Enlight21

Author: Gladwyn d'Souza | Category: Environment | Date: 01-16-2021

Weren’t we lucky that a virus came along to topple the resurgent confederacy? Going into 2020 he looked like a shoo-in. The economy was humming along; most employees were feeling more secure. The rich were getting richer. The poor were barely eking out a living but everyone agreed that was ok. The middle class was comfortably ensconced between Fox and MSNBC. The stock market didn’t crash despite innumerable trade wars. It did the opposite. Gas prices dropped. We were energy independent. And huge tax cuts for the rich brought even the most anti-Trump industrialist under MAGA’s now big tent. A family criminal syndicate had grown its tentacles beyond New York to constrict the nation.

And like an abscess, he had continued to fester. Children were torn from parents and locked up in cages. The situation was so bad that the media only bit after Melania stole the thunder in a jacket that said "I don’t care." A caravan of ragtag refugees was turned into Genghis Khan galloping in to slay white America. Another rape survivor made it to the courts and dropped from the news. Our purpose in the Middle East, he said, was to take the oil, something only he could do. Dictator love expanded---North Korea implied a Nobel Prize while India promised votes and campaign funds.

Even Bolsonaro, charred in the fumes of the inflamed Amazon, received a warm-covid welcome to the White House. The world's richest man, Putin, remained the nation’s best man. FBI, CIA, and other security forces were eviscerated like opposing mobs. Journalism was hamstrung by billionaires. Epstein was wasted under Barr's watch!  Khoshoggi was hacked and traded for arm deals by Jared Khusner to protect oil. Starved and droned refugees wandered the Middle East from Palestinine to Yemen, carefully white-washed from our screens. A conservative nominee slithered easily and quickly onto the high court.

The national nightmare was unrelenting and never-ending as January moved into February of 2020. One newspaper reported that there wasn’t a candidate as tall as Trump in the democratic field! The party in power was owned by the president. Resource theft remained the deal of the day. Offshore oil drilling, fracking etc. expanded widely, opening up Anwar, Bears Ears, and national monuments of all stars and stripes. Meanwhile,  an alphabet soup of agencies were gutted and captured to enable the theft: EPA, FDA, OSHA, DOI, DOE, USDA, even USPS. Removing barriers to resource theft was the name of the game. Trump looked forward to be added to Mount Rushmore.

Kleptocratic resource regimes (KRR) were a hallmark of third world nations installed by the great powers during the Cold War. KRR is the politics of natural resource theft that results in vast health and life disparities--all without consequences. Returns were the bottom line manifested in massive inequalities while the climate and health were some other generation's problem. Post cold war the powers themselves became KRR. George W. Bush imported the process to the US by elevating Haliburton, Gillead Science, Boeing, GE, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and other corporations into the business of stealing resources from Iraq, without consequences, utilizing formalized techniques for torture, citizen collateral killings, arbitrary detention, and remote drone assassinations. Pardons for war crimes were doled out with the impunity of forethought for future coups. Convicts were appointed to department heads.

As Kim should have said, "who can resist the big bucks of  the great game?" Trump got into the art of the KRR deal by opening up federal lands through regulatory capture. Rex Tillerson, our man in Moscow, took over as Secretary of State. People who had sued the agencies to enable lax enforcement, and increase pollution limits, were now management material. The fox was in charge of the hen house. The wealth flowing to the top turned into an immense torrent devastating workers and communities. Wall Street loved it. Communities turned to opioids and suicide. Wall Street surged. Whole swaths of Trump country were devastated. Wall street paid out billion dollar bonuses. It looked like the kleptocratic rein over resources would continue for a 1000 year.

Then along came a Trump toppling virus. March would prove climactic. Everything took on a new apocalyptic hue: raging California fires and huge hurricanes blew through the new normal, but were now cascading with the crisis of the pandemic. The lack of masks became a major malfactor. Jared SNAN2 (Senior Nepotism Appointee Number 2) was rolling in kickbacks over who would get the limited supply. Trump was trying to buy the rights to the patent on the German vaccine. The possibilities seemed endless… but the body bags kept pilling up. There was a shortage of hospital beds and coffins. Like Vietnam the visuals turned to vinegar. Cemeteries ran out of space, resulting in mass trench burials on the six o’clock news. Forget the pomp;  these events lacked even circumstances. Slowly, the electorate soured on the storied racial superiority of MAGA’s reign.

If it wasn’t for heroic organizing, most recently in Georgia, he may still have won. If there was a bright spot to 2021 it was Atlanta and Stacey Abrams. All else remains gloomy, clouded in the smoke of sedition and coups. Even the future appears murky, menacing, and mysterious. In the age of zoom and drones why would democrats assemble everyone in one place for inauguration? Will there be consequences or will attacks on the rule of law continue? Will the election doubters be seated to provide a platform for the dark web?

Trump won’t slink off into his sunset---this, after all, is the century when KRR has elevated democratic despots around the world. He’s promised a resurgent candidacy in 2024. The impeachment of Biden would be his first goal. In a chaotic farewell he transformed MAGA into maggots scaling the Capitol walls. The apocalyptic feel of the national maelstrom took on a pandemic hue scaling both new viral heights at the hospitals and hyper-partisan delusion over the election results. But he showed the staying power of a confederate statue. All the racism beautifully etched into a cold marble mask, topped with a bright orange streak and a flaming red tie, lay in pieces on the ground.

Still 75 million people were ok with him. KRR is defined by the distortion of language so that lying becomes truth through repetition and social media propagation. Monopolies of the media perpetuated the dark web because fear sells more advertising. Without a freeer more local press, the facts were shrouded in spin and smoke. Through this murkiness emerged a Christmas red ball with the spiky tufts of infection. Its presence announced that the novel could be unheralded, the hero infectious, the plot a ramble and sales a blockbuster. MAGA caught a cold. There on the steps of the Capitol all things were possible. Eugene would lead the mob astray. Biden would have his electoral college votes confirmed. KRR would be tempered, not jailed, waiting for another dictator wanna be, perhaps Ivanka. But at the end of the year a virus had toppled the resurgent confederacy. 

About: Gladwyn d'Souza