The Sucker Punch: Desperate Times Call for Cool Heads

“But he and establishment, unlike his former self who put Mobsters’ “rats” and “hitmen” and, who also put the bosses in jail, but around the politicos…a charade and façade and what? Will he surprise us?

“It’s never happened.” March 22, Taos Friction, Bill Whaley

There is no joy in Mudville, like Mighty Casey, Mueller struck out.

I don’t mind saying that the excerpt from my column above about the state of political corruption on March 22 was prescient. On the other hand, like any sports-politics fan, I was sucker punched by the Mueller report. Hope springs eternal. But we lost the super bowl of politics. Just as the New Orleans Saints got screwed in the play-offs by a “bad call,” similarly, the unholy Mueller-Barr cabal effectively anointed the tyrant as legitimate. Now he’s coming for your health care.

As David Brooks (a moderate-conservative) of the Times notes, “We’ve All Just Made Fools of Ourselves — Again”

You don’t need a “smoking gun” for evidence when a “wink and a nod” on TV toward racists and the ex-commie KGB agent Putin communicates policy to right-wing retros. NOW the Tyrant wants to take away health care, empower white supremacy, make nice with the world’s “other” dictators” from Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Brazil, Israel. When the language of hate gives serial killers and anti-immigrants permission to obliterate the “other” or kidnap children from their parents, you don’t need to reconsider the evidence Mueller missed in plain sight because the law has been detached from its historic foundations in traditional ethics and morals.

Nancy Pelosi is way ahead of us. Forget about impeachment Focus on the issues: climate change, the wealth and health-care gap, student debt, the pollution of the land, the parks, water and the air and the poison of the populace by fossil fuel and big pharma. For popular resentment on the right represents contempt for social and environmental justice. They dislike the idea of individual freedom lest someone have a good time, while listening to the blues or hike up the mountains at no charge to enjoy the view.

Trump is the logical and symbolic manifestation of Capitalism run amok, a system based on an unlimited appetite for greed and power. Many of those dependent on the system are blind to the insidious role they play in legitimizing the corrupt element, whether on progressive or conservative media or even elected to walk as the living dead in the hallowed halls of Congress. Without a villain, ratings and bonuses decline.

But open up the eyes and ears, hearts and minds, as Socrates did in Athens and Jesus in Jerusalem, and you can see your fellows as human beings. Emerson, the transcendental founder of philosophy in America says at the end of Self-Reliance, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

Lincoln tempered the second inaugural with this advice: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Make no mistake: we are engaged in a second civil war for the heart and soul of freedom and justice today. Sure, Casey at the Bat, Bob Mueller, and toady William Barr, struck out. But we’re going into extra innings. We don’t have a five-tool player like Lincoln but I like our all-stars: Nancy, the vote counter, AOC, the sharp-tongued bartender in heels and lipstick from the Bronx; Parkland’s Emma Gonzalez, who sings for the ghostly angels of gun violence; the New Dealer Bernie and Consumer Advocate Elizabeth Warren, who are fighting the beast in its lair, the mobster/tyrant and his cronies.

And somewhere, not in Mudville/D.C., there is joy, and somewhere the light shines.

In glorious Taos, I can’t resist telling you that on Sunday my nine-year old granddaughter and I, after skiing the Kachina Mainstreet a couple of times and Longhorn for a lunch run (all non-stops), we climbed the ridge. She scampered up while I huffed and puffed behind. The weather socked in and the snow and wind gave me an eerie top-of-the-world feeling of vertigo. But then we skied down the Tresckow chute among the rocks and trees in the gullies while floating on an unearthly two feet of powder. We didn’t stop till we hit the trail at the bottom. I hadn’t been up the ridge in forty years. For her, in her second year of skiing, it was a first time. There’s a beam of light for you.