by Henry Pelifian
The endless political indulgence of American Presidential elections is an arena devoid of reality like a crowing rooster with his cock-a-doodle-doo. The presidential campaign crowing seeks to mold a new reality proposed by presidential roosters and now hens. Oh, for a political election process lasting 90 to 120 days with debates costing candidates nothing on public airwaves instead of years of roosters crowing. So easy to do, but the political class is unwilling to remove the billions of dollars out of political process. Money is more important than the political process itself. Money has become an essential part of the political process like one’s credit rating which implies one’s ethics for jobs.
The devastation of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars consuming enormous blood and treasure is missing in the presidential elections as a focus of discussion. Not one question from the established press on the lessons of these fiascoes costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives lost and maimed. The American Empire with its obedient and profitable press avoiding failures, quagmires, failed policies, harmful legislation and glaring mistakes. Or it covers a transgression in a nano-second prior to profitable commercials on television news.
The reality of the U.S. political system is to protect itself and its prerogatives at all costs. Each party wants the ability to legally amass wealth in the easiest possible way, like allowing political figures who drift in and out of the political system to “earn” millions of dollars by just making speeches to corporations or influential organizations and wealthy individuals “donating” millions of dollars to their campaigns. You see, it is about the money one way or another. And of course the money will never unduly influence them.
Look at the state of the nation: health care costs crushing the middle class, neglected public infrastructure throughout the nation, fruitless wars costing trillions of dollars, a government that spends substantially more than it takes in while neglecting the economic health of the nation, providing subsidies to institutions peripheral to the standing of the nation in a game of favoritism for political support while an issue like homeless veterans is neglected.
There is the reality of enormous public funds expended on education while the dropout rate in major cities is unacceptably high is another issue hidden from public view. The entire concept of accountability in the public sector is anathema. The result is a political class like a rooster crowing in the morning cock-a-doodle-doo even when his nest is gone and his flock is in disarray.
The lessons of the Vietnam War do not exist. The lessons of the Iraq War do not exist. The lessons of Afghan War do not exist. The only thing that exists is the political class crowing in the morning on network news on so-called public airwaves playing cock-a-doodle doo every day. The insidious banality of the status quo looms over the nation.
How to solve the nation’s problems or even identifying problems is ignored to focus on everything but fundamental failures of the nation. Instead, they glory in the notion of national exceptionalism which is hollow and self-serving for politicians. Even the concept of neutrality is denigrated in the political process when applied to the Middle East.
U.S. foreign policy and military assistance is based primarily on private profit and favoritism masked as national security. Legislation has become a victory bestowed on a few at the expense of the nation. Ethics in politics is like the wind, it comes and goes and nobody sees it. In American politics truth and facts are friendless while lies are crowded with cash.
Public Air Waves are primarily providing cover and support to whatever government- Democrat or Republican is in power because the status quo is paramount. Corporate media in the run up to the Iraq War removed Phil Donahue from the air waves because his television program was critical of the impending devastation that would be unleashed in the advent of an invasion of Iraq.
How can there be a free press when the mechanism for that freedom is in private hands in a technological age, especially on television news and programming whose owners have vested interests that often are counter to presenting the facts necessary to have an informed citizenry?
Government today often uses public funds inefficiently and ineffectively to support public and private interests at the exclusion of the national interest. When a government is too large for effective oversight it becomes a rogue within the confines of the public sector. When freedom of the press is so constrained by laws confining ownership of the public airwaves to corporate interests which undercut the meaning of a free press a nation stands upon a mirage.
The political process is so consuming lasting years for the Presidency it has become a self-serving political and financial endeavor for candidates. Elected representatives in Congress have allowed the political class unlimited reign in its quest for power stunting and twisting and distorting the electoral process from gerrymandering, limitless cash donations and an endless presidential election cycle as the nation withers like a plant without proper water and nourishment.
A reality hovers over a nation wrapped in vested interests, favoritism and avoidance of chasms of failure led by the political class who use politics as another avenue for access to wealth and privilege. We have an imperial presidency whose spending is unlimited as presidents travel the globe for meetings and fun.
The governor of Hawaii recently declared a state of emergency to solve the homeless problem on the islands. He did so because the homeless were adversely affecting tourism. It was nonetheless a humanitarian act. With our imperial presidency spending lavishly on itself as permitted by Congress, there has been no elected leadership declaring a national state of emergency for the nation’s homeless. The nation struts across the world’s stage as superpower declaring its exceptionalism, while reality is discarded.
The Contrary Perspective 
This is like getting backed into the ropes – and taking one solid punch after another. But what must be done NOW? The defenders of the Status Quo will use any means to defend it (to the point where I would worry about Bernie’s safety if he ever were to become president — see the film “A Very British Coup” for what I think might be the most likely sequence of events).
Are the people who are sick of the way things are ready to “go the distance” as well?
You got it, the Status Quo will use any means to defend its prerogatives-power and direct access to power.
“You can count on Americans to do the right thing only after they have exhausted all other possibilities” Winston Churchill
I believe we have not yet exhausted all of our failing possibilities. The Republican and Democratic Partys are wording hard at that. .
Interesting quote — I wonder to whom he was speaking and in what context? Was it a “prod” before Pearl Harbor? Or did it have something to do with the Polish question post-war?
I would guess it could have been made in 1941 as Britain was being pounded with Luftwaffe air raids nightly and the Republicans, in opposition to Roosevelt, fought any support that he wanted to give to the British. He finally had to take executive action in the “Lend-Lease” program to trade basing in the Carribean for the US on British property for war goods, etc.
A prod, most definitely, by the usual educated foreigner who understands Americans and their inflated sense of self-righteousness — and how to goad Americans into serving foreign interests by cynically playing up to it through inexpensive flattery. Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, and any Apartheid Zionist leader you care to name could, can, and will easily prod the government of the United States into coughing up American blood and money for foreign (and related domestic) interests. Imperial oligarchy always works that way.
Yes. Working hard at hardly working. Parkinson’s Law meets The Peter Principle. If it’s broke, don’t fix it; and if it ain’t broke, wreck it. “Government” hardly gets any more recklessly ruinous than what we Americans pay taxes and borrow from foreigners to lavish upon ourselves. As Pogo used to say: “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” All Donald All the Time.
For the record, little Georgie Bush’s fiasco did erupt into the GOP circus when Trump claimed to have opposed the attack on Iraq in 2003. His rivals immediately attacked him for being “limp-wristed” (my choice of words), that is to say suddenly lacking in mandatory machismo in confronting “enemies” abroad. Doubtless Trump was trying to paint himself as so wise on foreign policy as to have foreseen that things would not turn out altogether rosily. But he assures us now that no one, absolutely NO ONE, will dare challenge US authority when HE’s Commander-in-Chief. Have you noticed that “Benghazi” has hardly been uttered lately? I am very confident that once Hillary gets the official nomination of her party that unfortunate place name will be impossible to escape. The GOP is simply trying to keep some powder dry for when Election Day is drawing nearer.
I can’t resist throwing in one more observation on the current geo-political tensions. The media wanted us to all be freaking out that “north” Korea had ordered its (microscopic!) nuclear arsenal to be brought to a state of readiness for instant deployment if necessary. And the US, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel? I suppose their warheads have all been allowed to rust away and collect dust? Their weapons aren’t ready to be deployed at moment’s notice? But I guess the DPRK just isn’t “exceptional” enough to be granted even the tiniest hint of “equality” with major powers.
An excellent use of the crowing-rooster metaphor, and I commend the author for exploring its many ramifications, especially given the previous and current neoconservative corporate subsidiaries — or “presidential administrations,” as we like to euphemistically call them — that have brought America so low in the esteem of the world. Having said that, and in view of the rapidly declining circumstances of the “exceptional” U.S. empire, I think that the clipped capon (i.e., castrated male chicken) might serve to more accurately represent America during the successive imperial misadventures of Bill Clinton, Deputy Dubya Bush, and Barack Obama. I don’t know if the clipped capon actually crows like a rooster, but if it attempts to do so, the noise probably emerges from its throat several octaves above what one would normally hear in the early hours before sunrise. I should think that “squeaking,” rather than “crowing” would best describe the sound.
The Chinese, too, have several fowl metaphors applicable to America’s devolving and dissolving empire: namely, “kill the chicken, scare the monkey,” and “the hen crows in the morning.” The first of these illustrates the persecution of American whistle-blowers by their own government, most notably the vicious and vindictive President Barack Obama who has outdone all previous American presidents in trying to strangle and suppress the flow of necessary information to the general public. Just ruin the lives of a few low-level government employees (the “chickens”) and the rest of them (the “monkeys”) will fall into line without a whimper of protest. The second of these fowl metaphors seems especially appropriate this year given yet another grab for political and economic power by You-Know-Her (and you know that you do), the notorious “other half” of the androgynous “two for the price of one” Clinton Twin. This self-serving slogan, by the way, in effect means that, starting with the Clintons, the obscenely wealthy oligarchs can purchase two Democratic Party politicians for what they would normally have to pay for a single Republican. What a bargain! Not surprisingly, Democrats like the Clintons and Barack Obama receive more money in bribes than even the Republicans do. I think this accounts for the virulent hatred which Republicans feel for the Clintons and Obama who have underbid them for political and economic services rendered to the ruling oligarchy.
Additionally, as a matter of cultural and historical interest, the Chinese metaphor “the hen crows in the morning,” translates to something like “the world turned upside down,” an ironic tune played by a British military band as Lord Cornwallis surrendered his troops to the American colonials at Yorktown. As President, You-Know-Her will probably have to surrender to Russia and China — since these two economic and diplomatic competitors don’t squander so much of their national treasure on worthless imperial militarism — so whatever crowing this chicken-hen tries to do will probably occur shortly before imperial sundown rather than sunrise, metaphorically and realistically speaking. So for America in the very near future, the hen will crow upside-down in the evening, metaphorically speaking.
Finally, many of us older persons remember a musical production from our youth called “The Mouse that Roared,” about a small European country that declared war on the United States figuring to quickly lose and then bask in the riches of American reconstruction aid. As things turned out, though, the little pipsqueak country won the war and then wound up even deeper in the hole with a deadbeat giant like the United States to support. These days, the story works out differently, as the deadbeat United States keeps declaring war on little impoverished countries (the ostensible “mice”) only to spend decades losing to them but leaving the impoverished countries even worse off than before while American corporate camp followers and politicians grow obscenely rich on the devastation and carnage.
At any rate, a decade ago I found all these metaphors running through my mind as I helplessly watched yet another U.S. government launch yet another suicidal war against yet another seemingly helpless country which would inevitably “win” by giving America’s military the boot in the butt it so richly deserves, time after time. But the metaphors got mixed up and came out looking like:
The Hens Roared Upside Down
The five-deferment chicken hawk
Who couldn’t graduate
The champagne flyboy too absolved
To make his monthly date
Two trophy chief executives
Who came to war too late
These three-piece-suit barbarians,
Attilas wearing ties,
With millions in their P. R. funds
To manufacture lies
Sent thousands to their early doom
Where few could hear their cries
You might as well give Genghis Khan
A haircut and a shave
And then expect this earthly scourge
To make nice and behave
As think that Bush and Cheney might
The lives of any save
Dick Cheney with his underbite
Into his armpit sneered
Denouncing Democrats who had
In uniform appeared
While Dick and his pet Bubble Boy
Had only profiteered
While Dick had other things to do:
“Priorities,” said he,
Much better men heard country’s call
And sailed across the sea
To fight against some mystic dread
So Dick and George could flee
But then the wheel came `round and gave
To Dick and George at last
A foolproof way to expurgate
The yellow from their past
They’d bash some Arab people not
Involved in terror’s blast
They said they knew of weapons that
Saddam would not dispose
If we knew what they knew, they said,
We’d give Saddam the hose
Just trust in them, they said, or else
Our wife’s job they’d disclose
When some asked for the proof they glared
And said they’d not debate
To any who had questions they
Said, “Hurry up and wait!
You’ll get your answers soon enough,
But first swallow the bait.”
They wanted all the credit for
The war that couldn’t fail
In no-cost, cakewalk, record time
They’d all be hoisting ale
To toast their grandiose design
A tidbit of a tale
Let’s do that Mongol thing, they thought,
And simply sack the place
Let’s watch while priceless works of art
Take off without a trace
And have Don Rumsfeld blow it off
As “some kid with a vase”
But after years of mission creep
They’re mired in Khyber Pass
They keep inventing rationales
That sound like passing gas
Their bait and switch has turned around
And bit them in the ass
So as the world turned upside down
The mid-east mouse, it roared
And out of soldiers’ punctured veins
A bloody torrent poured
Inducing Dick and George to do
The thing they most adored
They posed unwavering before
The steady camera lens
They beamed unshaking images
Into home TV dens
And heralded the sundown like
A pair of crowing hens
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2005
The reference to “The World Turned Upside Down” certainly caught my attention. I confess I wasn’t aware the melody is so old (or, more politely, “traditional”!). Just did some quick online research, finding a claim of c. 1640 origins. Also statements that the tune was NOT played at Yorktown. But more importantly I wish to note that I first encountered the tune by way of new lyrics supplied by topical British singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson. His version (also recorded by the Brit Billy Bragg) is the story of “the Diggers,” an anarchistic alliance that opposed the division of the English countryside into parcels of fenced-off private properties. Not surprisingly, their movement was violently suppressed by the established order. In the golden years of the Hippie Era, an organization called “the Diggers” arose in San Francisco to distribute free food to those on society’s bottom-most socio-economic ladder rung. Such activity was again frowned upon by the establishment in “liberal” S.F. “Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.” Woody Guthrie has been gone nearly 50 years, but there are still a few artists around willing to call out the ruling class for its dirty deeds. For some strange reason [wink], they don’t seem to rake in the big bucks these days, either.