Images of the State in 2020 - Ch. 1

One of the "images of the State" in Orwell's 1984 is that of a "boot in the face." 

 Needless to say, the latest iteration of cop-murder and violence against Blacks will trigger the usual outrage and excuses.   African-Americans will assemble in public places and loudly protest.  Police departments will denounce “inexcusable” violence and will promise to internally investigate.  Op-eds will denounce “institutional racism.”   It will be regarded as some kind of progress that we are no longer openly and officially talking about “a few rotten apples”  but rather of an “institutional” and “systemic” problem.   At least we are recognizing, the endemic and pandemic and “deeply ingrained” nature of racism in this county and blah, blah, blah.

All of this totally misses the point. 

“You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power,” Brian said, “Now tell me why we cling to power.”

Winston did not speak for another moment or two.  Then he spoke.  “it sought power because men in the mass are frail, cowardly creatures who cannot endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who are stronger than themselves.  The choice for mankind lies between  freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.  ...  You are ruling over us for our own good,”

A pang of pain shot  through his body.   “That was stupid, Winston, stupid!”  Brian said. “You should know better than to say a thing like that.”   Brian went on,

“We are not interested in the good of others;  We are different from all the oligarchies of the past,  They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.  We are not like that.  Power is not a means, it is an end.”

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”

Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?   Power lies in inflicting pain and humiliation.   The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.  ... If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever.”

Brian was right. 

At all times, rulers have sought to legitimize their having and their exercise of power.   In early times they did so with recourse to a cosmology and a divinity... Baal, Huitzilopochtli, Yaweh, Allah...  It was never they who demanded squealing babies or pulsing hearts but the god who had to have these sacrifices in order that it might rain, or that a pestilence would go away or a victory be achieved.    With the establishment of the secular state in the 18th century the excuses changed.  Violence and deprivation were exercised for some greater humanistic or economic good.  But, in essence, there was little difference between feeding babies into the fire or men into the maw of machine fire in order to make the world safe for democracy.  There was little difference between ripping out hearts in order to keep the stars in their orbits and imposing austerity -- hunger, cold, disease, hopelessness -- in order to keep the economic cycle going.  All this legitimizing prattle was simply a tissue over a more primary and naked truth:  Power, that sense of surging vitality and purpose that makes life life is not possible without the feeling the effects of power; that is, without causing  pain and suffering. It is plain Newtonian physics.  Power demands impotence.  Eventually impotence comes to understand that it needs to feel power  also in order to be what it is  -- helpless, hopeless, inferior and afraid. 

Blacks are the easiest and most visible targets of police power; but, in truth, the police seek out anyone who is marginalized, poor, powerless.  They seek them out instinctively because without impotence to be validated as impotence their power cannot be validated as power.   The excuses the cops offer up for their exercise of power are thinner than a fig leaf.  Among themselves and in their locker rooms they joke about what bullshit infraction or crime they can come up with to justify their “resort to force.”   When it comes to testifying in court they call it “testilying.”

And do not believe that the judges are fooled.  They understand full well what went down on the street and what is going on in court.    The might say that they wink at a few “irregularities” here and there for the sake of the greater good of maintaining public order or vindicating victims.   Some of them might believe it like Pasrsons, “an active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms.  One of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.”    Perhaps.

But the more systemic fact is that the United States in 2020 is increasingly and in all manner of things dedicated to the pursuit of power as its foundational and inalienable right. Racism is itself, in a perverse way, merely a legitimizing excuse.  As I shall detail, in subsequent episodes, bullying, rudeness, throwing one's weight around, pushing on others is a national pastime because it has become the naked nature of what we as a society are, once we have betrayed and forsaken all our excuses.

But when it comes to cops beating on, choking and blowing away Blacks, the means and end of the matter is simply the thrill and validation of feeling a boot on the face. 

©barfo 2020

Blowhard Bernie

Further thoughts on the pathetic revolutionary fizzle that was Bernie's campaign

My Facebook Feed still cranks out messages from Bernie...

"The Pandemic ought to have taught us the need for Medicare for All...

"Workers need to be kept on the payroll...

"It's unacceptable that people should be evicted during the crisis...

"Bail out working people, not corporate executives...
 
"We cannot lose sight of the climate emergency around us. ...
 
"The workers on the front lines of this crisis are heroes. They must be provided hazard pay, child care and safe working conditions.

"While working people struggle to survive, the rich reach unthinkable levels of wealth. We can and must build a system based on justice and dignity for all. It is fundamentally immoral that health insurance companies make billions in profit every year by denying care...”

The usual. Typical Bernie.

I don't disagree with any of it. Earlier this year I was sending money to promote all of it.  Now I find it obnoxious and want to say

OH SHUT UP ALREADY

Why?

Because there's a difference between a message with content and one without.  Or, put another way, between political rallying and moralistic speechifying.

Once Bernie threw in the political towel by suspending his candidacy and -- worse yet -- endorsing his rival, his words lost their political content.  They became noise from the sideline rather than shouts from within the game.

My sister said a nasty thing about Bernie. She called him a "whiner."  Of course, she was for Warren whom, she said, at least had done something.  I shrugged it off as the rationalization from yet another System-Invested Boomer.  But after Bernie capitulated I began to think twice about my sister's perjorative.

Bernie was certainly no revolutionary.  Not even a work-within-the-system revolutionary.  A real revolutionary would never had thrown in the towel to back his "good friend Joe," the Banker's Whore par excellence. 

Bernie's program was no more revolutionary than Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical calling for the establishment of the social welfare state

Funny how most Ah'murkans have never heard of it... not from Fox News nor the New York Slime's resident Catholic, Ross Douhat  The one thing the Huckstocracy of this  country does not want is for its hapless dumfucks to realize how reactionary and just plain 'tarded the country is. But I digress.

For those who don't bother with the likes of the New York Slime or MSNBC, it is hardly news that Bernie's program was warmed over New Deal. But it is worth reminding ourselves that the New Deal was itself just psuedo social democracy which in turn was nothing but fake socialism. We are three cousins removed from any fundamental structural change.  Regulating capitalism, curbing its excesses, remediating its economic cruelties is not the same thing as replacing it with a system not based on the use of money to make money (to put it simply). 

 In my view, New Dealism won't work.  It won't work because Pope Leo XIII did not understand the inherent contradictions of capitalism.  He, like Bernie, attributed capitalism's excesses to GREED; that is, is to a moral failure of the ruling, wealth-owning class.  

This is not to say that greed is not a problem.  In the United States, greed has been a virtual pandemic for the past 40 years, ravaging whatever pathetic distribution of social product there might have been.  Greed certainly needs to be curbed ... preferably with a sharp blade.

But other countries, where wealth is more moderate and certainly more discreet -- Germany, France, Sweden --, have still been cutting back on social benefits.  Why?  Why do Germany, Sweden, France outsource jobs to Eastern Europe, China or third world countries?  They do it out of economic necessity; that is to say, under the imperatives of the way capitalism works and the way it generates wealth.  Again, to put it simply: PROFIT IS NOT POSSIBLE WITHOUT CHEAP LABOR.  This is not a "failing" of capitalism; it is its essence and its inherent contradiction. 

America's high standard of living immediately after the Second World War was not due to the superior merit of our system but simply because we were victors.  America had all the gold's world (literally, except for a relative sliver held by Argentina).  We were the only country with an intact industrial infrastructure. We could dictate whatever terms we wanted and we had virtually free oil.   

We were rich in the manner of Attila the Hun and could fling our money around to create an artificial "middle class."  When the money and the free oil ran out, the Huckstocracy began the process of social triage which it has carried out for the past fifty years.  And things will only get worse.

So... from a revolutionary socialist point of view, Bernie's program was a mere panacea.  But what the fuck. Some respite on the road to collapse is nothing to sneeze at. More than that, it is always foolish to exalt theory over practice.  In real life, things happen organically if unpredictably. Transmogrification ("change") emerges from and with failure and contradiction. Let us suppose that the U.S.  were to adopt a full social-democratic, welfare policy within an operative capitalist system.  Let us suppose that it worked well for 15 years and that at the end of that time Capital started screaming that it couldn't "afford" all the welfare anymore; that the demand for investment and profit made paying for the welfare state impossible.  At that point a choice would arise: abandon social welfare and return to economic liberalism or scrap capitalism in favor of genuine socialism.  In abstract theory the choice was always one or the other: clean slate A or clean sweep B.  In practice no one can say what the choice will end up being except that it will be a mish-mash on the road to furthr mish-mash.  Half measures like the New Deal lead to experiential choices by which people at least reject going backward.  Stumbling forward is nothing to sneer at.

The reader might have noticed that "not being able to afford" the cost of welfare sounds rather familiar.  Indeed! It was the panic cry of Reagan, Thatcher, Blair and Clinton and, in Germany, Schröder.  In 2008, when the Flawless Obambi was elected, Nancy (La Bon Bon) Peelousy said "Don't expect a new New Deal."  Nancy understood that social democracy "won't work" -- which is the Huckstocracy's way of saying that it won't work within a capitalist system intrinsically based on cheap labour. If Nancy understand this, Jim Bezos and Jamie Dimon certainly do as well.  They are just hoping Dumfuck won't.

In my opinion, we don't need second experiential run to realize that New Dealism ultimately can't and won't work. But again, what the fuck. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  At the same time, however, it is well to bear in mind how tepid Bernie's demands really were the next time some Huckster's Helper over at the DNC begins blabbering about the need to “compromise.”  Bernie's progam was the compromise.

In the end, I supported Bernie because there was nothing else to get behind.  His program offered desperately needed relief to masses of workers and sub workers and non-workers suffering in need.  The alternative was to demand a real socialist revolution and, if one thing was clear, the 'Murkan working class completely lacked the class consciousness required for fundamental change.   

So as not to sound too hifalutin' "class consciousness" is just a doctrinaire way of saying "butt hurt awareness" and the Huckstocracy has been so expertly good at promoting dumbfuckery that this country's lumpen plebes are either numb to the pain or have been convinced that the pain is their own fault or worst of all don't even fucking notice no more.  They say that if you get butt-fucked long and hard enough you "grow" to like and even hunger for it.  

All that said, somewhere in the middle of 2019, Bernie's message underwent a subtle shift. He stopped hawking his Basket of Benefits and began to talk about taking over and cleaning out the Democratic Party.  My ears perked up.

It can be assumed that if Bernie were to have become the nominee, the party would in great measure fall under his control.  However, that would still leave quite a few "centrist" Democrats (i.e. Republicans in Kumbaya Clothing) in the Senate eager to block any change at all. Bernie's reply to this problem was to say (1) that his election was only the beginning of the fight and (2) that as president he would use his office to back real progressive candidates against corporate Democrats.   Now that sounded revolutionary.  It was not substantive revolution. Bernie's program remained the same. But it hinted at procedural revolution and that is more important than it might sound.

Let me explain. Any movement or political faction has a set of substantive goals and changes it wants to achieve.  However, the means of bringing those goals about itself requires a change in how things are being done. Bernie was no longer trumpeting just a program, he was aiming to take control of the levers of the party and, through the party, of government.  This more than anything else scared the shit out of the corporate whores and hucksters who comprise the DNC. Bernie had declared war on that cabal that controlled the means of politics.

Even here, Bernie's procedural revolution was tepid. A real procedural revolution would aim to scrap the Constitution even if it nominally kept capitalism.  It would not simply "overturn Citizens' United," it would abolish the Senate and institute a ministerial parliamentary system.  It would forbid presidential reelection and give the prerogative of appointing the judiciary to a non-partisan commission.  A real revolution in "how things are get done" would entail more than just taking over the Democratic Party.  It would be based on the understanding that the means of politics is related to maintaining or changing control of the means of production.  A true procedural revolution would realize that the Constitution was designed to protect and enable the Huckstocracy and that if the distribution of wealth is to be changed the means of politics also has to be changed.  As the much overlooked Lucy Parsons put it over a century ago,

Never be deceived into thinking that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.

Certainly not with a Senate controlled, always, by some shameless, Huckster-whore, without an ounce of  human sentiment. 

But at least Bernie was doing more than advertising a platform.  He openly realized that to achieve a set of goals he would have to wage a war of means. A limited engagement, as it were, but about time nonetheless. 

Whether "revolutionary" or not, he was more of a politician than the country had seen in decades.  This statement might at first seem baffling until one distinguishes a politican from a political huckster... a person who sweet talks, puff talks, razzle-dazzles and equivocates all the while serving the Masters of the Status Quo. Obama was (and remains) a political huckster.  Bernie was offering a real economic-political choice within a battle for control of political means. 

He came close. The array of empty weaslings the Demorat Party threw in his path in an effort to eat away at a first ballot victory proved too vapid for even an electorate brainwashed into accepting cornflakes and cheerios as meat.

Panic in Alberich's Cave on the Upper East Side.  One wonders how many niebelungen at the Slime got taken out back and whipped for failing to sufficiently omit facts and obfuscate issues.  The panic of the ruling Demorat Party Cabal was typified by the most ridiculous editorial endorsement, not only in American history but in all of journalism anywhere.  Bernie had them on the run.

Then came South Carolina. The proximate reason Bernie lost the state was that he failed to get the endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn, Kingfish to the majoritarian Black demographic of the party and personification par excellence of Demorat racial identity politics.  Clyburn is the political foreman of a dumbfuck demographic that does what it is told under the aura of Negro Iconograhpy.  The usual chicken feed for the poor wrapped in Overcome Talk.

 It is hard to see how such an endorsement was possible given that Kingfish is the very type of fake "liberal" corporate Demorat Bernie had vowed to sweep from power.

The only alternative left to Bernie was to do an end run around Kingfish by appealing directly to the state's black voting block. This did not, as Bernie's campaign evidently thought, mean appealing to Black millenials but rather to Black Boomers.  But Bernie's campaign consistently failed to address the needs of seniors.  "Protecting Social Security" -- a meaningless political slogan as it is -- only got mentioned every once in a while.  The most radical thing Bernie ever said about social security is that he would "expand it"  by a hundred bucks here and there for the poorest recipients.  In other words, do no more than Kingfish routinely promises to do.  The failure to address the needs of Not OK Boomers -- whether Black or White -- was a major defect in Bernie's Youth Folk Rock Movement and it cost him the state and the next state and the next.

Even so, Bernie's defeats were not a rout.  Of course, the DNC AgitProp Apparat swung into full gear, ballyhooing the inevitability of a Biden triumph.  Plus ça change.  But the difference between politics and a battlefield is that is Bernie still had the accumulated balance of prior wins and this gave him leverage over Biden until and through the convention

Two scenarios were foreseeable: (1) Biden was the inevitable nominee and (2) Biden was not the inevitable nominee.  DUH, right?  The second option arose from the fact that Biden is a terrible gaff prone candidate who managed to flub two prior runs. We are not dealing with winged Pegasus fleet of hoof.  A disastrous exploitable gaff was not only possible, it was a probability.

The first alternative would have been harder and more complicated but it basically boiled down to using his accumulated delegate count to blackmail the party into committing itself is an actionable way to pushing at least two of Bernie's signature programs.  The blackmail is simple: either commit or I run as an independent.

The Covid pandemic actually dovetailed with the strategy of political blackmail.  Bernie could have demanded a postponement of the primaries.  He should have vigorously, publicly, and inscesesantly accused Saint Obama and Lunch Pail Joe of murder... of aiding and abetting a killer virus.  He should have tied up the issue in the courts and, if necessary, reduced the convention to one huge cluster fuck.  A real revolutionary understands that at times you have to press your advantage to the point of destruction.

Disgracefully, Bernie lacked revolutionary guts.  In fact he lacked ordinary political guts.  He was summoned by the Flawless One and emerged, whimpering and contrite.  A true Sanbenito.

And what was the confessorial cant that accompanied this miserable revolutionary fizzle?  "We can't afford to let Trump win."  Standard Corporate Demorat Lesser Evilism.   A Bankers' Steppinfechit to save us from the Pathological Liar.... as if anyone in Washington were addicted to truth.   Let us be clear.  When it comes to lying the difference between Trump and Obama, Hillary or Biden is that Trump isn't good at it.

The propaganda that we need to "stop" Trump at all costs is just routine political scare mongering. What we need to stop is the economic and environmental trajectory we are on.  Not a single politician in the last 60 years, at any level, from either party has done jack shit to alter the direction of this trajectory.  At best, the Demorats merely slow the rate of devastation.  But the trajectory has now reached the point where the complete collapse of bourgeois civil society and the complete destruction of the environment are at hand.  When the next step is off the cliff, lesser evilism is not only not an option, it is irrelevant.

Let me put it another way.  Lesser-evilism is part of the system.  It is the "gear" the mechanism routinely slips into.    If you accept it, then you will always be tricked out power and out of change.  If you reject it, then you are willing to destroy the party in order to gain control of it.   

One had thought that Bernie actually understood what was happening to our society and our planet. He said all the right things that had not been said before, at least not in our lifetime.  And yet when the Flawless Obama blew his dog whistle, Bernie fell into line as much as Karamela Harris, Pogey Bait Pete, What's my name Warren and the rest of the gaggle of DNC hacks for hire.   And so now we get,

"The Democratic Party must stand up to powerful special interests and fight for economic, social, racial and environmental justice. I'm pleased that some of the strongest progressive leaders in the country will work with the Biden campaign to unify our party in a transformational and progressive direction."

Does Bernie really think that his "good friend Joe" will let him inch the party to left? Do you, dear reader, think that having anguished and connived to stop Bernie at all costs, the Demorat Establishment will now adopt his program?  Oh sure!  NOW we believe in Medicare for All! 

Really?   It is so utterly beyond belief that the question I now have is whether Blowhard Bernie wasn't all along Bait and Switch Bernie.

Even the New York Slime has gotten into the act.  This Gentrified Liberal rag, which but four six months ago begrudged Bernie so much as a column inch, is now loaded with progressive sounding op-eds, suddenly denouncing our health “care” system, our educational system, our housing system our justice system our anything system all as ineffective and unfair.  These days Slime is starting to sound like a progressive blog; surely this shows that the party, the establishment, are “moving to the left!”

DO NOT BELIEVE IT. It is a farce and sham; the Huckstocracy at its most cunning and vilest.  The Slime knows full well that it can print all the progressive homilies it wants but, in the end, the Senate will be there to protect it from its own hot air.

Bernie at face value was the last stop chance to change the Sheissestaat  from within the Muckway. Whether he blew it or was never serious, that path to a change in trajectory no longer exists.

Stay tuned, dear non-existent reader. Upcoming... what next?

©2020 WCG