Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Which Side are You on? (Trump?)

I could spend time breaking down President Trump's bizarre press nightmare, but I don't really fucking care what he said today. He was saying it all along, but some people just weren't paying attention. Hillary Clinton gave an entire speech about Trump and the so-called "alt-right" almost a year ago, and I thought the case she made was solid and apparent--my bad. It turns out, someone like Donald Trump can be a lifelong racist surrounding himself with other racists, and people will actually pretend they don't notice. That shocked me more than it should have, I will admit.

But then again, I am a funny old thing--I believe Americans should kill fascists. 

Look at the header of my blog--"This blog kills fascists. Eventually. It's a process I'm working on. Be patient with me." That header is a call-back to Woody Guthrie, who just forthrightly put "This machine kills fascists" on his guitar. My blogging isn't up to Woody Guthrie's songwriting, but I aspirationally hope I'm doing my bit. I'm not going to kick fascist ass all at once, but I will attempt it. Like I thought it was my job. 

And what do you know--Guthrie had his dealings and complaints about Old Man Trump (Donald's daddy).  Donald Trump started the hell off in this life Team Racist and fascist-associated. (No really, I'm not linking The Nation and I don't want to say Roy Cohn was such a fascist, but am I pretending Roy Cohn was not a fascist? Go--read Politico. McCarthyism is fascism. It doesn't matter that Cohn was a gay Jew. Demonizing and destroying and doubling-down and publically lying about everything? Shit's fascist. )

This blog is rooted in the mid-20th century ideas that Keynes rocked, that civil rights for all were a positive good, and that we all are supposed to stand against fascists. It's what the good people do. It's what Churchill and FDR did. (Stalin--I don't know him.)

It's what heroes are supposed to do. 

In the United States of America, where I thought I was living, Nazis are stupid and bad at best and are history's worst monsters because of course they are.  I mean, who demonizes and singles out ethnic minorities and gay and trans people and religious minorities  and disabled people and tries to codify into law ways to make the oppression of these people permanent? 

Oh, right. Trump. Because he is what he is. (And let's not actually "go there" and pretend his honesty is refreshing-it's shit. I don't expect people to eat shit and smile. You like this? You like eating shit, and there's something fundamentally wrong with you.) 

We are supposed to see Dictators as bad and even clowns in this society.

Hitler and those who are Hitler-adjacent are supposed to be targets of our scorn, not our admiration. People waving Swastika flags are not okay--ever.  You should expect better. The people who would easily accept standing right by them--are not okay either. And this Confederate thing--kind of fascist, also too, with the added problem of being treason against the US in the defense of bondage-slavery, because read the actual articles of secession of the states in question. Yes, it was always about slavery, not states' rights. Because it was about states' having the right to endorse slavery. Because the South was like, "Screw it" with respects to Northern States' feels about the Fugitive Slave Acts, which made catching free human (black) bodies and delivering them back into a pernicious bondage incumbent upon people who didn't want any part of it. Which was obviously fuckery. Northern states had to comply with making black people slaves, and the South at first simply didn't give a shit if the Federal law was about determining what states were free--but then when GOP President Lincoln happened, they had a total freak-out and got scared he'd take away their bondage humans. 

Wow. Fucking snowflakes. Makes you wonder why the Party of Lincoln is being all about Confederate statues now, doesn't it?


So color me unimpressed with the reasoning of weirdo RW fringe folks like disgraced election campaign finance fraudster and adulterer Dinesh D'Souza, who somehow thinks General Robert E. Lee was not in favor of slavery or secession, but kind of led the Confederate Army anyway.
Robert E. Lee, slave holder and warrior for the cause of secession, would have been astounded to have been so misconstrued, as was his opposition to Confederate monuments. Also too, we seized his property and buried heroes on it.  But D'Souza is firmly ensconced in hind-titterati land, anyway--after all, writing something with the title "The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left" is pretty explicitly recycling Jonah Goldberg's drool through a badly-abused sweat sock. I'd worry after his health if he gave me reasons to give a shit.

Anyway, when idiot-ass thoroughly uncloseted racist Donald Trump talks about antifa showing up with clubs, it is kind of weird that I just note that the only club-swinging-like activity I noticed was the abuse by racists of Deandre Harris.  And I note the car-ramming terrorist tactic was fresh out of violence ideation posted to Fox News via The Daily Caller.  Which Red state legislators were totally here for, and hate group leaders approved of.

We've seen RW terror before, and we'll see it again.  What we need to know is, this ideology is geared towards violence, and opposition to it is the only way to get over it.

Trump has tacitly supported our domestic enemies (which isn't what his oath of office was about at all). But I would hope most Americans knew what side they meant to be on. And yes, I would hope it would be the not-Nazi, not-treason-side. 

6 comments:

Formerly Amherst said...

Hi Vixen, I'm really surprised that so much attention is being paid to a bunch of alt-left and alt-right mental juvenile delinquents.

Should a municipality or a state wish to relocate a statue or put it in a museum, they are perfectly within their rights to do so. However, I think mobs of silly people taking the law into their own hands and circumventing the opportunity of citizens to make their will known regarding a relocation should be treated just as people who commit property damage.

In the South most of the citizens feel more or less like the rest of the country about most issues. However, probably most citizens would prefer for the statues to remain, because these figures represent something in the South that is different from the way people think of it in other parts of the country.

These generals protected southern citizens and their families and are respected for this even if their positions are not always admired. Frankly, very few adults have any interest in re-fighting the Civil War. From a historical point of view violent leftist groups are acting a lot like the Taliban destroying Buddhist statues or ISIS wanting to destroy Christian symbols. This should be repudiated, not encouraged.

People who get a permit from their town have a legal right to exercise their First Amendment rights. These rights are often offensive to others, but our Constitution protects free speech. This is why the ACLU has undertaken the protection of these dopey Nazi and Klan people. Others can disagree, but they have the right to speak. I hope all the violent alt-left and alt-right people are arrested and put in jail.

I would like to suggest to our alt-left and alt-right citizens: Think what you like. Feel what you like. But mind your own business.

Vixen Strangely said...

I can appreciate some of your points, here--I'm from the "right to speech ends where one's fist connects with another person's nose" school for the most part, and want to believe, without respects to ideology, if a group was out of hand and violence was literally underway, the respect for speech can only happen where there is order. People there reported that the police presence stepped back and let some things happen, and I don't think that's ideal, but also--it keeps either side from calling the police out for "violating their rights". Here's where we are in 2017. I also think groups bringing down statues on their own are going about things the wrong way--it might be well-intentioned, but it is statutorily vandalism--and besides that, they are metal and stone. A person could hurt themselves with the falling debris! There has to be a better way, and localities deciding on their own the time has come just seems more civil.

But I also understand the impatience of people who have felt for some time like symbols representing their oppression need to go for them to not continue to experience that oppression. I have a hard time putting statues that might have been erected in the 19-teens or twenties when Jim Crow laws were being formulated, in with 2000 year old Buddhas being taken down by Taliban. I don't think they have the same depth of cultural significance. There's Confederate statues that have been erected in states like Arizona and California that didn't even have to do with the conflict. They kind of seem to me to have had a different purpose than commemorating history. We've got more meaningful monuments (like at Gettysburg and Harpers Ferry and museums and so on).

One of things I think is incredible about this country is that the US did manage to somehow, maybe not perfectly, survive a bitter and bloody conflict and put a country back together when I don't know how great the odds of that even happening would have been calculated in the virtual eye-blink between April 9, 1865 and April 14, 1865. But it was managed in a odd dance of "minding one's own business" and "march of progress". I don't think we're re-experiencing the Civil War as a country, so much as we have disaffected and troubled people working out their own shit and choosing different "isms" to express their anger through. I welcome the conversation--I don't always agree with the tactics. But I also deplore an online and IRL phenomenon that seems to have brought back spectres of racism and misogyny and violence that doesn't seem to recognize what the history was about, either.

Ten Bears said...

There is no "alt-left". Your credibility ended right there, no point in reading anymore of it.

Grung_e_Gene said...

The permit was rescinded. There is no alt-left, there are the conservative traitors and people opposing them.

Formerly Amherst said...

Vixen, a couple of people have objected to my use of the “alt-left.” They have said there is no such thing. In all truth, I am in agreement with them. There is no such thing as the alt-left. However, there is also no such thing as the “alt-right.” These are both made-up journalistic words that attempt to characterize, but are empty of definition.

Factually, National Socialism has absolutely nothing to do with a conservative perspective. Conservatives are not socialists of any stripe. Conservatives believe in free market capitalism and are against a socialistic distribution system. Conservatism in the US starts with Barry Goldwater (who incidentally was Jewish). So the attempted linkage between National Socialists and the original Scottish thinker Edmund Burke is a completely fraudulent correlation.

The second Ku Klux Klan started around 1939 was completely of the Democratic Party. At that time in the South Democrats held complete sway over Southern sensibilities and political perspective. Bull Connors was a Democrat. Senator Byrd (himself a Klan member) was himself a Democrat. George Wallace, the segregationist, was Democrat. Lester Mattox was a Democrat. In fact Democrats dominated the South in those days.

Conservatives are interested in free markets and small, centralized government and have no particular ethnic requirement.

I know the left can be violent, because I was violent in the 1960s when I was part of the Civil Rights struggle. Shamefully, I was one of the people out throwing Coke bottles after I got back from Vietnam. One of my best friends was a Weatherman who helped break Tim Leary out of jail to go stay with Eldridge Cleaver (who later became a Ronald Reagan Republican). Today any real meaning has escaped definitions in our political process. It could hardly be otherwise since people are trying to sum up in a word a huge group of people, each who have their own needs, desires, and sensibility as it relates to politics.

My view as I've frequently stated is that, like George Washington, I wish political parties could be eliminated. Washington was afraid that people would become more loyal to their party than to the country, and I think this has occurred.

Furthermore, I don't believe that either an exclusively right or left perspective can ultimately achieve their respective goal in a global marketplace. These are mostly old points of view that can no longer rest comfortably in our chaotic world. However, If I have to choose one political philosophy over the other, I think that conservatism does the best for the country and the largest number of people. The problem with the left taken to its logical conclusion is totalitarianism. The problem with the right taken to its logical conclusion is rapacious materialism. So it's probably a good thing that neither of these can ever be achieved in the real world.

Grung_e_Gene said...
This comment has been removed by the author.

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