Liberal Lamentations in their Diminishing Hopes

Nevada DNC debates

Even while the six US Democratic hopefuls were busy in their pursuit of winning the most goodwill of the Nevada public, the Liberal media were busy constructing alternative futures towards containing a modest incursion by the “great unwashed” in their comfy domain where the corporations have an almost exclusive control over those chosen through a mind-numbing array of manipulative processes. My circle of liberal friends and acquaintances, were crest fallen as they saw their hopes dashed by the unconvincing performance of their choice candidates, Bloomberg, Buttigeig, Klobouchar et.al. In their moments of pessimism, most of them already conceded Mr. Trump his second take at destroying even the minor manifestations of justice and fairness in the US and the manner it conducts its business of imperial governance.

Well, I’m an optimist. If we view the great juggernaut, the USA, as a giant island for the wealthy and the privileged, the billionaires, and their valiant surrogates and well-wishers, that is the so-called “upper-crust” that populates the top Fifth percentile of its population, we would see a perennial presidency of Mr. Trump. Some of us had even pinned our hopes on another, a little shorter, a little older billionaire, but with personal minutiae that’s not much apart from his friend, Trump. He’s racist, classist, narcissist, authoritarian, and generally full of shit. But when he opened up his ill-gotten vault, dishing out hundreds of millions to the liberal media and FoxNews, the purveyors of liberalism ran after him with their tongues lolling, lips puckered up to be the first ones to latch on to the filthy asshole of, well, an asshole. Without even uttering a word, the dude was catapulted to herald the arrival of freedom from, well, another asshole. For a few days, until he opened his mouth, we were at ease basking in the crazed word-soup dished out by the loud-mouths and empty noisemakers like Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, the so-called scribes who see Russians lurking even inside their kitchen sinks. The liberal establishment, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the big pharma, health insurance boondoggle, intelligence community including assorted other warmongers, saw a sort of Phoenix rising. Sadly, the Phoenix turned out to be a dud. Hence, pessimism of my liberal buddies.

If we’ll continue to view the political landscape through the lens we have hitherto used, we’d likely get a skewed image. Yes, the economy is doing well. But for whom? 87 million Americans do not have any health coverage. Most of the ones with insurance can not afford to have one catastrophic illness. The per capita number of homeless people has grown exponentially. The salaries of teachers and other white-collar workers have been effectively frozen, hovering around 20% less in purchasing power than these were in the early 1970s. Salaries of the service industry workers have been at least 23% less in value than these were in 1968. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the pauperization of Americans has seen exponential growth. With the cutbacks in the food stamp type of social entitlements, the US is destined to fall into the times that Charles Dickens lamented about. Yes, the upper 5 percent have seen their fortunes tripled and quadrupled. Jeff Bezos is probably worth twice what he was last year. Those paying their fealty to this “majestic economic growth”, only see what they aspire to become and perhaps genuinely believe that they have a crack at it. They fought the 2016 US election on that same perspective. Up until the last electoral vote was counted they were busy putting final touches to their hero, Hillary Clinton’s trek through the glass ceiling. They believed in their own invincibility. They never imagined that a bunch of “deplorables” (as HRC called them) are going to snatch the presidency from her deserving hands passing it over to an orange clown.

After the election, they spent their entire time manufacturing one or another specious reason for their loss. Russia, Ukraine, Assad, Twitter, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, the list goes on. They are making the same mistake this time around. They need to unstuck their lips that are firmly latched on to the teats of the Wall Street and their noses permanently lodged inside the filthy assholes of the billionaires, the big pharma, merchants of war etc. There’s a need for analysing the causes of Trump’s first electoral victory. He won because the working class folk in the previously manufacturing states had experienced the wholesale loss of everything. They were drinking poisoned water, getting their protein from muskrats and assorted other rodents, living in dilapidated shacks. Their schools had converted into the places where the homeless squatted. They had always voted for a Democrat. Theirs was a protest vote that would have put Bernie Sanders instead of Trump in the White House. But the fact is that the greedy and selfish could not imagine sharing even a little sliver of the pie. Bernie is not a socialist. He is at best a mild social-democrat, with a plan to help improve some circumstances for the ones who have been fucked for so long. They, the liberal establishment, could not fathom even such a benign incursion into their power and wealth. And they are doing it again. Of course, that will once again rob freedom-loving Americans of a fair choice. Americans are wanting to change the power structure a tad bit. Unless we see the truth behind that simple formulation, we would always see the right-leaning protest groups, such as white-supremacists, ultra-Zionists, billionaires, and fascist evangelists, run the roost.

Zahid Makhdoom is a curmudgeony Canadian of Sindhi origins who lives in Vancouver, BC with his pet rock. He can be reached at [email protected]


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