Making America Great Britain Again: The D OD'd.

I saw a bit of the satire The Death of Stalin last night, and was bemused by the depiction of Stalin's son sallying out onto the ice to command an amateur hockey team, one that was practicing so as to seamlessly replace the Olympic Team that had been snuffed when an Aeroflot plane crashed to earth with them all on board. No one in the coterie of yesmen and sycophants surrounding him dared mention the fact that the team had been wiped out since, as the Son of Stalin so majestically proclaimed, "Soviet jets do not fall out of the sky." Any contradiction of which, from any of those surrounding him, would have resulted in summary execution.
                                                             Trump Towers over Paris Hilton

Ivanka the Terrible presidential adviser flashing her "Qualifications".

Now, although it brings the electronic media an enormous amount of fun and games (not to mention ad revenues: Listen carefully, or just attentively, and you will notice that every station, whether it's NPR, CNN, or Fox, must mention the name of the Corona-in-Chief several times per timeslice. In the industry they refer to it as the "TrumpBump", expanding their Bottom Line as if in competition to match the breadth of the prodigious President's own ponderous posterior), to Hail the Chief as an aberration and an insult to our Democracy, likening both his selection and temperament as a calamity on the scale of the Corona virus itself. Yet neither one of these disasters are the cause of the collapse of the USA as a great  power. They are both merely the agents that exposed the rot in the political system the former makes so apparent, and the economic system that the latter has shaken to its leveraged-to-the-hilt-on-a-prone-to-liquefaction foundation-of-debt's core (Whew!). 

How quickly we forget the Bush administration and the similar dynamic that prevailed during its disastrous tenure. We had to. How else retain the same rotted timbers that collapsed under the one to rebuild the same rickety debt-based structure all over again for the other?

We have merely replaced "The Decider" with "The Derider": The difference being that the Bushies, being a dynastic family, made sure to maintain at least the token obeisance necessary to maintain the fig leaf of "compassionate conservatism" values, whereas the current iteration of minority rule finds it far more lucrative to sneer at anything remotely resembling compassion, while their fans cheer them on. So, as many of my posts during the Bush era reflected, I found the similarity between the stultifying effect of the toadyism such Strongman politics encouraged as being more reminiscent of the Soviet Union than of the pre-USSR-collapse USA, even naming a post or two, "The USSA", so as to re-enforce the same logic that my reference to the GOP as the Red Party encompasses, one that pointing out its appointments of Bush acolytes to positions for which they had no qualifications, was meant to convey. Thus it also seemed apropos that I should call them Apparatchiks. Because that's all they were. But we had no word in the vernacular that expressed quite so adroitly the new reality Bush's political appointees reflected. They no more represented the interests of the Country than the current presidents' men do, a fact we seemingly, or perhaps just conveniently, have forgotten.

In the movie, when they bring the son of Stalin into the room where Papa's body is laid out, he starts giving ersatz orders, then whips out his pistol and starts shooting wildly when those orders are bemusedly ignored. Only the guard at whom he directly points his pistol bothers to try and restrain him. All the others stand around nervously, unsure of what to do: frozen by fear into inaction ... their fear of lifting a finger against Stalin's Son outweighing their fear of immediate annihilation from an errant projectile. Only when one of the members of Stalin's inner circle makes a subtle gesture do they take any action, even though he's firing a staccato round of bullets in every direction. At least so far, we in the West have not adopted the East's penchant for execution on-demand, settling, for now, on firing you in lieu of firing on you. That's a really big difference, one I in no way wish to portray as trivial. However the underlying dynamic at the heart of it, the propensity to further the abdication of citizens' representative rights to the whims of a Strongman in the name of "Security”, or for the promise of "Prosperity", are disturbingly echoed in the manner in which the so-called "Defense" Department, and increasingly, the equally ironically monikored "Justice" Department, has relegated Congress to the sidelines, investing total authority in the Chief Executive. This dynamic, in full play during the Bush years, had not gone unnoticed by everyone, as both Garry Wills, in Bomb Power, and Sheldon Wolin, with his Inverted Totalitarianism, are both testament to. That issue, long before the current occupant would have been conceived of as having even the remotest chance of becoming the tenant in what his occupation of has turned into the Offal Office, was one we mostly chose to ignore. However, unilaterally waging pre-emptive wars in order to throw open the Treasury chest of goodies, laying it bare to be plundered by the MNC's of America who ransacked it at will, gave full evidence that the Pandora's Box of Fascist rule had been thrown open as well.

What both those tomes suggests is that the Democratic functions  of the USA's political system have atrophied because of, in Garry Wills' argument, the abdication of Congress's power to declare War,  arguing that the relegation into the hands of a single "Decision Maker" the power of nuclear annihilation has had the effect of rendering Congress toothless; while Wolin, as stated by Truthdig, in an essay that reflects the full title of his book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, "lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire, and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls 'inverted totalitarianism.'” As UC Berkeley's Wendy Brown puts it:

"He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”

"Heavy statism". Precisely and succinctly put. It gets to the nub of the observation that the USA now more closely resembles the old Soviet Union than Russia itself does. Whether that is a good thing or bad, is not what I'm judging, it's the lack on the part of American polity to grasp their new reality, all in the name of "Freedom", that I find particularly annoying, alarming, and sometimes, I must confess, downright depressing.

It lies at the core of my frustration toward the  media for their supposed animosity toward The Donald, whereas in fact they absolutely Love him and what he's done to their boring ratings. A fact they had no compunction about admitting during his presidential campaign in 2016, but have since pretended no longer exists. But it is the TrumpBump that has transformed our entire media into a circus more resembling a sprawling TASS octopus, its tentacles squeezing every dollar to be gleaned from coverage of The Donald as though he were a member of the British monarchy and the entire press now shared the same journalistic mission of debauchery and slander as The Daily Mail.

Like the Son of Stalin, DJ fires off errant shots of frustration while everyone stands around  helplessly waiting, while cowering to stay out of the line of fire, for an adult in the room to step forward and put a stop to the hail of completely contrived bullet points before someone gets hurt. Even as the pile of corpses becomes unwieldy, he can proclaim, "Let them eat Yellowcake", or shoot up Lysol, ingest hydroxychloroquine, or douse oneself in deadly doses of UV rays. And like Stalin's son, running out on the ice uselessly screaming, "Play better", "Put it in the Goal!", ("Open the schools!"), he also believes his will alone is enough to magically shape reality, even as that reality show is losing the only pole still propping it up: for Stalin fils, the position of favorite son he inherited; for The DJ, the economy's place in the sun he inherited. Neither is equipped to deal with adversity now that Big Daddy's no longer there to wipe their nose, throw them wads of cash or dig them out of bankruptcy.

But whereas in Russia a return to Tsarism would be a return to a blighted peasant economy more in line with the plantation-era slavery of the South in pre-Civil War America, making it dead-on-arrival, the white supremacist movement that buttresses The Donald's great White House hope has a decided propensity for Monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings, having decided that the experiment of Democracy must surely have run its course if it's idea of progress means we must countenance such an outrage as Gay Marriage. The prospect of a queen in the White House, even as The Donald reigns as though he were the HydroxychloroQueen, is simply a step too far; it's that one step beyond that leads right into the Twilight of their God's Zone, such that "This LGBQTrans'-gression will not stand!"

And if that means the Donald is the man who would be King? So be it. As long as it would rid the country of the embarrassing scourge of gay marriage and transgender frights, I mean rights, they'd be perfectly willing to, "Make America Great Britain Again."