Native American Protesters in North Dakota Are Showing Us The Way

In just two months, Americans who bother will cast their votes for a new president.  If you believe the media, it is now a close presidential race between serious representatives of two traditional political visions for the future of this country, conservative and liberal. Trump is the boisterous, always entertaining and even scandalous outsider, ready to bring his dynamic personality and business acumen to bear on the country’s social and economic problems. Clinton is the sharp, experienced political insider who knows how to get things done in Washington, and the first serious female candidate for the nation’s top office. This is the narrative the mainstream media is weaving day in and day out, and it is, of course, pure fantasy.

The national train wreck we are all watching in slow motion is a match-up between a narcissistic, racist madman and a calculating corporate puppet. The winner will sit at the helm of the superpower that is, or tries to be, the world’s enforcer, sticking its corrupt capitalist tentacles into countries far and wide, toppling left-wing leaders, supporting right-wing dissidents and buying or stealing the planet’s natural resources. All of this is bad enough under a fairly benign president like Obama, but when you consider who will replace him….

Yet here we are, helplessly watching our own demise. Unlike the 1960s, there is no national effort to try and stop us from self-destruction, no passionate youth, no peaceniks, no one with the energy or will to stand up to our military/industrial/media masters. Sorry Ike, but your warning went unheeded and they have won control of this country, and their greed and disdain for democracy is pulling us down like a tin statue while we are distracted watching Dancing with the Stars.

It’s time to face the music, America. The national popularity of Donald Trump is the dead canary in the cage. It is the clearest indication of our imminent destruction as a world power. Our once envied public education system has been decimated, the mainstream media is nothing more than a corporate mouthpiece, elections are completely controlled and manipulated, and those people who actually run America are unaccountable elites who work behind the curtain.

While progressives seem content moaning and wailing on obscure online news sites, the country is collapsing. The only people I see today who have the courage to stand up for their rights are the members of the Native American tribes gathering in North Dakota to stop the construction of a pipeline through their land. Their collective efforts have resulted in at least a temporary victory. We must pay attention, because they serve as an example we progressives should be emulating across the nation; peaceful collective protests. It’s really all we have left.

“Take our country back” is Rand Paul’s confusing campaign theme

The Huffington Post is airing a new cable show called…wait for it…The Huffpost Show. Brilliant. Anyway, I caught a few minutes of it and the subject of the day was a phrase that Rand Paul is using in his stumbling, bumbling campaign for the Presidency: “We’re going to take our country back.” The two hosts were like “from whom?” and then a singer did a satirical song about it.

 Since the phrase is a center point of his campaign and, from a brief clip they showed of a Paul speech, very popular with his supporters, it seems fair to me to exam it a bit more thoroughly.

“We’re going to take our country back” implies that there was a time in the past when America was a conservative utopia and it exemplified the basic tenets of conservative ideology. Okay. When, exactly was that time?

Perhaps America’s golden era was as recent as the Reagan years where Ron and his band of neocons began the destruction of the Middle Class, made a secret pact with Iran to keep the American hostages until after Carter left office, illegally sold guns to the Contras and left this country in an economic mess when his term was up.

No? Well, we can definitely rule out the sixties. Maybe they really like the fifties, when taxes on this country’s richest individuals was as high as 80 percent, teen pregnancies were at the highest level they’ve ever been, Jim Crow laws still applied, and American citizens were persecuted if rabid officials eve thought you were a communist. It was, however, the Golden Age of television, that fictional world where father always knew best and children apologized if they disappointed their parents.

How about the thirties and forties? What? Turn back the clock to the New Deal and all of FDR’s socialist programs? No thank you. The twenties and thirties? The stock market crash, the Great Depression, prohibition, the Dust Bowl, etc. etc. The turn of the century? Robber barons, Tammany Hall, Native American genocide? Pre-Civil War? 1200 B.C.?

Obviously, there is no “back” to go back to for Conservatives. Whatever utopia they have in their fevered minds is a delusional blend of Ayn Rand, fifties sit-coms and racist dreams of a time when white people lorded over everyone without question.

What a minute. Hold on. Maybe the phrase “take our country back” actually means, “take our country backwards,” in which case I apologize and give Paul kudos for his brutal honesty.