Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?

Tags

america, Anti-prostitution laws, call-girls, corrupt politics, cowards, Donald Trump, escort ads, FOSTA, fundamentalist Christianity, harming women, hookers, hypocrisy, injustice, lawyers, media-cowardice, Mid-Term elections, pimping, Republicans, scapegoating, SESTA, sex ads, sex-trafficking, underage sex

 

It’s a line by Alexander Pope:

Let Sporus tremble –”What? that thing of silk,

Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk?

Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;

Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,

Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’er enjoys…

 

Sporus was a male sex-slave favoured by the Roman Emperor Nero, who also personally castrated him. The wheel is an excruciatingly painful instrument of torture and death.

 

Whenever you hear of politicians banning prostitution it’s always either due to feeble-mindedness or because elections are nigh. You can take your pick with the US Congress’s recent fantastically imbecilic and heartlessly cruel piece of legislation, which targets sex-workers, websites and newspapers running “escort” ads. Habitually gutless and unprincipled, these media immediately jumped when the ringmaster’s whip cracked down, dumping all such personal ads. Who cares? Such is the expected reaction from the housewives of America. Their hypocritical spouses know when to remain silent, even in the face of a monstrous injustice – well, most accept these as quotidian: after all,  they’re Americans. No one cares about the media losing ad-revenues, of course. Why would they? What we all should care about profoundly, however, are the many thousands of women whose livelihood has just been trashed, whose means of safeguarding themselves against psycho johns and intemperate weather has been ripped from under them, and who will now be forced to ply their trade under conditions of substantial danger, ill-health and chronic anxiety. Serves them right; they should get themselves proper jobs, you say. If you do say this, though, you’re a fucking bestial moron, unfeeling and mindless.

 

Prostitution may not be the oldest profession, but it’s definitely been around longer than politics – and it will be thriving long after the greed-heads in their suits and ties are scrambling over the world’s edge to flee society’s wrath. This current fool’s errand is largely an attempt by Republicans to play to their base among the trenchantly unchristian Christians and the immoral yapping moralists. Half the escort clientele in Washington are congressmen and senators – and you can be sure their female stables will be unaffected by the current bitch-hunt.

 

The new laws need to be examined closely, however, because they’re really not very new and of questionable legality. There are States’ Rights and Constitutional issues here, which we’ll leave to the Civil Liberties’ people. The two main prongs of this pincer attack are just anachronistic sheep in 21^st-century wolves’ clothing – the garb being what it usually is: semantics, or language-harassment. Pimping, or “living off the avails of prostitution”, has always been illegal, just as brothel-keeping has in the majority of states. The same is true for sex acts involving minors. These three antiques are now cloaked in the new sex-crime tag that involves something called “sex-trafficking”. This makes it sound like the slave trade, of course, hides it under a cowl of more-frightening darkness; whereas in reality – apart from a few exceptions, statistically very few in fact – these villainous “traffickers” are just the same old low-rent pimps and specious petty criminals we’ve always had. And this is another time-honoured line of work, one that may seem repugnant and objectionable, yet also one that has its indisputable advantages and value for the women involved.

 

Accepting money for sex per se cannot be made illegal without potentially making every housewife a criminal. So what these laws have done is frighten a lot of often desperate, downtrodden women, removing the means by which they conducted business in reasonable safety. We can understand why the media fled in fear. You run a thousand sex ads daily and get charged with “facilitating sex-trafficking”, you’re facing a thousand very tricky law suits. Because you have no way of knowing what lies behind each ad – and you’ll have to prove in court that none involve any so-called trafficking. A nightmare – ruinously expensive too. So you have to shut them all down. Common sense and pragmatism demand it.

 

But a woman charged under this same act only has to convince a court she’s not being trafficked (or pimped) – case closed. Some 85 percent of sex-workers say they have no pimp or coercer. Yet the fear generated by these laws makes it all seem so much worse than it this. The really sad thing is that when you persecute the outcasts and underdogs of any society hardly anyone will step up to defend them. It’s the same with smoking and the “vice Taxes” (e.g. booze and tobacco).

 

These women are thus being scapegoated in exactly the same way as the Jews, gays and gypsies were in Nazi Germany. A conspiracy of silence was the enabler then, and it is now. No one has the guts to stand up in defense of these oppressed ladies. And all it’s about, most disgracefully of all, is winning votes from the prurient, the priggish, the hypocrites, and those self-righteous Sunday-Christians whose knowledge of scripture can be engraved on an eyelash and certainly doesn’t involve the frequent and compassionate attitude toward prostitutes Jesus is recorded displaying. As he says of the woman taken in adultery: “Let he who is without sin among you throw the first stone…”

 

I don’t know what American “fundamentalist” Christians believe, but it’s scarcely fundamental and seems contrary to every core teaching allotted to Christ. “Blessed are… Do unto others as you would have others do unto you…” In all the ranting hyperbole and twisted hellfire nonsense, I don’t see much Jesus at all. Hypocrisy may not be listed by Thomas Acquinas as a “deadly sin”, but it sure as hell is one. And hate is the worst one of all. These church-going, Bible-thumping sinners have another woeful strike against them too: How sad is it that they’re unable to perceive the self-serving machinations of their alleged representatives in the capital? How pathetic is it that these pious prudes think Donald Trump is on their side? God assuredly isn’t.

 

To all those women whose trade is their own flesh, I say: Chin up, ladies. It isn’t as bad as it seems. When I was a kid we saw postcards in doorways: FRENCH LESSONS FIRST FLOOR, or SWEDISH MODEL – RING BELL. No one thought it was about linguistics or Scandinavia. There never were, or ever will be laws prohibiting advertisements for language-tutoring and freelance modelling. An escort agency only providing dinner companions for ladies or gents alone in a strange city is not responsible for whatsoever their escorts do by themselves on their own initiative, and agents cannot be prosecuted for it. There can also never be a law against anyone in any occupation receiving gifts from and/or having a brief fling with someone they meet during the course of their work or leisure.

 

This most ancient of professions has always found a way – and it always will. But it would help now if someone courageous and principled, ideally a lawyer or legal authority, stood up and fought these two-faced, duplicitous scumbags back into the rank sty where they belong. But when the Mid-Terms are over in November it will all fade away… until the next halfwit or the next election comes around, naturally. In the meantime, America, try a little tenderness, thought and compassion – they work wonders. History attests to the fact.

 

robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

The End of His Story?

Tags

america, assault weapons, electoral system, equality, fascism, gun control, gun lobby, hidden agenda, inherited wealth, lobbyists, Manitoba, mincome, National Rifle Association, Pentagon, police state, poverty, privatization, School shootings, trump, universal income, US Army, US military, US politics, violence, Washington corruption

 

“All this violence, the inner cities, the school shootings – it’s always the same weapons, the AR-15 and so on, the assault rifles… you make then unattainable, well, you’ve gone a long way to solving the problem… so why don’t these politicians do it? You got to face the fact that someone wants this shit to go on, the killing, the terror of our kids… they do say that fear is what feeds a police state, the kind of high security admin situation that someone like Trump wants in place… if his daughter got blown away you might see some action on guns – ‘til then though you’re going to see nothing…”

 

–       Caleb Bencher (Florida)

 

“More folks die in traffic accidents every day, we’re going to ban the car? Of course not. We need more guns not fewer… have armed guards in every school… a gun is the only protection any of us have got against these terrorist…”

 

–       Henry Posner (National Rifle Association)

 

 

O, America! You’re

supposedly a democracy, aren’t you? Have a referendum on this gun

issue, it’s the democratic way – see what the people really think and want.

Then, whatever the result, at least we’ll know who bears the tragic flaw, who

in fact wants this slaughter to continue on forever. But I suspect

Washington fears to have what the people really want etched there in stone

for all the world to see – for the government has no interest in what the

people want, and it rarely ever has. This explains the vested interest in

stupidity for the masses that every administration since Roosevelt has

displayed in a concerted and wholly successful attack on education. If the state schools are bad the working poor attending them won’t get any smarter, will they? And further assisting this stupidity drive, many will drop out of crummy schools around Grade Nine or Ten, certified for life as dumb. When you’re dumb, politics, the economy, etc etc, are beyond your ken, outside your sphere of reference – which encompasses sports, maybe religion (invariably fundamentalist Christian), hunting, food, possibly drink and maybe vacations in the US. Perhaps you see voting in elections as a waste of time; perhaps you always vote for the party that convinces you it’s on your side? This is always the Republican Party, whose candidates are always schooled in what you want (but almost never give it to you – and you always seem to forget or overlook this betrayal). The corporate-owned media see to it that your position of extravagant stupidity is never lampooned, or not cruelly, and indeed extolled in numberless dramas as a paragon to be aspired to by all invisibly indentured Americans, the wage-slaves who are the nation – but, alas, the nation isn’t them. Docility, steady work and obedience are guaranteed by the vast range of loans they all have to pay into each month, the mortgages, rents, health insurance, pensions, car loans, kids’ education fees and all the other rabid but unforeseen drains on the wallet to which we’re all vulnerable heirs. A thousand sources say this is the way, the truth and the life all yearn to live – and if you don’t or can’t read, how can you ever discover it may not be all they say it is? You do what your friends do, vote for the person who claims to be all about you and your needs, but remaining loyal and undeterred when they prove to have been fibbers (but not for themselves, f course, but rather because of unexpected situations arising during their term). In effect, the blue-collar masses always vote against their own interests, which are best represented by policies of the more liberal-minded. It’s a mystery. But the overall subtext of TV and video broadcasts clears up the mystery. Not all but most programs or shows reflect values, celebrate and endorse the situational plight of a proletariat oppressed and exploited by Big Business — without them even knowing it, which shows you how well-planned and successful the scheme is. This is the truth about most of America – and few dare

utter it, none of this few ever allowed to utter it on major media.

 

As in Britain and elsewhere in the West particularly, education is for a monied elite, those who can effortlessly afford the vertiginous fees of private schools, where classes are small (less than a quarter of those in the best state schools), the syllabi rigorous, useful and thorough. These schools of course feed the major universities (the lesser ones are mostly all businesses in disguise, profit their only real concern, their decrees scarcely worth the paper they’re on), where fees are a struggle for the poorer students, many of who are paying off loans into their forties or beyond. It is a system designed solely for the wealthy, to ensure their caste remains near the apex of our social pyramid (which once all North Americans could climb, but now all are discouraged and even prevented legally from climbing it –  just as they do in Europe to keep the strata stratified). It is blatantly iniquitous, this system, and until it is dismantled – all receiving the same education – society will not evolve or adapt well to a rapidly evolving global world. Private schools are the principal problem here, and there is no rational justification for their continued existence if a society is truly egalitarian. Poverty is a part of this problem too, though, and one of its solutions may well be a guaranteed universal wage, the sum paid to all regardless of their situation and without a means test. Small-scale experiments – conducted here in Manitoba – have shown that a major effect of this guaranteed income is people returning to school or college, or else continuing on with an education without fear of a chronically reduced income. Of course there are those who say why give people money for nothing – it’s unnatural and encourages the idle. But the vast subsidies paid out to  large businesses are generally money handed out for nothing. For that matter so is inherited wealth. Descendants do nothing generally to earn their inheritances – which are sometimes fabulous – yet these same people denigrate those who receive a guaranteed income to help them out of poverty, and for which they have done nothing – if caring for sick relatives, raising children, cleaning homes, pursuing a course of study, and so on are nothing. In fact just cutting subsidies to big businesses – which often use this money to pay executives ridiculously inflated salaries – would in itself finance the guaranteed universal income, which is still the only sure way to date for a practical eradication of poverty and its concomitant transformation of society. Naturally, though, I don’t expect this to happen, not soon and not ever – for those we elect to govern us, not all but most of them, either are or become beholden to the cash from big business interests, the real powers that be, whose interests are all too well known and immovably rigid when it comes to certain issues. This is far more true in America than it is in Canada, but the cautionary tale so much easier to see is still indispensable here. Just watching the pathetic spectacle of a distraught public pleading for Washington to do something about guns is a grim warning of how easily things can slide – with a President tweeting that the FBI is to blame for not following through with tips about the latest shooter, and this was because all 33,000 of their special agents were tied up being obsessed with the Russian collusion red herring. God, how do Americans tolerate this?

 

Stupidity would be one answer, although it’s spread over different areas, like the nationalist fervour that makes some reluctant to criticize the leader, or a class-bond with the ruling elite that chooses not to tarnish the GOP by broadcasting about the very bad apple in its current barrel. These are all forms of stupidity, whose brand burgeons by the day all over the world, and is the sole cause of social injustice and inequity. If you don’t support the abolition of private schools, for example, you’re stupid – because being part of the problem is just plain dumb. Ditto if you believe society has to be stratified, since people are not born equal or independent. Ditto if you have convinced yourself that some lead, some follow, and the rest should get out of the way. And ditto if you feel big profits justify fraud, deception, shoddy goods sold for top dollar, a thousand percent or more mark-ups, and any other felony or shameful practice you wouldn’t want practised on yourself. There are more of course, but the point is made. It is really all quite simple, this transformation of society from inequity to true egalitarianism, from plutocracy to real democracy; but it will never happen with the systems as they are – and a system will never change unless society itself is changed. It is a vicious circle, one leading only to even greater misery, really oppressive tyranny, vaster inequality, greater divisiveness, or of course bloody revolution – and these never work out well, assuming that when one nightmare is gone utopia ensues. No, an even worse hell takes over, and a dystopia no one has yet thought up ensues. You can see the problem. This latest gun issue is it in microcosm. Have the referendum – it’s clearly the only fair, reasonable and appropriately democratic course of action, isn’t it? What possible objection could there be? But will it happen? No, not in a dozen millennia. Why not? Well, this is the tricky part: the answer is because the United States is not a democracy by any stretch of the term, and it never has been. The electoral system is merely an elaborate guise to bamboozle the masses into believing the PR, when in fact two parties is an alternative not a choice, and the alternative is no alternative at all – look at the mass of congressmen and women: they’re all from the same caste, with some tokenism thrown in to make it deniable. These are not representative Americans, not remotely. Elections are easily rigged too, not that they really need to be rigged – no one undesirable ever runs for office. Win or lose, if you’re a ruler the government doesn’t change – it merely appears to change, usually by the character and personality of the leader, not – God forbid! – by any policy changes. US foreign policy has been consistent since the seventies, and economic policies have never veered far from a course set back in the late forties. You might assume from this that Americans don’t want change, but that is transparently untrue – a glance at the catastrophic conditions in cities shows you this, as does the decay of industry and the steep rise in unemployment. No, things don’t change because America’s rulers mostly serve those who are staunchly resistant to change, not per se but because the current deplorable state is good for business – their businesses of course. And these biggest businesses are the greatest of all worries: the arms trade, or the military-industrial complex, and now supply and logistics companies to keep a privatized army in all the things it used to do for itself, from rations to highly trained security personnel, men and occasionally women who fight for $1,000 a day alongside grunts earning a government salary of less than $100. It ought to give the military an idea of how it’s viewed these days – as an outfit ripe for replacement by robots – but a soldier’s code (aka brainwashing) instills a patriotism so fierce any criticism of the government is like wiping your ass on the flag. But do the math. Big Corporations = arms biz = government = perpetual war= ever-growing profits = dividends for shareholders = big corporations. The money-flow is circular, progenitors being the ultimate recipients too. But the system still depends on a proletariat to function at all – although this may soon change with robotic automation and other new technologies. So if change is to be it needs to come soon, or the cachet of labour will vanish, and with it all leverage. But change is not to be if so simple and rational a thing as banning assault rifles will never happen because too many in Congress are in the pocket of the National Rifle Association, one of the numerous very wealthy lobby groups that are also among the first things an y intelligent person would abolish in order to make government more viable. But they won’t go either, and because naked greed predominates in the upper echelons of American society – which in turn hands more power over to the ultra-rich. Another vicious circle; another condemnation of the moral character Americans love to flaunt as if they’d invented it – and usually as if they possessed it. I see a nation asleep down there, with no one at the wheel, each one thinking someone else will steer, so no one will ever steer. How terminally sad is it to see an entire country grieving over – what? – the 87^th school shooting in a year, and wondering what to do about this malaise; then discovering that stronger gun controls will actually help immensely; and finally finding that this will never happen, the carnage will continue, many more children will die, and all because your elected representatives rely on handouts from the gun lobby to prop up their high lifestyles and bolster campaign funds? Is there anything sadder? Well, there is: the parents of those dead children who find their government mutters platitudes and says empty prayers, but does nothing useful at all – because it doesn’t really give a shit about kids in the morgue or their grieving kin. All those suits and ties care about is money – and that is not sad, it’s fantastically monstrous! Land of the Brave, Home of the Free? How anyone can sing those words with a straight face these days baffles and appalls me.

 

Paul William Roberts

Travails of Trudeau le Petit

Tags

america, cia, communist revolution, cuba, Fidel Castro, justin trudeau, Pierre Trudeau

 

So, he won’t be going to the funeral of Fidel Castro, because his “schedule does not permit it”. Fidel came to the funeral of Trudeau le Grand. When major world leaders die, their counterparts usually attend obsequies, even though no one’s schedule probably permits it. It’s pathetic really – since it is not the schedule but public opinion that prevents him from going. Having said that Fidel was “a remarkable politician”, and received the usual backlash of hate from right-wing no-nothings, le Petit ought to have delivered a little history to those who think yesterday is long ago. But, since he did not, I will.

In 1959, the youthful Fidel overthrew Juan Batista, a brutal puppet-dictator, controlled largely by the American Mafia, whose members regarded Cuba as their personal fiefdom, a cess-pit for smuggling, gambling, drugs, prostitution, and other forms of exploitation. No one in Washington then thought this was such a bad idea, and Fidel was invited to the US in 1963, for what should have been talks to normalize relations between the two nations. But, because of the usual hysterical reactions to anything progressive – mainly from the demented Republican-fringe – exception was taken to Fidel’s appropriations of land and property, taken from fleeing millionaire gangsters and given back to the poor farmers from whom it had been stolen, these talks ended in acrimony. Bagman for the Mob, Meyer Lansky’s relatives even recently tried to reclaim his illicit Cuban properties. In 1963, Fidel addressed the United Nations, saying that he had been looking for friends in the West, but had only found one in Soviet Russian Premier, Nikita Krushchev. Encouraged by Moscow, he then conceived the idea of fomenting revolutions across Central America – something the area was ripe for, yet also something guaranteed to raise Washington’s hackles. Fidel’s sister, Juanita Castro, who has lived in Miami for the last fifty years, says that this was when her brother turned his back on the democratic revolution he had initially proclaimed, adopting the hard-line dictatorial stance favoured by Moscow.

We now know that, over the succeeding years, there were over 600 risibly unsuccessful attempts by the US Government to assassinate Fidel. If someone tried to kill you over 600 times, in what kind of light would you regard them? Nonetheless, during the hopeful presidency of Jimmy Carter, a former staff member of the US Embassy in Havana – closed in 1961 – was sent to Cuba as an envoy to re-open talks between the two nations. There seemed to be a chance in those years, but, again, paranoid agents of big business in Washington, ever-fearful of the commie plague that would end their own form of tyranny, stymied all attempts at a reasonable compromise. And when the Messiah, Ronald Reagan, came to power, he naturally had no desire to parley with any pinko lair of Satan – not that affable Ronnie knew anything at all about Cuba, beyond the smuggled cigars he offered to guests. The relationship fell into decay until Obama, who, to his everlasting credit, used his Executive Order – one of the few tools left him by a stacked Congress – in an attempt to open up dialogue. By then, the Soviet Union had collapsed, Fidel was ailing, and his brother, Raoul, led the country. Russia’s new czar, Vladimir Putin, showed no interest in the Caribbean nation, and Cuba was, and is, in need of powerful friends.

As part of his new Art of the American Deal, Herr Trump has, unsurprisingly, threatened to close down what little has been opened up with Cuba, unless his particular demands are met. Of course, typically, we have no real idea what these demands will be – but it is not looking good. No doubt, Fidel is glad not to be obliged to see the future.

In a very minute nutshell, that is the history lesson. In any accounts of the 20^th century, Fidel will always have his own chapter, and many of these accounts may well note that the Canadian Prime Minister, son of Fidel’s good and lifelong friend, could not be bothered to attend his funeral – in a pallid attempt to salvage a rapidly sinking public image. It will be interesting to see what his hectic schedule actually entails for the dates in question. Boo!

 

Paul William Roberts

 

The Great Debate?

Tags

america, Donald Trump, election, Hilary Clinton, lies, politics, USA

Really. The Hilary versus the Donald. Has there ever been a more dispiriting spectacle than these two individuals presenting themselves before 100 million viewers as viable candidates for what is believed to be the world’s most important and powerful job? Well, yes – every previous election campaign for the last fifty years springs to mind. But this one still caps them in its stunning efflorescence of blabbering mediocrity. The Hilary started off with a remarkable appearance of competence that revealed her as another run-of-the-mill Democrat, ablaze with high ideals appealing to a vaunted ‘middle class’, yet no more certain of how these lofty goals were to be achieved than her opponent was of how his plans to aid the wealthy made it clear how the neo-trickle-down effect would work. For his part, the Donald began by assuring us he wanted ‘Secretary Clinton’ – as she now was – to be comfortable and happy. After all, she was just a woman. He was Trump the Proud – albeit with a nasal drip that sounded as if he’s just snorted a hefty line of cocaine. Unfortunately, and doubtless contrary to the advice of his advisers, he allowed the Hilary to press his well-known and easy buttons. And, equally unfortunately, she decided that pressing them was her objective in this so-called debate. Unsurprisingly, a free-for-all ensued, with both candidates displaying little more than how unsuited they each were for the world’s most important job. The Hilary avoided answering issues like why she had deleted 33,000 e-mails from her improper server – and largely because the Donald’s bullish responses to her taunts blinded him to questions worth pursuing. Pundits understandably excoriated him for bragging that his avoidance of income tax was ‘smart’, without taking into account the fact that everyone similarly burdened with taxes, no matter how slight, would agree that it was smart. The host, or beleaguered question-master, tied insinuating some relevant queries – ‘Why don’t you release your tax returns?’ – but the combatants had grown too belligerent to pay attention. The Donald tried to point out that the Secretary – no doubt a demeaning title in his world – had once raised the issue of where Obama had been born during her fight for the White House, yet he raised it in terms assuming viewers and listeners knew the names of principals involved. We did not, largely, but by then no one cared. It seemed clear that here were two thoroughly distasteful people, neither of whom ought to attain any prominent public position, less still the one they aspired to.

The question I most wanted answered, listening to the Donald’s oft-repeated slogan, was one of when exactly it was that America could have been considered ‘great’. Was it during the Korean War?  The coup d’etat in Iran overthrowing nascent democracy there? The Vietnam War? The invasions of Grenada, Panama et al? CIA coups in Chile, Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region? Afghanistan? Iraq? Libya? Or now the debacle in Syria? When was this greatness, and of what did it consist? The Donald’s answers to this question would have been as enlightening as the Hilary’s answers to why her new bold plans had not been at least partially implemented over the past thirty-odd years of her political career. Yet it was all the ringmaster could do to keep the slug-fest on its scheduled course to where the final issues weren’t dealt with either.

Ah, America, we aliens think. What became of your great idea? What are we to make of a nation that can only produce these two sad wretches as its potential leaders? Perhaps we should be frightened? As it is, though, we are merely bored by watching your decline and fall – as we were by watching that of every empire once so gripped by hubris and so willfully ignorant of which way the wind always blows.

The only undeniably true thing said last night was, uncharacteristically, by the Trump: no more dire and pressing an issue exists for this world than the existence and proliferation of atmomic eeapons. Unlike global warming, this is two buttons pressed and – zap! That’s all, folks. Like a thief in the nuclear night, all human aspirations vanish forever. What more pressing an issue could we want anyone posing as a world leader to face and solve?

 

Paul William Roberts

P.S. And talking about political liars, what of British foreign secretary Boris Johnston’s meeting with the Turkish leader, whom he recently called “a terrific wankerer very fond of goats…”?

The Great American Divide

Tags

Afghanistan, america, hilary, hiroshima, iran, Iraq, racism, trump, vietnam

 

During the American Civil War, when fathers fought against sons, brothers against brothers, and families against families, a profound psychic divide in US society was first concretized. By ‘psychic divide’ I mean a pronounced mental proclivity to seek out fundamental social divisions. Of course, the rich-poor division exists in all societies. But it is innate in them, an inequity that can be addressed without necessarily tearing the social fabric. In the US these divisions always threaten social strife, sometimes apocalyptically – and I use the word in its original sense of ‘a revealing’. Perhaps the earliest division was between the Puritan Fathers and a settlement of avowed hedonists who lived along the shore from them and practised free love, as well as, one assumes, free speech. Naturally, these sybarites were termed ‘demonic’ by the purist Christians. The next major division was between white European settlers and the indigenous tribes, where countless fabricated tales were told of Indian atrocities to make the white population amenable to their extermination – which, after all, was the project. There is a reason indigenous peoples are not mentioned in the republic’s foundational documents, where all men are born free and independent. The African slaves aren’t mentioned there either, and they would go on to constitute another great divide which, lamentably, still exists – black-white. Nowhere are the rancid politics of division more apparent than in the US, in Washington, where partisan rhetoric is bitter and hateful, and, although there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of policies, one party is always the Devil, the other the Lord. In Canada, and in most western democracies, there is always a race between opposing parties – and there are usually more than two of them – yet when the race is run peaceful co-existence reigns. Not so in America, where shout-shows on far-right media even skirmish with the other media that are, at best, centre-right. And perceptions always trump issues in these so-called public debates.

One of the great unsolved riddles of American social history is the issue of why the working-class invariably votes against its own best interests by casting a ballot for the Republicans. Theoretically at least, the Democrats are more concerned with workers and the middle-class, and certainly don’t advocate tax cuts for corporations or the super-rich – although the party behaves differently when in power. As Noam Chomsky has observed, it is not difficult to win a US election: you simply promise what everyone wants – subsidized education and health-care. The working-class majority, however, votes emotionally along carefully delineated lines of division, including black-white, Christian-or not, salt of the earth-toff, pro-or-anti-immigrant, gay-straight, liberal-conservative, and, ironically, rich-poor. Sadly, it usually counts for more that a candidate seems like ‘the kinda guy you can have a beer with’ than he does the kinda guy who can intelligently run a country. And, although you could probably have a beer with Donald Trump – not necessarily an enjoyable one – you actually couldn’t have had one with George W. Bush, unless it was de-alcoholised. Again, the perception not the reality rules. Why? It is tempting to conclude that the lumpen proletariat is stupid, easily led by the nose. Yet why can’t a left-wing candidate lead them? It is, I think, the us-and-them divide, where ‘us’ means good old-time religion, traditional values, no blacks, no Jews, no immigrants, and ‘them’ means the opposite, a psychic break-up of the Union by the advocacy of change. It is no wonder that politicians are increasingly exploiting this polarised view of society. ‘Change’ has often been an appealing slogan, yet change is not really what 100 million citizens seem to want. What they do want is a politician who’s not a politician.

The politics of division do not stop at home either. US Foreign Policy deals only in angels and demons. Starting with the Axis Powers, and moving on through communism, the Axis of Evil, Islamic extremism, drug lords, and now Isis and terrorism in general, the attitude is not rational and certainly not open to diplomacy or debate. They’re always the Devil, we’re always the Lord. It is often said in war that you become like your enemy, and America has come to bear an eerie resemblance to totalitarian states, to a drug lord, and to international terrorism of the state-sponsored variety. For example, we now find that the CIA was responsible for the arrest of Nelson Mandela in South Africa – because he was a suspected communist. The us-and-them divide controls and directs such erroneous thinking. There is now a foreign minister in Israel who has threatened to blow up Egypt’s Aswan Dam, and to ‘flatten Gaza like a soccer-field’. We are outraged, no? Yet we are scarcely bothered by infinitely worse US aggression and mayhem in countless other countries – why? Because almost all western media play along with the American version of divide and conquer: we can do no harm, they can do no good. It is insidious, and only the few independent media, like the BBC and CBC, stand between us and the deluge of warped thinking.

Of course, nowhere has the Great American Divide been more apparent than in the current and catastrophic race to the next White House. There have been some pretty repulsive presidential candidates, but I can think of none so flamboyantly revolting than Donald Trump – but I don’t like Hilary much either. At best, she’d be dirty business as usual. They’re both up against an avowed socialist who, I fear, knows little about economics. Indeed, they’re all big on denunciatory rhetoric, and fanciful promises, or threats, but almost invisibly small on policies. When Trump says he’s going to make America great again, does he mean greater than it is with him in it? When, in fact, was America ‘great’? Hiroshima? Civil Rights? The Cold War? Korea? Vietnam? South and Central America? The useless War on Drugs? Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? And now the Syrian vacillation? Forgive me, but I don’t perceive much greatness. I do, however, see divisive politics opening up a chasm amounting to a Cold, possibly Hot, Civil War. One is forced to wonder if there’s a way out of this dilemma. You can lead a cowboy’s horse to water but you can’t make the rider think. It’s not as if the Internet isn’t choc-a-bloc with insightful articles revealing the real issues at stake.

When I was in Iraq, writing for Harper’s magazine, I witnessed new levels of cunning in military intelligence. I wasn’t embedded, and you had to get permission from the army authorities to travel here or there. I was never refused, but the BBC and many national newspapers had a dreadful time. I realised that the Pentagon didn’t care what a few hundred thousand Harper’s­-reading intellectuals got to think about the war, but they cared tremendously what millions of BBC-watchers or New York Times-readers got to think – and this they monitored carefully. It does not augur well for the health of a society that nearly half of its members base their voting decisions on slogans and not the intricacy of issues. Trump supporters have said that there is nothing he could do to change their minds about voting for him. Nothing? Well, the good news is that he won’t win, and the bad news is that Hilary will. Where will this leave America? It will leave a gaping wound in which the divide between have-brains and don’t-care-to- think has never been more apparent, and will not easily be healed. It is not even really a question of education. No society has been able to deal effectively with those elements which simply don’t wish to participate in the advantages a democratic government offers them. In Canada we have the Hell’s Angels; in America you’ve got 100 million Trump supporters. Welcome to the Grand Canyon…

 

 Paul William Roberts