Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote an outright lie for The Week, droning on as many do about the supposed myth of America’s invincible military. When 95% of all military bases on the planet belong to the United States, to perceive such a fact as meaning anything other than irrefutable domination, and for a mainstream news outlet no less, is not even insanity. Gobry appears to be yet another careerist peddler of propaganda.
The irony of what stenographers like Gobry sell to the public, is that while everything is composed under tones suggesting America’s pervasive exceptionalism and can do no wrong ethos, tremendous efforts are still also applied toward manufacturing narratives contrary to that, such as Russia, China or North Korea being widely embraced as the biggest threats to the American people. Even though the military for all three nations combined receives less than half the annual funding as does the United States all by itself. And that’s without considering unknowable black budgets given freely and regularly to various American law enforcement and intelligence activities. Western pathology cannot feel superior or unified unless others are rendered as inferior or opposing. America simply cannot stand on its own merits, not without some other to be contrasted by. Everything straying from such narratives gets vilified.
The political campaigning of American elections has long been nothing but divisively belittling others, including like-minded outsiders. And it is no different from what hip hop music has in common with country music, in that all words are alternately begging (primarily for attention, but also sympathy, and sex) and bragging, and all while idealizing where the performers are from. That is the underlining language of America.
Being the all-time greatest but with everything always on the line is an irreconcilable duality. And as entrenched as that duality is in the American frame of thought, the only possible conclusion to be drawn is that America was never really meant to last.
John Royalty, the egotistical mayor of Bardstown, Kentucky, is trying to explain away the racial divide within the city council as a side-effect of racist discrimination targeted at him directly by members of the council. In reality, blame for the divide falls squarely on his shoulders, as evidenced by the monthly occurrences of his dismissively getting up and walking out of council meetings when black Bardstonians are in mid-sentence. But while the physical terrain and historical buildings make for an unbelievably beautiful setting, Bardstown is obviously not a microcosm. Royalty’s denial shows a fine example for where the far right politically stands today across the country, and the world.
Over the past 8 years, as then President Obama would constantly contradict himself by saying very Neoliberal things while doing very Neoconservative things, he and the Clintons carjacked the liberal Democratic party away from the ideals of the left in a supposed bid for centrism. In response, the conservative Republican party gradually eased its own pledges that much further to the right and embraced the far right head-on. In prior decades, it was always a nudge-nudge wink-wink thing that the far right across America were overwhelmingly comprised of the most bigoted voters, all the way back to the incorporation of the Dixiecrats in the 1960s, the many southern Democrats offended by integration of public places.
Today, as Neoliberal Democrat leaders have moved the goalposts of their party to the right, they now hold far more in common with moderate conservative politics of the previous generation than with leftist socialism. I sincerely believe this goes over the heads of most Americans as most Americans honestly don’t even know the difference between socialism and communism. The whole idea that Nazi Germany arose to power by ousting its regional communist party, that World War 2 was largely about the Nazis vs the Russians and that the Russians lost more lives than any of the other allied forces, is alien-speak to most modern Americans, who have been taught that World War 2 was all about America trying to save defenseless Europe by leading the charge against the great evil of Nazism. As opposed to only stepping in during the final act to lay claim to as much of the redefined geopolitical infrastructure as they could pocket from the rubble.
Now, as the conservative Republicans are defined by far right ideology and the liberal Democrats are defined by what was the conservative right’s own ideology, the far left is set apart all the more, and by no action of its own. There is no evidence to support that the far left politically have suddenly grown into extremists, but rather that every other political persuasion has taken one small step for man sideways towards the right. The far right and the far left are pretty fucking far apart to begin with, so that centrism in American politics really does not exist unless cold, hard capital is involved. As fans of Obama’s administration showed how easily self-contradiction can and will be accepted by the public, now all those who took the step to the right from the DNC to the GOP can openly sell a normalization of their right-leaning collusion. And all while casually disavowing how the liberal left’s own ideology no longer exists in America.
All of this is complicated by how Democrat media liaisons such as the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC, and Republican media liaisons such as the FOX channels, the hysterical Infowars and the confederate Breitbart News, all preach to their choirs in the right. So there is a universal accusation by mainstream media to demonize the far left as the violent aggressors, when there is just no conceivable truth to support the claim. The opposite is very much the case, such as with Mayor Royalty seeing his lack of condolence to bully as he himself being bullied. Inability to infringe upon the rights of others is not itself an infringement of rights. (Hello, modern Catholicism.)
Just since the inauguration, a group of right-wing skinheads attacked grad students in a lower east side bar in New York City over one of the students having an anti-fascism sticker on their mobile. Judge Mike Erwin of Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court has been banned from a restaurant in his jurisdiction for verbally assaulting fellow customers with racist language. The state senate in Arkansas is pushing a constitutional convention to ban same-sex marriages, claiming such a decision is “not bigoted”. Yet meanwhile, also in Arkansas, if certain statutory exceptions are met (specifically parental consent), then a child of any age can be married.
This isn’t an indictment against conservative or liberal voters, even while they ignore the ample reasons to be opposed to their own leaders. And I am not necessarily defending the far left, merely addressing how it has not the influence to be responsible for any of what ails the nation. But if the politics it opposes grants Nazis well-segregated safe spaces and allows preteen girls to be raped and authoritarian thugs to enjoy unchecked powers, not to mention enabling the always villainous machinery of war, then yes on power to the goddamn people.
Especially at the government’s expense. At every government’s expense.