The Monday Lament

by Mike Meyer

The Super Bowl as pathology

What do you do when you try to explain how events are falling apart due the larger reality of falling apart and then things do just what you thought. That is a Monday morning lament.

Having described the strange ritual of the American Super Bowl as a religious ceremony to brutality and America’s own predatory capitalism, not to mention the ultimate sacrament to endless consumerism, it really sucks to have it go exactly as predicted.

Having refused to watch it I’m faced with the media analysis. It was an ugly game and a completely innocuous halftime dedicated to aging music. Maroon Five worked hard, I hear, and played their favorites. The national sporting event has become, itself, a lament.

The peak appears to have been an old clip re-purposed of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger. The layers of irony in that will probably produce a few dozen dissertations from the current and future generations trying to put this in some kind of context. Why did America collapse? No one knows but it was something to do with a hamburger and art.

Trump executive time

A willfully ignorant millionaire with pathological narcissistic problems is also lazy. Who would have ever thought. . .

The same individual goes on one of the national, premier political programs and makes no sense the entire time. Some one must have told him that it was bad to pull all American troops out of Syria although the reasons for that escaped him. Something about very fast airplanes and Iran was in the mix.

Of course the obvious ignorance of Trump is simply reported without comment. And his claim to have made peace with the heads of the US intelligence agencies after their report destroyed everything that Trump has claimed for months was, you guessed it, a lie. The Intelligence Report was published without change. Trump is, apparently per other staff reports, completely unable to read or understand any of his briefings. Since he would have had to read to find that out it was easy. No one ever told him.

Stupidity on the border

And, of course, the massive invasion on the Mexican border is cause for massive fear in parts of Kansas. More troops. That does achieve bad Monday mornings for all the people who work and live on opposite sides of the US and Mexican border. These are the people becoming very unhappy with this bullshit messing up their neighborhoods and workday commutes, not to mention family weekends.

Unfortunately putting a bunch of combat troops in cities with nothing to do but look silly to the people who live there is a recipe for trouble. As has been quietly reported, the border cities and towns are some of the safest with the lowest crime rates in America. See the decline in crime in San Diego as an example.

There is an increase in homicides and trouble in the bad neighborhoods in some of the Mexican areas. The exploitation of Central American refugees piling up on the border and with Trump’s goons trying to push people back across the border in defiance of international refugees laws is a big factor in this. Not ironically at all, much of the trouble in Mexico is caused by massive quantities of guns bought in America to arm people in Mexico.

Most of this trouble is the result of decades of American war mongering and support for repressive groups in Central America.

Venezuelan Oil

Anytime Mike Pence goes somewhere you can count on ugliness and hate of the worst kind. The Venezuelan mess is the product of nearly two decades of American efforts to retake control of Venezuela’s oil. The US is driven by the need for oil.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on the planet. The whole thing comes down to that. The results are continuous and ever growing disasters for the people who happen to set on oil reserves.

Sadly the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela of 1998 led by Chavez installed the most progressive and effective democratic state in the Americas. This, of course, outraged the oligarchs who control America. Proceeds from oil must go to them.

Two decades of action to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and return control of the exploitation of their oil reserves to the neoliberal corporations is now so tangled no one bothers to understand it.

This is the old pattern. Exactly what Trump was placed in power to support without question. The people of Venezuela are seeing their government destroyed by international forces who have managed to make it as ungovernable as possible.

It’s worth taking a look at this from another perspective.

Now we get to see what this week brings.