Two nights from now it won't be over
I'm remembering tonight how Ann Radcliffe said (rightly) after she and her husband had crossed a battlefield where thousands of horrifying deaths had occurred only recently: it's not true that war ends when a peace or truce is declared. War carries on long after the first overt demands of those who win: lost forever people, maimed bodies, troubled minds, no one forgets the experiences he or she has had.
The last few months it has become probable that US democracy consensus may be falling apart. Trump and his adherents talk of impeaching Clinton. This is the way elections worked in the 17th century: if you won, you put your opponent in jail; if they won, you went to court against the vote and tried to get a court to put you in their place. It may be temporary but now that these right wing fanatics see their power and have gotten away with so much, why not do more? They have not even questioned Obama's nominee for the supreme court; they got away with it, so now they are saying, they will wait the four years out. why not?
The Bundy family is now threatening to take over another federal place. Meanwhile Obama may say both sides on the Dakota pipeline should exercise restraint, but that's absurd, the Native Americans are demonstrating peacefully; it's the state that is beating, setting dogs on people, pepper spraying them, putting them and journalists in jail. What that suggests to my mind is the establishment that could stop the Trumpism won't or can't because they are so beholden to what's called the 1%. Right now in south American democracies are being brought down in other ways than the 1980s: the corporations have gotten smarter.
The LRB has several times provided a working explanation for what happened in the last 40 years with this utter turn to the right Informed essays with documentation (especially about organizations like ALEC): the right found they could get away with defunding all social programs, they could take over the airwaves; they could privatize the prisons; there was no one to stop them. They could undermine public education with ease. LeCarre's books have as their underlying thesis: see what is happening now that there is no effective force against militaristic capitalism (fascism). He shows us a world where police authorities have no respect for civil or any other political liberty, where gov't organizations support a terrifying arms industry and how individuals within these gov'ts grow super-rich.
A list-friend has written:
Reuters is reporting that a group of FBI agents are hostile to Hillary and are trying to influence the election.
This isn't so different from the Supreme Court handing the 2000 election to George Bush.
It's similar to the Watergate break-in that Nixon ordered, in order to interfere with the 1972 election.
It's similar to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, which allowed Nixon to win in 1968.
It's similar to the JFK assassination in 1963, which I think was a right-wing job, as were the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Rightwing plutocrats and their henchmen will do what they can to thwart the will of the people -- whenever they can
The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-1999..
To go further back in time, my friend, a series of incidents which perhaps you remember as you are some years older than I -- during a 1948 election didn't Nixon say or have himself photographed finding incriminating papers on his opponent (whose character Nixon destroyed) in a pumpkin. It was an October surprise. As I recall my father said that Nixon said he couldn't say what was in these papers in this pumpkin -- for whatever reason he invented.
The FBI has done nothing about the armed insurrections of the Bundy family and they are going on to yet another site -- they threaten. The FBI has been trying to destroy BlackLivesMatter as well as active in the despicable things being done by military people in North Dakota over a pipeline which threatens to pollute the water supply of the Native Americans and will destroy their burial grounds.
Another list-friend who at first thought this column from the New York Times was not serious. I was in the UK this summer and did witness the continual excoriation of a decent popularly elected labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in just about all the newspapers; in ordinary conversation, the vote for Brexit was not against the neoliberal EU organization and banks, but against immigrants, filled with resentment and anger and a desire to shut out all competition and cooperation with people outside English itself (that means Scotland and Ireland), never mind the Continent and beyond.
The worry over the electorate: over the desire to throw a wrench, any wrench into the machinery of gov't: memories of the Brexit vote from the New York Times.
***************************
What can one even seasoned girl do?
Hillary when young: she looks sure of herself here
So what I hope for is this: that Clinton wins big and assumes the power of the presidency because the democrats emerge as the majority party in the senate and the house. This will not make the forces for erosion, corrosion go away but it will make it much harder for them to have an effect immediately -- unless of course the Republicans and their adamently prejudiced and bigoted extremists decide to block everything she does -- this will then be an uphill fight. Can one do anything about the ignorant and maddened constituencies as well as the very wealthy who are willing to support them? Only slowly for some (the impoverished), for others one could try to change FCC rules to declare a show which is not news but lying propaganda, entertainment.
She then has to enact good and decent wide-ranging programs. She has to put up the tax rate of the very rich and make corporations pay -- not just a share, but what they proportionally should, as they make on tax-dollars. Control the banks. Does she have the stomach for this? will she?
She has a good track record for smaller and woman's causes: women's rights, children's rights, workers' rights, taxes, immigration, for gun control, for ending the school to prison pipeline, she believes in global warming. Her hawkishness and pro-Israeli gov't policy is worrying She does not seem to have the temperament to overturn the last 40 years damage as (like Obama) she has participated in some of it, especially violent colonialism, the beginning of mass incarceration, the destruction of welfare (especially hard on women and children), but her record is one of socially progressive laws and programs within the US. She's got a tin ear but she won't ratchet up hate. She has principles, is an intelligent principled perceptive woman. When confronted with Trump three times, each time she beat back his rhetoric and exposed him as a dangerous dictatorship rapist-male. See Katha Pollit on why one should vote for Hillary Clinton.
I hope she will begin by putting Obama's nominee on the supreme court, not because I'm so desirous of a middle-of-the-road man politically but because Obama nominated him and he should have had his confirmation hearing long ago -- he is apparently a decent and intelligent man.
I will vote for her also because she is a woman. Reread Elaine Showalter's Pilloried Clinton. Alice Walker is a propos:
""Democratic Womanism"
You ask me why I smile
when you tell me you intend
in the coming national elections
to hold your nose
and vote for the lesser of two evils.
There are more than two evils out there,
is one reason I smile.
Another is that our old buddy Nostradamus
comes to mind, with his fearful
400 year old prophecy: that our world
and theirs too
(our "enemies" - lots of kids included there)
will end (by nuclear nakba or holocaust)
in our lifetime. Which makes the idea of elections
and the billions of dollars wasted on them
somewhat fatuous.
A Southerner of Color,
my people held the vote
very dear
while others, for centuries,
merely appeared to play
with it.
One thing I can assure
you of is this:
I will never betray such pure hearts
by voting for evil
even if it were microscopic
which, as you can see in any newscast
no matter the slant,
it is not.
I want something else;
a different system
entirely.
One not seen
on this earth
for thousands of years. If ever.
Democratic Womanism.
Notice how this word has "man" right in the middle of it?
That’s one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded.
I want to vote and work for a way of life
that honors the feminine;
a way that acknowledges
the theft of the wisdom
female and dark Mother leadership
might have provided our spaceship
all along.
I am not thinking
of a talking head
kind of gal:
happy to be mixing
it up
with the baddest
bad boys
on the planet
her eyes a slit
her mouth a zipper.
No, I am speaking of true
regime change.
Where women rise
to take their place
en masse
at the helm
of earth’s frail and failing ship;
where each thousand years
of our silence
is examined
with regret,
and the cruel manner in which our values
of compassion and kindness
have been ridiculed
and suppressed
brought to bear on the disaster
of the present time.
The past must be examined closely, I believe, before we can leave
it there.
I am thinking of Democratic, and, perhaps
Socialist, Womanism.
For who else knows so deeply
how to share but Mothers
and Grandmothers? Big sisters
and Aunts?
To love
and adore
both female and male?
Not to mention those in between.
To work at keeping
the entire community
fed, educated
and safe?
Democratic womanism,
Democratic Socialist
Womanism,
would have as its icons
such fierce warriors
for good as
Vandana Shiva
Aung San Suu Kyi,
Wangari Maathai
Harriet Tubman
Yoko Ono
Frida Kahlo
Angela Davis
& Barbara Lee:
With new ones always rising, wherever you look.
You are also on this list, but it is so long (Isis would appear midway) that I must stop or be unable to finish the poem! So just know I’ve stood you in a circle that includes Marian Wright Edelman, Amy Goodman, Sojourner Truth, Gloria Steinem and Mary McLeod Bethune. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, John Lennon and Howard Zinn are there. Happy to be surrounded!
There is no system
There is no system
now in place
that can change
the disastrous course
the Earth is on.
Who can doubt this?
The male leaders
of Earth
appear to have abandoned
their very senses
though most appear
to live now
entirely
in their heads.
They murder humans and other
animals
forests and rivers and mountains
every day
they are in office
and never seem
to notice it.
They eat and drink devastation.
Women of the world,
Women of the world,
Is this devastation Us?
Would we kill whole continents for oil
(or anything else)
rather than limit
the number of consumer offspring we produce
and learn how to make our own fire?
Democratic Womanism.
Democratic Socialist Womanism.
A system of governance
we can dream and imagine and build together. One that recognizes
at least six thousand years
of brutally enforced complicity
in the assassination
of Mother Earth, but foresees six thousand years
ahead of us when we will not submit.
What will we need? A hundred years
at least to plan: (five hundred will be handed us
gladly
when the planet is scared enough)
in which circles of women meet,
organize ourselves, and,
allied with men
brave enough to stand with women,
men brave enough to stand with women,
nurture our planet to a degree of health.
And without apology --
(impossible to make
a bigger mess than has been made already) --
devote ourselves, heedless of opposition,
to tirelessly serving and resuscitating Our Mother ship
and with gratitude
for Her care of us
worshipfully commit
to
rehabilitating it.
To sum up: Let us put Hillary Clinton into the white house but it's a small move -- without also voting democratic to give her a working majority in the house and senate! So let's do that too -- all liberal democratic people you can see or hope for .
And then we must see her offered solutions, what is her record and then distinguish what can she hope to do quickly and then over 4 years.
Two nights from now it won't be over; it will be beginning again to try to defeat what's being called Trumpism ...
Miss Drake
The last few months it has become probable that US democracy consensus may be falling apart. Trump and his adherents talk of impeaching Clinton. This is the way elections worked in the 17th century: if you won, you put your opponent in jail; if they won, you went to court against the vote and tried to get a court to put you in their place. It may be temporary but now that these right wing fanatics see their power and have gotten away with so much, why not do more? They have not even questioned Obama's nominee for the supreme court; they got away with it, so now they are saying, they will wait the four years out. why not?
The Bundy family is now threatening to take over another federal place. Meanwhile Obama may say both sides on the Dakota pipeline should exercise restraint, but that's absurd, the Native Americans are demonstrating peacefully; it's the state that is beating, setting dogs on people, pepper spraying them, putting them and journalists in jail. What that suggests to my mind is the establishment that could stop the Trumpism won't or can't because they are so beholden to what's called the 1%. Right now in south American democracies are being brought down in other ways than the 1980s: the corporations have gotten smarter.
The LRB has several times provided a working explanation for what happened in the last 40 years with this utter turn to the right Informed essays with documentation (especially about organizations like ALEC): the right found they could get away with defunding all social programs, they could take over the airwaves; they could privatize the prisons; there was no one to stop them. They could undermine public education with ease. LeCarre's books have as their underlying thesis: see what is happening now that there is no effective force against militaristic capitalism (fascism). He shows us a world where police authorities have no respect for civil or any other political liberty, where gov't organizations support a terrifying arms industry and how individuals within these gov'ts grow super-rich.
A list-friend has written:
Reuters is reporting that a group of FBI agents are hostile to Hillary and are trying to influence the election.
This isn't so different from the Supreme Court handing the 2000 election to George Bush.
It's similar to the Watergate break-in that Nixon ordered, in order to interfere with the 1972 election.
It's similar to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, which allowed Nixon to win in 1968.
It's similar to the JFK assassination in 1963, which I think was a right-wing job, as were the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Rightwing plutocrats and their henchmen will do what they can to thwart the will of the people -- whenever they can
The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-1999..
To go further back in time, my friend, a series of incidents which perhaps you remember as you are some years older than I -- during a 1948 election didn't Nixon say or have himself photographed finding incriminating papers on his opponent (whose character Nixon destroyed) in a pumpkin. It was an October surprise. As I recall my father said that Nixon said he couldn't say what was in these papers in this pumpkin -- for whatever reason he invented.
The FBI has done nothing about the armed insurrections of the Bundy family and they are going on to yet another site -- they threaten. The FBI has been trying to destroy BlackLivesMatter as well as active in the despicable things being done by military people in North Dakota over a pipeline which threatens to pollute the water supply of the Native Americans and will destroy their burial grounds.
Another list-friend who at first thought this column from the New York Times was not serious. I was in the UK this summer and did witness the continual excoriation of a decent popularly elected labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in just about all the newspapers; in ordinary conversation, the vote for Brexit was not against the neoliberal EU organization and banks, but against immigrants, filled with resentment and anger and a desire to shut out all competition and cooperation with people outside English itself (that means Scotland and Ireland), never mind the Continent and beyond.
The worry over the electorate: over the desire to throw a wrench, any wrench into the machinery of gov't: memories of the Brexit vote from the New York Times.
***************************
What can one even seasoned girl do?
Hillary when young: she looks sure of herself here
So what I hope for is this: that Clinton wins big and assumes the power of the presidency because the democrats emerge as the majority party in the senate and the house. This will not make the forces for erosion, corrosion go away but it will make it much harder for them to have an effect immediately -- unless of course the Republicans and their adamently prejudiced and bigoted extremists decide to block everything she does -- this will then be an uphill fight. Can one do anything about the ignorant and maddened constituencies as well as the very wealthy who are willing to support them? Only slowly for some (the impoverished), for others one could try to change FCC rules to declare a show which is not news but lying propaganda, entertainment.
She then has to enact good and decent wide-ranging programs. She has to put up the tax rate of the very rich and make corporations pay -- not just a share, but what they proportionally should, as they make on tax-dollars. Control the banks. Does she have the stomach for this? will she?
She has a good track record for smaller and woman's causes: women's rights, children's rights, workers' rights, taxes, immigration, for gun control, for ending the school to prison pipeline, she believes in global warming. Her hawkishness and pro-Israeli gov't policy is worrying She does not seem to have the temperament to overturn the last 40 years damage as (like Obama) she has participated in some of it, especially violent colonialism, the beginning of mass incarceration, the destruction of welfare (especially hard on women and children), but her record is one of socially progressive laws and programs within the US. She's got a tin ear but she won't ratchet up hate. She has principles, is an intelligent principled perceptive woman. When confronted with Trump three times, each time she beat back his rhetoric and exposed him as a dangerous dictatorship rapist-male. See Katha Pollit on why one should vote for Hillary Clinton.
I hope she will begin by putting Obama's nominee on the supreme court, not because I'm so desirous of a middle-of-the-road man politically but because Obama nominated him and he should have had his confirmation hearing long ago -- he is apparently a decent and intelligent man.
I will vote for her also because she is a woman. Reread Elaine Showalter's Pilloried Clinton. Alice Walker is a propos:
""Democratic Womanism"
You ask me why I smile
when you tell me you intend
in the coming national elections
to hold your nose
and vote for the lesser of two evils.
There are more than two evils out there,
is one reason I smile.
Another is that our old buddy Nostradamus
comes to mind, with his fearful
400 year old prophecy: that our world
and theirs too
(our "enemies" - lots of kids included there)
will end (by nuclear nakba or holocaust)
in our lifetime. Which makes the idea of elections
and the billions of dollars wasted on them
somewhat fatuous.
A Southerner of Color,
my people held the vote
very dear
while others, for centuries,
merely appeared to play
with it.
One thing I can assure
you of is this:
I will never betray such pure hearts
by voting for evil
even if it were microscopic
which, as you can see in any newscast
no matter the slant,
it is not.
I want something else;
a different system
entirely.
One not seen
on this earth
for thousands of years. If ever.
Democratic Womanism.
Notice how this word has "man" right in the middle of it?
That’s one reason I like it. He is right there, front and center. But he is surrounded.
I want to vote and work for a way of life
that honors the feminine;
a way that acknowledges
the theft of the wisdom
female and dark Mother leadership
might have provided our spaceship
all along.
I am not thinking
of a talking head
kind of gal:
happy to be mixing
it up
with the baddest
bad boys
on the planet
her eyes a slit
her mouth a zipper.
No, I am speaking of true
regime change.
Where women rise
to take their place
en masse
at the helm
of earth’s frail and failing ship;
where each thousand years
of our silence
is examined
with regret,
and the cruel manner in which our values
of compassion and kindness
have been ridiculed
and suppressed
brought to bear on the disaster
of the present time.
The past must be examined closely, I believe, before we can leave
it there.
I am thinking of Democratic, and, perhaps
Socialist, Womanism.
For who else knows so deeply
how to share but Mothers
and Grandmothers? Big sisters
and Aunts?
To love
and adore
both female and male?
Not to mention those in between.
To work at keeping
the entire community
fed, educated
and safe?
Democratic womanism,
Democratic Socialist
Womanism,
would have as its icons
such fierce warriors
for good as
Vandana Shiva
Aung San Suu Kyi,
Wangari Maathai
Harriet Tubman
Yoko Ono
Frida Kahlo
Angela Davis
& Barbara Lee:
With new ones always rising, wherever you look.
You are also on this list, but it is so long (Isis would appear midway) that I must stop or be unable to finish the poem! So just know I’ve stood you in a circle that includes Marian Wright Edelman, Amy Goodman, Sojourner Truth, Gloria Steinem and Mary McLeod Bethune. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, John Lennon and Howard Zinn are there. Happy to be surrounded!
There is no system
There is no system
now in place
that can change
the disastrous course
the Earth is on.
Who can doubt this?
The male leaders
of Earth
appear to have abandoned
their very senses
though most appear
to live now
entirely
in their heads.
They murder humans and other
animals
forests and rivers and mountains
every day
they are in office
and never seem
to notice it.
They eat and drink devastation.
Women of the world,
Women of the world,
Is this devastation Us?
Would we kill whole continents for oil
(or anything else)
rather than limit
the number of consumer offspring we produce
and learn how to make our own fire?
Democratic Womanism.
Democratic Socialist Womanism.
A system of governance
we can dream and imagine and build together. One that recognizes
at least six thousand years
of brutally enforced complicity
in the assassination
of Mother Earth, but foresees six thousand years
ahead of us when we will not submit.
What will we need? A hundred years
at least to plan: (five hundred will be handed us
gladly
when the planet is scared enough)
in which circles of women meet,
organize ourselves, and,
allied with men
brave enough to stand with women,
men brave enough to stand with women,
nurture our planet to a degree of health.
And without apology --
(impossible to make
a bigger mess than has been made already) --
devote ourselves, heedless of opposition,
to tirelessly serving and resuscitating Our Mother ship
and with gratitude
for Her care of us
worshipfully commit
to
rehabilitating it.
To sum up: Let us put Hillary Clinton into the white house but it's a small move -- without also voting democratic to give her a working majority in the house and senate! So let's do that too -- all liberal democratic people you can see or hope for .
And then we must see her offered solutions, what is her record and then distinguish what can she hope to do quickly and then over 4 years.
Two nights from now it won't be over; it will be beginning again to try to defeat what's being called Trumpism ...
Miss Drake