Review: Watching McConnell Destroy Healthcare

Who would you say is more like Satan, Trump or McConnell?

Watching McConnell Destroy Healthcare

At first blush, this question brings to mind my oft quoted line from King Lear: The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.  If the question were rephrased to Who would you say is more like a gentleman?  The query becomes more palatable but far from digestible.  This blog raises the question of personal motive over devil’s intent by the “gentleman” McConnell.

Robin Bates paints parallels here.  With Democrats as God and healthcare as Adam, he seems to state that Adam/healthcare can’t be saved because of some implausible Justice.  McConnell’s determined revenge against Obama sacrifices innocents and achieves payback.  In the scale of Justice there is balance but it can hardly be discerned when weighing revenge against the body/bodies pile(d) in the green of Eden or the morgue of St. Somewhere.

Our current unbounded government is likened to the Hell of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Though Satan has nothing personal against Adam, he rationalizes the carnage as just business.  And so, it is with McConnell.  Cloaking his malice in “public reason” and “honor”, Mitch characterizes his stealthy proceedings on the GOP Senate AHCA as “promise keeping” and ignores the collateral damage (the suffering of innocents) that the promise promises (i.e. repealing Obamacare).   How can one recognize Satan?  Look to the savvy gentleman to your right.

Review: Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

John Semley reviews Naomi Klein’s latest leftie lament No is Not Enough.  Semley begins his review by characterizing Michael Bloomberg’s offer to fund U.S.’s financial commitment to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as mega-billionaire salvation.  He further metaphor’s Bloomberg, likening him to a firefighter saving a cat in a tall tree.  Then further depicts Bloomberg vs Trump as behemoths in a Japanese monster movie battling each other with briefcases.  Somewhere down below his third paragraph is Naomi Klein, pinned in by metaphors, lost in the sea of panicked little people scurrying for safety.

Finally, we find Naomi, disparaging elite liberals as saviors and advocating grassroots push back for meaningful change.  Populist uprising must be met and pushed back with grassroots movements on the green field of political advocacy.  The reviewer decides the Ms. Klein’s slim offering is a place for anyone to start to make sense of Trump and Trumpism.  Naomi describes a culture that grants indecent impunity to the ultrarich because it is consumed with winning and dominance.  As we have seen with articles of anti-Trump pundits and late-night hosts, the author prescribes making our president look like a puppet (Bannon, Putin).  This tactic and other such bating has proved, in some instances, deliriously successful.

Naomi Klein, with her holy trinity of of contemporary progressive-leftie doctrine (2000’s No Logo, 2007’s The Shock Doctrine and 2014’s This Changes Everything), preaches that major crises precipitate political change, both good and bad.  People unite to build a better world or disband and feel sorry for themselves in a Trump world.  A point that may be missed in John Semley review of Naomi Klein’s No is Not Enough lies in the final quote from Belgian cartoonist Jean-Claude Servais:

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

Note the word hour…optimism has a shelf-life, seize it before it spoils.

Better Living Through Beowulf – June 2017

Be Afraid of Trump’s Fear of Being Mocked

We all know the feeling of being laughed at but we don’t always feel the need to take action to stop it.  Getting back at someone who doesn’t care about the relationship only sets you back with the people who observe the abuse. Trump left the Paris Accord not because it hurt Americans but because its members hurt his feelings by laughing at him. When mockery of a cruel person occurs, the unimaginable insecurity becomes animated. A man’s obsessions bear out in his behavior before they act out in his vengeance. Obsessions build reputations which must be upheld. What is the horrifying story that applies to Trump’s obsession over mockery? Someone refused him and he was permanently embarrassed. He was put on the spot by someone and returned with nothing. Since the time of the laugh, he has determined to stop the laughter no matter what. Stopping a President is a kind of death wish.

Bob Dylan, Gifted Storyteller

Blowin’ In the Wind

A literary education gives principles, sensibilities and an informed view of the world. You can recognize when crazy men are taking over the world and the rest of us are on their doomed voyage.  In the end you can see yourself at sea, floating on a coffin, all quiet, and you are reluctant to that honor.  Literature influenced song writing by listening to early folk singers.  Listening to early folk picks up vernacular and folk lingo became the only vocabulary.  Once you loved the world, now you witness all the suffering of mankind.  Nature doesn’t notice but you are changed forever.  Death is blowin’ in the wind and to honor the dead shades the horror of it.  It is preferable to live a life of struggle than stay eternal in death’s place.  Better to tell many long stories of simple struggle, and sing the wisdom of a shunned pacifist.

Genesis: Story Truth, Not Happening Truth June 11, 2017

 Reducing religion to science reduces its understanding…

I recoil when someone begins dissecting Genesis with a scientists’ scalpel or a fundamentalist fillet, this article helped me uncoil. Poetry allows wonder to be expressed. Scientific analysis of religion diminishes wonder. Fundamentalists of both religion and science attack wonder with a deaf ear to its poetry. Story truth repeatedly reveals itself to a true thinker, while scientists seek only a single revelation. Scientism’s faith excludes wonder and therefore wisdom escapes it. The most important truths never translate into facts, expressing religion and poetry in inexpressible symbols … emblematic of wonder. Poetry rings insufficiently literal to fundamentalists of both religion and scientism, but brings pleasure to those sensitive to its insufficiencies.