This interview by neo-con Jeffrey Goldberg with General "Mad Dog" Mattis, who I have long detested for being a warmonger and a war criminal, much more in the mode of the infamous General LeMay than General Patton (no prize from me for Patton, either, but that is a topic for another day), shows Mattis has finally decided he could no longer avoid facing the consequences of what he supported throughout his life. It reminds me of something in the deepening past. Cut back to The Atlantic, circa December 1981, when David Stockman spoke bluntly with the now late writer, William Greider, and admitted the lie behind Ronald Reagan's economic policies, particularly when Stockman, then head of the Office of Management and Budget for the Reagan White House, and considered the architect who managed the data and arguments to push the Reagan economic agenda, admitted these were designed--and I repeat, designed--to undermine the middle and working classes, punish the poor, and exult the rich.
And yet, too many of us continued to elect people like Reagan, elected Clinton to finish so much of Reagan's ultimate plan, and kept on voting badly, including both choices each party threw up in primaries throughout all these decades, all while continuing to revere Reagan himself. Worse, so few of us have ever come to grips with the corporate hoax known as the Cold War, the significance of us allowing our nation's leaders to commit so much havoc, torture, and murder around the globe, creating and maintaining the military-industrial complex, which we turned into a prison-industrial complex here at home, and diverting us with the entertainment-industrial complex. So complex, one may say, but oh so interrelated, and oh so clear to anyone who stepped away from their corporate media network cable news and programming.
We did this, or allowed this, for our own selfish economic ends. We did this for our own racism, which we justified with our fears of the people who our police otherwise oppressed and treated like a colony within our own nation. And all the while we maintained a confident, yet, uninformed set of prejudices we arrogantly called "life experience."
Ah, to live long enough to see so many echoes of past eras. And to see how little many in our generation and my parents' generation have learned. So very little. But, sure. Tell us we have to vote for Biden as we continue spouting our uninformed opinions with an arrogance and refusal to see how reforming our nation's systemic racism requires some sacrifice on our part for the good of others who have so long suffered.
I guess the reason we could end up voting for Biden in November is not because of anything positive about Biden, or any foolish belief Biden ever means what he says with regard to anything hopeful. It will only be, and I repeat, only be because Trump has now ripped off any pretense of following any open governmental norms. Here we sit in June and I am still not on board with Biden, though he is now only forty odd delegates from a first round ballot nomination for president by a confused, frustrated, and frankly frightened Democratic Party electorate. But, really, what is Joe Biden really going to do to positively earn any votes of the disaffected, especially when exit polling data* shows the Bernie Sanders agenda to complete the New Deal is far more popular, and people were more herded by fear and propaganda to vote for Biden? What of those millions of young people, who voted for a true hope for a better world with Sanders? There is really nothing--just more vote shaming, and misplaced analogies to the 1920s and early 1930s German Weimar Republic, (see the final footnote at the bottom of this long blog post, where I exposed why that historically based analogy and argument is wrong).
The question of the hour is when will my fellow adults take some responsibility for what our generations have done to get us to this place? I still see no contrition, no humility, no understanding of how Trump is the result of our conduct over decades. None.
I say to my generation and older: Live with your fear. Live with your arrogant ignorance. And worry, and I mean, worry, about me as well as others who are not going along with your continually stupid, mean-spirited decisions which have brought us here. You figure it out. There is an answer or set of answers. Do your own homework for once in your benighted, blinkered lives.
*I guess I should at least mention the discrepancies between exit polling data and official results, nearly all of which adversely affected Bernie Sanders, and how the US government uses exit polling data for other nations' elections to determine if the elections are fair and not fraudulent.
