Call it what you will—outrage fetishism, outrage exhibitionism, outrage porn—but that’s what we see happening in the majority of today’s political discourse. Conflating seemingly benign comments into crisis memes and using them to obfuscate what’s actually happening. And yes, there is no bothsidesism to it—Fox News and the “alt-right” and white nationalist rhetoric they co-opt, and repackage for the thirsty masses, is the biggest perp.
It saddens me then, to see a small-town columnist like Al Fonzi continue to chomp up the bait, to take those contorted takes straight to the dome, half-digest them, and regurgitate them for a local publication.
Fonzi’s parroted rhetoric and beliefs rooted in misinformation seep into these pages on a bi-weekly basis for what I’m assuming is a cohort of readers split down the middle, half of whom are cheerleaders who swallow the same hate-filled pills on the daily and half of whom hate-read him to throw up their hands and wonder why in our little corner of the world this type of spittle has become the norm.
Trump and his empire are criminal enterprises based upon the tenets of the old-time grift. Lie, cheat on taxes, bilk people out of money, sue, steal, lie, and cover some more. He is a carnival barker, a solo act, a Svengali and a charlatan, a bright shiny bumbling bauble of vitriol who wouldn’t be worthy of note if not for the fact that his policies have real consequences. The debasing of our Constitution and very democracy is happening so fast that no normalizing news org or equivocal governing body seems to have the chops to even cover or react to a fraction of the malfeasance. And so it rolls on. The real consequences will be felt over the next three generations—even as we’ve already lost so much.
Party-line thinking that things will “go back to normal” after a Mueller report is released, after the next election, are as far-fetched as wishing the economy would reverse back out of the have-tons and have-nothings mode of late capitalism that those entering the workforce now are just getting a taste of. We are, wholly, through the looking glass.
Climate change, which is happening in spite of the fact that an insufferable and specious “debate” is still waged by one side questioning its existence; slow-playing mouthpieces of the oil and gas lobbies warping the masses into believing that things will remain the same as the earth ramps up temperatures and revolt after revolt, is the biggest threat to our lives, to our very existence. And yet, here we stand, segmented and outraged, crazy, and hand-wringing, and clinging to guns, religion, and racist statues, separating families at the border in totalitarian fashion and spreading hate memes as it all crumbles around us.
Andrew J. Pridgen
Los Osos
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 5, 2019.
HA! Wait until Pridgen finds out people have abandoned Trump for his complete failure to do anything not related to Israel and now support Yang, Tulsi, and Sanders.
Any Democrat could beat Trump by simply addressing immigration. Immigration is the reason Trump was elected. Immigration is the issue everyone cares about. This is objective fact proven by poll after poll. Mass illegal and unchecked legal immigration to the country has stagnated U.S. wages while redistributing the wealth of Americas working and middle classes to higher income earners. The National Academies of Science found that immigration shifts about $500 billion a year in wages away from Americas working and middle class to newly arrived immigrants and corporations.
But todays Democrats aren’t willing to respond to a people. They see America as an economic zone, not a nation. They are inherently a corporatist capitalist party and capitalism demands mass immigration to make up for the below replacement birth rates of the native population. The population capitalism has destroyed. Cheap flat screen TV’s aren’t worth the highest suicide and addiction rates ever recorded. Cheap flat screen TV’s aren’t worth the destruction of the family, meaning and the happiness of our posterity.
Right now, under the president we elected to deal with immigration, we have the most immigrants coming in of any time in all of American history. They will tell you worst in the last decade, but what they dont tell you is that a decade ago, most of them were getting deported. Now, none of them are getting deported, and though we have no idea what the actual numbers are, we know that it is more than any point in all of American history.
This situation is absolutely insane, and now even Democrats know it. Even Cher knows it.
Any single Democrat could win against Trump if they simply attacked him on his total and complete failure to control the border. It wouldnt matter who they were. If someone just went up there and said Trump has utterly failed in his pledge to secure the US border and we now have more people entering this country than at any time in the history of America, and I will do whatever it takes to slow this deluge, they would win. What Bernie should have said is we have to end the Trump Administration policy of open borders. If he does say that, he wins.
I dont care if Bernie wants full communism in America. If anything, me and my people might get something out of that. Maybe I can start a family. All the people speaking out against socialism are simply shilling for tax cuts for the rich and corporations. If those are the two options, then just give me the socialism. If the economy collapses who cares? I dont care. I have nothing. As long as things are the way they are, I will never have savings, or a home, and I will die childless and penniless just like millions of other Americans like me. Once I cant make enough to pay rent anymore Im finished.
Furthermore I find it very hard to believe that Bernie would be on board with Trumps neoconservative agenda of antagonizing Russia and trying to launch wars of aggression against Iran and Venezuela, among others. But that is all really beside the point, because no other issue other than immigration actually matters. Remember in 2015, when Bernie said that open borders were a Koch Brothers scheme? I remember that. Its a much better statement than Trumps we need the most people ever in history to work in factories policy.
If Bernie Sanders makes a clear pledge to end the open borders policy of the Trump Administration, I will endorse him.
The Mueller report came out, guess what no collusion or obstruction, wow again the left misfired with their rants and raves wanting to see Trump be impeached on bogus charges. It took 2 years and over $25 million only to find out that the left has more bones in closet than Trump. The left are now scrambling like rats in box, it’s comical and the American public has finally seen the purpose of the Democratic party, nothing, nada to offer many realize the left has become a big joke and righteously so many constituents are jumping ship faster than those fence jumpers on the borders.
Bring the popcorn and lounge chairs the next investigation will be a stool sample on Trump to see if he ate any Zharkoye lately to link him with those nasty Russians.