Starts With Devo

Shh! You know what? There's been this project in the works for a long time. It was ambitious as hell. The idea was to take everything we as a society had hammered out that made us prosperous as a people, and chip away at it until it was gone, until everything we held in common for the common good was hoovered into the private treasuries of a small number of people. Obviously that's not the kind of thing you're going to talk people into. They're much better off with their Social Security, their Medicare, their free educational system, their relatively petite police forces, their clean water and safe food, their pensions and benefits. Lord knows all of those things could be made even better, certainly starting with our crazy-expensive system of health care through private insurance, but still your average American wasn't interested in losing what we already had just to feed the insatiable greed of a few.

So the project didn't really get off the ground for the first few decades, but finally got rolling under Ronald Reagan. There'd been a worldwide energy crisis that provided him and his backers an opportunity. A good crisis should never go to waste. He recast the labor unions that supported the middle class as thieves and heavies, and suggested that we could do much better as individuals if we weren't carrying all that dead weight. And he helped create a new financial sector we could gamble in, using some of the money that used to go to our pensions. We could all hit the big-time, because we're so smart. And he read us new bedtime stories: how the government stood in the way of prosperity, and couldn't do anything efficiently. And how the new financial sector and corporations that sucked up all our old pension money would grow ever stronger and create ever more jobs once they were free of oversight and regulation. The Engine of Growth would lift all boats.

That was such a compelling con job that people didn't even notice that the corporations in all their efficiency bought each other out and killed or sold off solid industries and went overseas where slave labor was more abundant and environmental restrictions less onerous, leaving entire American towns in the dust. Or that mergers created billionaires at the expense of our living wages. We didn't notice we were losing ground every day. The idea that we individuals were so smart we could get rich on our own--an idea repackaged as "freedom"--was too seductive to abandon, even as we slid down the economic ladder, even as many of us tumbled into homelessness and poverty.

They took our public wealth from us. They privatized our public prisons and rigged the justice system to ensure there would be plenty of incarcerated bodies to profit off of--even to the extent of extracting unpaid labor from them; even to the extent of harvesting migrant children to detain at the cost of $750 per day, per child--our money, streaming straight into the pockets of private prison contractors.

They take our vital water utilities for profit. They run our wars for profit. They create our wars for profit.

It's been a hell of a successful fire sale of the commons, but there is nervousness now amongst the moneyed elites: their peculiar, stammering cartoon character of a figurehead is losing his shine, especially during a crisis that shows exactly what government of the people and for the people should be doing. But their project isn't done yet. They still haven't bought up all our public schools. Time's a-wastin'.

And that is how we must frame the latest edict from our Secretary of Education, a filthy-rich woman who has never been in a public school, never been an educator, whose family profits from privatization, and who was given the Cabinet job vowing to dismantle the system of free education in this country. She wants all the kids back in the classroom. (Who doesn't?) She declares it safe, or safe enough. And she says if schools decide on their own not to reopen, they should not receive federal funds. And those funds should instead be given to the parents as vouchers. So they can send their children to private schools, preferably Christian.

Betsy Devos. She's just one more poisoned arrow in their quiver, aimed at the heart of us.

It's the libertarian edict. Never let a good crisis go to waste. You can always make money off it. Always.

The Price Of Freedom, TBD

You really have to hand it to the Republicans. They can call up a standing army at any time and not even pay the soldiers. The pawns can be found everywhere, like little dormant seeds in the soil, and all the Rs have to do is plop in some manure and boom, up they spring in their little flag outfits, loud and proud and fully armed, ready to take on the enemies of the plutocracy. And boy oh boy do they have plenty of manure. They ain't running out of that anytime soon.

Their aim is pretty transparent. They would like to be in power forever in order to funnel all the money from as many people as possible to the lucky few that own the propaganda arm, the presidency, and the courts. Of course that's a lousy way to raise an army. You can't get people up in literal arms by telling them you want them to work for minimum wage or lower with no sick leave and no pension and no medical insurance, just so a small number of people can own everything in the world. That's where the manure comes in. They have to make the people believe they give one shiny shit about gun rights and abortion and [cough cough] freedom and then, just like that, they've got their sad little soldiers, marching as to war.

Not really sure what a bunch of people screaming and honking and wiping their noses on the flag because of a public health order has to do with the right to bear arms, but in certain circles that case can be made without any logic involved whatsoever. You could accuse your mom of trying to take your Second Amendment rights away if she runs out of Nestlé's Quik, and nobody'd even blink an eye anymore.

I mean, what's the good of open-carry laws if they're making you march around the living room with your toddler all day long? The point is to brandish. Can't brandish by yourself. Look at them! All dolled up in bullet-proof this-and-that, bristling with firepower! Nothing's going to take them down, by God. Psst: Do they know just how small a virus is? Perhaps they're planning to rain bullets into the air in case we get a locust plague next. That, at least, would take down one or two locusts, making it more effective than trying to kill a virus with an antibiotic--Mr. President Science-Boy, sir.

And if you can't rouse enough rabble with an imaginary assault on gun rights, you can always remind people how many fetuses have been lost compared with the number of grandmas dying ghastly deaths alone in the ICU. That old chestnut! Never gets old.

Hell, you can raise an army by telling people Democrat Governors want to shut down their states until December just so people can't say Merry Christmas to each other. You can make up any old thing. There will always be willing buyers. Seeds...manure...sprinkle, sprinkle. Boom.

The demonstrations in Michigan and elsewhere have had some adorable touches. "Don't carpool," one organizer tweeted, "gas is cheap!" And so in a new natural world that has gone blessedly quiet and started showing signs of environmental repair and recovery in a few short weeks, amassing the maximum number of vehicles making the maximum amount of noise is bound to have the bonus effect of annoying liberals. Awesome, my dudes! Now, don't you feel better?

You don't?

Excellent. That means you're still exploitable.

When you get your socialist stimulus check from The Little People, a.k.a. the chumps who aren't rich enough to quit paying taxes, just mail them to Betsy DeVos and her family, who have sunk a buttload of dough into your little "grass-roots" organization. That's really her point, stripped down. She and her friends want the rest of your money.

The Empty Hutch

It's quiet at first. Tater the cat has been swatted off the keyboard or plucked off the newspaper or punted from the quilt-in-progress or otherwise discouraged from expressing herself inconveniently. Minutes slide by.

Then comes the first "plink" from the dining room. Her favorite lightweight battable item, a small wooden chicken on the first shelf of the hutch, has hit the floor. It will be fine. There are three more wooden chickens on the hutch and in due time they too hit the floor. Plink. Plink. Plink.

It is important to not reward this activity by running into the dining room waving your arms and yelling "Potato Brewster, get down from there." There's nothing Tater would love more than to see you do that. That would be the highlight of her day.

There is a pause and then a new sound. The soft thub thub thub of a felted sculpture plummeting from the second shelf. Another pause. Then the scraping of a heavier item being relocated toward the front of the shelf. An ominous thunk and clatter.

At this point the human is no longer working. The human is mentally reviewing the contents of the hutch, and plotting the trajectory of the cat. Then a disturbing rattle is emitted from the dining room, its provenance sussed out, and the next target in line identified as a Steuben glass bud vase. No! The human vaults into the dining room waving her arms and screaming.

Cat, rewarded.

This is how I thought the Trump regime would be. In wave after heartsick wave of insomnia, I visualized the losses, totting up the horrors that would soon enough be coming our way: the demonization of entire segments of our society, the sharpening of the divisions among our tribes and creeds, the erosion of women's rights, the denial of science, the stripping of regulations from the financial sector, the accelerated transfer of wealth to the wealthy, the privatization of schools and public lands, the despoilment, the isolationism, and--the sharpest arrow to my aching heart--the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and the resumption of headlong investment into a fossil-fuel economy that will undo us all. I imagined each horror as another wooden chicken falling to the floor while the evil agenda churned inevitably through a Congress with an inadequate opposition, and periodically we the faithful would turn out to holler as the next beloved item hit the floor.

I did not think the soulless son of a bitch would clear the whole hutch in ten days.

But in ten days all of that was set in motion. A woman who made her millions undercutting public education is proposed to oversee education. Sheer fiction is employed to encourage Americans to fear each other: Muslims, Latinos, immigrants, protestors, and--oh, let's call them "inner-city types" and wink at Ben Carson. Innocents are scapegoated, assuring future carnage that will then be used to justify war or a police state. A former CEO of Exxon is installed as Secretary of State and already working on easing sanctions on Russia, allowing Exxon to drill the last oil in Siberia. The infamous abortion gag bill is reinstated with repercussions for the health of women worldwide including, not coincidentally, a spike in abortions. Diplomacy is abandoned for belligerence. Oil pipelines are approved and the military marshaled to quash dissent. Any constraint against Wall Street rapaciousness is to be repealed. The Stream Protection Rule is tossed out. Oh, let's slow down and have a look at that last one, shall we?

Coal mining is dying a natural economic death fast, due to better alternatives. The Stream Protection Rule, which prohibits the dumping of coal mining debris in waterways, is the only tool in the bucket for preventing companies from blasting entire mountains into oblivion, burying natural streams, and ruining watersheds for all time. The precious coal itself is all burned up by the time the coal companies haul up stakes and move on, stranding their workers and leaving residents to contend with poisoned water and a lifeless moonscape. Putting the Stream Protection Rule on the chopping block in the first two weeks is not about jobs: it takes far fewer men to dismantle a mountain than to mine it conventionally. It's not about energy, which is cheaper and cleaner any other way. It's certainly not for the health and safety of populations either local or worldwide. It is for the enrichment of a select few who can scrape out that last smudge of filthy energy and turn it into private fortune, and the hell with absolutely everybody else. And it's to give Mitch McConnell the woody of his dreams. That's all.

But none of that was enough. There was also the gratuitous assault on the separation of church and state. There was the transparently specious vilification of refugees for no reason other than to invent a class of enemies and grease the rails for the war machine. There was--could we possibly have made this up?--the elevation of an actual authentic fucking Nazi to the National Security Council--a man who is on record as being devoted to tearing down government and advancing the cause of white supremacy.

The hutch is empty. I don't know where Tater is, but I smell gasoline.