American Burlesque
By Paul Edwards
“They got a big theayter what they
call the burleykew, an’ fur fifty cents
yuh can see a dandy show.”
(Oklahoma! pace, Rogers and
Hammerstein.)
February 04, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- “Dandy” is pushing it in this
case, but burlesque it surely has been. The term
comes from the Italian, burla, for joke, which best
describes this boundlessly stupid, futile, dishonest
partisan greased pig chase.
The era when Congress was thought to possess any
collective intelligence or integrity is gone, if
there was one. Twain called it our only native
criminal class, an asylum of idiots, and this
impeachment farce bears him out.
To go to the root of the charade is to experience
grievous embarrassment at the sheer falsity, the
willful dishonesty, the moral vacuity, of the entire
apparatus of our appalling government. By that I
mean not only Congress: the whole dirty, shameless,
corrupted organism.
The House--bagboys for Capitalism, which for decades
has done nothing for the people and routinely
abrogated or violated solemn, specified duties--with
its Democratic majority, brought charges so
specious, vacuous, and exiguous in content that the
contrast between them and the scroll of blatant
crimes Trump has brazenly committed is stunning. The
kicker, the reason for this cowardice, is that
Democrats enabled Trump’s flagrant criminality and
they dare not accuse him of all the perfidy in which
they joined him.
So, a cowardly, deceitful gang of whoring pimps
accuse a base, diseased, ethical toad of behaving as
the creature he is, when their vile complicity with
him to rape and rob the world, eviscerate their own
country, sully and degrade all nature and, with
dazzling imbecilty, alienate the vast community of
nations, is provoking ecological Armaggedon and a
world war with states that can tear this
floundering, lunatic Empire a haemorrhaging new one.
The greatest appeal of traditional burlesque was
slow, lascivious exposure of the nude female body.
In this latter version, both Parties took the stage
without feathers, with their bare faces hanging out.
The only tease that took place was uncertainty
whether those two clowns of bathos, Biden and
Bolton, might have to bare their ugly old-man asses
to a disgusted public.
Now that the goofy, slow motion clogdance is
effectively over, what can be usefully said about
the causes and effects of presentation to the
appalled world of a dunderhead pageant of such
humiliating, degrading inanity?
First, as to causes, our Bull Goose tried to
persuade a foreign head of state to take a shady
action in return for money. Surely no President of
ours had ever done such a thing? Used dollar muscle
on a foreign leader? Please!
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Second, the
claim that the 48k in imbecile political ads came
from Ukraine outraged Democrats as it challenged
their “Russia did it!” fable. They went all in on it
as the alibi for Hillary’s Marie Antoinette
faceplant, with the rabid Maddow masticating it
nightly only to see it evaporate as purest bullshit.
This Democrat Ukraine fixation is a pathology that
derives from the cynical betrayal of America’s
promise to the USSR not to take NATO east after
German reunification, and because America never got
over its shock at the Communist Revolution and a
nuclear USSR, the animus against a totally different
Russia now is just the continuation of profound US
historic angst.
But experience has made it more than that. That
original US fear morphed after WWII into the Cold
War when massive US spending fueled Capitalist
expansion, funneling the wealth of America into
increasingly powerful war industries, proving the
threat of war put money-making on steroids. The
specter Ike identified in the MIC used that fear in
its cancerous metastasis till the USSR’s collapse,
which left the compelling myth of a mortal threat
hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote, for sudden
want of an enemy.
Only recovery of Russia from our piratical looting
under Yeltsin, put solid ground under the Machine
and it wasn’t going to lose it again. The Russian
threat was its guarantee of endless appropriation of
the wealth of America. It used to be said the
business of America was business. Its business now
is war, Russia fear fires its engine, and Democrats
stand on the throttle.
One need not ask why--given that Obama denied all
money, period, to a rotten failed state run by
brawling gangsters, NeoNazis, and racist nihilists--Dems
should embrace that stinking hogsnest, and mourn
Trump’s cruel delay of the bucks for guns the Azov
Battalion and Right Sector boys need.
So much for the Russia hysteria. What are the larger
implications? For our own nation this buffoonery has
reinforced a near universal conviction that our
government, our system, our whole culture, is
dysfunctional, derelict, and unredeemable. Americans
have no idea what can be done about it, and can’t
face the fact that nothing can. The cognitive
dissonance resulting from maintaining the gospel of
exceptionalism as all the evidence screams nonsense
has raised stress to intolerable levels where they
will remain.
Europe, Asia, and the wider world are mesmerized by
the spectacle of a thrashing, blundering monster,
lost beyond recall in gross irrationality and
solipsistic madness, but capable of working horrors
yet unknown in the throes of its devolution. The
raving lunacy of our highest, most powerful
officials would be risible if it were not seriously,
potentiall fatal for those who must watch the loons
goad the supine world toward death and extinction.
This half-assed impeachment failure was a burlesque
indeed that stripped the pasties and g-string off
the American body poliltic. What Americans, in their
fathomless confusion, will make of it in the Punch
an’ Judy show of our election is not knowable but
the result won’t matter. The fact is that though
human life on earth, and all that has shared with us
our vital home, is in play and at risk in the sick
power game, the symbolic figurehead that takes the
seat of Presidential power will be as imprisoned as
if in an Iron Maiden, as impotent of choice as a
bawling steer in the slaughterhouse chute.
The Capitalist System hurtles deterministically as a
ballistic missile toward the goal of its own
destruction which, unfortunately, includes our own.
Is the end of humanity inevitable? Soon now..?
Immanently..? Can we not come to our senses finally,
collectively choose to live, and put all possible
energy into that? We can. We could. The power is
there, if the will were.
Kafka said, “There is infinite hope, but not for
us.” Can there come, somehow, a sudden light of such
intolerble brightness in the mind of mankind that
our love of darkness can never put it out? Let it be
so.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in
Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
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