DEMOCRATIC DEBATES

"Democratic Debates" and Four Horses

In response to my question

I must learn to resist American neo-fascism and survive, must I not?

my cousin Michael wrote:

The debates seem rather daft, robotic.  I really don't know what to make of them.  I listen to Trump rallies.  Impressive, not that I agree with what he says.  I'm sure he loathes those people who come to his rallies in places like North and South Carolina.  But that's his base, and he certainly puts on a show. There's something blatantly honest about Trump.

[Michael Cola, August 1, 2019, email to Jerry Ward]

My cousin's words strike me like a revelation that's always been a part of the totality of the histories of the United States of America, like a vision that radio, television, and other technologies help many of us to underestimate.  American citizens are enslaved and tormented by the imperfections of politics.  And what seems deeply painful is the inability to know with any degree of certainty whether four horses  ---pale, white,  red, and black ---are coming or leaving.  Indeed, it is impossible to truly know why horses rather than elephants were chosen to symbolize profound existential anxieties.

For me, August 2, 2019 is August 2, 1969 in Vietnam, and I am listening to Peggy Lee sing

Is that all there is, is that all there is

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing

Let's break out the booze and have a ball

If that's all there is

and I broke out the Scotch with my Fourth Infantry Division buddies

And as I sat there watching

I had the feeling that something was missing

And my twenty-six year old black male self was not in Vietnam because I was patriotic. Hell no.  American systemic racism  had done an expert job of killing any desire I might have to be patriotic.  And fifty years later as I sit watching the Democratic Presidential Debates, I yet feel something is missing.  The spectacle of bad faith in my nation has effectively killed any desire for overmuch hope in a future for humanity and this planet. No, I do not subscribe to religious theories of End Time, to the implications of Revelation 6:1-8.   I have simply seen conquest, famine, plague, and war do "actual" jobs within a grid named "reality."

What I have seen led me to write on June 23, 2019----

Understanding why fascism is thriving in the United States of America in 2019 pivots on inquiry about the human will for power, especially its manifestations in ideological compacts which reinforce vulgar ideas regarding social order and disorder.  The will for power functions also in American practices of democracy and communism, in the totality of narratives created in the name of history. 

Inquiry is not easy and neat.  It is messy, as messy as the entanglements that characterize the actual, the real, and the fantastic. Thus, we must hold fast to doubts about the capacity of language to provide us with "truth."  Language  provides data, information that is either instructive or deceptive, prompts for laughter and cause for tears.  Neither foe nor friend, language (an array of American English with grace notes from non-English languages) in the USA is more or less a necessary, convenient, demonizing and enthralling instrument .  The instrument is amoral.  American citizens are complicit and culpable in its usage. There's the rub that endlessly delays access to more than relative, provisional "truths." And one of those "truths" is this: the pre- and post-Cold War dirt is at once soil and fertilizer for fascism.  Like our 1950s ancestors, we are existentially constrained to pledge allegiance to abstractions, to "democracy," to "communism," to "fascism."

From my perspective, the most attractive albeit temporary  escape from the constraint for African American peoples  is to think and behave aggressively as did Cross Damon in Richard Wright's The Outsider and to eschew the defensive posture of Bigger Thomas in Wright's Native Son.  That choice is the catalyst for an authentic revolution in a pre-future.  Dislocate language in the space of action.  Dismiss love. Intensify our will for pure power, not for boundless  freedom or compromised liberation.

The "democratic debates" reinforce my gut feelings.

Consider that the twenty Democrats who possess the will for power  are enslaved  a version of "reality television.  They do not and cannot within the genre-parameters of televised debate persuasively articulate comprehensive, fact-informed plans for dealing with the cesspool of American politics in the context of always changing global events.  Why have none of them said anything intelligent about foreign policy, about the continuing failure of so-called "white" people to admit they are race-defined individuals who have color, about the upswing of domestic terrorism, about American imperialism?  Why has not one of these Democrats suggested that arresting Trump on the grounds of mental unfitness to be a President is a better solution than  impeaching  him for alleged political sins?  One might think that at least one of the want-to-be-Presidents would  be brave enough to tell us the Electoral College shat upon the verifiable will of the voters who in the name of participatory democracy elected Hillary Clinton not Donald Trump  in 2016.  Yes, I am aware that breaking the silence would be very dangerous and would not persuade  anyone in the Tribe of Trump to replace passion  (insatiable will ) to hate with a modicum of cold reason.  Miracles do not happen in situations where American neo-fascism prevails. I calmly anticipate dwelling for four more years in a circus of horrors as like Voltaire's Candide I  turn my back on Panglossy political disinformation, cultivate my life-nurturing garden, and allow the plants to tell me how to continue to struggle. Brutal honesty is all there is.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 2, 2019