Categories
2020 Election Coronavirus Politics

It’s All Part of the Plan

You are now witnessing the beginning of the end.

For four years, the Trump administration has lied about every conceivable thing you could imagine: from the size of the crowd at the inauguration, to the covering-up of bribes/veiled threats to the Ukrainians in search of dirt on Joe Biden, pretending to care about health care while simultaneously attempting to scrap Obamacare in the courts and bring back pre-existing conditions, to making up fake caravans, hordes of angry liberals, tiny child soldiers stealing ballots out of the mail, and refuting recorded-on-tape claims Trump made that COVID-19 was a new Democratic hoax. But perhaps the most devious lies told by this nightmare presidency came in the midst of the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis and cities across the country.

After the “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” controversy, administration officials and surrogates assigned blame to Antifa (anti-fascists) and the “far-left”. Trump named them along with anarchists at Cape Canaveral Saturday morning, and not long after consiglieri William Barr followed suit.

As before, the administration politicizes everything. They never fail to blame the Democrats for just about every negative occurrence befalling the United States right now.

And, as always, all was by design.

The demonstrations in Minneapolis escalated from peaceful resistance to all-out chaos after protestors began smashing windows and setting fires to businesses. Only these “protestors” stood out from the crowd:

https://twitter.com/umnnmmm/status/1266166048958541824

Atlanta saw tensions boil over when more “demonstrators” shattered the CNN Center’s windowed entrance. A city whose last race riot took place over 100 years ago now hosted squad car burnings and rampant lootings.

My gut told me from the jump that something was off. Of course, the Ferguson demonstrations of 2014 and the Baltimore riots of 2015 indeed reflected both cities’ abject rage against the police. Not three days ago, Minneapolis Police’s 3rd Precinct and home of George Floyd’s murderers burned down. Gas stations, retail shops, and various other businesses have been turned into bonfires in Atlanta, New York, and L.A. But unlike these instances, I noticed the instigators of the early days of the riots shared one common trait.

They were all white.

Indulge me as I profile potential criminals in no way dissimilar to the prejudice generations of black people have absorbed and continue to absorb. Just ask Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. But if you look at the looters, the window-smashers, the men and women on the front lines at the beginning of the violence, they’re not black. Sure, black protestors have set fires over the past week, but mostly targets of their oppression. The majority are not seeking destruction. White supremacist fuckholes on the other hand?

You betcha.

Like in 1968, Trump seeks to turn this anger back onto the left. He’s blowing the right dog whistles the way Nixon did. And like Nixon, these snakes will use any tactics they can to undermine and smear the DNC, Joe Biden, etc. They’ll use their fabled “silent majority” rhetoric in hopes that white America will dupe themselves into voting for them once more. And if those moves fail to yield results, they’ll continue a long fascist tradition of staging false flag attacks.

Four weeks after Hitler’s rise to power, the Reichstag caught fire. Nazis immediately squared the blame on a suspected Dutch communist. Shaken by the attack on their government, the German parliament enacted a decree that gave Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich emergency powers, paving the way for the fascist scourge we all know and love.

It worked before. Let’s hope it doesn’t this time around.

Don’t kid yourself: Trump is doing the same thing.

Just yesterday, he angrily screamed at governors to be more “dominating” over protestors, announced his intentions to send in the military to quell demonstrators, and had a crowd peacefully demonstrating in front of the White House gassed and maced so he could take pictures with a bible in front of a church that didn’t want him there.

“I’m your law and order president,” the orange Nazi proclaims.

I’m sure he was dying to say Führer instead.

To recap, Trump’s people have already pre-determined who the “enemy” is, announced that only they are the true patriots safeguarding law and order, and are preparing a shock-and-awe response against citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

America, this isn’t a one-off.

This is your future.

This was the endgame all along. Trump wants to be a god, a supreme leader, El Jefe, the big boss man.

Why do you think he loves him some Kim Jong-un, Vlad Putey-Pute, MBS, and Recep Erdogan?

He aspires to BE these strongmen. He wants to be judge, jury, executioner for LIFE.

Trump intends to bend America to his will, have Congress enact any and all of his lawless schemes, and the judiciary to be his docile, doting lapdog.

The man in the high castle is already here.

It’s just a matter of how far he gets before we’re all shouting Heil Trump.

Categories
Coronavirus Politics

When A Nightmare Comes True

Captured by @kieroncg

In college, I anguished over a future day that riots would hit the streets of Atlanta.

I was mentally preparing myself for the moment that scenes from Ferguson would greet me on Sweet Auburn Ave and Andrew Young International.  

When Occupy Wall Street rose out of the economic crisis, hordes of protesters – mostly children of successful brokers and executives – flooded the streets of New York, railing against the very system that raised their priviliged soap boxes, allowing their denouncing cries against structural financial inequality to reach every corner of the national conscience.

Right at the same time, Troy Davis was scheduled for execution in Georgia. At this particular inflection point, the fires of rebellion and anger engulfed Woodruff Park. In a matter of days, the Occupy Movement re-christened their new home “Troy Davis Park”. Soon, Occupy Atlanta hoisted tents and filled them with disaffected youth, homeless old folks, and bored college students looking to embrace a counterculture. For what felt like three months, the space was theirs. Sadly, Troy Davis was executed, and the tent city fell at the hands of Mayor Kasim Reed’s Atlanta Police. By a small miracle, no one died. No unarmed black men gunned down like dogs near Aderhold. No beatdowns of rebellious 20-somethings on Luckie Street or Peachtree Center Avenue.

Somehow, The City Too Busy To Hate kept the anger to a simmer, but nothing more.

At the height of recent racial tensions of the last decade, I feared the worst. After Trayvon Martin, I prayed that the next death wouldn’t be in my city. When they murdered Mike Brown, I pictured the tear gas and fires overwhelming the Georgia Bookstore just up the block from my freshman dorm on Edgewood. When Walter Scott was shot in the back, I imagined angry protesters fighting police outside the Georgia Dome. After Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, and the countless unarmed black men and women murdered by police, I convinced myself that it would only be a matter of time until the streets of Atlanta would be alight in unbridled rage, indignant defiance against oppressive forces hellbent on maintaining the dynamics of Jim Crow and segregation.

Until I didn’t.

When I began working, I slowly lost that fear. Over time, the next shooting brought up anger, frustration, feelings of grief that things didn’t improve. But ultimately, I was preoccupied with bills and loans and building up my credit. I had to keep my head above water.

Even as the president morphed from a thoughtful black statesman to an incoherent orange zealot, I kept my nose to the grind as best I could.

When I least expected it, the powder keg finally detonated. Hell, I forgot the fucker was there in the first place.

The sight of a burned out APD car and huddled masses smashing up the CNN Center jarred me.

As I watched Keisha Lance Bottoms angrily beg her city to cease and desist, the overflowing lava of pent-up hatred I expected to greet me during college suddenly stared back through a tiny laptop screen. I didn’t smell the tear gas, feel the stinging rubber pellets, wince from the ringing within my ears from flash bangs and sirens.

I stood dumbfounded that the moment I once feared on a near daily basis would happen in my lifetime was actually happening.

George Floyd’s murder feels gratuitous, a needless attestation of the current state of the world: festering, oozing, bloviating while bleeding out in the middle of a society-crippling pandemic and economic shitstorm. We lost 103,000 people to COVID-19 in three months, but now we’re reminded that indeed black lives still don’t matter in America? What is this Nietzsche-concocted sick joke that we’re trudging through?

Is this the true 9th circle of Hell? Was Dante wrong after all this time? Or perhaps Milton’s Pandemonium?

Are we really living in a 1984 that fucked Hitler to bequeth us alt-1985 Biff Tannen?

Is this what South Africans felt under apartheid?

Martin Luther King during the “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” days of the civil rights struggle?

The fires destroying buildings in Minneapolis look eerily like the ones that raged in D.C. following Dr. King’s murder. The final-straw rage and lashing-out of the streets echo 1992 L.A. Within the images of the past week, I see America’s vulgar history re-birthed from the poisoned ashes of past failure.

It feels hopeless.

It feels inevitable.

It feels like it won’t end.

I can pretend to say I have hopes for a brighter day sometime down the line, but I’d rather not patronize you.

That’s the world we live in right now.

Fight for something more.

Categories
Blogs Coronavirus Politics

No Justice, No Peace

When will this scene go away? (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

G-d damn it.

G-d damn all of it.

It’s not enough that the country faces a highly infectious respiratory virus without effective treatments or a vaccine.

It’s not enough that the unemployment figures continue to skyrocket in spite of callous state governors re-opening businesses against all recommendations from infectious disease experts.

It’s not enough to have COVID-19 be an everyday killer within minority communities.

It’s not enough that George Floyd died at the hands of a racist.

It’s not enough that the sack of pompous shit in the Oval Office laughs at American journalists being laid off, or that he accuses a man of murder to the dismay of the alleged murder victim’s widower.

It’s not enough. Any of it. And it’s fucking infuriating beyond belief.

When scores of white people march the streets protesting the tyranny of state governments protecting their communities from being obliterated by the coronavirus, they’re met peacefully by health care workers standing stoically in the face of batshit conspiratorial charges and insanity, and state capitol police officers taking up-close-and-personal vitriol by men with assault rifles without moving so much as an inch.

When unarmed black people protest the unlawful murder of a black man at the hands of the police, as has happened time and again over the past 10 years, they’re shot with rubber bullets and tear gas. They’re forced to not only disperse, but are violently assaulted by the same cabal of murderers that started this whole fucking nightmare.

Meanwhile, senators caught profiting off of insider information are essentially set free before a charge can be laid by the President’s new law firm, the Justice Department. An organization run by a man who openly admitted that the victors can rewrite history to gloss over the acquittal of a friend to the President even after said friend plead guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. A man who believes that the President can apparently do fuck all without so much as facing a congressional committee.

A man who can tweet utter bullshit at will because Twitter is too chickenshit to exercise its right as a private company to consign Orange Hitler’s Twitter account to the same fate as the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

Tara Reade can lie about Joe Biden assaulting her and make him look like a potentially unfit candidate for the White House. Donald Trump can lie about hydroxychloroquine’s super-effective treatment of COVID-19 and receive one little “this is actual fake news” warning label after lying on Twitter for a decade and be given credibility when the press constantly asks if Trump has a point when sharing his crackpot musings because, you know, “objectivity”.

There comes a time when the needs of the many has to outweigh the needs of the few.

In America, the needs of the few have consistently outweighed the needs of everyday citizens seeking the preposterous and antiquated American Dream.

Now, it’s only a question of if this decades-old ailment will kill the country before COVID does.

Categories
Blogs

Is There Anybody Out There?

Remember outside?

Hey.

Are you alive out there?

No, really, did you make it? Are you on the other side or are you still on this plain of existence?

Am I alive?

I don’t really know.

Does simmering hatred-fueled rage over current affairs conjoined with the lack of professional sports count as “living”?

I guess in the biological sense, I’m alive. Breathing. Creating living cells and discarding dead ones.

My mitochondria should be all good.

Who the fuck knows, honestly?

Working from home differs greatly from being around your coworkers every day, seeing their faces, pining lustfully after the ones you think are cute, would make fun sleepover buddies…

Fuck, that was gross. Sorry. It’s this quarantine. Porn is basically an every-other-week ritual at this point.

In fact, so many people on Twitter have broadcast their thirst through their biggest platforms. Look no further than self-styled flower child/advanced being Caroline Calloway. Who? Exactly.

Don’t get me wrong, Calloway makes for fun following on social media. But like every other “star” that superficially invented their fame out of thin air using Instagram, Twitter, Vine (R.I.P.) or YouTube, she peskily, if not chaotically, commands your attention – you MUST know who she is.

That’s one lesson I’ve re-learned during this pandemic.

People don’t seem to give a shit about substance as long as you’re engaging The Consumer. It’s the inane drivel marketing aficionados and P.R. jagoffs blithely blurt out like second nature, easier than breathing, more effortless than sleeping. It’s corporate doublespeak elucidating how the world really works to Future Big Deals, be they influencer or necromancer, politician or celebrity (sometimes both), saint or Satan.

Why else does the world’s saddest self-pity tour continue pile driving our zombified corpse of a nation into our latest death spiral? Americans bore easier than any other industrial nation. Years of malnutrition, underpayment, under education, and celebrification metastasized into the living breathing cancer of Trumpism.

This new Astro-Turf Populism with heavy shades of Fascism infiltrated the U.S. through bullshit Fox “News” attack ads—I mean news reports, conservative-talk noise pollution, and of course Citizens United rendering political finance laws into mere words on a yellowed scrap of parchment.

The incessant word games playing out on network news and media outlets ad nauseum asking us whether a serial liar indeed did lie today distract us from actual issues. All of the environmental regulatory rollbacks undoing decades of the E.P.A.’s work. The Justice Department quietly seizing the power to determine whether naturalized immigrants, a.k.a. citizens, are actually citizens. Meaningful, consequential, society-altering decisions impacting each and every one of us right this minute.

So, I ask you once again, are you alive?

Is anybody truly out there?

I’m sending out an S.O.S.

Categories
Blogs Politics The Game of Life

Talk Is Cheap

A mass grave for unclaimed victims of COVID-19 on Hart Island in the Bronx. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

It’s happening again. Have you noticed? It’s the same as always, rote for all disasters of the last 20-25 years. Ordinary people being lauded for their courage and strength, their grace under fire, their cool-headedness, bravery, and grit.

The Heroes.

When a beautiful Tuesday morning in September turned into the single-worst act of brutality in American history, news anchors and politicians alike glorified the brave men and women who answered the call in New York and DC that day. Always, without fail, President Bush praised the first responders of 9/11 like mythic gods, patron saints of the dedicated worker, willing to put their lives on the line to ensure the safety of our great nation, amongst other flowery designations to comfort the masses.

For all the praise they were given, these first responders spent the following years dying of terrifying cancers with next to no assistance from the same government officials who shamelessly rode the memories of their deaths to re-election. The Heroes were great as political props, just not priority enough to cover their chemo, bills, and funerals.

The victims on the planes received the same lionization. Heroes, all of them, simply because terrorists hijacked their flights and plowed them into three buildings. The deification of these ordinary travelers only grew as time moved forward to the point where now one is simply un-American if they dare mention 9/11 without first mentioning those brave Heroes or their families.

For the past three weeks, we’ve heard pundits, celebrities, experts, senators, house reps, the President praise the doctors and nurses on the front lines, highlighting their heroism with vaunted vigor and wonder.

Included on this list of titans are the “essential workers” – grocery store clerks, garbage collectors, postal workers, restaurant staff, the WWE, Florida lifeguards, moronic protestors fighting for the right to die of COVID-19…

OK, not so much the latter group but if you’re paying attention, you understand the ongoing theme.

It’s all words and no action.

In Canada, people out of work receive $2,000 a month from the government. In the United Kingdom, employers are providing 80% of furloughed workers’ salaries.

Here, we’re waiting for the dipshit in charge to sign his fucking name on the memo lines of our one-time $1,200 “stimulus” checks. While Canadians and Britons have state-covered health insurance and some sort of access to testing, we’re routinely lied to by our governors, various Trump apologists, and the asshole himself that the worst is behind us and we’re near ready to re-open the country.

Of course, this is because talk is cheap. One can say whatever they please without need to bend over and lift up the downtrodden from their knees.

Give the Democrats some credit. At least they fought the jackals in the Senate over guarantees that Americans would at least get their pittance checks while also preventing the Banana Republicans from throwing money into the bank accounts of Fortune 500 firms without congressional oversight. Ultimately, this fight was for naught since Trump fired the person put in charge to oversee said congressional oversight mechanism, but then again would you expect anything less from Moscow Mitch and his gaggle of merry con-men?

My mother works at an organic grocery store. She’s due back in about a week where she will face the general public in a state where there are more unemployment claims than anywhere else in the country. People like my mother will put themselves before single parents devoid of any other choices but to drag around their petri-dish toddlers with them while scoping the aisles for colloidal silver and vitamin C. Thankfully, the store gives each employee masks and gloves for protection. But they won’t give them hazard pay or a raise, nor will they limit the number of shoppers allowed within the store. Combine these listless precautions with the utter stupidity of Americans blocking hospital entrances to protest safety measures enacted by their respective governors, and you see the cracks within the system exposed.

In a land where we pay more money for health insurance than any other nation by an astronomical margin, businesses refuse to bump up salaries for the people keeping their lights on, forcing their underlings to risk life and limb for the benefit of the economy. Never mind that economies don’t function when consumers are sick or dead, it’s crucial – nay, chief to saving us and our way of life. Send the cannon fodder to the front of the regiment as a mighty shield against the destruction of capitalism.

In a perfect world, we’d be more concerned about the wellbeing of our families and neighbors. We’d cast aside our smocks, lay down our tools, remove our hands from keyboards, keep ourselves in isolation until such point that the experts agree life can resume as before.

Instead, we the people are asked by the wealthy few who live not in fear of missing meals or mortgage payments to work without guaranteed sick leave, medical coverage, wage hikes, or rent freezes.

After all, a working-class Hero is something to be – in name only, but not in treatment. Hell, if you’re lucky, they’ll thank you for the sacrifice you’ll make.

Immortality awaits, future brave souls of yesteryear.

Categories
2020 Election Politics

Help Wanted: Nation Seeking Real President

This is embarrassing. We had more than 100 years to prepare for another situation like the one we’re mired in at the moment. Neck-deep in contagion and paranoia, Americans are showing the rest of the world just how entitled the shittiest of our population truly are. Stabbings over water. Brawls over toilet paper. Shortages of food and medicine. A non-existent government “stimulus” not for the general public but for the wealthiest corporations in the world, and the agreement of sending a one-time pittance to the rest of the nation while senators profit off of our misery.

One week into this self-isolation, it’s no wonder that we’ve seen no real strides towards lessening the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. While angry Twitter eggs rage at Chuck Schumer for wanting to give the country more than the most stripped-down version of UBI, the “president” continues to call COVID-19 the Chinese Virus. As of today, Italy surpassed China’s death toll, making this disease eligible to earn a similarly simplistic and moronic moniker of Tuscan Virus. Notice that the World Health Organization, the international body keeping the rest of the world from cratering within itself, refuses to use such a dumbass classification. Not because they are in fear of the mythical PC Police Trump and his acolytes incessantly disparage, but because they’d rather people not attack innocent Chinese folks just as fearful of contracting the virus as the rest of the planet:

“’[…] It’s really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus,’ Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of WHO’s emergencies program, said at a news conference Wednesday when asked about Trump’s comments inciting violence against Asians.”

On-brand as ever, the Sentient Skin Tag is going out of his way to continue his erroneous assault on the notion of a virus’ self-agency, and has now dialed up his unoriginal lügenpresse routine to 11 with the help of some friends. The banana-republic-tyrant cosplayer continued his nauseating display of venomous self-pitying bitching for the cameras just ten days after resorting to his most consistent routine of his presidency, prompting the creepy indoctrinated adulation of his cult and swift acerbic ridicule by his critics like clockwork.

This is the new leadership we’ve polluted our government with. It’s telling when professional sports leagues demonstrate stronger leadership reacting to worldwide pandemics threatening countless millions than whole governments. The entire world is losing its collective mind, and the world’s self-anointed steadying presence is batshit up a creek without a real president.

As we hunker down for the long and terrifying road ahead, the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

We’re on our own.

Categories
2020 Election Politics Sports

Buckle Up, Kids

Yo, this might not be the smartest or most profound observation at the moment, but shit be fucked.

Like, SUPER fucked.

Never in my life have I seen such a moment in history where the entire world seemingly shuts down. The closest thing I can equate this to is the immediate hours and days following 9/11. Growing up in a country where planes flew overhead every day, it took some getting used to silent skies.

It was brief, but it was unforgettable. The world hadn’t existed without commercial planes flying overhead since early in the 1920s, maybe the ‘30s. It was like living in a different time.

Like when deadly diseases ravaged weakened populations across the globe following humanity’s (first) nadir.

1918 – not just the last time the Red Sox won a World Series for 86 years, but more importantly, the last time the world faced such a contagious and deadly virus. The Spanish Flu nearly killed all who were fortunate enough to survive the Great War, eradicating even more generations out of existence.

Thankfully, dumbass world leaders notwithstanding, COVID-19 appears to be less deadly.

For now.

If we’re lucky (and let’s face it as a country we’re comparatively quite lucky), the virus runs its course and goes away in about a month. Of course, because the world’s most unqualified toxic gastropod with an anus for a mouth obliterated our country’s dedicated portion of infrastructure built specifically to combat a deadly viral outbreak, we’ll experience exactly what China and Italy are going/previously gone through. I’m praying that we don’t get a nationwide quarantine, but I’m not too optimistic.

The strange thing is knowing that we won’t have our usual entertainment to distract us. Movie premieres are being delayed across the world. Festivals, conferences, and concerts are getting bagged left and right.

Sports are effectively done across all walks of the sporting world. March Madness has officially become #MarchSadness. And without such daily respites from the cesspit that is the 2020 Election, we’re gonna be stewing in our own misery it seems. Well, maybe you won’t be. Lord knows I have been for weeks now.

I never thought I’d see the day where I wanted absolutely NOTHING to happen, just nothing whatsoever. Good, bad, cataclysmic, anything. Just one fucking iota of a break from the constant push and pull of calamity waiting to murder the Christ out of the world.

Anybody got any good shows to binge for an apocalyptic viral plague?

I’m all ears.

Categories
2020 Election Politics

Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s Time to Unite

“We at war.

We at war with terrorism.

Racism.

But most of all,

we at war with ourselves.”

When Kanye West first recorded these words in 2004, America had only recently begun its descendance into the costly quagmire that is the War On Terror. President George W. Bush declared war on Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator keeping his country in organized terror and fear for decades. In a matter of days, Saddam’s capital fell, he fled, hid for nearly a year before being captured, tried, convicted, and executed in 2006. Few people knew what kind of hell our country was about to dive headfirst into.

One of those few is currently running for president.

The other, one of many then-Senators whom voted to begin the long, spiraling, calamitous affair that Donald Trump vowed to end before his consequent inauguration, many, many, many lies concerning everything from national security to personal infidelities, calling off talks with the Taliban, reigniting talks with the Taliban, signing a treaty with the Taliban to end the Afghan War, and subsequently breaking that treaty with the Taliban before the ink could dry.

Countless men, women, and children have died as a result of our actions in the Middle East. Iraqis, Afghanis, Kurds, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, Libyans, Israelis, Palestinians.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria alone, 7,000 American military servicemen and women have died since 2001. This does not include the number of military personnel who died due to mental and physical wounds suffered over that same period.

Most importantly, these wars and the subsequent tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration plunged the economy into oblivion, forcing corporate bailouts, shuttering countless factory and manufacturing jobs across the country, leaving people like my parents in soul-crushing debt, poverty, or worse. These conflicts destroyed numerous lives, and brought nothing but suffering to the world.

And right now, we stand at the cliff edge of yet another self-destructive force: a fractured opposition to easily the worst man ever to hold the title President of the United States of America.

If you’ve read this site before, I apologize. This is meant to include some talk of sports, not merely my personal dismay at the state of our nation. But now that the Orange Führer has decided to prevent states from conducting coronavirus testing, I once more must implore you the reader to heed my words. Listen carefully to my begging now and hear my pleas later:

Vote for the Democrat in November.

No, really. Just fucking do it.

It really is that simple.

As a matter of principle, I dislike former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. His at-best dubious past of propping up his standing within the civil rights movement, passage of discriminatory bills and policies that hurt minority communities over decades, and his notoriously-botched chairmanship of Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment, a stark moment of patronizing misogyny in American history, make it clear that the Joe Biden of yesteryear is a man I would never willingly give my vote under any circumstance.

But right now, if he truly becomes the Democratic nominee for the general election, I will vote for him with a smile on my face and an overwhelming sense of terror, praying the rest of my countrymen ignore his nonsense ramblings and his naïve confidence that Trump’s departure will bring us back the country we love in blithe ignorance of reality.

It’s not a question of him being the man with the best policies, oh no. In my opinion, Elizabeth Warren still holds that title. Sadly, her candidacy is proof that no matter how competent a woman may be, she will always take backseat to ineffective famous white men thanks to their G-d-given birthright of having penises and not vaginas.

But don’t be fooled. I’m under no illusion of the choices I face.

Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist demonized by Democratic leadership, establishment, strategists, pundits as well as his rivals on the campaign trail, represents in my mind the best remaining policy choice. On a more personal note, he will be the only Jewish candidate for president I’ll have a chance to vote for in my lifetime. I’m that confident that this opportunity will not come again, especially if the fascist running us into the proverbial brick wall wins re-election.

But I cannot, will not resign myself to such predetermination. It’s the reason I’m hunched over my laptop battering my keyboard, hammering this rant out at 2am on a Sunday night.

I refuse to sit idly while the maniacal lunatics set fire to the mattresses within the asylum. I won’t walk away from the polls if the man I don’t want to be the nominee becomes the name on the ballot next to Trump’s. I will not cut off my nose to spite my face like some Twitter trolls threateningly intimate to former Warren supporters and other “fake progressives”, demanding her public allegiance to the man who told her she couldn’t be president.

Scouring the web for news about the election, I ran across a reminder of the pedestal I inherited at the dawn of my life. I had to be Dear White People-ed back into reality with some sober, insightful analysis of the race:

“I know you take your vote for granted because it came included in the birthright package while ours was earned by the blood, sweat and slit throats of our ancestors. Disappointment is a bitter pill to swallow when you’re accustomed to having your larynx coated with privilege and the perspiration from black people’s labor. But we were not put on this earth to clean up the mess that you created. Our purpose is not to jumpstart another round of economic justice for white people that will undoubtedly leave black people behind.”

As pointed out by smarter and better writers around our marketplace of ideas, Bernie’s lack of support from key voting blocs are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If voters simply don’t want him now in the Democratic Primary, will they really want him when the votes actually count?

Yes, primary voting IS IMPORTANT, else why even have the primary to begin with? And true, the race is far from over. But when you consider that the general consensus from those in the know predict a brokered Democratic National Convention, the thought of hashing out the two old men’s qualifications through purity testing and electability scaremongering seems trite and counterproductive.

We, the liberals, moderates, centrists, pragmatists, idealists, realists, leftists, cultists, what have you, of this country want Donald Trump gone.

His inhumane treatment of asylum-seekers, people of color, women, LGBTQ+, members of all marginalized communities, or anyone who dare disagrees with the very stable genius reeks of America’s darkest moments if not outright eclipsing them to levels once thought impossible, improbable to ever happen outside of classic dystopian narratives.

Alas, Big Brother menacingly watches his Twitter feed and Fox News, waiting to vomit out more lies to instill confusion and spread disinformation in the hopes we will all be too dazed to keep our focus on his demise – the one, true, paramount prize.

Folks, it’s now or never. Liberals must cease with the never-ending one-upmanship for the benefit of their ratios and followers. We must remember that it’s this very instant, this fight of our lives, that matters.

The Devil continues to try breaking us down but we must not relent. We cannot fight each other once the convention arrives. We cannot break, we cannot hide, we cannot splinter.

Even if he isn’t your candidate, he’s your last shot at ending the nightmare that we’ve been living since January 20th, 2017.

In the end, that’s the point.

It’s either Biden, Bernie, or bust.

Moderates, liberals, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Hear my cry before we perish in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Join, or die.

Categories
Baseball Blogs Sports

2020 Chicago Cubs Preview: Will They Or Won’t They (Suck)?

HOLY SHIT, it’s NOT POLITICS!
AND, a Marquee that WORKS!

Are the Cubs going to be good this year?

Honestly, I’m asking all six of you, dear readers. I’m perplexed as to where the floor and ceiling sits for this 2020 iteration.

If you’d told me that the Ricketts were gonna cry living-on-the-street poor exactly one year after doing literally the same goddamn thing the previous winter, I’d have naively told you “Nuh-uh, these guys?! They’re a bit cheap lately, but they’re not Tribune cheap AND stupid!”

That statement would have aged so well – like a fine wine in a rotten cask surrounded by cow shit in the middle of an Indiana landfill.

Where was I? Ah, right, does this team suck or not?

Welp, let’s look at the “moves” they made this offseason.

Gone are Pedro Strop, Brandon Kintzler, Steve Cishek, Cole Hamels, five weeks of Derek Holland, two minutes of David Phelps, a literal cup of tea with Tony Barnette, Ben Zobrist’s reanimated corpse, and a wife-beating bag of stale toenail clippings in Addison Russell, whom the Cubs inexplicably paid $3.4 million for a grand total of 82 games, a whopping .237/.308/.391 line, 9 home runs, and 23 RBI. Oh, but at least he had a .995 fielding percentage in 63 games at second base. Useful!

Did I mention that they also let Nick Castellanos, their best trade-deadline pickup since arguably Aramis Ramirez, sign with a division rival despite said pickup dragging out his free agency in the hopes that the team would magically clear enough payroll to re-sign him? Because that happened, too.

How did the Cubs combat these significant losses in the lineup and bullpen, you ask?

They didn’t.

Their most noteworthy additions of the offseason were a cadre of camp invitations for mostly minor league fodder. Included in this group are an over-the-hill and so far uninspiring Jason Kipnis, and Brandon Morrow – the team’s former closer who has battled seemingly every ailment but the coronavirus.

Their official acquisitions this year include free agent signees the likes of formerly-reliable-Brewers-reliever-turned-walking-fucksplosion Jeremy Jeffress, a formerly well-established light-hitting backup outfielder who sat out all of 2019 recovering from a catastrophic knee injury in Steven Souza Jr., a career meh guy consigned to the Canadian dustbin of forgotten baseball in Ryan Tepera, and the 2019 Braves’ worst reliever with a minimum of 25 appearances, Dan Winkler.

While the Yankees snagged Gerrit Cole, the Angels landed Anthony Rendon, and the Dodgers acquired Mookie Betts, the Cubs traded for a guy who hasn’t pitched in the Majors for three years.

The main storyline for the Cubs this offseason concerned their apparently fractured relationship with former MVP Kris Bryant, inspiring numerous think pieces about the Cubs’ wish to shed his contract before attempting to negotiate with his agent, part-time player rep and full-time hijacker of free agency Scott Boras. Also, the team was allegedly looking to ship out Willson Contreras for reasons probably involving some analytical bullshit about pitch framing or G-d knows what.

Add first-time manager, 2016 folk hero, and former Dancing With The Stars’ contestant David Ross to the mix, paired with the team’s shiny brandy-dandy new specially-dedicated and unviewable TV network, and voila!
*chef kisses*

If I had to summarize my thoughts in one GIF, it’d be this;

After a season in which the team failed to make the playoffs for the first time in 5 years due to injuries and inconsistency from veterans and rookies alike, culminating in an insultingly atrocious, fate-sealing 9-game losing streak in the final week of play, you’d like to see a little bit more effort out of the front office than just some failed trade negotiations, confused shrugs, and a bunch of show-me deals to guys with next to no proven track record of being anything useful for a playoff-caliber team.

For all the confidence the Cubs are exuding with their “core” of guys from 2016 (some of whom haven’t performed at acceptable standards since that magical season), the physical makeup of this group elicits more panicked reservation than joyful spring-time optimism.

Call me fairweather, but this team ceased being enjoyable when Joe Maddon began mailing in each season starting in the first half of 2017. In the meantime, we’ve watched the Dodgers own/waste the NL Pennant two years in a row, and our former bench coach outfox the trashcan-banging scoundrels from Houston for DC’s first world title in 95 years and whatever the fuck this was:

“A WHOLE NEW WORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRLD” (Sorry, politics, I know but seriously, da fuq Kurt Suzuki?)

And yet, the team is in great spirits and on a “Yes We Can” kick that admittedly has me feeling somewhat…confident? Maybe confident isn’t the word. Upbeat-ish, fanciful, eager even…?

I can’t at all explain why on Earth I have anything but a semblance of utterly ball-breaking pessimism. Perhaps it’s Rossy’s confidence in his guys. Maybe it’s Yu Darvish looking like the dude we shelled out $126 million for two years ago. I haven’t the faintest idea why I want to see this team after the past three clusterfucks of lost seasons.

If I’m being honest, maybe it’s my love of this stupid old game. Brushing aside the insufferable legion of REAL AMURICANS tersely enforcing their unwritten rules and purist proclivities upon young, mostly non-white players for allegedly “disrespecting the game”, baseball remains my sun, moon, and stars.

I’ve been hooked since the home run derby of 1998. The Steroid Era was a blast (ba-dum tssssss), and I frankly believe McGwire, Clemens, and my all-time favorite Cub Sammy Sosa deserve enshrinement in Cooperstown. But thanks to the standard-bearers of the BBWAA, only the most deserving men of conviction can be graced with a plaque at the museum in a town no-one would otherwise remember.

And though the current out-of-touch corporate attorney running MLB continues treating the sport, its fans, and players like simpletons oblivious to the grander scheme of Making Baseball Great Again or whatever the hell, I remain firmly invested, ready to drudge through the full marathon of the regular season.

Plus, I’m ultra-competitive, obnoxiously clutching to the chip on my shoulder forged through years of futility and pure suckage. I’m watching this team no matter how frustrating and detestable the season.

If the 2020 Cubs have anything going for them, they sit in a division without a clear-cut frontrunner. Sure, the defending-champion Cardinals feature a mostly-returning group of talented young pitching and Paul Goldschmidt at first, but Yadier Molina is another year older, Paul DeJong remains somewhat of an unknown in terms of what to expect from him production-wise, and if not for an utter collapse from the Cubs, they may not have won the division at all. Meanwhile, the Brewers have virtually no starting rotation, not much of a bullpen to write home about, and a team that will heavily rely on the success and/or failure of Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain, the latter of whom played most of 2019 on a bum knee and ankle. And the Pirates are…well, really bad.

The power vacuum atop the NL Central culls the field down to a team of upstarts in the Cincinnati Reds boasting a stacked lineup and interesting group of starters and relievers, and the 2016 World Champion Chicago Cubs.

Looking at both rosters, the Cubs look like the clear favorite. 9 players from that 2016 group remain key contributors, not to mention a Craig Kimbrel who will have a full spring training under his belt, a possibly improved Yu Darvish, and some young arms, like Rowan Wick and Kyle Ryan, whom made a decent impression on former skipper Joe Maddon last year to earn late-game appearances in set-up roles.

However, this is also the same Cubs team that self-destructed down the stretch. Plus, their dud of an offseason leaves them with little to no depth behind key positions in the event of injuries or subpar play.

Long story short, the Cubs could foreseeably win the division. Given recent history though, this team doesn’t look like it has what it takes to survive for 162 games and then push through the potential likes of Washington, Atlanta, or L.A. not to mention the wide-open American League.

As always, the future isn’t written. No evidence suggests that the Cubs face a cataclysmic season, but you won’t see me planning ticker-tape parades down Michigan Avenue anytime soon.

Categories
Politics

America Succeeds When She Dreams

It’s truly bizarre learning about my heritage.

In the time that I have ever known about the roots of my parents’ families, I have found more questions and fewer answers. I know only that not long ago our ancestors, all Eastern European Jews, sailed to America across multiple seas and oceans, on rivers and estuaries, all to attain the mythical American Dream. Chasing everything from milk and honey to streets paved of gold, the promises and rumors were better than the tiny shtetls engulfed by the massive Russian Empire, surrounded by blood-thirsty Cossack armies and waves of invaders from each nation imaginable. Pogroms, virulent, palpable anti-Semitism convinced these people, from young couples and their babies to middle-aged codgers and their entire households, to board cramped ships stacking human beings on top of one another for weeks on end to sail to New York, America. They could be neighbors with their old friends in towns like Philadelphia, America, or perhaps next door in Chicago, America, or even Los Angeles, America.

Finally, a place they could live away from the underlying threat of sudden, inescapable violence. True freedom.

The opportunity to begin anew.

For those left behind, I’m beginning to learn, they were continually denied such pursuits. Dark forces emerged all around the Old World. For my kin, it was the anti-choice regime of the Bolsheviks looking to create a G-dless utopia to rule over all men, a State aiming to deliver unto humanity the elusive paradise Marx concocted decades earlier, albeit with a flawed perception of a world that in reality would never willingly surrender its agency for more than a few generations at best. Combine this new-found allegiance to the State instead of the arrogant and opulent Czarist elite with the existing hatred of Jews, and suddenly places where we had dwelled for hundreds and thousands of years became more foreign than the passing invaders our bubbies and zaydes grew up fearing would be the deliverers of their destruction. Over time, a revolution changed the landscape of Russia. Then, depression changed the landscape of the whole planet. By the time any of the hardened stalwarts who had watched their families flee to the New World could possibly settle back into some form of comfort, such as it was, new legions of radicalized thugs blotted out the sun.

I wish sitting here today in my modest bedroom-turned-office that I could say the past will remain the past. But after the United States took a step back into 1933 yesterday, I can safely declare that Never Again, the catchy and memorable motto of the Holocaust Remembrance Movement, has not so much fallen on deaf ears but on the ears of twisted little men employing evil strategies of old, red meat for their rabid and ravenous fanbase. And just in time for the rise of a possible new epidemic to blame on the poorest of society, to scapegoat and vilify people like my distant relatives no doubt during Adolf Hitler’s rise. When seeking asylum from the Nazis, they would be turned away from self-described nations of the people, placed out of sight in the hope that their suffering would stay out of mind. Just as our wonderful stable genius turns away the tired and poor, so too do other despotic cesspools around the world.

We have sunk so low that we cannot differentiate the horizon from the depths of Hell.

Of course, we then see the same scourge of Jewish vilification that haunted my ancestors rear its ugly, derivative head over the course of the last couple of days. The first, simply a terrible use of an over-the-top metaphor. The other a damning perversion of truth that while not uncommon in today’s world is yet another telling example of the lows to which defenders of this president will go to paint his opponents as a tidal wave rising to wipe out the “real” America they invoke at their Nuremberg re-enactments:

It’s here that I disclose that this pig, this waste of human flesh and blood, this smirking apologist of the single-worst squatter in the White House I have ever seen in all of my life represents my home state of Georgia in the United States Senate.

Unless another challenger wins the primary, David Perdue’s Jewish opponent will face our smug incumbent miscreant and the full brunt of the GOP war machine, just as he did in 2017. Perdue and his lackeys will fear-monger scared white Christians into blaming those seeking refuge from despotic murderers, bandying about threats of destructive socialism chaotically upheaving the way their lives operate, sapping them of their already-vanishing savings, and end their health coverage to appease George Soros and his globalist co-conspirators in service to the New World Order. Who knows? Maybe he’ll compare Jon Ossoff to the regime that systematically killed his ancestors, too.

History tends to have an awful habit of repeating itself. The tyrants are all the same, occasionally changing skin colors, languages, regions, or religions, yet still espousing similar rhetoric. All different variations of hatred, bigotry, treating people holding different faiths or those born into different creeds as dirt beneath their jackbooted feet.

They assure you that this time, their cruelty, their blatant disregard of convention and humanity is all for you, the humble citizen. They’re doing this for all of us, for the good of the country. They’re keeping us safe by beating back incoming hordes of foreigners. They promise to deliver you to the glory days, when your country was great, when all was in order. Things were simpler then. It wasn’t their fault that international forces sought to flip the world upside down.

They have always been the same.

That last sentence is true. No matter what form oppressors take, they parrot all the same lines – jingoist dog whistles perking up the ears of the disenfranchised seeking to assign blame for all their misfortunes and shortcomings.

That hatred has destroyed so many innocent lives, wiped out whole generations, whole towns, whole peoples.

It’s that hatred that forced my ancestors to flee to this place, a country colonized by people running from kings and persecutors, some seeking religious freedom, others only wanting to thrive in a place of endless opportunity. If not for them, I’d never exist. Sure, my parents could have still existed, but possibly still in the old country, living an entirely different life with different passions and potentially different paths. Or, even worse, I could have never been born at all and perished the day the last holdouts in Pavoloch were massacred by the SS.

Besides a sense of overwhelming gratitude, I’ve developed over the course of my life the steadfast belief in one universal truth.

Immigrants create.

They work, they grind, they fight for survival, seeking the approval of their new neighbors. In this country and many others, they have become leaders of industries, captains of armies, innovators in medicine, science, and technology, even prime ministers and presidents.

Unless you are 100% Cherokee, Sioux, Sac and Fox, Apache, Iroquois, descendants of Illini tribes, the Seminole, Cree or Algonquian, you are only here thanks to immigrants.

When you strip people of their G-d-given birthright that has shaped their identities over a lifetime just because you don’t believe they’ve earned it, you not only deserve your fate, you deserve to join the bigots that perished before you.

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