America is burning itself up, inside out. Please do not ignite another uncontrollable fire.
There’s still leeway to reverse course and rise above this latest combustible showdown. In less than 46 days from Saturday, September 19th, if your fellow citizens can participate in a free and fair election and choose to validate your incumbency at the polls, you can take your time and revel in the sanctified spotlight of process as well as outcome. You can dine out forever on both.
If the opposition prevails, enablers deserting your brand will become legion in their haste and hypocritical in their desperation to rewrite history starting with ripping your name off walls. You will need redemptive insurance. Going long on additive restraint today could become epic, better than a last-minute self-pardon.
Choosing between the siren partisan thrill of appealing to a base you already own down to the last MAGA cent and compared to infinite psychic and financial legal costs of forever shouldering a severely damaged brand synonymous with you, your family and their multi-generational descendants, is really a no-brainer. Ask the Nixons, Agnews and Bill Clinton. Ponder why official records indicate that in Germany where your paternal family comes from, only thirteen children were named Adolf between 2006 and 2013.
Instead, you have a chance to honor the “last fervent wish” of America’s gender equality jurisprudence icon and let the people elect the President who subsequently will nominate her replacement for a reconstituted Senate to consider. Going both long and deep on behalf of the Republic, giving your hardest critics their longest pause, could measure up to one of this country’s most defining moments. Better than a Nobel, an Oscar, or Red Square real estate prize.
Reaching for a greater common good, rising to that occasion colored by constitutional fairness and respect in the midst of so many raging pandemics, embodies America’s better angels and nourishes abiding greatness. Ask Abraham before and after Gettysburg. Under the right circumstances, you could even unleash the Mitch-Kraken to his Confederate’s heart’s content. (“Mitch McConnell’s most savage move is to back off” – The Week)
While you’re at it, please recluse your twitter matches and help put the other fires out. A stripped mined climate scorching California. Red hot stock market capitalism without stakeholder firebreaks consuming humans as disposable combustibles and commodities. Raging racism competing with the surging virus to scorch lungs, stack bodies, breed smoldering inequalities into targeted, uncontrollable firepits.
Already, the most self-centered markets factor in gratuitous arsonists scorching the nation’s democratic practice legacies. Profit-takers pick off remaining, uplifting, last full measures of devotion one by one like sharpshooters at a fire sale shooting range. Primary shareholders flee tipping point marginal rates of return where a minority tyrannizing a majority interposes systemic immorality, corruption, and contamination. Locked-in, national self-immolation flames outpace any domestic ability to recoup, regenerate, renew, reinvent, reengineer, and respire.
Pete Seeger ‘s wisdom that living grass grows through dead cement means you will not want to enshrine and preside over a nation’s last supper cannibalizing democracy past the marrow of its increasingly brittle, betrayal-frayed bones. Nero, Brutus, and Judas bypassed any pretense of having to justify means to ends. Nobody names children after them.
Winning an election at all costs marries the best of your formidable swift boating arts to your relentless product branding genius by selling the opposite of what exists, alternative facts as reality delusions, sabotaging any retreat pathway to step back through your looking glass. Those who swore public oaths to serve as stewards pulled a corporate raider bait & switch, morphing under your tutelage into illegitimate barbarian traitors inside the existential societal gates of a country still struggling with its founding demons. Sauron’s Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, has not yet repossessed and rezoned your Fifth Avenue namesake, but you know it could.
Your “Second Amendment People” hunt down “Mocha Dick”, a great white whale of a once rising mosaic country, repeatedly ambushed and lynched by guardians sworn to uphold and defend it. Now listlessly floating from sea to barbecued sea, a prostrate buffet unable to fend off apex predator feeding frenzies. Those in power hurl one envenoming power over principle harpoon after another into its soft underbelly body politic, clogging an already redlined air spout with partisan fallout debris and stench from a rotting, selfishly failing, civic carcass.
We can only build back better when the nation stands in line after line to vote down its fires until the last ballot cast is respected in full. When a nation so conceived and so dedicated dampens its self-induced conflagration to reinvent and renew a rising rainbow phoenix. When ICE no longer traps America’s immigrating babies of lesser gods in federally funded, sanctioned, and privatized detention cages and then your Department of Education no longer schools them in underfunded, pandemic-threatened classrooms.
We can only build back better when ethically supine, extractive, and predatory markets value all humanity as precious, beloved currency and when stakeholder aspiration for the many supersedes the ambition, privilege and pretension tithed by an all-powerful shareholder few. When it is no longer possible for companies to own their governments and purchase regulators so that corporate personhood cannot dominate and deter its human counterpart.
When deleveraging 200,000 pandemic deaths is no longer morally permissible to win an election. When intrinsically free markets no longer honor arbitraged human labor that shrink-wraps workers in Unobtanium chains.
When outright click-bait, ethnocentric, “lost cause nostalgia” no longer rebounds to grievance, greed, and gluttony gospel. When ethically challenged social media algorithmic models gaslit by pay-to-play pharisees no longer resonate in Mammon’s online mega temples because once captive flocks have voluntarily abandoned the Plantation Matrix. When Elvis has left the Supreme Court building.
It is “altogether fitting and proper that we should do this”, all of it, now more than ever. After the jury is no longer out on whether the biomedical virus can break the deadlier cultural fever. After Notorious RBG is laid to rest by a grateful nation practicing and perfecting how her virtuous legacy can finally rest in peace.
Saturday, September 19, 2020