All posts by Mike Zonta

Asshole Monk Hogging Meditation Spot Under Waterfall For Whole Hour Now

Kuang S Falls, 30 miles from Luang Prabang, Laos

November 11, 2020 • TheOnion.com

WAKAYAMA, JAPAN—Expressing disbelief that their colleague had failed to notice the long line of practitioners stretching back to the temple, sources at Seiganto-Ji monastery confirmed Wednesday that an asshole monk has been hogging the best meditation spot under a nearby waterfall for a whole hour now. “Come on, buddy, we all know you don’t need more than 30 minutes to see the emptiness of the ego, especially under the most tranquil waterfall in the whole goddamn prefecture,” said Junior Priest Ryōgen Ichishima, adding that he had tried to cough politely, but the meditating jackass had just pretended he was too “blissed out” sitting in his full lotus position before the cascading water and mountainside scenery to even notice. “Well, don’t worry, pal. Time is a fucking illusion, so take as much of it drinking in the gorgeous scenery as you want. Hey, I’ll just drop off body and mind over here in the dusty corner of the meditation hall. Enjoy transcendence, you prick.” At press time, the infuriated Ichishima had announced his intention to give it another 15 minutes and then really show the careless fuck that life is suffering.

New Moon In Scorpio – Healing

by Astro Butterfly (astrobutterfly.com)

On November 15th, 2020, we have a New Moon in Scorpio. 

GOOD NEWS: This is one of the most auspicious New Moons of the year because it makes favorable aspects with Jupiter, Pluto, and Neptune. This New Moon is also a Super Moon and it is at 23° Scorpio

Unlike the previous New Moon which was very challenging (it was exactly square Saturn) the New Moon in Scorpio doesn’t have any negative aspects. What a relief! 

The New Moon in Scorpio is compassionate, supportive, and will give us the chance to regroup and rebound. 

To understand how the New Moon influences us, we not only look at the direct aspects the New Moon makes with other planets, but also at the ruler, or rulers of the New Moon. The rulers of the New Moon in Scorpio are Mars, the traditional ruler, and Pluto, the modern ruler.

Mars Goes Direct, Jupiter Is Conjunct Pluto

And it is VERY interesting what each of these two planets does at the time of this new New Moon. Mars turns direct on November 13th, 2 days before the New Moon.

This change in direction is very important. Mars has been retrograde since forever (more exactly, from September 9th, 2020) and when Mars finally goes direct, things WILL get unstuck. Plans WILL change. Outcomes WILL be nothing like what we expected them to be.  

The modern ruler of the New Moon, Pluto, is conjunct Jupiter. The Jupiter-Pluto conjunction occurs only once every 13 years, and on November 12th, 2020 we had the final conjunction of the cycle. This is another major milestone. 

Mars direct and Jupiter conjunct Pluto are extremely important transits which suggest that the upcoming Lunar Cycle (November 15th – December 13th) is super significant and will bring us events that will influence our lives profoundly. 

Let’s remind ourselves that the main purpose of a New Moon is to teach us about one of the 12 signs of the zodiac. This New Moon is in Scorpio, so this is that time of the year when all of us get to experience the energy of Scorpio. 

Scorpio – Still Waters

Scorpio is a water fixed sign. Water is fluid by definition – NOT fixed. Water flows, joins other streams, and seeks unity. Scorpio’s still waters are different, however. Since Scorpio is a fixed sign, Scorpio’s waters are lakes, ponds, aquariums and icebergs.

What’s beautiful about lakes and still waters is that they are more at one with their surroundings – they have a lot less change with longer life-cycles, than, for example, a waterfall, or a fast running river.

But still, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of still waters! Every little thing that is done does not go unnoticed and has consequences. If you’re in a lake, it’s not that you can just “jump ships” and leave everything behind. 

You continue living in that enclosed space, which you’ll eventually get to know better and better. Within the frame of the lake, Scorpio’s focus goes deeper, and deeper. With Scorpio, no stone is left unturned. Scorpio gets to the bottom of things. 

Scorpio is the opposite of Taurus. If Taurus is what we achieve as the result of our own efforts (that’s why Taurus is connected to money and finances), Scorpio is what we achieve with the help of others.

Taurus is an Earth, practical sign “what you see is what you get”. Scorpio is a water, emotional sign that focuses on what’s not obvious – yet, is vitally important. Scorpio brings clarity and finds hidden connections that no one else can see

Scorpio doesn’t shy away from problems. Scorpio doesn’t hide things under the carpet. Scorpio confronts them. The result? Unparalleled depth, clarity, strength and resilience. 

Together with Pisces, Scorpio is the most healing sign of the zodiac. Scorpio’s waters are clean, healing and nourishing because when we do confront our dark side and make peace with ourselves, the result is deep and profound healing. 

At the New Moon in Scorpio, we too, can get a glimpse of this energy.

Here are some keywords for the New Moon in Scorpio:

  • Healing by exposing the truth 
  • Reconciliation
  • Empathy and emotional depth
  • Learning to trust and share “what’s mine” with others
  • Clarity and laser-like focus “Now I know what I want”
  • Strength and resilience “What hasn’t killed me had made me stronger”

The New Moon in Scorpio will influence you more strongly if you have planets or angles in Scorpio. Even if you don’t have planets in Scorpio, the New Moon will still influence you because it will transit a particular house of your natal chart. 

If you want to learn how to read your natal chart, and how transits like the New Moon influence you, enroll in the Natal Chart Reading course while the doors are still open:

https://astrobutterfly/natal-chart-reading-course/

Astro Butterfly

Book: “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

by Christopher R. Browning 

Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.  

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work, with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. 

(Goodreads.com)

The Fall of Trump: On Presidents, Dictators, and Life After a Regime

Francisco Goldman Considers What Happens Next

By Francisco Goldman (lithub.com)

November 12, 2020

It was 1986, late afternoon and snowing pretty heavily in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and people were pouring out onto Eastern Parkway, charging up and down through the snow in their long winter coats, shouting with joy and triumph, some carrying and waving half blue-half red banners, the flag of Haiti. The neighborhood, back then, was a center of New York’s Haitian community; in the massive apartment building on the avenue that I was living in, many of our neighbors were Haitian. The date must have been February 7, the day the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier fled into exile, ending a family  stranglehold of the country that had spanned thirty years. Rather than via CNN’s Magic Wall, the news would have reached them by long distance telephone calls, or over the radio, triggering what somehow could only be expressed outside on the avenue, with other people. I went out and ran and jumped around in the snow too.

That memory came back to me last Saturday, when the networks finally called our election, and so many—on social media or the news shows, friends texting—were comparing the jubilant celebrations filling the streets of American cities to the fall of a dictatorship, calling up media images of scenes of similar outbursts, perhaps with statues being toppled, images of The Wall swarmed. Watching on television at home in Mexico City, and looking at photos and videos sent by friends in New York and Washington who were taking part, I ached to be there. (Even Azalea, our two-year-old daughter, had caught the spirit, lifting her arms into the air, gleefully chanting her new children’s rhyme, “Joe Biden Joe Biden.”)

Likewise, the day before, on Friday, when Trump delivered his televised rant from the White House, insisting that he’d won the election and won it easily, alleging a vast conspiracy of electoral fraud—mostly centered in American cities with large black populations, of course—it seemed like a first reaction of many, myself included, once we’d shaken off the initial shock, was to compare Trump to a dictator. Like one of those stereotypical strongmen derived from certain Latin American, Caribbean and African novels, or cartoonishly outlandishly satiric movies: deranged, paranoid, a monster of violent ego and autosuggestion, but sinister and dangerous, blustering mendacity and buffoonery an essential part of his show, a deception, or maybe not a deception (maybe he really is that fucking crazy).

I thought of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the most notorious of the string of military dictators that ruled Guatemala for thirty-plus years following the 1954 coup against that country’s last democratically elected president. Guatemala is my mother’s country, but I’ve spent parts of my life there, including much of the 1980s, a decade during which Ríos Montt headed the military junta for two years. Ríos Montt, an Evangelical Christian in a mostly Catholic country, was regarded as divinely anointed, a “chosen one,” by his fervent followers. During his years in power, the Guatemalan military waged a campaign, against the rural Maya especially, of relentless massacres and atrocities, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. When 200,000 attended a Protestant gathering that Ríos Montt presided over, the dictator boasted that not even the Pope would draw as big a crowd when he visited Guatemala. On Sundays Ríos Montt gave television sermons on morality. “The guy who has a gun should be shot, not assassinated,” was the kind of moral edification he proffered. In the Guatemala City cemetery, young delinquents were being rounded-up and, without court trials, executed by firing squad.

VIDEO FROM LIT HUB:

Arundhati Roy: “We Need a Reckoning”

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People don’t always need to see a tyrant fall, to be ousted, to realize that our hopes of a better world have finally been realized, triggering an ecstatic outburst.  Sometimes a democratic election—perhaps even regardless of who wins it—in itself can be a celebration, as much a release as any statue-toppling street carnival, though it can also be like the final sacred destination of a pilgrimage, a long line, stretching for city blocks and village squares, of pilgrims who’ve finally arrived. An election can be at least as much an expression of hope and optimism as what follows the toppling of a demagogue or tyrant. That was certainly the case during the Guatemalan presidential in the summer of 1986, when Guatemalans finally got to elect a civilian president for the first time in over thirty years, though the country’s long civil war wouldn’t formally end for another decade. It’s the longest I’ve ever gone without sleeping, two nights and three days, catching some occasional naps in the car as, with a couple of journalist friends, we tried to cover as much of the country as we could, from the city to Maya villages still shrouded by war and military repression, out to Puerto Barrios, on the Atlantic Coast.Normal people need to feel that their lives are normal and acceptably good even when they are living in the shadow of human cruelty and injustice.

Everywhere we went we found excitement, and hope for an end to terror, death, and injustice, and for the start of a new era, during which Guatemala would get to be a normal country, one with problems, of course, its staggering poverty and inequality, but at peace, with some degree of justice at least, and where citizens would have a voice, and a chance to make things better, because they got to vote for their government. The Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo won the election. He frequently remarked that as president he would possess only “70 percent” of the political power; he meant that the military and its allies would retain the rest. When my friend Jean-Marie Simon interviewed him in the National Palace, he pointed to a nearby potted plant, suggesting that an eavesdropping device was planted there, that the National Palace wasn’t a place that he, the president, was free to converse. Seventy percent was wildly optimistic; whatever it actually was—25 percent?—amounted in reality to almost nothing. The military had only agreed to elections because the dictatorship’s human rights violations had made it a pariah state; the brutal war had essentially been won, and now they wanted, for obvious economic reasons, to be accepted by the community of nations.

In many ways, the dictatorship in Guatemala has never ended. The Cold War years, when the military and right-wing economic elites held power through complicity with the CIA, evolved into a military and political narco-kleptocracy. The cause of democracy and justice had some successes in the ensuing years, but under the last exceedingly corrupt government, fiercely supported by the Trump Administration, those forces were routed, driven from the country, crushed. So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim would say.

Trump isn’t a dictator, of course. He just acts like and reminds us of a dictator. Trump is like a dictator. A sub-headline in the November 10th New York Times read: “President Trump’s iron grip on his party has inspired love for him among many Republican lawmakers and fear in others.” Usually we think of dictators—“Dear Leader”—inspiring love and fear with their iron grip, not democratically-elected leaders. Trump’s circle of advisors, his supporters in government, act like the advisors and supporters in a classic dictatorship, utterly subservient, but also conniving and corrupt sycophants, fattening off the dictator’s delusions and lies. His most fanatical followers remind us of the fanatical followers of a dictator, worshipful, credulous of every lie, fevered by his rhetorical poison, because every dictatorship presumes a pact with violence and hatred of an enemy that needs to be stigmatized, subjugated, defended against, crushed. Otherwise, there would be no need for a dictator, or a dictator-like president, there would merely be an opposition, with its competing vision and ideas about how to govern; after an election, the winner would win, the loser would accept his or her defeat, and peace and civic seriousness, an essentially agreed upon common public reality, would reign. Obviously that’s not even close to what is happening in the United States of American today.

One of the reasons that Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was because he stood up to the president, refusing to invoke the Insurrection Act to send American military troops into the streets to repress this summer’s Black Lives Matter-led protests. Imagine the protests we’ll see in the streets if Trump succeeds in deploying his power, if cowed and servile Trump-appointed judges overturn the election on false charges of fraud. Presumably his new Secretary of Defense—sure to be a yes man, Esper has already warned—would authorize the Insurrection Act. Now imagine the ensuing bloodshed in our streets. Does anyone believe that Trump’s most feverish supporters, the most extreme of whom like to parade military trappings and weapons of war even when they gather outside centers where votes are being counted, are not eager to see that happen, or that they wouldn’t swell with a sated righteousness if it did?

*

The fall of a dictator, the end of a dictatorship, is a release from suffering, fear, hopelessness, that’s why people flood into the streets to celebrate the way they do. The suffering is going to stop now, and so is the fear; a heavy darkness is dissipating, and that’s why we practically feel like we’re floating, and need to dance and raise a liberated clamor in the streets. The smothering pollution of lies and hate is lifting, and it’s our joy that is helping to drive it away. What we saw in the streets of so many American cities on Saturday was a genuine release. These aren’t really emotions that can be faked. (Did Republican voters break into such spontaneous outpourings of joy when Trump was elected to succeed Barack Obama? Not that I recall. No doubt they felt vindicated, now that their own chosen one, representing their own values and desires, would be running the country.  But even Trump’s inaugural crowd was famously subdued. The closest Trumpian expression of carnivalesque public expression came months later, when the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis held their Charlottesville tiki torch parade.)The aftereffects of an evil dictatorship are hard to get rid of, to scrub clean. It usually involves a steadfast struggle, and justice is really the only remedy.

Such pivotal moments don’t inevitably lead to disappointment and disillusion, even if they usually do. But sometimes, almost instantly, they mark the start of a true change for the better. I was there the night, in 1997, that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas became the first democratically elected mayor of the Distrito Federal, or Mexico City. Before that the Mexican president appointed the mayor, who, like the president, was always from the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution, the PRI, which ruled Mexico “with an iron grip” for seventy years. The Perfect Dictatorship, Mario Vargas Llosa memorably termed the PRI, in part for their mastery of “demonstration elections” that were always rigged so that the ruling party would win while providing the veneer, the illusion, of a functioning democracy.

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas headed an opposition center-left party and his victory was the first breaching of that “perfect dictatorship”—three years later the PRI would finally lose a presidential election too, this time to the candidate of a right-wing party—but that night the streets of Mexico City overflowed with jubilation. Yellow PRD banners were everywhere, streaming from the honking cars circling the Angel of Independence monument; my friends and I went that night from riotous party to party in homes thrown open to strangers. At the time Mexico City was notorious for being one of the most dangerous and corrupt cities in the world; rife with violent insecurity, kidnappings, hold-ups, car-jackings, rampant sexual abuse, practically bankrupt, and its citizens, if they could afford to, were fleeing to the provinces.

Under Cárdenas and a succession of left-leaning mayors, Mexico City became an oasis of progressive reform; while much of the country—ravaged by the narco war and the corruption that remains the Perfect Dictatorship’s seemingly ineradicable legacy—grew ever more violent under succeeding national governments, including the disastrous PRI restoration of 2012-18, Mexico City became much safer, with a resilient and feisty civic spirt that made it a much better place to live, and transformed it into a cosmopolitan world city. By standing apart from the way the rest of Mexico has been governed, perhaps CDMX points the way to a better national future? (The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is a former mayor of the capitol; but in my opinion the two most promising potential future presidents, younger than AMLO but from the same left-center party, are Marcelo Ebrard, also a past mayor, and the current one, Claudia Sheinbaum.)

*

Guatemalans often strike outsiders, and even themselves, as a taciturn, dour, mistrustful people, and those deformations of character are usually attributed to decades of living under repressive dictatorships; but those same fearsome pressures also account for the chapines’ defiant black humor, and the incredible warmth, loyalty and generosity of their spirits, at least once you’ve won their trust; I can tell you that there are no better friends on the planet.

During my first visits to Chile, I was struck by how sour, testy, closed-off older people seemed to be in that country—it made sense to me that Chile has more pharmacies per capita than any other country in Latin America, if not the world—compared to the younger people, who seemed just the opposite, friendly, open, charming and funny, as well as free-spirited and rebellious. My good friend, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, has written brilliantly and movingly about the strange sense of distance that separates the generations of Chileans who’d lived to survive as adults, working, raising families, under the decades-long Pinochet dictatorship, the corrosive moral compromises so many of them were forced to accept as a consequence, the relentless grind and drama of daily fear and humiliating conformity they lived with, as opposed to the generations that at most witnessed the dictatorship from the vantage point of children, mostly sheltered from those fears, pressures, and inner struggles.And we are supposed to just forgive that? It’s time for Americans to come together, so let’s not talk about the family separations on the border anymore.

In Guatemala, including around my own family, I was always noticing how people normalize their acquiescence to and silent complicity with horror. People don’t want to acknowledge, even to themselves, that they are being debased; they greatly resent anyone judging them as morally deficient because they, in order to live their lives, and keep their families safe, have had to go along with evil. They are right to resent it, especially when such judgments comes from people who haven’t had to endure what they have! Normal people need to feel that their lives are normal and acceptably good even when they are living in the shadow of human cruelty and injustice, of such murderous evil that, were they ever to act or speak out too emphatically against it, could cost them, and their family, everything. I love my middle-class Guatemalan family and learned to live with their conformity, their discomforted silences about all that I—an American, after all—was free to rail against, privately, and even in print.

There’s another side to this: people who need to feel that they were right in supporting the dictatorship, whatever its crimes. These are the people who to this day, decades after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, still revile any even slightly liberal person as a Communist. They are everywhere in Guatemala, though especially among the rich and powerful, going around even now in 2020 menacingly quacking, Communist Communist Communist!

*

It takes many years for a dictatorship, or even existence borne under a demagogic president who acts like a dictator, to finally damage the human spirit in the ways I’ve been describing. What would happen in the United States if Trump had been given another term to go on dismantling and subverting our democratic institutions in the way he has been, and now, unrestrained, probably even more radically and punishingly than before? The foundational rhythm to which Trumps moves his followers is cruelty. Racial cruelty, cruelty against immigrants from poor (“shithole”) countries, manifold cruelty against women, cruelty against anyone who is not like the people Trump and Trumpians approve of. Trump’s America dances and marches to cruelty, derision, mockery. Lies are his weapons in buttressing and justifying his various cruelties.

Evil dictator, that’s a normal collocation, evil and dictator. We don’t easily say, Evil president. It drags back on the tongue. The words aren’t supposed to go together. Our country elected him, how can he be evil? If he’s evil, does that mean we’re evil too? But, thank God, he’s not a dictator, and, at least now, this second time, we didn’t elect him, we dodged that bullet.

And so now we need to come together, Joe Biden and so many others are saying. Come together Americans, it’s the new consensus. Forgive and come together with people who disagree with us about what should be done about the economy, NATO, the Covid pandemic, and so on, even come together with those who don’t believe in climate change! But, of course, that’s feasible, a functioning democratic government includes the possibility that even parties holding extremely divergent opinions on the most crucial issues can somehow find a way to move forward. I can “forgive” someone for holding a view I disagree with, that I even detest, on any of those issues, and would expect the same in return. Our side just has to argue and persuade better, I suppose that’s what I tell myself in these circumstances.

But how are we supposed to forgive evil? How do you compromise with racism? It’s not possible to reach a half-way point of common agreement on racism. Or on denigrating and punishing immigrants. Or on unimaginable cruelty to children, carried out in our name.

It’s hard for a society to rid itself of the effects of an evil dictatorship, I’ve seen so many try and fail. Some of these effects can be institutional—in Chile, for example, the Pinochet dictatorship survives through a constitution absurdly contorted in such a way as to guarantee to right-wing parties an outsized share of power in any government, and through the extant, despised, repressive Pinochet-era militarized police colloquially known as “Los Pacos.” A decade of non-stop protests by students and other young people, especially, seems now finally to have led to the chance to write a new Chilean constitution. Maybe that will sweep away the other remaining vestiges of Pinochetism that survive, whether institutional or embedded in human spirits.But how are we supposed to forgive evil? How do you compromise with racism? It’s not possible to reach a half-way point of common agreement on racism.

In Guatemala, after peace negotiations put an end to its three-decade long internal war, with a blanket amnesty for human rights crime, the victors—the army, the rich, the establishment political parties—called for forgiveness. It’s time to heal. Our long nightmare has ended. Forget the past and forgive. But the Catholic Church’s preeminent human rights leader, Bishop Juan Gerardi, knew that really there can’t be forgiveness without some accountability, without justice. Standing up for that principle cost him his life. He was bludgeoned to death in his parish house garage days after presiding over the release of a Catholic Church-sponsored human rights report that exposed military officers to possible war crimes trials. In Guatemala, despite some victories, despite its at times laughable democratic facade, the only haphazardly disguised iron grip of dictatorship survives.

Of course the United States has committed horrible crimes “in our names” before Trump. For years, when the US was directly supporting the military dictatorship and the slaughter of civilians in Guatemala, few things tore at me as much as the indifference of US citizens to the role of their government in these crimes which were partly enabled by their tax dollars, their silence nearly as painful and infuriating as conscious, implicit support. People could name many other countries where the same or maybe even worse has been done “in our name.” Our presidents and governments always have their justifications, ludicrous and exaggerated as they often are. We’re fighting Communism, Islamic terrorism, we’re keeping our country safe. Such are the disagreeable responsibilities of being an imperial power. Would you rather be ruled by Russia, China, a caliphate? Out of sight, out of mind, that’s certainly a big part of why people go along too.

Trump’s “Muslim ban” was carried out in our name. So was the abrogation of long held laws granting migrants fleeing lethally dangerous circumstances to petition for political asylum. The child-separation policy on our southern border was also carried out in our name. Families who’d arrived at the border, mostly from Central America, seeking asylum, were often separated, the children, including infants, taken from their parents, who were sometimes deported, while the children were infamously even “kept in cages.” All done in our name. There was nothing about the child-separation policy that was essential, or strategically sound, for putting a stop to illegal immigration. It was pure cruelty. Contempt for poor migrants, not just a lack of respect for the sacred dignity of their family units, but an active, aggressive policy to cause suffering, to do harm, to abuse and traumatize children. No other of the Trump administration crimes carried out in the name of the American people so befouled us.

And we are supposed to just forgive that? It’s time for Americans to come together, so let’s not talk about the family separations on the border anymore. Except only yesterday it was revealed that we now know that 666 of the separated children have not been reunited with their parents, and that those parents cannot be found.

In her classic book about the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, and its disappearances of “subversives” and secret prisons, Lexicon of Terror, Marguerite Feitlowitz wrote, “The regime’s depravity reached its outer limit with pregnant detainees.” The Trump regime’s depravity reached its outer limit with what it did to the children of those detained migrants.

The Argentine dictatorship had a policy of keeping those pregnant detainees alive until they could give birth in secret birthing wards. Afterwards, the mothers would be murdered, and the children were secretly given away for adoption, usually to childless supporters of the dictatorship. The children of detained subversives were regarded by the dictatorship as “seeds of the tree of evil” that needed to be “replanted” in healthy soil. Ever since the fall of the Argentine dictatorship, Argentinian society has been reckoning with the repercussions of those crimes.

The group known as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have relentlessly searched for the missing offspring of their own disappeared children. Of the approximately 500 children believed to have been taken in that way, the Grandmothers have managed to identify and recover 130, restoring to them their original identities, at least. Argentina is one of the countries that has been most successful in bringing the criminals of the former dictatorship to justice. But it took longer to hold members of the former military junta and their accomplices accountable for their “systemic plan” to steal babies.

Back in 2011, when I was in Buenos Aires reporting on another case involving the Grandmothers and missing children, I attended some sessions of the trial being conducted in the enormous, chilly and bleak federal courthouse on Avenida Comodoro Py. On the left side of the courtroom, three groups of prosecution attorneys, including one from the Grandmothers, sat at their own tables facing the tribune of judges; the defense sat on the right, and behind them, in a sort of box of pews, sat the accused military men, including former junta leader General Jorge Rafael Videla; some of the former military men had been brought to the trial from prison, where they were already serving sentences for other crimes of the dictatorship. Separated from the courtroom by a high wall of bulletproof glass were two areas for the public, one atop the other. Upstairs was reserved for relatives and supporters of the defense. Journalists could sit downstairs with other spectators.

That day I listened to a witness, a former physician, testify about how the illegally detained women were brought to give birth in a small epidemiological area in a military hospital. Civilian physicians participated in the secret births. Newborns were entered as NN—no name—in the official birth ledger; the secret-prisoner-mothers were NNs too. A nervous woman in late middle age, in bulky sweater and a thick white wool scarf, who testified that same day was Sister Felisa, from a Franciscan order of nuns who’d worked at the hospital until 1983. She served meals to patients, and managed a dispensary where soldiers received and exchanged their bed linens. In 2007, when the Grandmothers had first called her to testify, she’d spoken of being told to write down NN in her ledger for bed linens handed out to people with “no name,” but now she told the court that she didn’t remember that. “I ask you to think back now,” said Judge María del Carmen Roqueta. “Why did they use NN? Who could those people be, who could not be named?” “I don’t know, doctora,” answered the nun, in her timorous manner.

In 2007, Sister Felisa had vividly described her encounter with three small children who’d turned up in a corner of the hospital one night in 1976, who the Croatian Mother Superior had ordered her to feed, but now she insisted that she didn’t remember those children either. Incredulously, Judge Roqueta read Sister Felisa’s 2007 testimony back to her. There had been a boy of about six, who was the cousin of the two younger children, another boy of about four and his little sister, who the nun had guessed was about two. The little girl was crying for her mother, the nun had testified, and the older boy had told the girl that her parents “aren’t here anymore.” Their parents, he’d told the nun, had hidden them all under a bed, and thrown a mattress over the little girl. This had apparently occurred on the night the parents had been abducted by the military; afterward, the children, separated from their parents, had been brought to the military hospital. And now Sister Felisa didn’t remember that? No, doctora, she did not remember.

“You were never told what happened to the three children?” Judge Roqueta asked, her voice exasperatedly rising. “You never wanted to know what happened to them?” The judge demanded, “Do you understand that you are testifying in a federal court? Has someone pressured you? Are you under a threat? Do you want us to clear the courtroom so that you can speak?” The nun, grinning nervously, said no.

Later, during the recess, I approached a group of lawyers huddled in the grimy vestibule outside the courtroom—all of them young, scruffy, in dark suits, looking almost like a gaggle of English public school boys—and asked, “So how could Sister Felisa have remembered so much in 2007, and nothing now?” A tall, gangly young lawyer with a shock of black hair falling over his forehead, said, “Because one of those two times she was lying.” It was obvious that he thought she’d been lying today. A man thought to be Sister Felisa’s lawyer had attended the trial that day TOO, he explained. The man had identified himself as a lawyer, and had arrived with two other nuns and they’d sat upstairs, and he’d stared at Sister Felisa throughout her testimony that day.

So even now the dictatorship survived in that nearly ghostly manner, in the person of that man, whoever he was, who’d come to stare from the balcony at Sister Felisa, delivering a silent message, intimidating her into retracting her testimony.

*

The aftereffects of an evil dictatorship are hard to get rid of, to scrub clean. It usually involves a steadfast struggle, and justice is really the only remedy. A post-dictatorship never manages to bring everybody who might deserve it to trial, I’ve learned, but it’s crucial that at least some of the official evildoers, hopefully the most prominent, be held to account. That means everything.

I try to picture Stephen Miller, allegedly the main architect of Trump’s child separation policy, standing in the defendant’s box instead of the Argentine former military men, in that bleak, chilly courtroom. I picture Trump standing alongside him. Up on the stand someone is testifying, perhaps a woman who worked in one of the ICE migrant detention centers on the border. She is white, and both she and her husband, a border patrolman, worked for ICE. She had earlier described for investigators an incriminating act she’d witnessed, something done to a Guatemalan child separated from her parents. Can she repeat that testimony now for the court? Hesitantly, she raises her eyes to the second balcony. Is the evil presidency, some incarnation of “the evil done in our name,” still somehow present in that courtroom? Or can we be at least symbolically cleansed of that stain.

Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman is the author of Say Her Name (2011), winner of the Prix Femina Etranger, and of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle 2014, was awarded the Premio Azul in Canada. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens was awarded the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including The Pen/Faulkner and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award. The Art of Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award and The WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. In December, 2020, the documentary film of that book will be shown on HBO. He has received a Cullman Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim, a Berlin Prize, and was a 2018-19 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was awarded a 2018 PEN Mexico Award for Literary Excellence. He co-directs the Premio Aura Estrada, and teaches one semester a year at Trinity College, in Hartford, CT. His work has appeared in The New YorkerHarper’s,The New York Times, The Believer, and numerous other publications. Monkey Boy, his latest novel, will be published in 2021. Francisco lives with his wife Jove and their daughter Azalea in Mexico City.

“More of an Exorcism Than an Election”: Priya Gopal on What Biden Win Means for Britain & Ireland

(DemocracyNow.org) November 12, 2020: U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been one of President Trump’s closest international allies. How will he adapt to working with a Biden administration? Cambridge professor Priya Gopal says Johnson was clearly betting on a Trump reelection, especially amid Britain’s exit from the European Union. “I think they were certainly hoping that there would be a Trump victory,” says Gopal. “Brexit and Trump, as Trump quite correctly recognized, are very deeply in sync.”

How to be fearless in the face of authoritarianism

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya|TEDWomen 2020 (ted.com)

How do you stand up to authoritarianism? And what does it mean to be “fearless”? In this powerful talk, housewife-turned-politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya describes her unlikely bid to defeat Belarus’s long-time autocratic leader in the nation’s 2020 presidential election. Painting a vivid picture of how small acts of defiance flourished into massive, peaceful demonstrations, she shares a beautiful meditation on the link between fearlessness and freedom, reminding us that we all have what it takes to stand up to injustice — we just need to do it together.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya · PoliticianSviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is the leader of democratic Belarus.

Your Horoscopes — Week Of November 10, 2020

November 10, 2020 • (TheOnion.com)

Aries | March 21 to April 19

Your marriage will soon erode to the point where you’ll be sorely tempted to turn her in for the reward money.

Taurus | April 20 to May 20

The stars find that the time has come for you to put away childish things. Yes, that includes your three small children.

Gemini | May 21 to June 20

If there is more to life than fishing, you don’t want to know what it is. This will help explain your death from malnutrition and dehydration next week.

Cancer | June 21 to July 22

You will be shocked to learn that, due to a legal fluke, your long-term houseguest is now your common-law wife.

Leo | July 23 to Aug. 22

Try as you might, you will not be able to improve your mediocre putting game. Gee, some big fucking problems you got, asshole.

Virgo | Aug. 23 to Sept. 22

After 14 long years, you will be admitted to the Baseball Hall Of Fame when you finally come up with the $11.50 admission price.

Libra | Sept. 23 to Oct. 22

Start childproofing your house now, as a pack of bloodthirsty feral children is headed your way.

Scorpio | Oct. 23 to Nov. 21

It’s true that secret agents have crossed international borders with microfilm hidden in their colons, but you should’ve known better than to try it with three liters of duty-free scotch.

Sagittarius | Nov. 22 to Dec. 21

You never thought anything could ever replace sex in your life, but that was before you tried pouring yourself a nice stiff drink, putting on some music, and having sex.

Capricorn | Dec. 22 to Jan. 19

Financial experts know that a number of factors are to blame for the downturn, but they won’t be able to shake the hunch that it was all your fault somehow.

Aquarius | Jan. 20 to Feb. 18

Your uniqueness as a human being is threatened when you find a person who enjoys ham just as much as you do.

Pisces | Feb. 19 to March 20

No matter how bad things get, or how hopeless life may seem, you can always go home again and take it out on your family.

“The Envy of the World”: Still No Functioning Democracy Here

November 11, 2020 (counterpunch.org)

BY PAUL STREET

Photograph Source: Derek Simeone – CC BY 2.0

Those who own the country ought to govern it. – John Jay

You have owners. – George Carlin

Nobody Said Biden’s Name

I walked up to Chicago’s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday night. Within four blocks of the hated structure, both sides of the street were jammed with cars full of young LatinX, Black, and white folks honking their horns, hanging out car windows, waving, roaring their engines, playing YG’s chart-topping hit “(FTD) Fuck Donald Trump,” and aiming bird flips at the Trump building. Young people of all races and ethnicities danced on all four corners of Michigan and Wacker.

It was one Hell of a celebration. As well it should have been. Donald Trump is a vicious, pandemic-spreading white-supremacist, eco-exterminist, uber-narcissist, and instinctual fascist who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” A second Trump term would be a tragedy from which the nation and world might never recover.

Anyone on the “the left” who wouldn’t like to see Trump removed from the world’s most dangerous job is morally and intellectually comatose.

I say “like to see” because Trump is challenging the election with the backing of much if not most of the Republican Party. A Trump coup seems like a bridge too far to me but so did a Trump presidency and I see little basis for confidence in the supposed “resilience” of America’s “democratic” and constitutional institutions and values in light of recent history. I’ll believe the orange beast is out the door when he gets flown off the White House Lawn for the final time.

Contrary to news broadcasters who called the demonstrators “Biden supporters,” there were few Biden-Harris signs on display. There were lots American flags, Mexican national flags, and Black Lives Matter banners.

I didn’t hear one person say Biden’s name. Not one.

“Stop Counting”

Assuming he is ushered out of power next year (sooner would be better), the wannabe fascist dictator Donald Trump will be remembered, among other terrible things, as the one-term president who wanted the country to stop counting. Stop counting COVID-19 cases and deaths Americans needed to keep track of because they made him look bad. Stop counting poor and nonwhite people in the U.S Census because completing a credible count and categorization of the populace would hurt the white-nationalist agenda. Stop counting the disastrous amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And, of course, stop counting the millions of mail-in ballots required by the pandemic he spread.

How pathetic. A letter writer in last Saturday’s New York Times puts it very well: “Trump’s early claim of a victory on the night of the election and his news conference Thursday night reminded me of playing Candy Land with my 5-year-old nephew. It only counts if he wins and forget about the rules. If disappointment ensues, the whole board will be flipped upside down. Is this what the United States of America has come to? When is the intervention?” (NYT, November 7, 2020, A18).

“We Are Still in a Very Dangerous Moment”

When indeed. The orange-brushed authoritarian man-child will never willingly concede. As his psychologist niece Mary Trump warned and has been saying the last few days, acknowledging defeat is simply not in Trump’s make-up. The Narcissist-in-Chief is incapable of humility.

Like the fact that 71 million people voted to give this lethal fascist lunatic a second term, this nothing to laugh about. “He still has the power of the presidency for 76 days and we need to be prepared for anything that he might have in mind,” Ms. Trump told an interviewer five days ago.” If he thinks he’s going down, he’s going to try to take the rest of us with him.” Trump is engaged in “an attempted coup. “We can’t be delicate about this. We need to be very straightforward about what’s going on here,” Ms. Trump said.

Trump and his dead-enders – his two demented sons, his personal attorney general William Barr, fascist propagandists Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, the re-installed Nazi Senator Lindsey Graham et al. – are apparently playing along with his effort to use Republifascist control of the Supreme Court and some state legislatures to reverse the will of the voters. Along the way, Trump is trying to spark his hard-core Amerikaner base – including the near-third of U.S. citizens who would welcome a right-wing military dictatorship in the U.S. – to rush into the streets and wage “cival war” on the “radical Left Democrats.”

On Tuesday, the nefarious white nationalist neo-McCarthyite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) endorsed Trump’s refusal to concede. The Republifascist Party is aligning with the final madness of their Dear Leader, who has 70% (!) of the nation’s Republicans behind his baseless claim that Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

Axios’s Alayna Treen reported Monday that “Trump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead — plus hold campaign-style rallies — in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.”

“These actions could amount to inciting insurrection,” a friend writes me: “He’s not done, and we are still in a very dangerous moment.”

“God Help Us”: Fired for Failing to Crush Civil Rights Protest with Federal Troops

Consistent with these warnings, Trump on Monday Twitter-“terminated” Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Trump nearly fired Esper last June 3rd for publicly contradicting the fascistic president over the possible activation of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military units against protests in Washington and other cities. Esper said the circumstances did not merit use of the act, which Trump had threatened to invoke two days earlier. It was widely understood in Washington that Esper would resign before he would agree to deploy U.S. troops against U.S. citizens protesting the theft of the 2020 presidential election.

It is an extraordinary move for a president to fire his Defense Secretary just days after losing an election. Esper’s replacement, Christopher C. Miller, is head of the National Counterterrorism Center. It is reasonable to guess that Miller is a racist Trump-fellator who will be more amenable to using military personnel to quash “civil unrest.”

The Esper firing could just be payback for his earlier public contradiction of Trump and his determination to move ahead with stripping of Confederate names from U.S. military bases. Or it could be about something more ominous.

You never really know with a frenzied, power-mad maniac like Trump.

Esper offered some interesting commentary to Military Times on his potential firing just days before it occurred: “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”

“A System of Governance That’s Been the Envy of the World” for 240 Years

With the December 8th “safe harbor” deadline for states to choose Electoral College electors just one month away, millions of Americans should prepare to stop all paid work and take to the streets, town plazas, public squares, and central cities and highways to make it clear to the American ruling class that this nation will be ungovernable and unprofitable if the terrible tangerine-tinted, tiny-fingered, Twitter-tantruming tyrant insists on trying to stay in office past his formal expiration. (My own preference is for Trump and Pence to be forced out now, before the orange monstrosity can do any more damage).

Don’t look for Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden, a died-in-the-wool defender of the status quo, or any of his fellow corporate and imperialist Democrats, to spark or endorse such mass action. Keeping the people off the streets is very much at the heart of their core institutional and ideological mission. The corporate-captive Democrats are about conciliation, pacification, and inauthentic opposition.

Last Thursday night, the soon-to-be President Elect told Americans to cool their jets while Trump tried to invalidate the election. “Democracy’s sometimes messy,” Biden said, in words that could easily (and may well) have been written by Barack Obama or one of Obama’s speechwriters[1]“It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.” (NYT, November 6, 2020, A1)

What an offensive and idiotic comment – nothing new for Joe Biden, who said earlier this year that Trump was “America’s first racist president.” There’s little real and functioning “democracy” in the United States. And there was never supposed to be as far as the U.S. Founders were concerned “more than 240 years” ago. Popular self-governance, the rule of the people, was the last thing the new nation’s aristo-republican slave-owner, merchant capitalist, and publicist rulers wanted to see break out in their “infant republic.” Popular sovereignty was the Founders’ nightmare, a threat to their wealth and proper class rule in their militantly propertarian world view. Leading Constitution advocate John Jay put it very well: “those who own the country ought to govern it.” The new nation’s leading intellectuals and politicians were very explicit about this in The Federalist Papers and in the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, where the framers constructed a government dedicated to keeping We the People at bay.

The openly anti-democratic Electoral College, required to appease southern slaveowners, was just one of the many ways in which the Founders’ holy parchment was designed to check the power of the people. Under its openly absurd reign, Americans still don’t elect their president through a national popular vote and presidential elections come down to winner-take-all Elector slate contests in a small number of contested states. Constitutionally speaking, by the way state governments are technically free to send to Elector slates that contradict the popular presidential vote in their jurisdictions (more on this below).

How enviable.

“It’s Like You Want to Stop People from Voting”

New York Times editorial published last Saturday reflected on the curious difficulty of getting one’s tally properly taken and tabulated under Biden’s “system of governance that has been the envy of the world” for 240 years:

“From the endless lines to the pre-election legal wrangling to the president’s constant effort to undermine the process, every ballot cast this year was a leap of faith: Would it get there in time? Would it get there at all? Would they try to toss it out because you voted from a car? Would they throw it out because you signed your name carelessly? Would judges be called upon to alter the mail-in deadline after the election had already begun? Would you ever be able to find the one drop-box in your sprawling county? And, after all that, would anyone believe the count, anyway? All of this uncertainty is unworthy of the ‘world’s oldest democracy.’ American elections are broken, and because the legitimacy of the entire political system rests upon our votes, their brokenness mars every other part of our democracy” (NYT, November 7, 2020, A18).

A short Times video on “How U.S. Elections Look Abroad” showed people from other nations reacting to various pathetic aspects of the United States’ bizarre and byzantine voting system(s)” “From gerrymandering to voter roll purges,” the Times reported, “we showed people around the world how the American system works. It didn’t go well.” The foreign interview subjects shook their heads and rolled their eyes in disbelief over numerous voting rules and practices that plague elections in the nation that calls itself the homeland and headquarters of democracy: partisan gerrymandering, replete with bizarre “Jackson Pollack” voting districts; absurd voter registration deadlines; absurdly low voter registration; rampant non-voting; voter purging; absurdly long lines at minority polling places; the failure to make elections a national holiday and to otherwise make voting convenient; discriminatory and unnecessary voter ID laws; felony disenfranchisement laws and more.

The judgement of a New Zealander: the American voting regime “is just not acceptable in a democratic country.” A woman from India said, “it’s like you want to stop people from voting.”

That’s not exactly “the envy of the world.” More like global laughingstock. Or worse.

More Fully Constitutional Absurdity

Sadly, the Times video and editorial said nothing about the Electoral College, the systematic disablement of third and fourth parties, and the United States’ preposterous and only plutocratic campaign finance laws and (see below) rulings. Even if voting itself was made more suitable, practical, and efficient in the U.S, these authoritarian characteristics of America’s supposedly grand “system of governance” would continue to badly dilute the supposedly sacred power of the American ballot.

1 State with 40 Million People and 2 U.S. Senators v. 22 States with 37 Million People and 44 U.S. Senators

Another anti-democratic legacy of the Founders’ supposedly glorious “system of governance” ignored by the Times video and editorial is the assignment of two U.S. Senators to every state regardless of state population size. California has nearly 40 million people. Wyoming is home to less than 600,000 citizens. Both have 2 U.S. Senators – a brazen violation of the elementary democratic principle of one-person one vote. As the Atlantic noted last year, “Today the voting power of a citizen in Wyoming, the smallest state in terms of population, is about 67 times that of a citizen in the largest state of California, and the disparities among the states are only increasing.” The nation’s 22 least populous states are home to roughly 37 million people and 44 U.S. Senators. On top of this grotesque absurdity (from a democratic, one person, one vote perspective), neither the U.S. taxpaying province of Puerto Rico (more populous than 20 U.S. states!) nor the U.S.-taxpaying District of Columbia (home to a total population greater than that of 2 U.S. states – Wyoming and Vermont) has a single representative with voting power in the U.S. Senate.

The nation’s small-population states are disproportionately white, rural, and Republifascist. This abjectly authoritarian set-up grossly overrepresents the nation’s most backwards and racist, right-wing regions.

Thanks to this open violation of democracy’s most elementary principle – one person, one vote – the Senate stands far to the portside of the U.S. populace.

How enviable.

Never forget the absurdly venerated U.S. aristo-republican Founder James Madison’s case for the U.S. Senate (originally beyond any popular election) at the 1787 Constitutional Convention: 

“In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.”

Senate Confirmation and Judicial Review/Veto

To make things yet more egregiously reactionary, the Senate holds confirmation power over the president’s appointments to the federal judiciary, including the absurdly all-powerful appointed-for-life Supreme Court, which has (under the 1976 Buckley Valeo and 2010 Citizens United decisions) granted giant corporations unlimited financial input on the American candidate selection and election processes.

The 6-3 right wing Supreme Court crated malignant sadist Trump could soon end American women’s right to an abortion and remove millions of Americans from health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. It has the technical power to invalidate Biden’s election, something the Trump administration says it’s still counting on while ginning up its ugly, heavily armed Amerikaner Death-Cult base with the evidence-free charge that the election was “rigged against Trump.”

The Supreme Court’s power of final judicial review – established as American legal doctrine in the 1804 Marbury v. Madison decision – effectively gives the right-wing the power to veto any policy it sees as antithetical to its white nationalist and oligarchic world view.

Envy that, world.

Another Ghost of 1804: The Twelfth Night Amendment

Yogi Berra was right: “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” One scheme for Trump staying in power is fully constitutional. It was explained concisely by the insufferable neoliberal Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post five or so weeks ago:

“Imagine the scenario during election week: Trump is leading on Nov. 3, but Democratic nominee Joe Biden gains ground in the days following.  Republicans file objections to tens of thousands of mail-in ballots. Democrats file countersuits. Taking account of the confusion, legislatures decide to choose the electors themselves…Of the nine swing states, eight have Republican legislatures. If one or more decide that balloting is chaotic and marred by irregularities, they could send what they regard as the legitimate slate of electors, which would be Republican…Democrats may object and file lawsuits. In some of those states, Democratic governors or secretaries of state could send their own slates of electors to Washington. That would add to the confusion, but that might well be part of the Republican plan. When Congress convenes on Jan. 6 to tally the electors’ votes, there would be challenges to the legitimacy of some electors. Congressional Republicans would agree that disputed states should not be counted. That would ensure that neither candidate would get to 270 electoral votes…At that point, the Constitution directs that the House of Representatives vote to determine the presidential election. But it does so with each state casting a single vote. If the current numbers hold, there would be 26 state delegations that are Republican and 23 Democratic (with one tied), so the outcome would be to reelect Trump. Trump does not need to do anything other than accept this outcome, which is constitutional.”

While they maintained a total majority of individual representatives in the U.S. House, the Democrats failed to win a majority of the state delegations in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2020 election.

It is true that most states have passed laws committing their Elector slates to the candidates who won the popular vote in their jurisdiction. But those are just state laws that have never ruled as federally constitutional by the Supreme Court, which is currently under the command of the right after Trump’s three appointments (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett).

The specific part of the Constitution that would send the election to the House is the Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804. “But in choosing the president,” the amendment reads, “the [House] votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote.”

I’m not saying that the election is going to the U.S. House of Representatives. But I’m also not ruling out the possibility and cannot help but sadly register some agreement with the title of Zakaria’s reflection: “Trump could stay in power even if he doesn’t win the election. The Constitution allows it.”

Wow. Something to make the world green with envy!

Whether five Republican-appointed justices (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett) have the courage to spark a mass popular rebellion by backing Trump’s Ahab-like war on the electoral process is another question altogether. They probably do not have the guts to pull something as fascist as that (part of me hopes they do: it would put millions in the streets, where they belong until racist, sexist, eco-cidal, capitalist and imperialist American regime is overthrown). But maybe they do. Never say never.

“The General Public Has Been Virtually Powerless”

What “democracy,” Joe Biden? Where is it, New York Times? Twenty-three decades after the Constitutional Convention, the Founders’ nightmare has yet to break out and take over in “the world’s oldest democracy.” University of Kentucky history department chair Ronald Formisamo’s published a book titled American Oligarchy.  By Formisamo’s detailed account, U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires), elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions.

This “permanent political class,” Formisamo warns, is taking the nation “beyond [mere] plutocracy” to “the hegemony of an aristocracy of inherited wealth.”  It “drives economic and political inequality not only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables, emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent,” creating “levels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed almost all advanced nations.”

Formisamo is one of many astute and mainstream U.S.-American experts who understand that the U.S. is an oligarchic nation. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book Democracy in America?:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout…[so that] the general public has been virtually powerless…Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].”

Even conservative elites like the veteran federal jurist and economist Richard Posner acknowledge this elementary reality, which is well understood and relished in ruling class circles.

A perfect example of American oligarchy was the arch-regressive Republican tax bill signed by Trump in late 2017. Predictably enough in a nation where the top tenth of the upper One Percent already possessed nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, the tax law was opposed by three in four U.S. citizens.

So what? Who cared? The oligarchy wanted a tax-cut the nation hated. Money talked and bullshit walked.

Seven in ten Americans back Single Payer health insurance, Medicare for All (M4A). Super. So what? Who cares? M4A wasn’t on the 2020 presidential ballot and barely made it into more than a tiny percentage of Congressional races, thanks to the longstanding capture of the Democratic Party by the nation’s unelected dictatorship of capital.

Money screams, quietly, behind the scenes, rendering the mere citizenry “virtually powerless.” As George Carlin used to say, we don’t have “choices” in America, we have “owners.”

How enviable. How jealous people outside the United States must be!

The Democrats’ corporate establishment is already launching rhetorical assaults on their party’s small progressive contingent, accusing mild social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of supposedly evil purported “socialism” and other forms of alleged “radical extremism.” In the wake of its painfully narrow defeat of Trump’s large and absurdly over-represented minority and with an eye to appeasing the right wing, corporate Democrats are already reaching out to the nation’s reactionaries while playing along with the Republifascists’ neo-McCarthyite rhetoric when it comes to demonize those who would seriously advance decent humanistic and egalitarian policies supported by most Americans.

So what if progressive Democrats like Sanders and AOC busted their butts to defeat Trump and elect Biden? Who cares?

Money talks. So does corporate media, where huge commercial revenues from the insurance companies mean that AOC and Sanders are considered to be wild-eyed “bomb-throwing Marxists” (to use the language of the insufferably arrogant CNN anchor Jake Tapper) for wanting to save the human race from climatological self-immolation with a Green New Deal. No wonder AOC is floating the possibility of getting out of American major party politics altogether.

“A Dark Cloud Enveloping Society and the Political System”

In 1932, during another moment of crisis, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey significantly observed that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Four and a half decades into the neoliberal era, the moneyed elite’s domination of the nation’s political and policy processes reached a level that almost defied belief. Noam Chomsky put it well during the first Obama administration, in the wake of the elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, when the leaders of both of the major parties agreed to slash government expenditures in defiance of majority citizen support for increased public investment to address mass unemployment and poverty. “Since the 1970s,” Chomsky observed, “[Dewey’s] shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.”

Envy that, world.

“Nothing Will Fundamentally Change”

Chomsky’s “dark cloud” is how and why the fake-populist racist monster Donald Trump got elected in the first place [2] – and how he damn-near pulled off a second term with no coup required. The cloud darkened and grew during the Trump years. Fresh from a profit bonanza thanks to de-regulation, tax-cuts and bail-outs under Trump and Pelosi, the corporate and financial oligarchy eagerly anticipates a center-right Biden presidency combined with a persistently Republican Senate and a far-right Supreme Court. American “democracy’s” owners will be quite content with that configuration. Investors are pushing the stock market up in expectancy of a “calming” corporate president (Biden) who will be “prevented” by the Senate and judiciary from acting to any significant degree on progressive pressure from “the left” and the technically irrelevant citizenry.

Not that Biden is a threat in that regard. He’s a “reach across the aisle” conservative Democrat in the Clinton-Obama mode. Like the last two Democratic presidents, Biden will be all about mollifying the ever more fascistic American right and corporate/financial capital while dismissing and denigrating progressive Democrats. “Reaching out to your opponents” means extending a hand of appeasement to the right-wing while refusing solidarity with the hated left inside your own party. Think Rahm Emanuel. If he becomes president, Biden he will be happily “hamstrung” by a Republifacist Senate and Supreme Court. That will give him cover he wants to more easily be the center-right corporatist and imperialist he is: he can tell the populace and progressives that he can’t act on their demands for urgently needed policies like Single Payer, seriously progressive taxation, a peace dividend, free public college, a Green New Deal, and the re-legalization of union organizing.

So what if those policies are backed by most Americans? Who cares? An open tool of big insurance capital, candidate Biden suggested that he would veto M4A, extraneously backed by a super-majority of American citizens, if it if came to his presidential desk.

This was consistent with his promise to elite Manhattan campaign donors last year: “nothing would fundamentally change in a Biden presidency

That’s right: nothing would fundamentally change. He meant that.

How about that great “democracy,” that “envy of the world” for 240 years!

It has worked out nicely for America’s oligarchs. The masters of capital preferred the stable Goldman Sachs neoliberal Hillary Clinton to the destabilizing fascist oligarch Trump in 2016 but they got a sweet deal from the tangerine hate machine: a bunch of deregulation and tax cuts along with huge military budgets and a populace ready for “relief” from a malevolent, pandemic-spreading provocateur in the form of a sleepy corporatist like Grandpa Joe.

On Patience

Imagine how Frederick Douglass would have responded to Biden’s claim that Americans’ “patience” with their propertied masters’ “system of governance” has been “rewarded for 240 years.” Black chattel slavery lived on for nine decades after the American Revolution, which was driven in no small part by North American leaders’ desire to preserve and expand slavery. Slavery was deeply protected in the Founders’ holy charter, which continues to cripple American “democracy” well into the 21st Century. Black slavery came back with another name after another contested election – 1876, which finalized the death of Reconstruction, of the nation’s final retreat from any lingering commitment to freeing and empowering the Black masses of the South.

Maybe one of Biden’s staffers can get him a synopsis of historian Edward Baptiste’s prize-winning study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Baptiste’s remarkable volume shows that the cotton slave system that thrived in the South a half century after the American “revolution” was a forced labor regime of pure racist terror and murderous torture. Just exactly how was Black Americans’ supposed “patience” rewarded under the American “system of governance” during the long nightmare of slavery and its horrific Jim Crow aftermath, not to mention up through contemporary mass ghettoization, mass incarceration, and persistent race-class residential and educational apartheid?

How is patience is working in regard to the capitalogenic climate crisis, the biggest issue of our or any time, slated to cancel hopes for a decent future and organized human existence in the near future? The officially unchallengeable, growth-addicted profits system, the underlying cause of the COVID-19 crisis, is hard-wired to poison livable ecology beyond repair.

It’s good that Trump, a malignant fascist, may soon be removed from the world’s most deadly office, but his nightmare presidency is a clear outcome and reflection of an underlying and insidious, bipartisan, corporate, imperial, patriarchal, white-supremacist and eco-cidal authoritarianism. The “real issue to be faced” remains, in the words of the democratic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” That will mean a thoroughgoing overhaul of the nation’s “system of governance” in accord with the Founders’ ultimate nightmare: popular sovereignty. And that will mean tearing down the corporate state. It is a matter of life and death for the whole species now.

We must do what young Frederick Douglass did: rise up against our owners.

Endnote

1. Consistent with my suspicion, Biden in his Saturday victory speech stole a moronic but emotionally potent line from Obama’s instantly famous, career-making speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “there’s no Blue State America and Red State America, there’s only a United States of America.” Really? Sleepy Joe might want to take another look at the 2020 Electoral College map: there is a clear division between blue and red states. Biden has received congratulations for his clear election victory from a grand total of four Republican U.S. Senators as the GOP has rallied around the absurd claim that his victory was fraudulent. There’s a Red State America and a Blue State America.

2. Please see Chapter 3 (titled “Barack Von Obombdenburg”) of my new book Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, October 2020)

Paul Street’s new book is The Passive Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.

The Coronavirus Update

(image) WIRED Coronavirus Update Logo

11.11.20 (wired.com)

Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine could break scientific ground, CDC releases new mask guidelines, and an interactive map illustrates the risk of holiday gatherings. Here’s what you should know:

Headlines

Pfizer’s coronavirus shot will be the first ‘genetic’ vaccine approved for humans if it is green-lit by the FDA

On Monday morning, Pfizer announced that its Covid-19 vaccine is more than 90 percent effective. More time and data are needed for FDA approval, but if the vaccine is distributed, it will be the first of its kind: Rather than injecting people with a small quantity of the pathogen so they can build up immunity, it teaches cells to build benign proteins that train the immune system to respond to SARS-CoV-2. This is a huge scientific development if it works. But we will likely still need many non-mRNA vaccines to ensure that everyone around the world gets inoculated.

CDC releases new guidance explaining that masks protect all parties involved

Yesterday the CDC updated its mask guidance, saying that wearing one protects both you and the people around you. Masks block particles you exhale from spreading to others and help filter the air you’re breathing in, the new guidelines explain. It also says that wearing masks can be an economic boon, citing an analysis that found that increasing universal mask wearing by 15 percent could prevent national losses of up to $1 trillion.

Interactive Covid-19 risk map shows there’s virtually no safe way to gather for the holidays

A color-coded interactive map from the Georgia Institute of Technology helps users assess Covid-19 risk level based on location and the size of the crowd. It’s a striking visual representation of something public health experts have been saying for a while: There is no perfectly safe way to gather for the holidays, especially as cases rise nationwide. And new research corroborates the map’s implications, finding that a small number of locations—indoor places where people gather for a long time, as they would on the holidays—are often responsible for a disproportionate number of Covid-19 cases.

Vincent van Gogh on Art and the Power of Love in Letters to His Brother

By Maria Popova (brainpickings. org)

“You can only go with loves in this life,” Ray Bradbury memorably proclaimed. Whether love be bewitching or tormenting, whether pondered by the poets or scrutinized by the scientists, one thing is for certain — it is art’s most powerful and enduring muse, fuel for the creative process more potent than anything the world has known. A poignant testament to this, and a fine addition to history’s most beautiful reflections on love, comes from the visionary Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) in My Life & Love Are One (public library) — a slim 1976 treasure that traces “the magic and melancholy of Vincent van Gogh” by culling his thoughts on love, art, and turmoil from his letters to his brother Theo, which were originally published in 1937 as the hefty tome Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh. The title comes from a specific letter written during one of the painter’s periods of respite from mental illness, in which he professes to his brother: “Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one.”

In one letter, Van Gogh extols the grounding, self-soothing quality of love’s intrinsic wisdom:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngEveryone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.

It was certainly an armor he needed — he lived his life in poverty, and the residents of the town where he settled in his final years petitioned to have him evicted from the artist commune he shared with Paul Gauguin and two other artists, on account of his madness. He soon moved into an asylum, where he continued to paint. Another letter to Theo rings with the paradoxical poignancy of desperation and resilience:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngWhat am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.

vangogh.jpg?zoom=2&w=680

‘Self-Portrait with Straw Hat’ by Vincent van Gogh, winter 1887/1888

And what a heart it was. In a different letter, Vincent relays to Theo the consciousness-expanding capacity of love — which Kierkegaard so eloquently captured — at the dawn of a new love affair:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngSince the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my chance is slight or great? I mean, must I consider this when I love? No, no reckoning; one loves because one loves. Then we keep our heads clear, and do not cloud our minds, nor do we hide our feelings, nor smother the fire and light, but simply say: Thank God, I love.

To be sure, Van Gogh has the prudence to recognize that friendship is at least as great a gift as romantic love. In another letter, he tells Theo:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngDo you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored.

And in another still:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngLove a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.

This all-inclusive approach to love — this casting of a wide net of affections — is something Van Gogh believed wholeheartedly, and something Ray Bradbury would come to echo a century and a half later in telling aspiring writers, “I want your loves to be multiple.” Vincent writes to Theo:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIt is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!

And later:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngThe best way to know God is to love many things.

Van Gogh sees the human capacity for love as integral to the creative process:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngIn order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart.

secretmuseum_vangogh1.jpg?zoom=2&w=680

Van Gogh’s first sketchbook from The Secret Museum

Indeed, it is this capacity for love — for living from one’s heart — that sustains the artist through struggle and rejection. In another letter, Van Gogh writes:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngI believe more and more that to work for the sake of the work is the principle of all great artists: not to be discouraged even though almost starving, and though one feels one has to say farewell to all material comfort.

For Van Gogh, this heart-first approach to art and life was the root of all that is worthy. In another letter to Theo, he articulates what might well be his deepest underlying credo:

2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.pngDo you know that it is very, very necessary for honest people to remain in art? Hardly anyone knows that the secret of beautiful work lies to a great extent in truth and sincere sentiment.

Though long out of print, surviving copies of My Life & Love Are One are still findable and very much worth the hunt. Complement it with a peek inside Van Gogh’s never-before-revealed sketchbooks, then revisit Susan Sontag on love.

RELATED READING:

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Gauguin’s Stirring First-Hand Account of What Actually Happened the Night Van Gogh Cut off His Own Ear

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Legendary Cellist Pablo Casals, at Age 93, on Creative Vitality and How Working with Love Prolongs Your Life

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Nicole Krauss’s Beautiful Letter to Van Gogh on Fear, Bravery, and How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns