Can all the mice shed their fear and bell THIS cat? and soon?
The Wall
Street Journal reporter asked a poignant question of Prime Minister, Marc
Carney, in Washington yesterday…..To what extent can and do you trust that the
administration is negotiating in good faith?
Or words to that effect….and Carney’s answer, ‘that will become
clear’…..
The media
frenzy, using detailed, precise questions looking for literal, microscopic
answers in order then to parse their ‘meaning’ as if they were holding a
feather up on a golf course to determine the direction of the wind, is, among
other things, an exercise in self-demotion.
Even Rachel
Maddow’s persistent, accurate and deep dive into the various protests around
the country, while useful in the cause of potentially generating more of such
protests, is another of the ‘headline’ frenzy of anxiety, skepticism, anger and
disbelief.
Having
twisted the media into a frenetic, obsessive-compulsive turmoil, both
intellectually and professionally, trump has succeeded in capturing media time,
without spending a dime. And the reporters, while anything but fake news, are
impaled in the image of the uroborus snake, with its head in its tail, going
round and round the same circle it has been trained and experienced to dig.
All of the
media training, and all of the professional expertise and creative and
courageous questioning fail in this current American political theatre.
Inductive
reasoning proceeds from the fine details to a conclusion. Deductive reasoning
proceeds, inversely, from the conclusion to the fine details. And, while both
are necessary, in order to serve a wide and diverse audience, many of whom have
either turned off or become so apathetic and hopeless they are no longer paying
attention. Even the Democrats have fallen into the trap of perceiving, and
strategizing around the micro-details. Last evening, on her inaugural show, The
Briefing with Jen Psaki, Pete Buttigieg exhorted the Democratic party to begin
to address the issues of cost of living, in order to demonstrate that the party
has heard, and actually listened to the complaints and the needs of ordinary
people.
Well…the
literal, empirical, data compilation, necessary for a legal trial, in order to
convince the judge and/or jury of the culpability of the accused, is consuming
both needed energy and political capital that is needed for the larger, more
existential and deepening crisis. Professors Like Ruth Ben Gihat at NYU, and Timothy
Snider at Yale and Jason Stanley formerly of Yale and now of the University of Toronto
need far more air time, on both sides of the 49th parallel. Along
with retired judge Michael Luttig, and emeritus professor of Law at Harvard,
Lawrence Tribe, Conservative lawyer George Conway among others, need to be
saturating the air waves with their substantive, principled, arguments that,
taken together can and may eventually weave a net of both public opinion and
activism, both political and legal, that just might be able to ensnare this
orange buffoon.
The usual principle
of constitutional separation of powers, underscored by the media and the
courts, and historically by the Congress as well is insufficient to tackle and untie
this gordion knot of an administration that defies all laws and conventions in
favour of the despotic and anarchic will of the president. The media’s hourly
wringing of hands, as purveyors of what is effectively a Greek tragedy of epic
proportions, even incentivized by legal and historical and fascist scholars is
also not adequate to the monumental, and growing task of dismantling this
papier maché movie set of a government.
Ethereal,
effemeral, deceitful, dishonest, destabilizing, untrustworthy, unpredictable
and also lethal in so many ways, this government has, like under-sea submarines
torpedoed the world economy, the world order of the past 75-80 years, and has
set human lives so on edge that physical, emotional, economic, political and intellectual
health and well-being, of everyone on the planet, outside of the crazed far-right
thugs, ostensibly in order to provide absolute power to those very thugs.
Human
health is under direct and indirect threat by the very department of Health and
Human services designed and deployed to protect and enhance human health.
The
oversight and substantial funding of the education of the most impoverished
children in American has been eviscerated, by the very department established and
deployed to sustain and support that endeavour.
The
strength, stability, and sustainability of NATO, the most effective and long-lasting
defense alliance in history, is being undermined both overtly and covertly, by
the numbskulls appointed to lead and grow and direct the American cohort of
this organization.
The specific,
constitutionally-assigned powers and priorities of Congress have been trashed
by the very Republican elected members of both the House and the Senate, in
their headlong mass sycophantic craze, like teens rushing and trampling the
stage of a rock concert, as each hollow-man/woman besought by the hysteria
seeks either direct favour or the avoidance of a direct ‘political-assassination-bomb’
ordered, and then of course, denied, by the president…..whose blind insecurity
tolerates nary a word, or even a scowl or frown of criticism, protest or
intolerance.
If this person
who has been elected to the Oval Office were a member of a family, that family would
already have conducted a penetrating intervention, as if the family member
needed help. If this were a chief executive of a major corporation, the board
will already, long ago fired him without bonus or pension or investment
certificates. If this were a professor in a respectable university, his academic
credentials would long ago have been revoked, based on nothing more than
plagiarism, falsifying evidence, corrupting his students and fleecing the budget
of whatever department he might have worked in.
If this
were a military general, doubtless, his peers and subordinates would have
court-martialed him long ago, even if it took a mutiny to accomplish the
removal.
If this
were a commercial airline pilot, he would never have passed the flight exam, and
would have been turfed from the program,….and don’t get me started on the
premise of his serving as an air-trafffic controller…..Yikes!
Dave
Leterman snidely notes that he would be fired if he had already been hired to
manage a Dairy Queen….who can or would dispute that?
Eviction, insurrection,
impeachment, Constitutional Amendment 25, street mutiny in each and every city
simultaneously, nothing seems to be either capable or surmountable to finally
prohibit this political, theatrical, chameleon Houdini from escaping his self-designed
entrapments, and wrestling him finally into silence, impotence, the very state
from which he is obsessively-compulsively racing every moment of every day….just
ask his niece, if you don’t believe this scribe.
The phrase ‘belling
the cat’ comes from a fable about mice who decide to attach a bell to a cat’s
neck to warn them of its approach, but none of them are willing to risk the
danger.
If the
whole communication, legal, corporate, academic, voter army of people,
institutions, banks and Wall Street, including those totally empty digital mice
are not either aware or willing to shed the fear that the mice in the fable could
not shed, and re-think their personal, professional and patriotic identities,
in order to serve something far larger than any one of them, the united states
of america (no caps because the reputation of the nation has been so
besmirched, capitals are no longer warranted)…..then…..
The whole world is watching….and the whole world is already paying the devastating and potentially lethal priceS…..and there are so many ways to measure the cost of this tragedy!