Grumpiness & It's Not All Politics Induced (Part 1) - Time For A Change Democrats

 The echocardiogram did a number on me. I have to admit that. This morning, I woke grumpy from stiffness and achiness. 

I made a trip to the convenience store for cigarettes and caffeine. Then I started on the email. 

First stop, the Los Angeles Review of Books. Two things I like about LARB. It is not as stodgy as the New York Review of Books without sacrificing a quality of writing, and it is free.

A Week Occupied by ICE, or How Close Does the Violence Become by Rhys Langston makes serval points that people outside of Los Angeles should know about Trump's invasion of LA, but points out something Democrats — even those of us in places like Indiana — should take heed of.

By myself that Tuesday afternoon, I paced among the 200 or so people gathered before the National Guard soldiers armed with launchers and riot shields (and a few M16s). In one visual sweep of the crowd, I saw a pair of 10-year-old children embracing each other as they yelled righteously indignant rhymes next to disabled protesters on mobility devices waving miniature flags. A few hundred feet away, soldiers stood behind tripods on the second and third floors of the Federal Building. Eventually the soldiers at street level tightened into a long phalanx formation, with a second line arriving through the mouth of the parking lot/loading dock entrance behind them. A man in our contingent called out: “They mounted rifles on those tripods before they started using cameras on them! Is there any news media here? I have a video on my phone to share with you.” While we stood in place, our chants grew louder, independent newspeople and content creators moved in with their Black Magic cameras, and eventually the soldiers loosened their ranks. At that point, it had been an hour and a half since I had arrived, and my lack of sleep sent me in the direction of my car, to where the LAPD had now blocked off Temple Street. They told those of us leaving the protest to exit the way we came, closer to the demonstration. As we set out south, the sound of a launcher and sight of smoke billowing from the crowd reversed our course. I should not have to think it fortunate that the LAPD allowed us to pass their blockade. But I do.

***

However, before that moment when police horses charged us and burned our eyes and throats with weapons outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, a window of centrist delulu could be imagined. On the Westside, the mostly upper-middle-class white folks got their catharsis from laughing at the cleverest signs denouncing Trump, and then patronized HomeState or Honey’s Kettle Fried Chicken on Culver Boulevard for a bite after. Downtown, the multiracial coalition in attendance for the flying of the giant baby Trump balloon took their lunch at Grand Central Market. I passed both instances, seeing the pressure valves release on people’s faces and shoulders and the harmony of US and Mexican flags set down side by side as people clinked chelas in cheers. If the sole objective were to rewrite the ruling-class narrative of violent rioting, carefully cropped images and sound bites were aplenty. Yes, frame it as lawful assemblies stimulating the local economy of small business, a choice intersection of neoliberal economics and pluralistic law and order. I am sure 50501, the organization that coordinated the No Kings events and are known for working with law enforcement groups, pined for that.

And here is what the Democrats should be thinking about:

Over the last two decades, our supposed opposition party, the Democrats, have helped fund, maintain, and oil the engines of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, while posing teary-eyed beside kids in cages. They have presided over the bipartisan expansion of Big Tech to cantilever a sagging economy, which (teleological interpretation or not), provides the logic for Palantir’s profits and stocks to soar, as it levies its government contract to create a database of information used to track immigrants and political dissidents. In the same vein, the Democrats are party to the aggressive development of AI models that seek to replace all facets of work and labor, which can only end in us losing the last true bit of leverage we have: a work stoppage via a general strike. This supposed opposition party says it fights for our healthcare and economic well-being, but it signs off on our tax dollars funding and propelling propaganda in favor of history’s first live streamed genocide, in Gaza. Therefore, it should come as no surprise when the tool kit they have sanctioned for us (one containing awareness, voting for elected officials, and peaceful protest) is not a commensurate form of resistance to match what we may look back on as Donald Trump’s cloud-computed Kristallnacht.

When those who still believe the myths of America speak of the virtues of “representative democracy,” we must ask what “representative” means. As the political theater of our ruling class becomes ever more vaudevillian in its lack of touch with reality, perhaps democracy is representative the same way a cardboard cutout is representative of a lead actor at the local cinema’s premiere of a blockbuster film. Such a thing is not hard to crumple and break.

 This post is getting too long, so I am breaking it up. Part 2 will be published tomorrow morning.

sch 8/2