Yves here. Some readers were upset by the frequency of criticism in the comments section of Team Dem. I suggest you read this post and consider: the party treated the workers, as union members and the poor, as those who could not deliver cheap and crumbly slogans. The group becomes the vehicle for the needs and wants of the Professional Managerial Class, and everyone under it must see how they qualify for that position and absorb it.
Mind you, Common Dreams is a trusted leftist outlet and author Phil Wilson has a long history of writing for progressive outlets. It takes a lot of abuse to make former fans react like renegade lovers or recovering cult members.
By Phil Wilson, a retired mental health worker who has written for Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire, The Hampshire Gazette, and other publications. Phil’s articles are posted regularly on Nobody’s Voice. Originally published at CommonDreams
In the crazy, distorted light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can simultaneously be part of the administration that sends billions of dollars in weapons to the IDF, and pity the innocents crushed under the rubble of Gaza.
I suffered through three nights of fake programming called the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I watched almost everything interesting—jugglers, acrobats, gladiator contests, cockfights, and dancers too. I am constantly amazed by the endless bread and circus offerings—lions and Christs, tightrope walkers and card tricks—I may be the only person on Earth who can watch the entire show.
That’s not all—I walked my dog, looked up baseball scores, dissected and thought about weird things, opened my brand new copy The Complete Poems of EmilyDickinson-but I returned to the DNC as an artist circling back to a particular theme or motif. And what a spectacle and cruelty it was!
It was like an extended, uninformed commercial, perhaps, but it also seemed like a funeral where people shuffled to the podium to convey meaningless memories of the intended content – at a funeral no one wants to hear about a DUI arrest at home. battery, we only want good things about how they go and climb the tree and save the kitten.
The Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris has been given a wonderful trip to the land beyond the sun. We went knowing that she was a holy woman at worst, and the daughter of God sent that she would save us at best. We heard not just praise, but blessings, confessions, tears, and wonder combined with songs by Stevie Wonder, Pink, John Legend, and Sheila E! But what kind of funeral ends with the deceased in the flesh, telling his own story? And what a story he tells, born into almost Calcutta-style poverty in Berkeley flats.
I know something about the rough streets of West Berkeley myself, having lived on Channing Way between Bonar and Browning for over a decade. On the flat plains Berkeley homes can now be purchased—if you’re very lucky—for a hair under a million dollars. But I lived there in the 80s and 90s and Kamala would be gone by the time my wife and I moved to the west coast.
The Berkeley flats (as I saw them 40 years ago) cannot be placed in a conventional system of class divisions, because Berkeley existed just outside the normal boundaries of our four-dimensional universe. At the same time it showed the characteristics of the working class, the middle class, and the upper middle class in some strange overlaps of the matrix. In our backyard lived two doctors, a factory foreman, a kindergarten teacher, a single grandmother on social assistance, and a crack house owner. Kamala, in her DNC acceptance speech, tried to portray herself as a low-class child oppressed by the disrespect endured by her parents—two black immigrants.
Kamala shocked us all with the trauma of a social class where a family headed by two academics with medical degrees can be passed off as a symbol of lack of opportunities. In the DNC speech at the time, we heard nothing about class, but about race and immigration status. We were expected to be shocked that Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, somehow, no matter what, did well in school and went on to top law schools.
Of course, this is an American myth that is corrupting our national soul—the idea that we live in a respectable democracy where all levels of office display a clean work ethic, and privilege has no part in the outcome (you know—the virtue that Donald Trump has become a self-made man). I would respect Kamala Harris more if she looked the nation in the eye and said:
I was born with two silver spoons in my mouth and almost none. Each of my parents had doctorates and senior positions in the world of research and education, and yours probably had less than a bachelor’s degree. Still, despite being encouraged to study hard and succeed every day in my childhood, I do my best to imagine what it would be like to grow up in an illiterate family, and try to put myself in someone else’s shoes. they are forced to attend school with no guidance and no expectations. Yes, that is not easy for me, because my very educated parents made it difficult to imagine what it would be like to feel like a stranger at school. But I’ll do my best to go outside in your five-year-old Nikes.
In the entertainment spectacle of American political theater, one must know that every minute of the election process is equal to a lot of bulls. In the opposite, washed-out light of bent and broken images, Kamala Harris can at the same time be part of the administration that sends billions of dollars of weapons to the IDF, and mourn those tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands according to The Lancet) of the innocent crushed under the rubble of Gaza. In the physically impossible dream of DNC fiction, Kamala Harris can say in one paragraph that she will feed the military industrial complex as if she were a zookeeper with a bucket of meat going into a cage of hungry tigers, and at the same time, fight climate change.
As all the trapeze artists, ballet dancers, and magicians tricked us with beauty stunts, two things remained conspicuously absent from the DNC convention—a voice representing the plight of the Palestinian people and Kamala’s father. I thought the economics professor, Donald Harris, must have been dead for a long time, but a quick run through Wikipedia proved that he still lives on in our world. Is Mary Trump of Dr. Harris Kamala—an estranged family member holding the family bones? If so, he testifies in a strangely quiet manner and does not force his obscure secrets into public like Dr. Mary Trump. Does his absence speak of something terrible? Mary Trump lets her family’s secrets go with little hindrance and enlightenment. He doesn’t tell us anything about his dirty uncle that we don’t know.
But more than that, in a circus that promises to remove all humanity from the mire of disillusionment and horror, the failure of the directors and producers of the DNC extravaganza to produce an independent, compassionate Palestinian voice cannot be overlooked. Green honchos who are supposed to be agonizing over a Palestinian speaker willing to utter a word of affirmation to cut Kamala Harris off our doubts about her role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza—they all somehow came up with bupkis.
In the case of mass exploitation, that must have cost the price of a nuclear delivery system, the DNC couldn’t clear one very low bar that needed to be crossed. Millions of people waited in vain to hear that Kamala Harris would step down from President Joe Biden on the issue of providing bombs to continue the attack on the extermination of Palestinian civilians.
The biggest fear many voters may have is this: Behind the invisible curtain, the Wizard of Oz is wearing a Donald Trump doll in one hand, and a Kamala Harris doll in the other. A vote for any vote for more war, increased police spending, a military budget large enough to invade every inhabited planet within a hundred light years, and a vote to burn every drop of fossil fuel still buried in the lithosphere. Every vote is a vote for Oz.
There is another narrative, which I cannot completely dismiss—that Donald Trump is a monster who makes all kinds of genocide a Fred Rogers comparison. We may have a choice between something cold-hearted and destructive and something worse. Trump gives me the creeps in a way Kamala Harris doesn’t, but that might just be my paranoid distortion. I worry about falling into a lake and coming face to face with a boiling saltwater crocodile wearing an orange wig.
Noam Chomsky called Trump the most dangerous person in human history, or something to that effect. How long will we kick the can down the road with right-wing Democrats wearing their FDR masks, knowing we have no universal health care, no safety net, endless war and CO2? Most people I know agree with Chomsky and will vote for Harris. I don’t hold that. Trump scares a lot of people with a complete collection of wits.
We live in an age of inescapable truths: Donald Trump is a rotten psychopath as devoid of inner complexity as a bullet in a chamber. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotions, but I’m not sure she feels real pain.
Maybe it’s a choice whether or not we admit that we don’t have a choice. Welcome to America.
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