I've grown weary of cats, dogs, flowers, and garden vegetables, and decided to post some political content for a change on a semi-blog that I keep on Facebook and share only with thirty or so family members and work friends that I want to keep in touch with. A close family member disowned me and blocked my account after telling me that the post was "Vitriolic" and "hate-filled" and that I ought to move to Russia if I don't like the Democrats. She's since simmered down a bit, but all the same I was taken aback.
Now there's nothing I enjoy more from time to time than a good old hate-filled vitriolic rant. Granted, this isn't the greatest piece of writing, but all the same, I thought this was pretty reasonable: ------------------------------------------- The big story in DC this week wasn’t politics; it was snow. It snowed and was cold for a few days. Now the snow is melting in 50-degree-plus weather. The park in Logan Circle has begun to fill up again with entitled white people having the now-traditional yuppie Happy Hour (more like Happy Day, but ...) where they all sit around producing that seabird clamor they find so polite and elegant and drinking alcohol from open containers. This is patently illegal and intimidating, and is quite impossible to ignore if you don’t wish to join the club or are excluded, but nevertheless constitutes an assertion of privilege that the DC police feel obliged to respect. There are occasionally persons of color in the crowd, though fewer than in Trump’s Capitol Hill insurrection rabble, but it is transparently an assertion of the white settler colonialist ideology that underlies the whole pack of lies about “vibrant community” and all the rest of the gentrification nonsense. I ran into a fellow septuagenarian I know who also lives in the Iowa tower. He said that he’d been vaccinated against COVID and I should be eligible also. But when I checked for the messages I'd signed up for from the DC vaccination authorities, I was referred to a Web page listing zip codes with priority for vaccination, and mine wasn’t on the list. I’ll have to call someone on Monday and find out what gives. The good news is that vaccination is beginning. But at this point it’s like the Rapture, and it seems that a lot of us will be left behind. The prospect of lockdown ending is in any case a daunting one. Who will take over the streets when they open up again? The yuppie gangs in Logan Circle have been quiet, but when they reassert themselves, they may become dangerous. There has always been an undertone of frat-boy violence under the smug self-satisfaction that prevails in certain quarters here, especially when combined with the assertion of a right to mass public drunkenness. These people accept no limitation to their entitlement, regard the police as their body-servants, and know from repeated experience that they will be held to an altogether different and more tolerant standard of behavior than those they regard as their inferiors. In this, although they appear to be mostly Democrats, they share much with the petty-bourgeois Capitol Hill rioters—that is, a well-founded belief that white privilege and caste privilege render them exempt from the stern demands they instinctively make on others. The new gentry see themselves as the avant-garde of neoliberalism among the barbarians. They have a lot more in common with the infamous Florida McCloskeys than they do with working people. "Karen" has many guises, some not so obvious. For some reason, I haven’t seen any Republican complaints about the Jewish space lasers on the Capitol lawn. How did they miss that one? I half think I should send pictures to McCarthy and Boebert and demand an armed response. This should be sensational—I can’t think why it’s been so little remarked. Despite the incomprehensible failure to grasp the imminent threat to Donald Trump of alien abduction, the Republicans are becoming vociferous in their objection to the extent of the new Green Zone, which some authorities are clamoring to have made permanent. The DC government are also objecting. The plot thickens. The Trump impeachment trial—and his inevitable triumphant second acquittal—is looking like being a nasty spectacle. I find the new “security” zones both excessive if intended to be permanent and possibly ineffectual depending what sort of attack they may come under. But I don’t think in any case that the Trumpy mobs against which the new security precautions are supposed to be the Maginot Line are the great enemy. The enemy IMO are Trump’s fellow billionaires and multimillionaires who continue to support “fraydom.” We should add all the CEOs who continue to make massive contributions to right-wing causes even when their companies no longer do so in their own right. No fence can keep these malefactors out—they are already ensconced in the heart of things, and can pass through the security fence whenever they wish--in some cases Glock and all. What the nation needs is a thorough and forcible purge of the Trumpy right. That won’t happen—and if it did, the price would be the violent suppression of dissent in all its forms, essentially substituting one devil for another. Also necessary is the dismantling of the privileged caste whose parasitism has grown so geometrically since Reagan. My crystal ball remains out of service—but beyond a possible end to the pandemic--and despite the better-than-expected start of the Biden administration--things IMO are looking pretty murky. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6364): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6364 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80619540/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
