The addiction to the
grotesque, to our own
version of Mugwumps, has
become our national
pathology. We are
entranced, even as the
secretion of Trump’s
Mugwump fluid repulses
us. He brings us down to
his level. We are glued
to cable news, which
usually sees a huge
falling off of
viewership after a
presidential election.
Ratings for the
Trump-as-president
reality show, however,
are up 50 percent. CNN,
which last year had its
most profitable year
ever, looks set in 2017
to
break even that record
and is projecting a
billion dollars in
profit. The New York
Times added some 500,000
subscribers, net, over
the past six months. The
Washington Post has seen
a 75 percent increase in
new subscribers over the
past year. Subscriptions
to magazines like The
New Yorker and The
Atlantic have increased.
This growth is provoked
not by a sudden desire
to be informed, but by
Americans’ wanting to be
continually updated on
the soap opera that
epitomizes the U.S.
government. What country
will the president
insult today? Mexico?
Australia? Sweden?
Germany? What celebrity
or politician will he
belittle? Arnold
Schwarzenegger? Barack
Obama? John McCain?
Chuck Schumer? What
idiocy will come out of
his mouth or from his
appointees? Can
Kellyanne Conway top her
claim that
microwave ovens that
turned into cameras
were used to spy on
Donald Trump? Will DeVos
say something as stupid
as her assertion that
guns are needed in
schools to
protect children from
grizzly bears?
Will Trump make another
assertion such as his
insistence that Obama
ordered his phone in
Trump Tower to be
tapped?
It is all entertainment
all the time. It is the
result of a media that
long ago gave up
journalism to keep us
amused. Trump was its
creation. And now we get
a daily “Gong Show” out
of the White House. It
is good for Trump. It is
good for the profits of
the cable news networks.
But it is bad for us. It
keeps us distracted as
the kleptocrats
transform the country
into a banana republic.
Our world is lifted from
the pages of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s novel
“The Autumn of the
Patriarch,” in which the
“eternal” dictator was
feared and mocked in
equal measure.
The kleptocrats—and,
now, those they con—have
no interest in the
flowery words of
inclusivity,
multiculturalism and
democracy that a
bankrupt liberal class
used with great
effectiveness for three
decades to swindle the
public on behalf of
corporations. That
rhetoric is a spent
force. Barack Obama
tried it when he
crisscrossed the country
during the presidential
campaign telling a
betrayed public that
Hillary Clinton would
finish the job
started by his
administration.
Political language has
been replaced by the
obscenities of reality
television, professional
wrestling and the
daytime shows in which
couples find out if they
cheated on each other.
This is the language
used by Trump, who views
reality and himself
through the degraded
lens of television and
the sickness of
celebrity culture. He,
like much of the public,
lives in the fantasy
world of electronic
hallucinations.
The battle over health
care was all about the
most effective way to
hand money to
corporations. Do we
stick with Obamacare,
already a gift to the
for-profit insurance and
pharmaceutical
industries, or do we
turn to a sham bill of
pretend care that gives
even more tax cuts to
the rich? This is what
passes for nuanced
political debate now.
The courtiers in the
media give the various
sides in this argument
ample airtime and space
in print, but they lock
out critics of corporate
power, especially those
who promote the rational
system of Medicare for
all. Health care costs
in the United States,
where 40 cents of every
health care dollar goes
to corporations, are
double what they are in
industrial countries
that have a national
health service. This
censorship on behalf of
corporations is the
press’ steadfast lie of
omission. And it is this
lie that leaves the
media at once distrusted
by the public and
complicit in Trump’s
fleecing of America.
When we are not being
amused by these debates
among corporate lackeys
we listen to retired
generals, all making
six-figure incomes from
the weapons industry,
selling the public on
the imperative of
endless war and endless
arms purchases.
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Trump understands the
effectiveness of
illusions, false
promises and lies, an
understanding that
eludes those in the
Freedom Caucus,
many of whom want to do
away with health care
systems that involve
government. If the
ruling kleptocrats strip
everything away at once,
it could provoke an
angry backlash among the
population. Better to
use the more subtle
mechanisms of theft that
worked in Trump’s
casinos and his fake
university. Better to
steal with finesse.
Better to strip the
government on behalf of
corporations while
promising to make
America great again.
The kleptocrats,
whatever their
differences, are united
by one overriding fear.
They fear large numbers
of people will become
wise to their
kleptocracy and revolt.
They fear the mob. They
fear revolution, the
only mechanism left that
can rid us of these
parasites.
They are perverting the
legal system and
building mechanisms and
paramilitary groups that
will protect the
kleptocrats and
oligarchs when the last
bits of the country and
the citizens are being
“harvested” for
corporate profit. They
don’t want anything to
impede the pillage, even
when climate change
forces people to
confront the reality
that they and their
children may soon become
extinct. They will steal
despite the fact that
the ecosystem is
collapsing, heat waves
and droughts are
destroying crop yields,
the air and water are
becoming toxic and the
oceans are being
transformed into dead
zones. There will be
hundreds of millions of
desperate climate
refugees. Civil society
will break down. They
won’t stop until their
own generators have run
out of fuel in their
gated compounds and
their private security
forces have deserted
them. When the end comes
they will greet it with
their characteristic
blank expression of
idiocy and greed. But
most of us won’t be
around to see their
epiphany.
The kleptocrats have
placed all citizens
under surveillance. This
is by design. They sweep
up our email
correspondence, tweets,
web searches, phone
records, file transfers,
live chats, financial
data, medical data,
criminal and civil court
records and information
on movements. They do
this in the name of the
war on terror. They have
diverted billions of
taxpayer dollars to
store this information
in sophisticated
computer systems. They
have set up surveillance
cameras, biosensors,
scanners and face
recognition technologies
in public and private
places to obliterate our
anonymity and our
privacy. They are
watching us constantly.
And when a government
watches you constantly
you cannot use the word
“liberty.” The people’s
relationship to
government is that of
slave to master.
The kleptocrats have
used the courts to strip
us of due process and
habeas corpus. They have
constructed the largest
prison system in the
world. They have
militarized police and
authorized them to kill
unarmed citizens,
especially poor people
of color, with impunity.
They have overturned the
1878 Posse Comitatus
Act, which once
prohibited the military
from acting as a
domestic police force,
by passing Section 1021
of the National Defense
Authorization Act.
Section 1021 gives the
kleptocrats the power to
carry out
extraordinary rendition
on the streets of
American cities and hold
citizens indefinitely in
military detention
centers without due
process—in essence
disappearing them as in
any totalitarian state.
The kleptocrats have
handed the executive
branch of government the
power to
assassinate U.S.
citizens.
And they have stacked
the courts with
corporate loyalists who
treat corporations as
people and people as
noisome impediments to
corporate profit.
This omnipresent
surveillance state and
militarization of the
forces of internal
security are designed to
thwart popular revolt.
These tools are the
moats the kleptocrats
have built to protect
themselves from the
threatening hoards. Full
surveillance, as
political philosopher
Hannah Arendt wrote, is
not a means to discover
or prevent crimes, but a
device to have “on hand
when the government
decides to arrest a
certain category of the
population.” The most
innocuous information
will be twisted and used
by the kleptocrats to
condemn anyone
considered a threat.
The kleptocrats, in the
end, have only one real
enemy: us. Their goal is
to make sure we are
mesmerized by their
carnival act or, if we
wake up, shackled while
they do their dirty
work. Our goal must be
to get rid of them.
Chris Hedges,
spent nearly two
decades as a foreign
correspondent in
Central America, the
Middle East, Africa
and the Balkans. He
has reported from
more than 50
countries and has
worked for The
Christian Science
Monitor, National
Public Radio, The
Dallas Morning News
and The New York
Times, for which he
was a foreign
correspondent for 15
years.
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