My aching 2003 Toyota Matrix is finally at the mechanic’s for some major surgery. The kind only plastic can pay for. So I’m shut in, housebound – stuck inside with nothing to do but stream DemocracyNow’s coverage of the “March on Washington DC”. I’d planned to watch a bit of it anyway as some recourse to the pharmaceuticals I lack but badly require after bearing witness to the kabuki theater of a sparsely attended anointment of our 45th potentate the day before. Like my car, I’m badly in need of uplift.
All I’ve got is this near frozen bottle of Prosecco, poor man’s champagne. I’ve unearthed it from a drawer in my fridge where it’s been consorting with a bag of limp dehydrated carrots for at least a year. It’ll have to do. I don’t drink. I shouldn’t drink. There’s an eight year old delusional megalomaniac in the Oval office surrounded by billionaire privateers and stone cold killers. I’m drinking.
And now I’m watching this thing and America Ferrera hits the mike and kicks things off in fine fashion. She sets the tone and I’m down because I’m a feminist. I see reproductive rights and women’s rights across the board being foreclosed with every other civic right that makes life worth living on the chopping block or about to be privatized. I’m down with some pushback. Bring the rage already! So I’m watching and listening as Ashley Judd shuts down Michael Moore and just busts out a spoken word piece in such righteous indignation and emotional commitment you could just color me sold. I’m all in.
But then a few things occur to me in no particular order. The first and obvious is that the sister is looking good – great in fact. Secondly, Ashley can rap pretty good for a white girl. Who knew?
But the third thing was that part of me, the wet blanket part of me that never gets invited to parties, shaking me out of my own torpor, forcing me to ask, “What the Hell is happening here”? This thing is already way, way bigger than I thought it was going to be and the more I watch, the bigger it gets. What’s going on?
Then the dull thud of a bell goes off in my head. Hostage in my home, aloud to no one in particular I exclaim, “This ain’t no grassroots bullshit! This is huge institutional dollar-dollar global wag the dog shit!” It just hits me, late, like how the obvious so often does in my life that this is some special interest sponsored spectacle I’ve invited myself into. But I’m reading feeds and they’re all saying grassroots this and grassroots that, grassroots organizing . . . . bullshit.
Grassroots is me shaking down 10 broke-ass Marxist friends of mine for $80.42 and sending it to KPFA. That’s grassroots. This March on Washington DC – and 300 coordinated sister marches worldwide – didn’t have any apparent sponsorship. No NFP’s and certainly no corporate logos anywhere. And yet the kind of money and professional event planning staff required to pull off something like this successfully is clearly not raised going door to door. We’re talking millions and millions of dollars with no expenses spared to organize something huge in a very collapsed time frame beginning not a day prior to election day, November 8th, say around 11 p.m. There is no way one, dozens or even hundreds of not-for-profits can budget for that! That’s not how any of this works. Grass roots my ass.
And the more no one is talking about that, the more I want to know why.
So by the time Alicia Keys and Angela Davis come and go part of me is absolutely stoked in the knowledge I’m watching something truly historic. I’m enjoying it on a high level because I love to see sisters rise. They’re massaging my social justice button and I’m taken quite favorably by the whole feel good, populist solidarity and resonance of this carefully choreographed master’s class in public resistance – and dare I say identity politics.
But that other half of me, the half with all the scars is saying “Who is spending all this money to make sure I’m feeling all the good things I’m feeling right now?” And who is using every actress, singer and activist I’d kill to have a slow dance with to do it?” I can’t help myself. Everybody is enjoying a day at the beach and I’m staring out to sea looking for dorsal fins.
The timing is what’s bothering me. Something is wrong. There’s nothing spontaneous about this demonstration. The timing is, is . . .too perfect.
Look, at least a half a million children die under a terrestrial partition and no-fly zone in Iraq under President Bill Clinton. He oversaw the strafing of Iraq with so much depleted uranium munitions that Iraqi women to this day are giving birth to genetic monsters, babies so hideously misshapen you’d turn your head away in horror and revulsion to go throw up on your knees. Of all this carnage, Secretary of State Madeline Albright infamously said the price was worth it. Where was the groundswell of women’s indignation about that? Nowhere.
On the heals of a straight up judicial coup d’etat in 2000 followed by 9/11, America lays waste to Afghanistan, Iraq and the whole of North Africa in a seamless escalation of global brutality from the Bush doctrine to Obama’s full spectrum dominance of perpetual war. The voices of American women don’t rise above a whisper.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton literally cackles at the savage assassination of Gaddafi who was sodomized by a sword while she and Obama laid waste to Libya under false pretense launching almost 10,000 strike sorties, a great many of which targeted civilian populations. Unicef reported that most of the children killed were under the age of ten. Sisters Unite!! Bueller? . . . . Bueller?
Under Obama, Hillary and her team of psychotic plate spinners at State including Jen Psaki, Marie Harf, John Kirby and Mark Toner – not to mention Victoria Nuland who deserves her own very special place in Hell – seven countries were turned into an abattoir using the most savage women hating proxy head cutters to do it, plus the Ukraine. We created tens of millions of refugees, most of them women and children running for their very lives, turning the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard. The collective rage of the American sisterhood? Not a whimper.
Hillary Clinton green lights a coup d’etat in 2009 in Honduras, toppling democratically elected President Manuel Zalaya. Her statecraft turns Honduras into a gang rape of trans-national corporate resource extraction, the serial assassination of indigenous environmental activists like Berta Caceres and a free fire zone of drug gangs and lawless police and politicians who work for them. The uncontainable protean din of organized American female revolt? Not a mumbling word. Crickets.
So suddenly, like a bolt from the clear blue sky a day after a sparsely attended inauguration ceremony for our 45th President, it starts raining A-List female celebrities, singers, actresses and activists from all points of the compass on one stage on one day in a “spontaneous grass roots event” before as many as a half million people all wearing what Amy Goodman called, “pink pussy hats”. And I’m saying, “Hummmm, where have I seen this before?”
And before I go on I just want to say that I was one of the four people who voted for Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. I’m left enough to not even have any friends on the left!! How many of you reading this right now have actually read Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” with a hi-liter? hmmmm?
So I’ll just say this as plainly as I can. Watching the timing and trajectory of the March on Washington and the extraordinarily expensive and coordinated sister marches held all over the country in cities whose attendance levels were also in the hundreds of thousands reminded me of the well financed, highly organized color revolutions our Deep State have down to a science and utilize to topple fragile democracies all over the globe. The March on Washington DC felt to me like an impeccably tailored variant for an American audience of useful idiots in pink knit hats who think they’re there for their civil rights when in reality they’re being used to send a very clear message to the Trump Administration by the people who paid the people to front for this global shindig. Billionaires who don’t give a rat’s ass about a woman’s right to choose, #BlackLivesMatter or LGBTQ rights.
As a dear friend e-mailed me the other night:
What most people don’t understand is that the highly politicized and civilian neocon/neoliberal led CIA has brought ruin to America and to large swaths of the world. And much of what we see in Syria today is CIA backed proxies run amok.
Trump, the nationalist, represents that portion of the Deep State – the more progressive part – which includes the military, ironically, which is now on the offensive to save the American project from absolute failure in the face of an unstoppable union of Russia-China-Iran; the latter which not only is technologically ahead of the US militarily but also seeks to replace the petro dollar with a new global currency system. This is truly a fight to the finish, in my humble opinion. That is why virtually the entire neoliberal press and the right wing neocon intelligence agencies and corporate banking and political power structure of the Clintons is going full bore against Trump.
While the women have much to complain about, the real story is not “pussy grabbing” or even civil rights – there are no civil rights for black, brown or native peoples anywhere on the planet – but rather, IMO, the very real threat that the Neocon/Neoliberal austerity capitalist grouping could destroy the whole fucking world. They are evil and will stop at nothing.
What’s clear to me is this. There’s a war of elephants going on. The intelligence community and the Deep State wanted Hillary. She manifests and reflects with terrifying, atavistic zeal a lust for both wealth and power and was a natural extension and amplification of the many decades old neo-liberal agenda of a unipolar not so “new world order” that finds China encircled by 400 American military bases like a noose and NATO backed up to the very borders of Russia brandishing troops and nukes stationed in the countries of compliant Nazi hosts. But as fate would have it, a delusional narcissist named Donald Trump won instead and he wants to make nice with Russia and engage in mutually advantageous trade policies. The Donald seems to prefer making economic deals with Russia over saber rattling, fear mongering, military escalation, debilitating sanctions and threats of World War III. Bill Clinton played ball. George W. Bush played ball. Barack Obama played ball masterfully. Donald Trump hasn’t gotten the memo.
The contention between two competing agendas boils down to a multi-polar world of de-escalating military tensions with the global pie carved up between America, Russia and China or the Great Game – a suicidal extension of a uni-polar neo-liberal vision of American hegemony based on broad spectrum military dominance and perpetual war, and if that means the use of next-gen tactical nuclear weaponry, so be it.
And truly, I think that’s what the March on Washington DC – and elsewhere – was really about. The front end was an exquisitely timed, feel good push back against the very real threat all our remaining civil rights, public institutions and environment are facing. But the real purpose being served by the men behind all those otherwise laudable not for profits who wrote the checks to fund the March is something quite different, I suspect.
I know that with the entirety of the self-identified left in a state of post-coital euphoria surrounding the phenomenal global impact of the March on DC – packed as they are on one side of an overloaded Pakistani ferry on a windy day – I make no friends saying this from the lonely side of the boat, but the enemy of my enemy is not my friend and the hallmark of being used badly is being given what you want – for a while. And all my sisters and brothers on stage and in attendance this past Saturday, January 21st – who I bear deep love for and solidarity with – got what they wanted. Was it good for you?