Justice in America?

 How screwed up is America? A baby faced punk kid who should have been miles away home playing video games instead plays out his violent fantasies with a real AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on real flesh and blood people, killing two of them. Penalty? An "atta boy" from U.S. justice. 

Bush's Words Fall Flat on 20th Anniversary of September 11

Ironic. Insulting. And unsettling to see former President George W. Bush rewrite history as the good guy today in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — calling out "violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home" for their "disregard for human life."

It’s unsettling of course because we know that after his administration failed to read the myriad, alarming warning signs leading up to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, Bush exploited the unity Americans felt in the wake of the attacks, to fearmonger a lie about weapons of mass destruction and ties to Osama Bin Laden — so the citizenry would swing along with the unprovoked invasion of a Iraq.

An invasion that killed hundreds of thousands of humans and spawned the scourge of ISIS - "violent extremists" that  plague the world today - in unstable regions like Afghanistan, where Bush’s other disastrous and costly war just ended, after 20 long years, leaving tens of thousands of innocents dead, several trillion of dollars spent — and a vacuum for an emboldened enemy to fill.

Bush, who has been out of the limelight for 12 years, on Saturday briefly sounded like that same disingenuous alarmist who gave the fear-mongering State of The Union “axis of evil” speech in January 2002 —  that was the impetus to ensuring America, indeed, would have a blood-thirsty foe to fight abroad for decades to come.

The disastrous eight years under Bush created a lasting sense of desperation -- namely after initiating endless wars and insitigating the 2008 "Great Recession," which bankrupted millions of lives. 

Arguably, that lingering desperation was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the eventual precipitous rise to power of a phony, populous demagogue like Donald Trump.

And, of course, Trump was the culprit who emboldened those same “violent extremists at home” — namely the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists — of which Bush was clearly referencing on Saturday.

So, when the guy who was clearly instrumental in ensuring the manifestation of an “evil” enemy “abroad” — and at “home” attempts to strike a protective, foreboding tone about those same visceral threats, his words fall resoundingly flat.

It's crucial to connect these dots if we earnestly going to learn our lesson from the mistakes of our recent past. And not get fooled again.

Animal Farm in America?

They may be standing on their hind legs and dressed up as humans. But Republicans’ masks have slipped to their chins – and their snouts are showing.

Conservative leaders across these un-United States, in state and federal positions of power, are the pigs of George Orwell's Animal Farm, hypocritically declaring: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

No “Big Lie” is too ludicrous. No obstruction of justice is out of bounds. No alarmist incite is too inflammatory. And so, no low is too far to go.

It’s never been more acutely clear that the “Party of Trump” considers itself “more equal” than the rest of us – particularly in the wake of Thursday’s Republican-majority U.S. Supreme Court decision endorsing Arizona’s suppression of the minority vote; by virtue of congressional Republicans’ persistent opposition to desperately needed stimulus and voter protections; through the GOP’s obstruction of a bi-partisan probe into the deadly Jan. 6, Capitol coup attempt that nearly ended the Republic; and in the face of Republicans’ exhaustive sycophancy towards a twice-impeached, electorally defeated and disgraced former president facing indictment any day now.

Like the pigs in Animal Farm, Trump and his gluttonous Republican abettors have been playing the American people for a bunch of dim-witted barnyard animals for so long – trashing truths, twisting reality and. trampling justice – that, like Farm’s animals, much of the citizenry appears too bamboozled and numb to give a damn.

But this Independence Day 2021 –perhaps more than any prior Fourth of July celebration in this nation, since our forefathers first declared independence from the oppressive British motherland exactly 245 years ago – we should sincerely pause to treasure and reflect on the bloody hardships colonists endured to gain our treasured freedom from tyranny.

And we should embrace with a renewed fervency the frequently quoted but often-ignored preamble to the 1776 Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Let’s face it, the Republican Party, beholden to the grotesquely rich and powerful, has constituted an authoritarian movement most notably since the turn of the 21st Century.

For years, Republicans have been chomping at the bit to carve up the people’s Medicare and Medicaid and privatize social security so some fat cats can turn a profit.

Only now, after five years under the disingenuous tutelage of their unscrupulous “leader” Donald Trump, is it so abundantly obvious that the alleged “pro-life” party doesn’t give a rat’s rear about “the people.”

George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm primarily was a dystopian fable parodying early 20th Century Soviet Communism’s ruthlessness that cost millions of lives.

But Orwell himself indicated that his simplistic foreboding fairytale held “a wider application” about “power-hungry people.”

Oppression is oppression. Greed and abuse of power produce essentially the same result whatever the misanthropic ideology – Communism or Fascism or some other demagogic hybrid  “ism” to which Trump and his plutocratic pigs aspire.

“I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert..” Orwell writes Politics magazine founder Dwight Macdonald in a 1946 letter.

Much of the citizenry who sought a revolutionary change of sorts by casting their lots with a self-promoted populous “outsider” in 2016, weren't so much “alert” as they were desperate.

And certainly, in the devastating aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s hellish, incite-riddled, death-plagued four-year reign, a newly woke citizenry made their druthers clear this past Nov. 3 presidential election –– by casting 8 million more votes for Joe Biden than Trump.

But still, that hasn’t stopped Trump and his loyalists from trying to steal the Republic from us. We must maintain the vigilance of which Orwell speaks.

Pigs Hoarded Milk and Apples; Repubs, Tax Cuts For Rich

Just as Farm‘s pigs reason early on that they need all of the farm’s “milk and apples” to make smart decisions for the rest of the animals, Trump and his complicit Republican chums insisted at the outset of his presidency in 2017, that billionaires’ tax breaks are the key to economic revival for all.

Never mind that Reaganomics trickled down – and out, decades ago. Never mind that corporate profits continue to soar, while workers’ wages stagnate.

Let's not forget that the corporate elite reaped billions of dollars from the Trump-facilitated lethal Covid-19 pandemic that wiped out more than 600,000 American lives while crippling the livelihoods of millions.

Now, predictably, after granting hefty tax cuts for the wealthy and adding nearly $8 trillion to the national debt, Republican leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy suddenly are obsessed with the deficit as they parrot alarmist, right wing think tank talking points warning of Democrats’ march toward “Socialism” or “Communism.”

“The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves,” Orwell writes in the 1946 letter to Macdonald, published in George Orwell: A Life In Letters, 2013.

“If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then,” Orwell continues, “it would have been all right.”

Which begs the question: Is it too late for Americans, as a united whole to finally put heir foot down?

Like the pigs in Animal Farm, today's Republican leadership on Capitol Hill can’t be bothered by facts or justice, but only in contorting reality to conform with their unrelenting lust for absolute autocratic control.

“Napoleon is Always Right”

Trump, of course, is Farm’s ruthless ruling pig, Napoleon, a Berkshire boar who, Orwell writes, has a knack for “getting his own way.”

Napoleon counted on his propagandist pig, Squealer, who “could turn black into white” to brainwash the farm animals with lies about their tyrannical leader’s supposed benevolence.

Even Clover the mare, who notices the changes the pigs sneakily make to Animalism’s “Seven Commandments”, eventually is lulled into a sense of complacency, convincing herself that she must have “remembered it wrong.”

If Washington D.C’s plutocratic pigs had their druthers, Americans will be so dumbed down by the former con-in-chief’s exhaustive hyperbolic lies and incessant grating vitriol, that we'll have about as much say in our Republic’s affairs as Animal Farm‘s befuddled barnyard animals had on the farm under the pigs.

Like Farm’s animals who were deprived of adequate food as they worked harder for less, millions of Americans remain food insecure as they work jobs at slave labor pay.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, some 140 million Americans were living at the cusp of, or in, poverty, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In Farm, the beloved, but dull minded carthorse Boxer declares, “I will work harder” and routinely motivates himself by extolling the pigs’ most controlling lie of all: “Napoleon is always right.”

Despite the animals’ increasingly desperate circumstances on the farm, Squealer’s barrage of untruths ultimately convince the lowly, overworked animals that “things were getting better.”

Yet, at the first sign of feebleness, Boxer, the farm’s hardest worker — instrumental in the farm’s success from which the pigs alone capitalized — is hauled off to the slaughterhouse.

Of course, to advance his assault on truth and civility from the start of his presidency, Trump employed his own tag team versions of Squealer – in imaginative mouthpieces Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Sanders, former White House press secretary, seemed eternally lost in an alternate reality where if President Trump “says it, it must be true” – just as Farm’s animals were programmed to parrot of Napoleon, no matter how absurd the lie.

According to Sanders: Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe was a “hoax,” the President wanted to protect pre-existing conditions after all, and, despite her boss’ constant maligning of the media as the “enemy of the people,” Trump actually favored a free press.

And we Americans, like Farm‘s flock of mindless sheep taught by Squealer the pig to obediently bleat “Four legs good, two legs better,” were supposed to believe it all.

In May, a Reuters poll found that a mystifying 56% of Republicans in the country fell for Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate President.

Sadly, that alarming statistic lends credence to the old adage that the more a people are lied to, the more likely they are to believe the lie.

The late famed American writer Gore Vidal said: “We live in the United States of amnesia. We don’t learn anything because we don’t remember anything.”

Perhaps, that explains how folks will believe the biggest lie of all from a guy who told some 30,000 lies during his caustic presidency. They just don’t remember, conveniently or not.

Surely then, the flummoxed masses wouldn’t be familiar with legendary CBS TV broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s instructive to viewers that we must “remember that accusation is not evidence and hearsay is not proof,” in the midst of his exposing Communist Red Scare ringleader Senator Joseph McCarthy.

“Some are More Equal Than Others”

In Farm, the pigs methodically mangled Animalism’s “Seven Commandments” under the cover of a barrage of lies, dulling the senses of their fellow barnyard animal “comrades” until they settled for one contrived declaration:

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

We should realize from history and plain Common Sense, (a nod to Thomas Paine’s rallying cry book credited for uniting American colonist revolutionaries to stand up to the British imperialists) that a entity which constantly accuses the opposition of a socialist agenda, while itself is breaking from all democratic norms of a Republic – such as facts, justice and decency – is guilty of bolstering it’s own autocratic ambitions.

“What I was trying to say was,” Orwell continues in the McDonald letter, “‘You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.’”

Trump may have legitimately lost the election and been banned from Twitter and Facebook. But, his dictator dreams, encouraged his fellow privileged porkers, are alive and well and pose as severe a threat to the Republic as ever.

As Trump desperately resurrects his campaign-style rallies, resuming his mission to insult and connive his way across the American landscape, leaving a destructive path of Reality TV rubble for us to clean up, he’s promoting a seditious fantasy that he will retake the White House come August.

In the meantime, hate crimes have steadily spiked annually since Trump’s disparaging mug first invaded our living rooms nightly five years ago.

Mass shootings up ticked the first quarter of 2021. And white Nationalists were emboldened to the point of attempting to overthrow the government. 

Presently, Republicans in 43 states are peddling legislation designed to  suppress the minority vote.

Let’s set the record straight. Again. Once Trump laughed off the Covid-19 virus for at least a crucial lost six weeks while it was already incubating death in the homeland – declaring “everything is under control,” that it would magically “disappear” and labeling it a Democratic “hoax” – the contagion in America became the Trump Virus.

And through it all – the deception, the seditious cover and the tragic death – Republican head hogs offer nary a snort or squeal of objection.

The same folks who stumbled out of their way to defend Trump’s unrepentant childish outbursts and destructive autocratic impulses for years – the McConnell, McCarthy, Lyndsey Graham, Jim Jordon, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz and the like – still embrace Trump as their daddy.

After the Jan. 6, Capitol riot, McCarthy flew down to Trump’s Mar-A-Lago, the site of past Republican party gatherings, to once again kiss up to the most disastrous President in American history.

In an opinion that ran in The Hill shortly before the presidential election in the fall of 2016, I first warned that Donald Trump was “America’s most dangerous home-grown terrorist.”

He’s proved that out ever since.

Obstruction — A Majority Party Privilege?

As if obstructing justice were just another majority party privilege, Senate minority leader McConnell wrangled 35 senators to nix a bi-partisan commission to investigate the machinations behind the Trump-instigated Jan. 6, attempted coup.

McConnell played the same cover-up role when he refused to consider a bi-partisan vote to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections. Similarly, he led the Senate to acquit Trump on two separate impeachments.

For more than a decade, McConnell has run cover for Republican’s suspect agenda –even when it meant stonewalling President Barack Obama's attempts to aid the people during America’s other desperate time amid the ruin of the 2008 Great Recession.

Meanwhile, in America, amid the abject swirl of controversy befitting a crime boss encompassing Trump, the autocratic programming advocated daily by Trump apologist “news” outlets like Fox, even now has so many citizens convinced that if Trump “said it, it must be true.”

Who is the real “enemy of the people”?

The Trump movement smacks of the authoritarianism abuses Orwell called out incessantly in his lifetime and creatively alerts us to with Animal Farm and his later novel, 1984.

Which is Which?

In Farm’s last pages, the pigs have rewritten Animalism’s “Seven Commandments” to suit them, embracing the ways of the animals’ sworn enemy humans.

“Comrade Napoleon” and his fellow privileged porkers have moved into overthrown (Manor Farm) owner Mr. Jones’ farm house, are dressed in his clothes and are walking upright on their two hind legs.

By then, the incoherent sheep under the absolute sway of Napoleon’s propagandist pig Squealer, no longer are sounding off on command: “Four legs good, two legs bad,” but rather, “Four legs good, two legs better.”

Animal Farm leaves us with the animals peering through the farm house dining room window as the pigs inside schmooze and toast mugs of beer with neighboring farmer, Mr. Pilkington and his associates.

The pigs and humans end up squabbling over a card game in which Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington each play an ace of spades.

Who is cheating?

In the novella’s last line, the baffled animals at the window look from face to face, from the humans to the pigs, but: “It was impossible to say which was which.”

Anymore, it’s becoming more difficult to distinguish “which is which” from Trump’s privileged porkers from say, a hostile nation or the likes of Trump’s “comrade” Russian President Vladimir Putin,  who has strived incessantly through social media manipulation, likely cyber attacks and myriad means to compromise America’s democratic foundation.

A seditious tyrannical movement is still a foot. Someone said: “A coup attempt that goes unpunished is practice.”

Will we ever find out what Trump was doing for nearly four hours while the nation’s Capitol was under siege by the red hat lovers he provoked to attempt to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

Why did Trump order his newly  install puppet Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to barr the national guard from intervening in the insurrection where Capitol police were brutalized for hours?

Today, this July 4th, as we reclaim  our a sense or normalcy from the chaos inflicted on us by the Trump Virus, and gather to gaze in wonder at fantastic fireworks shows, we best remember what this favorite festive summer holiday is all about.

We should reflect on how close we came to losing our celebrated liberties just six months ago.

And we should heed Orwell’s reflections on the early passage in Animal Farm when the power-hungry, ruling pigs confiscated all the milk and apples for themselves:

“If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then it would have been all right.”

We need to finally, forcefully put our foot down. 

Whether we remain a Republic or not, won’t depend on the Democrats who have their hands full on Capitol Hill. And we know now we can’t rely on a right wing packed U.S. Supreme Court.

Our future as “the land of the free and home of the brave” hinges on whether “we the people” finally put our foot down and start  demanding, loud and clear, our fair share of the milk and apples.

Jonah and The Whale All Over Again

This whale of a tale lends credibility to the biblical tale of Jonah and the Whale.

A lobster diver finds himself inside the mouth of a whale for half a minute -- until the whale spits him out like the whale in the Old Testament did to Jonah.

Interestingly, the story also features the biblical name, Josiah - the favored godly king of Judah who restored God's law several hundred years before Jesus Christ.

God speaks?

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/06/11/us/cape-cod-diver-eaten-by-whale/index.html

Authoritarianism Rising

The former "moral majority party" doesn’t give a rat’s back end about the people, just power.

When a political party incessantly fear-mongers “communism” and “socialism” to the masses, while breaking from all democratic norms of a Republic – by suppressing the vote, truth, decency and reality – then authoritarianism already has one clumsy foot in the door.

If no one ever said that before, someone should have.

Five years ago, I concluded an opinion that appeared in the local weekly newspaper, The Herald, with these words:

“Rock bottom line: Obsessive greed and the relentless pursuit of absolute power, is the mad scientist that inadvertently electrified and enlivened this amalgamation of our lesser selves, (Donald) Trump, to run amok, deceive, disparage and ultimately destroy with impunity.”

At this unsettling point five years hence – after so much deception-generated upheaval, degradation and tragic death in these un-United States – what more really is there to say?

In 2016, amid the ugly, unprecedented precipitous rise of an unrepentant demagogue to power, many of us Americans sensed gratingly and forebodingly in our spirit the absurdity and imminent danger of handing the Oval office keys to a man demonstrably bereft of any sense of decency and devoid of any hint of compassion, for even one month, let alone four years.

The writing in bold-faced, capital letters was on the wall.

But the long disenfranchised were blinded by their desperation for a savior. Many of my fellow white Christian evangelicals who have worshipped the Republican Party as an idol for decades, since the days of the alleged the “Morale Majority Party” led by political opportunist Jerry Falwell, were hoodwinked again.

“Donald Trump is what happens, he’s the result, the divine justice administered, in the wake of so much criminal negligence and inexcusable abandonment of the people in their most desperate times of need,” I wrote in that same Herald opinion five years ago.

Decades of tireless hypocritical policy and lies masking our society’s engrained economic disparities and racial inequities which oppressed the “least of these” for so long, finally manifest into the glaringly obvious – Donald Trump.

And now, the destroyer has destroyed. And continues to destroy. And he’ll keep on destroying as long as his sycophantic abetters, in high office and across the American lowlands, give him license.

For the sake of salvaging the Republic, let's drop this “bothsidesing" talk, as if each of the two present day political parties had an equally legitimate argument or agenda. They don’t.

One party is eviscerating truth daily, working feverishly to suppress the minority vote, muddling our nation’s racist history, opposing desperately needed jobs/infrastructure stimulus and obstructing a probe into the machinations behind the Jan. 6, deadly Capitol coup attempt that shook this nation to its core.

The other party is defending the truth, trying to protect the vote, coming to terms with the nation’s systemic racism, striving to pass legislation that fires up the economy and rebuilds America and urgently is seeking answers to how our Republic was nearly overthrown by a bunch of Trump-loving insurrectionists six month ago.

Through all the chaos and pain that Donald Trump exacerbated -- the Covid-19 pandemic that killed nearly 600,000 Americans, the racial unrest sparked by George Floyd's murder, escalation in hate crimes and mass shootings -- it's as if an almighty Creator has been shining a giant LED spotlight on this nation's vast inequities so that we might finally start acting right.

But, still, way too few of us are picking up what God's been putting down.

George Floyd Indeed "Touched The World"

"Jesus Christ, who preached love, truth and forgiveness was crucified on a crude cross, to save man, according to God's plan. God's righteousness demanded such a price.

"George Floyd, who once told a friend 'I want to touch the world' and who mostly spread love and joy during his 46 years on earth, was also killed by hate, it seems, to save the rest of us."

I wrote that on my blog last summer. 

I was reminded of it when ex-cop Derek Chauvin's trial began Holy Week. The irony or perhaps the ordained timing wasn't lost on me -- with images of Floyd's death fresh in our minds come Good Friday, the day Jesus was crucified for our sins.

It served as a reminder that perhaps Floyd's murder in broad daylight by a cop seemingly intent to crush the life out of Floyd for more than nine minutes, in essence, was a crucifixion capturing the world's attention.

Floyd's death was a cruel lynching that served to wake us all up, perhaps white Evangelical Christians as much as anyone -- and ultimately save us from our sins.

For decades many white Evangelicals have sat quietly, idily by, embracing an indifferent rightwing agenda, while our society and Republican leaders have effectively abandoned Jesus Christ's command to "love your neighbor as yourself" -- often when that neighbor's skin is a much darker shade than theirs.

So, 12 racially mixed jurors have handed down their verdict. Guilty on all three counts. 

It won't bring George Floyd back. 

But perhaps it will serve, in time, as a vital impetus to wake up those same Christians who too often resemble the hypocritical Pharasees of Jesus Christ's day. 

George Floyd's life -- and death -- indeed mattered more than we may comprehend. 

George Floyd's desire to "touch the world" was, like Christ's, painfully but powerfully fulfilled. 

A Pivotal Point

So much hinges on the trial of George Floyd's killer.

We live at a time where deceivers in the highest offices of the land increasingly insist that we Americans can't trust what we see.

That's an undeniable part of Donald Trump's destructive legacy, through his relentless lies (some 30,000) over four years.

Truth has become a mere inconvenience to so many of Trump's fellow Republican sycophants still insisting their cult leader had no culpability in the Jan. 6, Capitol Hill coup attempt that was clearly orchestrated by Trump and left several Americans dead.

But, that all will be tested as final arguements are heard today and the case is handed off to the jury. 

If former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin, who crushed the life out of Floyd by kneeling on his neck and back for some nine minutes last May, were to get his freedom, all Americans could soon lose ours -- amid the resulting chaos.

A guilty decision lays the groundwork for change. But it will still be a rocky road to healing and enduring justice.