- by NoahI'm pretty numb right now. I woke up this morning and I felt like I did when, as a boy, I woke up on the morning of November 23,1963: heartbreak, depression, and wondering what would become of all of us. I live in New York City and the streets are eerily quiet today. The constant cacophony of honking horns is silenced. No one is stopped at the light blasting their choice of music for all the world to hear. Normally, it’s only this quiet during a hellacious blizzard. I haven’t even heard a raised voice.I worry about what the election of Donald J. Trump says both about and to all of us. Perhaps most of all, I worry about what this election of Trump says to our children. It tells school kids that they can get all the way to the top, not if they study but if they refine their bullying ability, as if bullying wasn’t already a problem in our schools. It tells our boys that assaulting our girls is not just ignored but may be even rewarded. I think of what a picture of an accomplished woman president placed, nicely framed, on the classroom wall would have said about our country and what it would say to our girls.
Don’t waste anytime mourning. Organize!-Joe Hill
I do know that we need a patriotic resistance movement. I'd like to think that Trump is such a pathological liar that he was lying about everything, but, I know better. I don't see him changing. He is incredibly mentally ill and maladjusted. I do suspect that the most disappointed people in the next couple of years will be those who voted for him. The weight of buyer’s remorse will be immense. The rest of us will have expected the misery. We will all have to live in the consequences. The media has played a supportive role in the rise of Trump (and not just the $2 Billion in free airtime for his Castro/Hitler style ravings) in that his supporters have no idea that he is far more of a crook than they ever imagined HRC to be, and that he has repeatedly failed in his business ventures. They will now have a President-elect on trial for fraud and, possibly, if the case proceeds, rape of a minor. Impeaching him will be hard with a Repug Senate and House. His brand is already suffering. His Toronto hotel closed. The new one in Washington is about to go belly up, but, ironically, his inauguration will buy it time. The way Trump operates, I have little doubt that visiting dignitaries will be told to stay there, and, that somehow, we the taxpayers will pay for their stays. Now he can use his position to enrich himself and his family, which is, most likely, the reason he ran in the first place.All I can say in Trump’s favor is that, yes, things like NAFTA and CAFTA and similar trade agreements do need to be renegotiated. I recall that the great Thom Hartmann said several years ago now that the party that gets behind that idea and incentivizes the return of industrial jobs to Americans will reap the political success. Unfortunately, there is no doubt that the republicans would give us a structure to go along with it that pays workers slave wages and enriches only the big boss man. I see the return of the company store and the company-owned home. We had a hint of that in what Mitten Romney said about the “wonderful” factories in China; the “wonderful factories in China where Ivanka’s line of shoes is made and where Trump’s line of ties is made.Funny how the powers that be have removed all mention of Joe Hill from school textbooks. We’ll be needing another Joe Hill more than ever now.Trump’s supporters called the flawed Hillary Clinton many things. One was "Oligarchist." So what did they do? They voted in an Oligarchist on massive steroids. Even Trump’s New York home is patterend after the Palace of Versailles, right down to the gold filigree chairs he sits in.Trump’s campaign was a case of "The Cult Of Personality" ruling the day. Personally, I could never have thrown in my lot with the KKK and all of those other White Supremacy groups even if I thought Trump was sane and even if I agreed with him on economic issues. Character should matter, but, all too often, it doesn’t when we decide who goes to Washington. In fact, bad character is often the one true bipartisan thing in our nation’s capitol.I'm left with two hopes. One is the aforementioned highly unlikely one about him lying so much that he turns out to be the opposite of what he presented to us all. The other is more long term: I see our country's political history as a series of pendulums. The country swings left. Then the country swings right. What happened in the 1920s and the FDR reaction of the 1930s is as good example as any of this. Soup kitchens begat the now endangered Social Security program. The more the pendulum swings one way, the more it often swings back the other way. Trump's followers saw things like gender equality and Obamacare as extreme left things. They even saw the corporatist-centrist President Obama himself as extreme left, and homophobia and race was something that they, unconsciously in some cases, consciously in others, hung their criticisms and nihilistic hatreds on. So, perhaps, in four, or eight years, or maybe twelve, the inevitable reaction will give us the Republican Party's worst nightmare, full blown Socialism, or, at least President Elizabeth Warren. My advice (unwanted) to the Republican Party is: Be careful what you wish for. [NOTE: Bruce has a part II, or an update, coming mañana.]I've been listening to this song a lot in recent months. It's one of my absolute favorite songs of the last 35 years. It could not be more appropriate than it is today. Great artists give us timeless art.
