One Born Every Minute [Fiction; revised post Trump]

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I don’t expect other from any President–=whose President, what President? The President of any City Library, of any corporation not in the private sector, of any government anywhere, any-when?

What should anyone expect from anyone in any position of governmental authority, especially the President of the United States, an office more circumscribed by Power and Money than we would want to imagine . . . more manipulated? Who pulls the strings when our latest former President was given a list of Cabinet selections from the CEO of Citicorp and from that list came to be his cabinet?

Obama, Oh Bankers! I have said before and I will say again as I do here now in this place at this time, itself simply present, thus usually or always.

Can we expect more than that which I understand to be presidential in the way the most powerful office in the world attracts power playing people, power brokering persons, playing at the power dynamics of power as it is always and only of power by power and for power? Never perishing? Questions about Power beget more questions about Power, others about US, We the People. 

Of course, you or I would be a fool to expect any President to be his own man. Perhaps that is what is most frightening about President P. Murt? Is he his own man? I am not sure he is his own anything except chameleon? He plays hop-scotch with what is true, having been fully subsumed by our culture’s definitive postures against Truth, against anything absolute, against categories and Categorical thinking–not what you think by how it has been popularly misused. The inability to think categorically has left us mishandling some very important ideas, and mishandling others, even those concepts we use as if we knew what we were talking about, which we clearly do not, if anyone had eyes to see or ears to hear.

Raising doubt, doubt and more doubt about anything that could be true, must be true, should be; our President (and he is ours whether we like it or not, whether we voted for him or not; that is the rub, now)–he is more in the image of our intellectual hegemony over the last fifty years than anyone would want either to believe or from anyone occupying the Oval Office–be in the world, not of it, I recall from one or another call to wisdom. Yes, this man currently sitting behind the Resolute Desk is made up of everything we think by how we think determining what we get to think by subsuming what we agree is knowledge, the limits thereof. What has paraded in our Academies of learning as an Emperor’s new clothes of epistemology, makes up most of what we might hesitant call the mind of this president. But is he even this, that, whatever, however, moreover, exactly yes, no or maybe these? What exactly is he? Catch him if  you can. Narcissistic? Egoistic? Solipsistic? All of these fit, do they not? Need I remind you that the answer to them is Yes! Yes! Yes!

I am sure that there is something of him that fits, at least in some people’s conceptions of what they think they think, into one or another received idea of a fascist, and that in so being or doing the term fascist raises the specter of what they think they are imagining when they hear the word Nazis; but President P. Murt fits the pattern of a much older form of dictator when dictator was not the role as it functioned electively and for a set term in Ancient Roman politics or their politique; the cult of personality is upon us, but then that is something we understand from leaders who did not lead in old formed dictatorships, but in the 20th Century’s prototypal Totalitarian Societies: Nazis Germany and The Soviet Union.

II

What is it that we expect a People who desire freedom to manage in the ways it dreams of checking Power, if that is what we do, as it is understood here as what we should be doing?

To check Power or not to check Power should be the question? Of course, it should. Another truth to be held self-evidently.

We are failing miserably in the matter and manners of Democracy. You do not think so? The two most Liberal Presidents since JFK got himself elected convincing us that the new mantra of State should be ours; and that Government was not going to be doing anything anymore for any of us at any time in any place in the futre–yes, the two most Liberal since JFK were Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Imagine that! Yes, Obama and Hilary more conservative than Tricky Dick? The horror once more. I should re-read Heart of Darkness. 

What is this, simply put? How to put these things, ideas, conclusions into perspective; yes, just how far we have moved monolithically to the Right is easily enough discerned. What we call and think is Left, might be another thing for many of us to achieve, especially if those concerned call themselves liberals and equally especially if those concerned call themselves conservative. Part of the polarization in America political arenas is misapprehension rooted in mis-assignation. Liberal exists only by contrast with what has moved ever further to the Right.

Our Democrats are more heinous than the Republicans in one very simple way: they have always managed to present the idea, the image, while maintaining the aura, of being People-centered, of being Liberal with a capital ‘L,” when in fact their abdication of the Left and Liberalism has helped Power to become more powerful and more monied while Money has become richer and even more powerful than ever they could have dreamed when it was mostly the Right of our politics and politicking that served Money and Power–although to imagine a time when even liberal democracy in America did not serve Power is almost impossible to imagine. What is not impossible to understand is that there was a time when Al Smith could have garnered Party support–no Democrat could support him today, not after showing us that vilifying Bernie Sanders as a Socialist was so easy for so many who could masquerade as Democrats. I mean, as benign as Sanders was when running for President, someone as liberal as Al Smith would never had gotten the chance, probably could never be elected. Not even by working class, working poor and immigrant workers and immigrant poor–the very people Al Smith helped with more legislation than any other man in history, anywhere.

The Democrats are no more Liberal today than the Merkel of Germany has been, as conservative as she is–and do not mistake Friedmanesque Neo-Liberal Globalism for what the name confounds–it is as conservative as Thatcher and Reagan, who adored Friedman and their brand of neo-liberal globalizing, right along with Bill Clinton, Bush I and II, Hilary and yes, your darling, Obama.

One of you is born every minute.