An Inauguration that Befouls and Defiles the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday
A theme on this blog over the years is that the United
States is poised to become the shortest-lived dominant Empire in Western
history. It might be the shortest lived
empire in all human history, Full
disclosure: I am not an historian and my
reference base is only the Roman, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and English
empires, all of which owned the global stage for significant stretches. According to Wikipedia, England was the
“foremost global power” for about century.
One could argue that the US became the dominant empire after WWII, when
the previous great empires slaughtered themselves into subordination in an orgy
of stupidity, violence, cruelty and greed.
For the US empire to exceed Britain’s reign, it would have to endure
until the year 2045, which marks a century since the end of WWII. But such endurance is highly unlikely.
The primary reason is the country’s internal rot, its extreme
corruption. On that front, we can apply
the classic saying: the fish rots
from the head.
11/5 was one of the worst days in the history of human civilization. On November 5, 2024, a fascist dictator Donald
Trump took the White House in the United States. It was a close election, and though America
deserves to be condemned for its cruelty and vice, which I will get into below,
I want to point out, underscore even, that 48% of voters backed Kamala Harris,
a Black and Indian woman who deeply believes in human rights. The election of Harris would have put a major
dent in 12,000 years of patriarchy and, as well, over four hundred years of
American racism and misogyny.
If Harris had won, the maturity of the collective
consciousness of the human species would have continued. Our ethics technology might have advanced, improving our chances of escaping the petty, insecure warlordism
that has reigned for millennia.
Speaking as a US citizen myself, tens of millions of us are truly
horrified by what happened on 11/5.
Now, though I dread to write about it, onward to the awful
topic. Today Trump is inaugurated as President, an act that befouls and defiles the other meaning of this date: a national holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.
A Defining Moment
The majority of US voters went for Donald Trump, a man who
has been found liable for rape in civil court, and accused by over twenty women
of sexual assault; a man who has been caught on tape saying that he could “just
grab them by the pussy” and get away with it; a man who has been found guilty
of 34 felonies; and who has been indicted on charges of treason in federal
court, and who was in the process of being tried for them; a man who had been
publicly diagnosed by dozens of professional psychologists and psychiatrists as
both a psychopath and a narcissist; and a man who, for all his life, reveled in
multiple vices, suffered six bankruptcies, and who earned money, not from
business acumen, but as an actor on a TV show who played merely what he
is: a meretricious paragon of vanity,
insecurity, falsehoods, and greed.
The racist, sexist Trump does excel as a con man. He has plied cult-level demagoguery to amass
a cult-base constituency of zealots who worship him. Copying the classic tactics of tyranny, he
proclaims that those outside of his base are the enemy, who deserve to be hated and who need
to be destroyed.
And so the noble momentum in the USA for true equality--for
people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community--has been shattered by a
fierce, violent backlash of willful, gaslit ignorance. Trump’s followers sacrifice their own health
and financial well-being, the very stability of their own country, for one
essential purpose: to maintain what
Isabel Wilkerson rightly calls the American caste system---more simply, traditional
White macho patriarchy.
Will Trump fix America’s corrupt healthcare system? No.
Will he end the financial imbalance that hands a tenth of a percent of
the population 90% of the country’s wealth?
No. And yet he will ensure White
male rule. This includes, as it always
has, a system of rewards for women and people of color who accept and serve the
White patriarchy, granting them perks over those who refuse to bow.
Dredging up the words of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President
of the USA:
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than
the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him
somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-immigration-white-supremacy.html
Adding more context, the United States is a country that
only a hundred and sixty years ago fought a four-year Civil War because the
Southern White patriarchy refused to give up its Black slaves. After the South lost the war, they hated the
North with pure, raw animosity.
Here are the lyrics of the song, Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier,
written right after the Civil War:
Oh, I'm a good old Rebel soldier, now that's just what I
am;
For this "Fair Land of Freedom" I do not give a
damn!
I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won,
And I don't want no pardon for anything I done.
I hates the Constitution, this "Great
Republic," too!
I hates the Freedman's Bureau and uniforms of blue!
I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss,
And the lying, thieving Yankees, I hates 'em wuss and
wuss!
I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do,
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too!
I hates the "Glorious Union" -- 'tis dripping
with our blood,
And I hates their striped banner, and I fit it all I
could.
I followed old Marse Robert for four years, near about,
Got wounded in three places, and starved at Point
Lookout.
I cotched the "roomatism" a'campin' in the
snow,
But I killed a chance o' Yankees, and I'd like to kill
some mo'!
Three hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust!
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
But I wish we'd got three million instead of what we got.
I can't take up my musket and fight 'em now no more,
But I ain't a'gonna love 'em, now that's for sartain
sure!
I do not want no pardon for what I was and am,
And I won't be reconstructed, and I do not care a damn!
This attitude of hate extended to stubborn, vicious embrace
of the idea that slavery was absolutely fine.
Perhaps, at some point, the South let go of the idea of Black slavery. I’m not really sure it has frankly, speaking
as a White person myself, whose ancestry is Southern and goes back many
generations. My ancestors owned slaves.
Nevertheless, this is certain: a virulent racism plagues the USA; and alongside
it a great hatred, embedded in White culture, for anyone who dares challenge
it. Racism hides these days behind a
mask of deceit. Since the Civil Rights
Movement, it has become the norm, even in the South, to deny in word that
racism is acceptable (Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!) even as it is
advanced in subterfuge and deed.
In back rooms, no doubt, the ‘N-word’ continues to be used
in full contempt and rage. My
grandmother used it all the time and frequently went on rants. “Bean, those N-s are smart,” which was the
beginning of a long tirade against Black people. “Bean” was my nickname as a child.
Such is the ‘United’ States.
Infected with bigotry, misogyny and homophobia. The “Manifest Destiny” movement learned early on--in
its genocide of Native Peoples, in its use of Black slavery to build the
country--that violence and Darkness can win out over the Light.
And now, in the form of Trump, Darkness has won control of
the soul of America. Darkness was
wrested control from America’s other side, the wonderful one that brought us
the first Black President in Barack Obama, the one that championed the rights
of women to vote, and which continues to fight for the rights of women and
LGBTQ people.
Darkness has won over Light. I
don’t know if the war between Selfishness and Ethics is completely over, but it could be. Why?
Because physical violence is an extremely effective tool of social
control; and Trump has the military and the police under his authority. Trump also has power to inflict heavy
economic damage in the form of lawsuits, the outcome of which will likely be
determined by judges under his thrall.
Battened on decades of consumerism, slathered in its petty,
shallow vanities and insecurities, the American people have little ethical
spine. We have been trained to be
materialistic and needy, insecure and pathetic, not the sort of noble citizen who is worthy or willing to fight for anything higher, such as
Justice. Our penchant is to obey and lap up frivolous gifts, perks, discounts, coupons,
sales--on and on, while we are commercial-whipped to rush to get cheaper products
and to show them off with the vulgar awe of a shill in an advertisement.
If
our neighbor has some socially invented status symbol that we don’t have, we
fret and pout, never thinking about the deeper levels of life, only the
validation of our own voracious, product-hungry ego. For decades, under the banner of "free market capitalism," the purchasing power of the US citizen was considered the 'economic engine' driving the world economy. It has forged shackles of vice and voracity in our psyche.
Maybe, if we are lucky, the American people still possess
the seeds of righteous determination, and can rise up from this moral trench. But it would be absurd not to consider the likelihood that
the USA, with its mightiest military, under the mercurial control of a narcissistic psychopath, will spread forth its Dark
Shadow to encompass and devour as much as it can, straddling latitudes and longitudes, along vectors of greed, power-lust,
malevolence and malignancy.
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