While Thinking About The Principles Of Kwanzaa

After Listening To Callie Crossley Last Night

AS THE BILLIONAIRE OWNERS of the "free press" join the other grifting billionaires in kissing Trump's ass AND PAYING HIM OPEN, OVERT BRIBES,  remember all those self-serving lines about the "free press" as the guarantors of American democracy which were generally lies in the past and are entirely lies now. 

I think we're finding out democracy is not the product of some kind of natural, inevitable evolution, it's not a product of alleged education and literacy.  It's not the product of ever expanding and increasing libertarian freedoms as those were dreamed of in 1960s era secularism and illusion.  Democracy is not about getting your own way, which is what most Americans seem to believe constitutes "freedom."   It certainly cannot survive in a country where the Supreme Court has declared money to equal "free speech" thus, with one ruling giving billionaires billions of times more "free speech" and so "freedom" than those who have little or nothing. 

It is now clear that democracy cannot exist with a billionaire-multi-millionaire class because it is inevitable that they will use such freedoms to corrupt a margin of Americans into either voting for fascism and peddling lies to enough of them to ensure that self-government is a pious fiction at best while being a total and obvious lie in reality.   Our choice is to either be rid of income inequality or be rid of equality and democracy,  that is the big, glaring, reality as can be read in those signs of the times I mentioned yesterday.

It may be incomprehensible to many why I rail a lot against the "civil liberties" industry, the big name civil liberties, especially "free speech" "free-press" presstitutes,  old line ACLUers, and the "liberal" "justices" and judges who have given the billionaires and their media a privilege to lie with impunity because it was their, not infrequently personally profitable service to the big media, the lying media, the Republican-fascist, billionaire and multi-millionaire owned media because they have  played as big a part as the billionaires and millionaires in corrupting enough People to produce the ever increasing disasters that have led us to Trump II - American Democracy Implodes Like His Atlantic City Casinos.   

The old secular liberalism and leftism betrayed the real American left which has always, for our entire history, been all about equality,  legal, social equality and economic justice.   It has been about telling the truth which is the enemy of the kind of privilege that is baked into the Constitution and which the courts, from the time of the Marshall Court on have expanded, though on occasion they would, in effect, permit such rights equally to the poor and destitute as they would to billionaires and millionaires, guess whose "equal rights" of that sort would prove to be the real ones.  

Reading Jeremiah and the other Prophets of the Jewish Scriptures,  their warnings of consequences for Judah and Israel that came with the abandonment of the radical egalitarianism of the Mosaic tradition,  I don't think we have any reason to believe that America is going to escape similar consequences.  I think we have every reason to expect such as will come will be far worse than the pillaging of the capital city and the exile of a few thousand aristocrats and royals - what the actual biblical Exile consisted of.  If, as happened then, America's presumed special status is going to be stripped away has yet to be seen.   

I think with, first, the imposition by the Supreme Court of Bush II with the disasters it instituted, especially in its invasion of Iraq with consequences still playing out right now, then the voters putting Bush II in power, even as the catastrophic policies foreign and domestic were known to be a disaster - then a mere eight years later Americans and our corrupt Electoral College giving us Trump I with its massive corruption and criminal insanity - costing hundreds of thousands of American's lives - to have Trump II a mere four years after that - after the most remarkable domestic policy success of the Biden years were rejected by the voters at the urging of the "free press" ,. . . with the world seeing how truly corrupt our media, our politics, our "democracy" has become, how easily gulled and led a majority of the electorate is,  they have certainly learned that America's best days are well and truly behind us and they will need to make other plans in the future.   

Our mass media, which now includes the Zuckerberg Face Book - he being one of the billionaires to kiss the ass of Trump - Twit's Musk who is about to strip the American treasury on the inside -  ABC - which caved to the tune of fifteen-million FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUMP  and the freedoms to operate as they have been handed by the "civil liberties" industry and "liberal" and fascist Supreme Courts - proves that the First Amendment is so stupidly drafted so as to have always been a danger to equal justice, equal rights, equality and, so, democracy.   The United States has no hope of reaching anything like a stable, never mind progressing egalitarian democracy so long as those words remain unchanged, making it clear that there is no right to lie,  that the media is a corporate entity and, so, has no rights and that any privileges to operate require mandatory obligations to tell the truth and nothing but the truth,  America as America was alleged to be is over. 

America won't recover until a large margin of voters grow up and accept that a decent government and a decent society carries not only the necessity of knowing the truth that might, might make us free BUT ALSO THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS THAT COME WITH REAL COSTS IN THE IDIOTIC NOTIONS OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" THAT WE HAVE BEEN SOLD.   And I don't think that will come unless they realize that secularism cannot sustain that because secularism will always erode morals, even from those who may retain vestiges of such notions through socially inherited feelings about that.   Even a rational calculus that shows such decency requires morality to come about to start with and, even more so, to sustain it isn't enough.  You as well  as an effective majority have to really, truly believe you are consequentially obliged to practice that morality for it to really, truly, become reliable. 

I listen to those Black People who sincerely and joyously practice Kwanzaa  and the principles of it and sincerely envy them such an inspired season.  I don't think it would be good for white guys, such as I am, to break in on it because that would dilute it as much as if Christians started in on the Jewish holy days or appropriating other cultures' sacred times.  I mentioned here years ago, while reminiscing about my decades as a gay man, that I read a 1970s gay activist, a Quaker, saying that the "gay liberation" movement needed a Martin Luther King jr. and that it wasn't going to have one.   I don't remember his name, I doubt he is still alive, though he might be, but he was absolutely right.  I think the LGBTQ+ community - by which I mean those of us who are mutually committed to universal equality, not to the kind of rich gay and lesbian millionaires and billionaires and Trump ass kissers - would benefit from a similar list of principles and a similar period of organized promotion of them every years - "pride month" doesn't do it.   But, I doubt we're going to have that.  We could adopt that list of principles without coopting or risking appearing to appropriate Kawnzaa, it would be a pretty good list to go with.