2020 ENDS NOW
“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.” –Paris street graffiti during 1968 spring protests and strikes
“I don’t take responsibility at all.” –Donald Trump, March 13, 2020
Yes, even Donald Trump can occasionally utter the truth, not through understanding or honesty, but through self-concern. He takes no responsibility. You keep it.
As 2020 becomes a storied year in modern history, we can hope—be it cynically, honestly or foolishly—that 2021 will find some things on this planet getting better.
This has been a killer year. Pandemic. More Americans dying of drug overdoses. In the western states there was drought and wildfires. Here in Oregon we suffered forest fires, extremely unhealthy smoke-filled lungs, destroyed homes. Towns burned include Detroit Lake, Talent and Phoenix (how could the founders have known it would have to rise from the ashes at some distant future?).
I do not fall for the canard that the U.S. is more bitterly divided than before. I do, nonetheless, believe Trump in the White House has exposed the myth of the shared American Dream as an obvious falsehood, a fake news commentary if you will. We have always been a violently divided nation. Genocide of Native Americans so white settlers could take the land, beaver pelts and bison. Wounded Knee. Seizure of land from Californios after U.S. annexed the state. Slaves imported from Africa. A constitution that protected such slavery. Our very own civil war fought uncivilly and giving birth to the machine gun. Racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Still no reparations to those whose ancestors were shipped here as human cargo and then mercilessly exploited. Prejudice against newcomers: Irish Catholics, eastern Europeans, Italians, Mexicans, Jews. All-WASP clubs, neighborhoods. Assassinations from Lincoln to Martin Luther King. KKK. Lynchings. Persecution of Mormons. Sacco and Vanzetti. Joe Hill. America’s Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh. Banning Asian immigrants. Internment of Japanese-Americans. 1929. Joe McCarthy. 1968—click here for one guy who says that was worst year ever. I lived through it as a draft dodger who refused induction. Bad but not the worst. 1861 gets my vote as worst year ever–you can look it up.
Birtherism. QAnon. Police who too often feel they have the duty to shoot dark-skinned people powered by their own training, fear and prejudice. I would venture to say that the nation has been getting less unified, as usual, since the end of World War II. A nation founded for religious and political freedom for white men and their households, now turned to worship of money, has a lot of serious flaws to self-examine. That is not a strength of this culture. Shut up, get to work, make more money. Even in the face of this deadly covid crisis, a whole wing of one major political party says it is ok to die for the good of the economy. At the same time this same party pretends to be the only one to support Christian values. Whatever happened to “Do unto others…”? Maybe I should look at some modern Bible text to see how that’s been reinterpreted to suit warlord capitalism.
For more on that scary topic, click here for George Monbiot’s insights. Even though Monbiot is focused on Brexit, we Yanks are all over this. Perhaps scariest is how prominent Americans have been in promoting warlord capitalism in Britain, not just here. Ayn Rand’s theories, Rupert Murdoch (we can no longer pretend he’s just an Aussie), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Robert Mercer (who helped bankroll Trump’s first campaign).
Global capitalism–with help from our Supreme Court: money is speech and corporations are people–has further corrupted our money-based election and political system. There is no longer any discernible line between large donation and bribery. What Trump has made painfully clear is that much of American law and justice is totally dependent on the quality of people in power. The separation of powers looks good in a textbook, not so good in reality as a President moves money around to build a wall on the border that no Congressional vote ever approved.
Why did Trump really oppose the defense spending bill recently passed into law over his veto? The law contains regulations to curtail use of laundered money to do business and political transactions (often identical) in the U.S. Duh, where do we think Trump Org borrowed those hundreds of millions of dollars it owes?
Corruption even leaks down into “non-profits” like Girl Scouts.
Beyond mere corruption and arrogance there has been an explosion of incompetence in the past four American years. Bad covid test kits from the CDC. A pathetic lack of organization in the distribution of vaccines now available. And Republican values (money, money, money) are screaming from news reports—one place in Florida is offering first-come, first-serve vaccination for old people who are now lined up in wheelchairs! Welcome to our reality version of “Game of Thrones”.
Covid is the most indelible fact about 2020, here and globally. Trump will be little more than an acerbic footnote in a 2120 history book if ever there should be one. Covid is part of a great human tradition. Plague. Typhoid. Malaria. Chlorea. 1918 flu pandemic.
Disease had a major role in the settling of white people onto lands once populated by Native Americans. In 1803 President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark and their men out to explore the Louisiana Purchase we had bought from France. Sure, there were still millions of Native Americans on the land, but they went with the beaver and elk and pelicans. Within thirty years much of the western two-thirds of the eventual US had been de-populated. Former villages along the upper Missouri River were ghost towns by the 1830s. Diseases brought from Europe decimated native tribes with little or no resistance to these new diseases. Yes, the Spanish and Mexican Missions enslaved California Native Americans, but even then in the late 1700s the locals were dying in epidemics, tribe after tribe.
Nation state failure—I’ve come to view the nation as one of man’s most dangerous inventions.
Some effects of the pandemic may be good. Online workers are pursing flight from cities—distance earning. Emissions are down as fewer people need to go to the office. If we can get all those delivery trucks to go electric…
I expect the GOP rediscovers penury and budget deficits as a curse, a crime, a form of treason. Anything to keep Biden’s Administration from spending money to help people and smaller government units—towns, school districts, states.
War on drugs—this idiocy should stop. It was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon, largely as an anti-hippie slogan to use before older, white audiences. We are making drug cartels ever more wealthy, violent and powerful. Legalize and treat. Guns won’t keep people off drugs, ever. If we legalize we can test heroin, et al. for fentanyl. Our attempt at Prohibition a century ago should tell us all we need to know. Remember how the anti-pot forces warned that drug cartels would take over Colorado when it was legalized? Nope, efficient local farmers and licensed businesses get product from field to user, and now most of the products are NOT smoked into sensitive lungs. The same could happen for other drugs and treatment for those addictive ones could be open and accessible.
Our technology has outpaced regulation and understanding—social media used by Putin and nihilists to lure the gullible. Our modern auto tires break down and leach a toxic chemical into streams killing salmon. Our foods and drugs and cosmetics are full of crap we don’t know anything about. Styrofoam and plastic pollute our oceans and is not recycled. We are on track to destroy most life on this planet, including that of our progeny. Climate change. Nobody has an answer for what we do with tens of millions of Bangladeshi when their land is under the ocean. All those seaside navy bases, all those homes built in western forests, all the coastal airports built on fill land…
Happy New Year…we need renewed hope and effort and honesty toward ourselves and others. We can’t buy the future we need, we might try to create it.
Veblen21 