No one is better at bullshitting the TV-addled working-man and -woman than Donald Trump. Thanks to his personal billions, he's not beholden to the usual fat cats, and his reality-TV instincts are impeccable. We know it's all bullshit, but he's so incredibly good and entertaining at it it's impossible to turn away. Better than anyone, he knows that presidential election campaigns have become major American entertainment cycles. Celebrities gouging and biting to obtain Power: What better Reality TV could anyone come up with? Instead of a new car or a million bucks, the ultimate winner gets to be President of the United States. Benito Mussolini coined the term fascism from the ancient Roman magistrates' symbol of power, the fasces, a battle axe surrounded by sticks that represented the people huddling up to his power. One man recently said of Trump, "He's my microphone." Accordingly, the Trump symbol might be a silver microphone surrounded by plastic cocktail stir sticks.
Deresiewicz again: "Neo-liberalism believes that we have reached the end of history, a steady-state condition of free-market capitalism that will go on replicating itself forever. ...The world is not going to change, so we won't need young people to imagine how it might. ...All we need to do is ... run faster and faster." He tells how educating youth in ideas and thinking used to be considered a critical function of an evolving society. Then he concludes, "If there was ever a time that we needed young people to imagine a different world, that time is now."
Today's reality can be pretty demoralizing, which no doubt makes the likes of Rick Scott and Scott Walker dance in delight. Then someone like Bernie Sanders comes along, a man unafraid of ideas and open minded thinking and how they encourage change. Picture it: The once Socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, is drawing huge crowds. As they do with Trump, the politics-as-sports reporters and pundits all say Sanders will burn out and we'll have to settle for someone like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Joe Biden! The guy who, when Reagan cleaned their clocks, saved the Democratic party from oblivion by colluding with Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Senator Strom Thurman to beef up America's police forces and fuel the Drug War that has filled our jails to the brim with young black males. Joe, please go back to Scranton.
Deresiewicz cuts to the chase: "Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. ...That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education."
It's called leveling the playing field. Sander's would tax Wall Street to make a college education free for all Americans. This way, a young person can educate him- or herself, then go to work and build a family and a life without an oppressive lifetime debt burden to the neo-liberal market economy. It makes me think of that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song about a coal miner, "Sixteen Tons." You may recall the line, sung to a dirge: "I owe my soul to the company store." That kind of oppressive debt peonage would be lifted from our young citizens' futures.
In Littleton, NH, where he is ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls, Sanders urged the news media to focus on issues like jobs, income and wealth inequality, climate change, racism, college costs, retirement security, criminal justice and poverty in America. "What the American people want," he told a large crowd, "is a media that looks at the real problems facing America and does not look at politics as though it were a football game or a soap opera." You hear that, Chris Matthews? That's almost as refreshing as Norman Mailer's famous campaign line when he ran for mayor of New York in 1969: "Cut the bullshit!" It would be a powerful beginning if our media began to focus less attention on celebrity, money and winning and more on the richness of the ideas at play that include everything on Sander's list, plus the repair and maintenance of public infrastructure, the improvement of public transportation and how to begin the difficult process of undoing the mass incarceration mess Joe Biden and Bill Clinton helped institute. Then there's race. Many thought the election of Barack Obama meant the end of racial conflict in America. Not so. As someone recently pointed out, the Obama presidency was actually an important milestone that kicked off a new period of examination of race in America.
Donald Trump and his pallid-by-comparison Republican colleagues, would all make "America great again" by pumping up the military even more and further empowering the neo-liberal financial "killers" at the top -- to borrow Trump's favored characterization for dealmakers like himself. The difference is, the things that Bernie Sanders likes to talk about would actually accomplish it, would actually empower America from the bottom up and the inside-out to make America great again. The important difference is, Woody Guthrie's America would be included in the mix.
The choice is becoming stark: More of the same neo-liberal, free-market empowerment of the rich at the very top -- or thoughtful, serious social reform for the betterment of all Americans. For me, it's a no-brainer: It's about more of the same bullshit ... or beginning to talk real sh*t for a change.
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