Echoes of Cassandra, and of Huxley and Orwell, and of Heinlein as well.  The counterintuitive blues.  Perhaps our hidden pandemic.  The real plague among us.  Our mirrors don’t seem to work anymore.  Narrative is all that counts.  “Resistance is futile”!

As so often happens, diverse parts of the world are being stricken by social convulsions, spontaneity now become a carefully organized production.  Good causes immediately perverted into evil.  Sauron wins again.  At least for now.  As usual, the United States is the focal point the catalyst, and then, the betrayer.

Although denominated “Black Lives Matter”, the movement convulsing the United States and resonating around the world would be better described as “Criminal Lives Matter”, at least if facts mattered.  And they do.  Both criminal lives and facts.  And they should.  And they must in a system that seeks to reflect the values to which most societies aspire.  But it seems to me that there are three very different issues at play that are being hysterically conflated in the United States into only one for no purpose other than to attain political advantages in upcoming elections.  They involve: (1) the problems of police impunity and corruption; (2) the reality that too many of our citizens find themselves immersed in a life of violent crime; and, (3) the accelerating polarization of our society that increasingly divides us by race, nationality, religion and gender.  Black lives matter.  All lives matter (strange that this statement is now considered racist).  Human dignity matters.  Equity matters.  Equality matters. 

Criminal lives matter but police lives matter just as much.  In each case, both the victims and the perpetrators are human beings.  They are parents and siblings and sons and daughters, cousins and uncles and aunts.  Friends.  They are us, … but for fate and blind fortune, as Joan Baez sang so long ago.  And we probably all agree, regardless of how the corporate media and Deep State seek to confuse and divide us.

Impunity is a poison that leads to corruption and needs to be eliminated, not expanded to criminals as well.  The United States, indeed the world, is full of African American and minority heroes, real role models.  Role models like Mandela and King, and a bit east, like Gandhi.  And their modern variants are myriad and exist at every social level and in most political and social movements.  But career criminals, injured or killed resisting otherwise lawful arrest, do not fit that bill unless what we want to create are more violent criminals resisting arrest.  Role models are people we hold up to emulate, those in whose footsteps we want our children to follow.  But during this past century that role has been perverted.  Our role models are now too often selfish athletes, or selfish singers, or selfish actors, or selfish plutocrats.  And now, seemingly, selfish violent criminals resisting arrest.  Still, notwithstanding that violent criminals ought not to be our role models, extrajudicial killing ought not to be accepted and much less justified.  Criminal lives matter and police impunity deprives the state of the justification for its monopoly on the use of force.  That is the real issue tearing the United States apart, and now the very real issue spreading throughout the world.

As should be the case with public servants across the board (especially those holding higher office), police should be held to higher standards of conduct and perhaps, conviction for misconduct should involve a lower threshold of proof given how easy it is to hide official wrongdoing, and more serious punishment.  But with reference to public servants of whom we demand that they place their lives at risk in order to protect us and our property, that reality also needs to be taken into account.  A complex conundrum not attained through politically expedient, simplistic solutions designed to appeal to emotions of the moment rather than to reason and logic.  The same is true of our military.  In each such case we teach that both killing others and risking their lives are acceptable options, then, after those dehumanizing lessons have been inculcated, we seek to bind the resulting impulses with rules of engagement that are all too frequently impossible to analyze in the split seconds available.  And when the predictable consequences take place, we seek to wash our bloody hands and blame them, and only them.  We fulminate and excoriate and make ludicrous suggestions in lieu of solutions and we do so because their crimes are ours as well.  And that, we prefer to ignore.  If the violators of the public trust are depraved and sick human beings, it is the depraved society that we not only tolerate, but which we select at the polls that is ultimately responsible.  When war abroad makes killing and mayhem quotidian events (a price to be paid only in collateral consequences), how can we be surprised when it comes home to roost?

But what of criminals? 

Well, … they obviously should not resist arrest!  But then, they should not have been criminals in the first place.  The reality is that most criminals did not choose to be criminals for the fun of it.  While some are subject to mental aberrations, most have been drawn to crime by “opportunity-denied” generationally.  By failure assured.  And the resulting self-loathing is relieved and hidden only under layers of readily available psychotropic drugs.  Those responsible for the evolution of a society where such problems are festering social wounds are much more to blame than are aberrant policemen and women.  In that regard, the Clinton administration with its lurch to the right to attain power at any cost may be the most to blame.  Its penal and welfare “reforms” are what most exacerbated an already seriously unfair economic system whose primary victims were African Americans and Latinos.  Its “reforms” have led to the incarceration of a higher percentage of our residents than are incarcerated anywhere else in the world; worse than in Russia or in China, worse than in our allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel.  Its “reforms” destroyed the nucleus of the Black family with males driven out so that welfare benefits might alleviate the existing abject poverty.  Its reforms are responsible for the fact that African Americans are responsible for more violent crime than any other ethnic group despite being a minority of the population.  Odd that African Americans adopted President Clinton as one of their own but then, they don’t call him “Slick Willy” for nothing; feminists have done the same thing.  And now they’ve adopted the other shoe, the one who assured passage of the Clinton era “reforms” in the Senate.

As in the case of all aspects of terrorism (and violent crime is just that, whether perpetrated by criminals or rogue police officers), it will not be minimized by eliminating those who engage in terrorist tactics but by minimizing the social factors that maximize inequity and injustice.  “Palestinian lives matter” but we did not care and the Israeli tactics designed to permanently eliminate the reminders of their own “peculiar institution” have been imported by police departments all over the United States where they now form an integral part of domestic police practices.  Iraqi lives matter but we murdered hundreds of thousands of them, a price Madeline Albright found acceptable.  Afghan lives matter but we murdered tens of thousands of them, a price Bush II, Obama, Clinton and Biden found acceptable.  Libyan and Syrian and Honduran and Ukrainian and Yemeni lives matter too, but every one of our major political leaders in both major political parties have found the price acceptable.  And we, the voters, especially those willing to settle for lesser evils, are personally responsible.

This is who we have become thanks to the bellicose oligarchs we permit to dominate us (and the current president is far from the worst among them; not exactly a tribute).  The Obama-Clinton-Biden triad happily led us into Libya and Syria and Yemen and Honduras and the Ukraine.  And current GOP allies of the Biden presidential campaign such as the Bush family and Colin Powell, and numerous generals and admirals and intelligence officials, current and former, etc., led us into the continuing Iraqi and Afghan quagmires.  So for all the noise and blunder, for all the protests and riots, for all the looting and arson, we keep headed in the same direction.  Not the blind leading the blind but lemmings following bloody murderers to the polls to vote for the same old options.  To vote for evil in the name of lesser evil, but with the same results.

“Is America Headed for a Race War” is the headline in an article published on RT by Robert Bridge, an American writer and journalist and the author of Midnight in the American Empire.  RT is much maligned in the United States, especially among partisans of the Democratic Party, traditionalist Republicans, the Deep State, etc., but many of its authors have academic credentials from “Western” sources far superior to those of “journalists” writing in the corporate media. Hopefully Mr. Bridge’s article is hyperbolic as its conclusion ought to be unthinkable.  But it raises valid points.  Points we should consider.  Unfortunately, Mr. Bridge continues to associate the left with the Democratic Party as though they were synonyms, which they are not.  While some leftists are indeed trapped in the Democratic Party, leftists I admire like Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich, and others are seduced by fantasies of a shortcut to attaining power by capturing one of the two existing major political parties (but will more likely become what they believe they are fighting), the Democratic Party has since 1992 been controlled by neoliberal, neoconservatives little different from those that control the GOP.  One need only consider who their candidates for president and vice president are.  The truth is that, rather than being “leftist”, the Democratic Party does not even qualify as center right.  Furthermore many of today’s rioters (as distinct from protesters, two very different social roles) are anarchists rather than socialists, and anarchists are not leftist either; they are far to the right of libertarians in the individual-to-collective spectrum. 

The United States is obsessed with hyperbolic labels (seemingly more now than ever).  Republicans falsely equate the Democratic Party with communists and Democrats return the favor, associating the GOP with fascism.  Neither cares for the truth, only for power.  Something most voters understand but feel incapable of correcting because, this time, the election really is existential  This time one opponent of the other party must be stopped, even if evil will win again as it has in most of the “democratic” elections during our lifetimes.  Perhaps, due to our political apathy coupled with the naivety of too many of us, we’re receiving just what we deserve. 

But does our progeny deserve it as well? 
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

Craig Paul Roberts, PhD (University of Virginia, not Moscow), has published a daring article, albeit one that smacks quite a bit of hyperbole, unless of course, it’s accurate.  It’s entitled “The United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left”.  Read it, either because you enjoy being terrified, or because you enjoy a good laugh.  Only time will tell which is the more appropriate response.

I initially discarded Dr. Craig’s article as, after all, despite impeccable credentials, he does write for RT and anyone who even relies on RT is considered a Russian dupe by a growing segment of the US population, a segment that prefers to religiously rely on the corporate media, even when it is incoherent, contradictory and hyperbolic, especially when it attacks the current administration and super-duper especially when it attacks the current president.  Not to do so is worse than heresy and at least anathema.  At least that is the way I sometimes feel after being serially attacked with respect to posts I share or articles I write, attacked relentlessly by a small but very vocal minority, one that seeks to keep me engaged in useless responses, frequently demanding that I conduct research with cites to support my opinions (something they should consider doing themselves).

But his warning seems prescient, and being a fan of the Trojan princess, Cassandra, a seer without peer, always right but never taken seriously, I’ve blinked.  His postulate seems to be, at least as seen through my filters, that the Deep State has had enough of fooling around and, perhaps, shaken by the threats to its bipartisan hegemony posed by the Trump presidency, is ready to assure that never again occurs by stepping in directly.  Given that the nature of opposition during the past three years seems unprecedented, at least in the United States, perhaps anything is possible (anything not always being positive).

So I’ll post and await the wrath of the killer trolls from inner space, the domestic rather than Russian variant.  After all, that is their job (as they see it), to contradict my pleas for voters to reject evil and vote their conscience instead of their induced fears, or, failing to make their case, their job seems to be to at least insure that I am unproductively engaged with visitors to my posts who have no interest in considering what I or the authors I share have to say, only in ridiculing us, frequently by insisting we have no minds of our own, no independent memories, no values, or are Russian dupes (albeit perhaps not quite as well qualified as Dr. Craig).  They, on the other hand, see themselves as antifascist crusaders, unfortunately forced to rely on censorship to protect free speech, liberty and what they perceive of as “democracy” (i.e., voting as they see fit or else).  After all, the fact that their “lesser evils” keep turning out to be “greater evils” now means the law of averages is on their side, the corporate media told them so and the corporate media cannot lie.

I await the onslaught with trepidation.

In some instances my visitors are specifically instructed by their political club leader in charge of “talking points” to seek and attack posts by people they do not know, or with whom they have a sort of sidereal social media relationship, and to stay there as long as they can.  If I remain engaged, I cannot share my heretical perspectives.  Of course, if they spark my interest and I visit their sites to share my views, I am promptly blocked (I understand the reaction, but resist it myself).  More insidious and hurtful is when “inadvertent” trolls take to doing the same thing in a frenzy of misplaced patriotism, when they are friends or family for whom I care deeply, usually acting as second or third level recruits, usually without realizing it.  Pretty much what they claim the Russians are doing.

This is a kind of projecting as I’m obviously writing before I post, so my personal trolls have yet to react, but, as though leaking in from the future, I sense their presence, ready to pounce, “ready, ….. set, …..  Go!!  But my courage holds up, at least for now, at least so far.

I think I’m ready to publish.  Dr. Craig’s reputation so far outshines most members of the corporate media (see for yourself, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts) that, …

Here goes. 

I am daring to share his article and damn the torpedoes.  The fact that having lived through this weird epoch, actively engaged in politics and academia, I am not as surprised as others might be by his observations is helping me to get up the courage to risk the wrath of the Lesser Evil, Identity Politics, Woke, Antifa, etc., partisans who grace my posts. 

As always, I note I am not a supporter of the current president and less so of the Deep State that seeks to overthrow him (of which Dr. Craig writes).  I am a dedicated third party activist and politically, an anti-war, anti-sanctions, anti-interventionist social democrat whose choice for president was Tulsi Gabbard before she turned and endorsed Joe Biden.  Had Dennis Kucinich run again, I would have cheerfully endorsed him.  My kind of people.  Of course, my troll friends have advised me on numerous occasions that regardless of what I think, I do not believe the foregoing but rather, that I am a closet right-winger, perhaps racist and xenophobic, they, of course, being “Woke”, know best.

At any rate, I also note that being an optimist, I am not convinced that Dr. Craig’s prophecy will come true, after all, we’ve survived the de facto dictatorships of Abe Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and FDR.  Although our time as a democratic, libertarian republic do seem to be running out.  Indeed, our times seeming much too much like those of the late Roman Republic. 

But perhaps our luck will hold this time as well.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

A strange anniversary today.  Sad, as always, but very, very different this time around.  Perhaps it was time.

Nineteen years have passed and I do not perceive that we have ever reflected as a People on why that terrible day occurred or how it would affect or has affected our collective psyche  There are plenty of conspiracy theories and at least one of them is valid, perhaps several.  It shaped who we became, at least for a while, and millions have been displaced and died worldwide as a result.  But our cycle of despair and mourning and furious overreaction with patriotism become jingoistic seems to have run its course and a contrary dystopian overreaction has set in, violence having subsumed reasonable and necessary protest.  Self-loathing replaced American exceptionalism although the balance is somewhere in between.  Perhaps karma has caught up with us at last.

It is said that those who live by the sword die by the sword and we as a People have lived by the sword for way too long.  Apparently, we have now become fratricidal and suicidal as a society as well.  It ought to have been expected.  Indeed, the “Sleeping Prophet” predicted it a century ago.

The past three and a half years have been terrible as well and perhaps in the long term more destructive than that day in September almost two decades ago, at least to us.  The rest of the world may see things differently.  Perhaps dreaming that its long nightmare may soon come to an end. 

The foundation of a functioning democracy: that the winners govern, that the defeated accept their defeat at least during the next cycle, and that the government stays neutral during the election, have been shattered in the United States, less “united” than at any time since our first “Civil” War.  As in the case of Pandora’s Box, I doubt that the harm and disruption occasioned since that fateful day in November of 2016 will ever be repaired or that future elections, regardless of the winner, at least for the foreseeable future, will ever be accepted as legitimate by large segments of the population.  I doubt that the reaction to such delegitimization will, in the future, be as patient as that shown by the current president.  “Dictatorship”, from the Democrats or from the GOP is in the air, and it will, as was the case in the Roman Republic, as has occurred three times in the United States already (Lincoln, Wilson and FDR during war), be found acceptable by many members of a weary People. We will have become enured to “lesser evil”.

For good or most probably, as seen from where we sit today, for ill, we the People are deeply enmeshed in a fundamental transition, pulled hither and yon by selfishly chaotic forces that care little for our welfare, only for their own.  For power and wealth perpetuated on the one hand and for instant gratification on the other, instant gratification sometimes bred of despair but too often just out of selfish, childish boredom: on the one hand an urge to accumulate and on the other an urge to destroy.  We are firmly focused on the instant blithely ignoring the future, consequences be damned.  But we have been bred that way for almost two centuries, it is who we have become, and the chickens have come home to roost.

I wonder what the next nine-eleven will be like.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

The United States finds itself as polarized as it’s ever been, culturally, racially, with respect to gender, generationally, economically and philosophically.  Patriotism for a great many is not only passé, it is vile (perhaps not a bad thing).  Freedom of expression?  As New Yorkers might say “fogget about’t!”  Trolling has become an art form with purportedly progressive volunteer Internet monitors breaking into others posts to ridicule those who dared express their opinions and hurl personal insults with organized responses insisting that voting one’s conscience is heretical treason (independents and third party advocates are deemed the worst).  Freedom of expression?  Again, the New Yorkers’ response: “fogget about’t!”  Toe the line!!!!  All of the foregoing are elements of fascism but spouted by those of all ages (though mainly younger, Caucasian and well off) who seem to believe that all those who do not believe as they do or do not behave in the manner they deem appropriate are “fascist pigs”.  Why pigs you might wonder?  Why is it always pigs?  We really need a porcine liberation front!  Riots with looting arson and mayhem organized and led by black clad “progressive” purportedly anti-fascist storm troopers spout slogans last effectively used by Confederate politicians while insisting all non-Union Civil War memorials be destroyed.  As Elphaba, the purported Wicked Witch of the West (bad press really), wailed as she melted: “What a world, what a world!”

And soooo, let’s consider democracy in the context of the censorship, identity politics and woke pandemic.  Hyperlinks are provided to relevant supplementary information for those interested.

This past week, Ron Sprovero, a well-educated, very experienced and intelligent friend, shared with some of us the fact that he had been suspended from a purportedly neutral Internet platform because he had posted the accurate and uncensored birth certificate of a candidate for national office, something seemingly relevant to decisions as to whom to support in the upcoming United States federal elections. 

Stories such as Ron’s are becoming all too common.  The Internet platform involved enjoys a virtual monopoly on the sharing of information by its members and rejection of their participation has a direct impact on electoral results not at all different from limiting the right to vote itself.  Proponents of such censorship insist that it is not inappropriate because the entity is privately owned and the fact that it has attained monopolistic power any government would envy is irrelevant.  The reality, however, is that censorship by any entity with such massive public access and which claims to be politically neutral is not only inappropriate but too dangerous to tolerate, at least in a purported democracy.  If we are fine with an elitist oligarchy of the 1%, then of course their point is valid.  If not, then, well, perhaps we should consider eating cake as Marie Antoinette is reputed to have suggested several centuries ago.

Experiences such as that suffered by Ron are now all too common and not only on the specific platform involved but on all major Internet platforms.  Censorship decisions are purportedly made through use of “politically neutral” algorithms and are supposedly designed to only eliminate inappropriate postings, however, in reality, even assuming only algorithms (and not partisan humans) are involved, their programmers’ political biases assure that they are tailored to generate very specific political results.  They do not only impact conservatives like Ron.  To many of us who write from perspectives to the left of the Democratic Party, it has long been obvious that a very specific wedge of the political spectrum is favored, indeed, our progressive readership was artificially contracted by more than 80% immediately after algorithms first began their attack approximately four years ago.  Surely a coincidence!  Like the pandemic which we are currently facing, such censorship has spread globally so that now, major corporations and myriads of self-anointed, holier-than-thou individuals are busily seeking to decide for all of us what information is fit to be shared and even what terminology is fit to be used, all oxymoronically in the name of preserving First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association.  Caitlin Johnstone, a free-lance journalist and civic activist captured the spirit of the times, as she so often does, in an article entitled “How We Could Wind up Banned from Discussing an October Surprise on Social Media this Election”. It, like so much that she publishes (except perhaps her attempts at poetry) is very much worth reading.

So, … what are the most important issues involved in this new “memeticized” pandemic?  To me, they involve the issue of whether even a semblance of democracy exists or can exist when relevant information is restricted.  For purposes of this article, I will posit that democracy is generally a good thing, at least when it is functional, but can become horrendous when it is distorted (as occurred during the metamorphosis of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich).  That it can be a good thing does not mean that it is the best form of government in every context, it requires an involved and participatory citizenry and today that seems the exception rather than the rule, but for now, it is what we claim to “enjoy”.

Whatever the form of governance, its most important aspect would appear to be that it be perceived by the governed as legitimate.  But what makes a government legitimate?  I posit that what makes a government legitimate is the consent of the governed, although determining the existence of such consent is difficult outside of a democratic framework.  Democracy is not a scientific method for arriving at correct decisions.  It may not even be functional.  It is more an art form predicated on the premise that the collective wisdom and perceptions of a majority of the members of a society will, more often than not, arrive at functional decisions, especially in the intermediate to long term.  It is an imperfect system but one that improves over time if permitted to function through trial and error and is provided with unrestricted access to information.  If those fundamental requisites do not exist, then neither does democracy and the verisimilitude of democracy peddled to the citizenry will, at best, be a dysfunctional system subject to manipulation in favor of those who are willing to attain and wield power ruthlessly, especially if done so subtly, especially if done so hypocritically with liberal doses of hyperbole.  Especially if done in the way it is being done today.

In a democracy, elections are supposed to be the periodic event where citizens individually exercise their right to evaluate information on their own and come to decisions as to governance which are then tabulated to determine a collective consensus and implemented based on majorities attained.  But elections only work when access to information is not limited.  It is up to the individual to evaluate the accuracy of available information and thus all information ought to be available.  When information is filtered, democracy cannot function regardless of how well meaning the censor.

Censorship of any kind distorts the exercise of democracy and when censors have a political agenda (as, being human, they always do), they impose their perspectives on the electorate rather than facilitate the electorate’s exercise of political rights.  Elections are and always should be about “meddling” and opining, but freely and openly.  If any group is excluded, the pool of information from which one can select what to believe becomes distorted and useless.  The role of journalism is supposed to be to make more, not less information available, and to do so in a neutral, not a partisan manner.  Only then can democracy function.  “Political correctness” is anathema to free speech, to a free press and to functional democracy.

Democracy is a social collective of individuals.   The citizenry serves the role of the cells in a human body.  Our elected leadership, hopefully serves as the brain and the information necessary to make informed electoral decisions constitutes the blood.  In this metaphor, the entities involved in facilitating circulation of information (which ought to include journalists and the major Internet platforms) would function as the heart, but the reality is heartless.  Then again, the problem is not novel[1].  Objective journalism has never been the norm in the United States; indeed, journalism’s highest awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, are named after the founder of “yellow journalism”, Joseph Pulitzer who, with his chief rival, William Randolph Hearst, crystalised the concept.  That journalists, as censors rather than neutral intermediaries in the circulation of information, perceive of themselves as well-meaning is a hugely condescending insult to our collective intelligence.  A patronizing elitist oligarchy is the biggest threat that any democracy can face. Democracy is not about making decisions that partisans consider correct but about the exercise of free will by the citizenry, thus, inappropriate meddling does not involve the sharing or circulation of information by foreigners (who, due to the dominance of the United States in world affairs, have legitimate interests in the outcome of our elections), but the filtering and withholding of information and restrictions on our ability to share and circulate information we feel is relevant.  Unfortunately, that is what the mainstream media and the major Internet platforms are doing to us all.

So, where do we find ourselves?

As seemingly always, we purportedly find ourselves in the midst of an existential election whose results will irreparably impact us and our progeny forever, but with our choices artificially limited to interchangeable greater and lesser evils (there are other options but our censors are pretty successful at keeping them hidden) and with access to information manipulated in order to distort our perceptions and thus our electoral decisions.  And we find ourselves more polarized than at any time since our devastating Civil War, one from which we apparently have yet to recover.  The right wing of our political spectrum, relying on the Second Amendment to our current Constitution, is well armed but slow to violence and the left wing, now arming as well, seems all too prepared to not only accept but promote violence in the name of progress (although some might wonder how looting, arson and mayhem promote equality, pacifism and equity). To some of us it appears imminent that, as the War to End All Wars had to be renamed World War I a bit more than 20 years after it ended, our own Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, or the War between the States, etc.) will all too soon need to be renamed Civil War I.

Do we still enjoy a functional democracy (assuming that we ever did)?  Do a majority of us consider our government legitimate?  Do we believe we have access to the information we need to make informed electoral decisions?  Do we have faith in our ability to effectively express our perspectives?  Do we really trust the purportedly “mainstream” media?  Will we be voting for candidates we trust and in whom we believe?

I think that in each case, the answer is a resounding: “No, ….  Hell No!” but the reality (if it can somehow be determined) is that as Adolf Hitler noted in his epic, Mein Kampf, (I paraphrase) omnipresent efforts to manipulate us politically through use of behaviorist tactics in the dissemination of information, even when we know it is inaccurate, have an effect.  That was certainly the experience in the Republic of Colombia’s 2018 presidential elections, the results of which were all too quickly regretted by the all too gullible electorate.  The Deep State and the mainstream media have learned from their defeat by the United States electorate in 2016 and have quadrupled their efforts to more efficiently dampen the populist waves from both the left (Sanders) and the right (Trump) which defeated them that year.  Consequently, it is unlikely that their efforts at bending us to their control will not prove more and more successful as their tactics are refined, improved and implemented and our reactive options limited.  One clear indicia you yourself can test is whether or not you have heard of electoral options other than those proposed by the two major parties in terms other than their roles as spoilers.

We seem to have become a collective metaphor for Laurel and Hardy the instant before Oliver turns to Stan and comments: “well this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into” and, daring to mix metaphors, in the place of Elphaba, the purported Wicked Witch of the West (bad press really), as she melts, observing, “what a world, what a world!”  We find ourselves with our ability to communicate and receive information censored, perhaps without any choices at all except to accept domination by our self-proclaimed betters and hope for the best. 

One wonders if that is how the decent citizens of the German Weimar Republic felt at the dawn of their own elections in 1933.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.

[1] Indeed, the famous Peter Zenger Case which established the predicates for protection of the press found in the United States Constitution was premised on the right to engage in seditious libel and, two centuries later, virtual impunity was granted to the press by the United States Supreme Court in the “infamous” case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), a case which once again involved the media’s apparent right to be wrong without consequences.  The situation has drastically exacerbated by another Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) which gave the wealthiest among us cart blanch to buy political power through bribery in the guise of political contributions, huge speaking fees and generous book deals.  As ominous, as disclosed in an article four years ago, the wealthiest among us have gained total control of the United States media (see, e.g., “These 15 Billionaires Own America’s News Media Companies”), now concentrated in six media conglomerates, interestingly, most now fused with the entertainment industry and those same billionaires now virtually own many of the most important career federal and state bureaucrats, especially in federal intelligence, justice and defense agencies and in state departments of justice (see “George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system” a prescient article published on Politico four years ago by Scott Bland).

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