide by earnest progressives and bigots alike. To make sure nobody misses the violence, to assure people that their assumptions about the dreaded Other were correct all along. There are people behind those creations. And those people don't give a damn about black lives. Or poor white lives, either. They want war. They want the spoils.

But they're not stopping with inflammatory posts on the social media. They're willing to invest living bodies. They've got mercenaries on the payroll, ready to step in at any time, whenever the tinder they've spread around gets lit. Mercenaries to begin the smashing, to spark the protests, to ensure the violence.

Naomi Klein, in her extraordinary book Shock Doctrine, explained how the plutocrats have been poised to exploit any shocking disaster, from hurricane to tsunami to terrorist event, to further their own rapacious ends; they have playbooks on hand and players ready to muster. They privatized the education system during the chaos of Katrina, they privatized the beaches and evicted the native fishermen after the tsunami in Indonesia. And if a disaster does not occur naturally, they'll engineer one: invade an irrelevant country after 9/11, when people were too shocked to mount an objection, and reap billions in profits. Stage a coup in Argentina and take over all the publicly owned utilities and companies. They've got playbooks, they've got players.

And that is how they can insert agents provocateurs into the protests in Minnesota. Just like that. They have them all ready to go. To incite, to divide, to conquer. Don't fall for it.

Power To The People

The truths we used to hold to be self-evident are so two centuries ago. We've got new truths now, conceived in think tanks and dedicated to the proposition that rich people need more money. Government is the problem. Taxes are bad. Regulation needs to get out of the way of business. And this will lead to prosperity. That's the narrative we're being sold, and a whole lot of us are buying.

How's that working out for us?

A few of us are very prosperous indeed. Many of us are much worse off. The middle class has declined. Our natural world is despoiled and its systems on the verge of collapse. Our resources are dwindling. We've been at war for years, and we're barking for new wars.

This isn't my notion of prosperity.

Maybe what they're selling us is fake goods. Maybe government and taxes and regulation aren't really the problem after all. Maybe it's time to yank the narrative back, by telling the truth.

What is this nasty old Government, anyway? Well, we're trying an amazing experiment here. We declared we are the government: we the people. We gave limited power to those we elected to represent us. We have banded together to achieve for ourselves that which we cannot achieve on our own. Do we want clean water and clean air? Do we want safe food and educated children? Do we want to provide for our defense sensibly? Do we want to share the donuts or give them all to the fat guy? We're in charge. If we're not getting what we want, it's up to us to change things.

But we're easily swayed. We're hanging onto all these myths from back when we could head out and homestead all the land we could steal. We're rugged individualists; we're cowboys. We think we can do just fine for ourselves if The Government would just leave us alone. But there are more than 320 million of us cowboys now and no place left to dump the trash. We need to be careful.

So the next time someone goes full Bundy on us and declares the government the enemy and demands that the land be given back to We The People [sic], remember that government land is our land, and the people who want it for their own purposes--to run cattle on, or mine, or drill, or clear--do not care about ours.

Regulation? It's not there to thwart enterprise. It's there to do an accounting of the true costs of business. Go ahead and grow your business as much as you want, but you don't get to skate on the garbage bill. If you pollute, or you endanger, or enslave, or misrepresent, or cheat, you have to answer to us. Regulation means your bottom line might be somewhere different from where you'd like it, but we're all under the same sky, and someone's always downstream. There's a cost to everything, and if we run our economy without accounting for all of it, we're letting pirate ships sail away with our treasure.

So we regulate. When we strip away regulations, we give more to those who have too much already, while we pick up the tab. When we lower everyone's taxes, we discover ourselves without what we need, just to further enrich those who need nothing.

Do we want clean drinking water at the tap? Then that is something we should keep in the commons. We hire people to make it happen--they're called government workers--and we pay them. Government workers are not our enemies. They're the people we pay to do the things we want done, that we can't do by ourselves, at no profit.

Right now, the shrink-the-government crowd prefers to use our taxes to pay private outfits to do the things we want, so they can profit. Water. Power. Prisons. Schools. Even our war-making is delegated to mercenaries, with Blackwater and Halliburton raking in the billions. The already-wealthy want ever more of our treasure, and that's who's running the show.

That's because a few people with great wealth have an outsized effect on what happens in our name. But it doesn't have to be so. We are the people, and if our government is not doing what we want, we can change it. Our power is in our numbers, and our will, if we exercise it.

What could we accomplish if we banded together? Could we be as powerful as Walmart?

Walmart, the largest private employer in the world, became the behemoth it is by hacking the middle class off at the knees. It arranged for products to be made in low-wage countries with low environmental standards, and then insisted our local manufacturers cut wages and benefits or lose their market. They led the charge to the bottom. Their prices were so low they wiped out smaller local businesses. Now they are so powerful that they can bargain for lower pharmaceutical prices and everyone thinks that's a good thing. But we the people can do that too. If we the people got together to provide for our own medical care by adopting single-payer insurance, we could negotiate our own drug prices and the costs of our procedures.

True, the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industries would take a huge hit. True, we wouldn't enable six human beings named Walton to have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American people. But we'd have health care.

Serving Mammon

All over the world, and for much of history, women have tried to avoid getting pregnant, and often sought to abort if they did, even at risk of their own lives. In modern times, wherever abortion has been legal, abortions rarely resulted in their deaths. I do not know if making abortion legal results in more abortions. But it's very clear that legal, available, and affordable birth control results in a lot fewer abortions. It's not even debatable. Statistics bear that out.

Nevertheless every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan's has instituted the so-called "global gag rule" withdrawing aid to any organization providing reproductive healthcare that includes abortion, or even alludes to abortion as an option. This has a large impact on the provision of birth control and invariably leads to more abortion. The current Republican administration has gone many steps further and has withdrawn money for all charitable aid services, if the organization that provides them does not denounce abortion. Mortality from malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and other diseases is expected to spike. That is what it means, now, to be pro-life.

An adviser for the administration's new policy issued a strange rationale. She said "The Trump Administration, and most of America, doesn't believe that taxpayer funding ought to go to abortion. And it certainly shouldn't go to nations that generally are very, very pro-life, which is true all across Africa. The cultural imperialism that exists at the heart of this idea, that they can't be happy unless they have abortion like we do, is outrageous."

Cultural imperialism. This is not a phrase she came up with off the top of her head. This is calculated propaganda straight from a think tank.  The idea is to rip a page from the left-wing playbook, mark it up a bit, and toss it back. We lefties hate imperialism. We're always going on and on about countries forcing themselves on other countries. We're anti-colonial. We find it deplorable to blast our way into another culture and replace it with our own.

We are so shocked by the audacity of the phrase in this context that we splutter and falter. There are so many things wrong with this that we don't even know where to start objecting. That's the point, of course.

We're stuck with this counterproductive policy because those in power are not especially interested in reducing the number of abortions. They are interested in claiming their place in a holy war, marching into battle with the brightest banners and the loudest trumpets, a battle in which abortion is the greatest of sins but war is a perfectly honorable way to murder people. Many of us liberals are puzzled by the willingness of some self-described Christians to overlook or even reward reprehensible moral behavior in their candidates--let alone their worship of mammon--but we are making the mistake of imagining their doctrine stems from the Gospels, from the Sermon on the Mount. From Jesus. And it doesn't. It comes from Revelation. And according to Revelation, Christians are headed toward a final, cataclysmic battle for the human soul, and the sides we choose will mean our salvation, or not; so we'll follow that godly anti-abortionist, anti-gay leader straight to the gates of Hell, and it doesn't matter how many people we kill along the way, as long as they're post-fetal. All we need is righteous fervor and enough sacrificial Muslims.

With a few exceptions, the leaders themselves don't care about these issues. They're in it for themselves. The President himself almost certainly doesn't care about abortion--I'd be astonished if he hasn't paid for more than one himself--but he knows a good lever when he sees one, and many people can be maneuvered into voting for plutocrats as long as they swear allegiance to the right hot issues. Millions of single-issue voters will flock to their side if they claim to be anti-abortion, or pro-gun. But make no mistake, they're on their own side. They're fine with war. They'll make one out of whatever they have at hand.

That is why Iraq was selected to be bombed into smithereens after 9/11. Iraq was irrelevant but handy. Over a half million Iraqi citizens perished and those that survived lost their livelihoods as the United States, having manufactured deliberate chaos, privatized industry and opened up the country to piracy by multinational corporations. Billions were made and funneled off to private hands as our conquering armies smoothed the way to installing unfettered capitalism, which was the main goal all along. Quite a caper for a party that disapproves of "cultural imperialism." Iraqi society predictably disintegrated into factions, many of them now stoutly anti-American. And on and on it goes. Our leaders still profess to be against terrorism, but they're not. That's something they can use. Peace is the enemy of profit.

Fuzzy Logic

I was walking under a tree the other day when I noticed a fizzing knob hanging from a branch which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be not a visual migraine, but a swarm of bees. A living, vibrating unit of life, admirable in every way. My friend tells me I could have knocked the whole thing into a box and had me a swarm of my own, as long as I managed to bag the queen. It ain't over if the fat lady clings. The queen is the key to the whole swarm. She is endowed by Nature with something special.

Charisma.

It's hard to know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I admire a good cohesive social group. I believe in comity. I believe we can and must band together for the common good. If we pull together we can all have honey. And if we don't, we're just a bunch of lone rangers in pollen pants. On the other hand, it's a little frightening to think of a mob following one individual so slavishly.

Pollen Pants

We all learned how this works in school. The queen runs the outfit. She decides who the boy bees will be, and they lounge around in tiny togas waiting for a chance to inseminate her. She decides who the girl bees will be, who, bless their hearts, are in for a lifetime of work. At some point she even designates a successor, who becomes a queen by being fed Royal Jelly, which has 100% of your daily requirement of charisma. The entire operation runs smoothly but it still has all the hallmarks of an authoritarian dynastic state.

Which is fine most of the time, but what if it's a bad queen?

What if it's a Nestle queen, and she decides to jack up her personal net worth by directing her workers to decant the community honey into little tiny individual flavor packets and sell them back to the drones at an obscene markup? They'll do it, too. They'll do anything for jobs. And the drones will all buy the flavor packets. I don't know why, but they will. They're biddable, those ones. It's a plutocracy waiting to happen.

Bees get along together so well not because they have no imagination, but because they're all imagining the same things. That, and they all look alike. They're soft and fuzzy. But consider the ants. Ants are reputed to work together well too, but half the time you look at them they're hauling other dead ants around. And that is damned fishy.

Let that be a warning to us. It's one thing to work cooperatively together, but if everyone is piling on board a charisma train, somebody ought to be paying attention to where the tracks lead.