Common Ground

Sunday, 13 November 2016

COMMON GROUND

     I live in a demonstrably conservative neighborhood. Two things you will see a lot of in this part of the Southwest Metro Area are Christian churches and military families. Just about every bumper sticker you can read in the local driveways here will most likely mention gun rights, Jesus, a branch of the Armed Forces, or all of the above.

     You might think, then, that there would have been jubilant celebration in my neighborhood after the results of this most recent presidential election. There was not. Homer and I go for daily walks through this neighborhood, and the general vibe I get from the local populace is neither jubilant nor celebratory. In fact, if I had to put a single adjective on it, I would say the mood here is worried.

     Already I can hear my liberal friends sneering, “What do they have to worry about? Their candidate won, right?”. Yes, he did, but here is the thing: most of my neighbors are conservatives, but almost none of them are idiots. They are fully aware that The Don was everyone’s last choice, including their own. I suspect most Americans who voted for Mr. Drumpf have spent nearly every waking hour since then worried sick about whether or not they made a good decision.

     In essence, it seems, liberals fear (and rightly so) the threats built into every last one of Mr. Drumpf’s campaign promises. On the other hand, conservatives are deeply concerned (and rightly so) because King Orange clearly cannot be trusted any further than a man could heave him by his pumpkin-colored comb-over.

     I believe it is time for people to begin looking past their binary differences to find the common ground between them, and The Don has unwittingly provided just such a meeting point. Whether you voted for or against Him; whether you think Him a shithead or a visionary; no matter what end of the Ass-to-Elephant spectrum you fall most closely under, we can all unite in the fact that ABSOLUTELY NONE OF US trusts the next president.

     This fact alone may be enough to guide us. Whatever dilemmas you face in the next eight years, just think What would Drumpf do? and then do the opposite, secure at last that you are most likely doing the Right Thing.

Has George Bailey Left For Good?

Saturday, 12 November 2016

Has George Bailey Left For Good?

     I ran into some troublesome news about a month ago. I was reading the news at the time, so clearly I was asking for trouble, and sure enough it found me. I read that the French multinational banking conglomerate BNP Paribas was among the financial backers of the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

     This was troubling to me because my friendly neighborhood bank, Bank of the West, is a subsidiary of BNP Paribas. Once again, I found myself face-to-face with my own privileged hypocrisy: I fear climate change and sling self-righteous anger at the people and companies still profiting from fossil fuels, yet here I am maintaining my last remaining bank account with just such a company.

     I will admit I have a less than stellar personal track record when it comes to conserving fuel, reducing my carbon footprint, et cetera. Like many of my fellow Americans, I make full use of the electric grid to run a furnace, an AC system, and a hot water heater. My concern for the future of the planet still falls short when I have an immediate need to stop sweating, stop shivering, or take a hot shower. Nor does my desire for a livable environment stop me from cranking up my twenty-seven-year old three-quarter-ton pickup truck when I have errands to run or a job to get to, never mind that my gas mileage tops out at about 10mpg on the highway (I can feel your sanctimonious sneers, Prius drivers). In light of these facts, paying a few bucks in service charges to a subsidiary company of a DAPL stakeholder might seem so minor a sin as could be ignored, yet I found I could not let it go. Almost on impulse, the next time I brought in a paycheck to the bank for processing, I stopped and asked the branch manager about closing my account.

     Now I’m in a real pickle, because I need a checking account with someone in order to keep paying my bills. I have a few weeks’ grace on that, but finding a Socially Responsible local banking option is proving as difficult as finding an honest man in congress. Several times now I have fired up the search engines looking for some financial holding company run by the likes of George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, and I keep on finding Mr. Potter and his Wall Street partners at every turn. I shouldn’t be surprised that finance organizations operate in the dark, like vampires, avoiding exposure to the glaring eye of the internet, but it is frustrating not even being able to tell where to begin looking.

     Banks I have investigated which seem small-time are often owned by New York money mafias or international finance-swindling conglomerates, and even that information is blasted difficult to find. The truth of it is that you will never find truth on any company’s own website, but with banks the obfuscation does not stop there. Third-party assessors focus their findings on the numerical advantages and disadvantages to potential investors and devote zero effort towards finding what else these conglomerations are funding. Left-wing environmentalist sites are delighted to provide the names of DAPL funders, but rarely offer any comprehensive sense of alternatives to those of us who just want a checking account with a friendly, local organization.

     It is not as though I will be moving huge assets around-- my account is already cleared monthly by all the creditors collecting from me these days. I suppose I just felt it was time for a gesture, no matter how small or apparently stupid. Stupid is fine, as long as it doesn’t also mean Pointless. Thus I am committed now-- to go back to Bank of the West or step sideways into another fossil fuel investor’s system would completely defeat the purpose of all the hassle I am putting myself through.

     The search is not defeated, nor is it hopeless. I have heard encouraging things about credit unions, as opposed to more traditional banks, and there are several institutions with “Colorado” in their titles I haven’t looked into yet. In the meantime, increasing the heat-efficiency of the house and researching more fuel-efficient cheap cars are both worthy causes to take on. Maybe I started at an unusual point, but the journey towards responsibility has to start somewhere-- why not here?

     Are you out there, Bailey Building & Loan? You have a new customer.

Gas on the Fire: Anti-Trump Protests Are Not Helping

      We live in a time when the unthinkable is becoming routine. The September 11^th attacks and America’s responding torture program were both inconceivable, until they happened. No one seemed to predict the 2008 market crash or the #OWS movement that followed, and climate change provides us with hundred-year-record-breaking weather every month. Not all of it is terrifying-- a two-term black president, the internet in everyone’s palm, and legal cannabis in Colorado are all things I would have said were impossible twenty years ago.

      Unfortunately, the latest unthinkable thing to happen strikes many of us as deeply sinister: Donald Trump has become the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

It is clear that hardly anyone in the political establishment thought this was possible. Trump’s campaign has broken all the rules. It was supposed to implode after his earliest outrageous statements about immigrants, Muslims, and women, but that did not happen. Later, Trump’s ambivalent reaction to the support of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan was supposed to mark his downfall, but it did not. The Trump campaign has refused to follow the program of flip-flopping and gaffe-dodging. Standing by statements that would have destroyed more traditional candidates has given Trump a veneer of straight-talkin’-from-the-hip invincibility, and led his followers to declare “He tells it like it is”, a statement even less grounded in reality than Trump’s own campaign promises.

To understand why this is, it is important to take a closer look at just how The Donald has managed success in defiance of all apparent logic and expectation. As nice as it would be to believe, Donald Trump is not just an incredibly lucky idiot. He and his campaign managers have shown that they are in fact brilliant cynics.

One truth that both sides ought to grasp is that Americans outside the top 1% (which is rapidly becoming most of them) are completely fed up with the status quo. The 9/11 attacks dealt the first serious blow to American optimism, but true disillusionment did not strike until massively expensive wars and a spectacular market crash destroyed the two things necessary to keep Americans happy: buying power and upward mobility. For the last eight years, stagnant wages and sluggish job growth have forced more and more of us deeper and deeper into debt just trying to cover our expenses, and the looming specters of climate change and international terrorism threaten to destroy everything we have managed not to sell off. Meanwhile, we have watched as our leaders failed to prosecute any of the ’08 corporate criminals, went back on their promises to bring our troops home, and fought tooth-and-nail to keep us from attaining reasonable health coverage.

We are left with huge percentages of working-class and middle-class people who are broke, frustrated, frightened, and angry about consistently being locked out of the system of governance and ignored by the people ostensibly elected to represent them. For all his pomposity and egomania, Trump understands this--far better, I think, than Hillary Clinton does. This is demonstrated by the Clinton campaign’s inability to shake off Bernie Sanders, for Sanders’ momentum is representative of the liberal side of the same exasperation with the establishment. Americans no longer believe they are being given a straight deal or a fair shot, and as a longtime Washington insider, Clinton is going to have to work very hard to convince voters that her presidency would be anything else but business-as-usual.

Trump, on the other hand, has already had most of the hearts-and-minds work done for him by Fox News and the rest of the conservative media empire. Ever since Bush Jr. left office, Fox has been running twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five pumping American households full of the idea that our work is worth less and our future is uncertain because minorities, immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, and socialist slacker welfare recipients have come to take it all away. Of course, the message is not presented so simplistically, they’re clever about it, but the underlying implication of conservative programming is that traditional white Christian America is under siege, beleaguered by soulless, Anti-American forces masquerading as Democrats and women who want abortion access.

I suspect Republican officials allowed and even assisted all this because it seemed to galvanize their voter base and keep the muddled debate away from the money-grubbing cronyism that has become central to our political process. Their mistake was thinking that they could harness the Devil of Our Lowest Instincts without letting him out of the cage. For years now, Republican politicians have been delicately toeing up to the line, trying to tap racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic sentiments for their own ends without actually endorsing the viewpoint. What they didn’t realize is that they were blue-balling a huge amount of middle-Americans, whipping up their prejudicial sentiments into a frenzy without ever offering a release. After a while, that kind of pent-up frustration demands a way to be vented, and along came Donald Trump just in time to crank open the valve. Angry people all across America found themselves thinking, “Finally! A man who ain’t afraid to just come out and say that what we really need is a border wall and a ban on Muslims!”

So I have no sympathy for the Republican leaders currently shitting their pants over the thought of a Trump nomination. As far as I can see, they did it to themselves. After a decade of shouting through their mouthpiece that scientific research is a liberal farce, they shouldn’t be surprised that facts and lies have no effect on Trump one way or another. After spending two administrations obstructing and shutting down the government instead of running it, they shouldn’t be surprised that their constituents no longer trust them. And after eight years of shrilly declaring that the Democrats are out to destroy America, that immigrants are taking over the country, and that the only good Muslims are dead ones, they have absolutely no grounds on which to claim that Trump and his campaign do not represent their party. They made this bed and it is up to them to figure out how to avoid dying in it.

But as the political strategists continue scratching their heads over this anomaly, down here among the rank-and-file of the American people the mood is growing more and more tense every day. Many liberals are bewildered by what they see: a crude, bullying billionaire celebrity dominating debates with grade-school antics and riding waves of popular support for repugnant ideas. After two decades of elections characterized by mudslinging and skullduggery, liberals are well acquainted with feelings of contempt and even occasionally disgust for the Republican side, but Trump and his supporters inspire something liberals are unused to dealing with: visceral fear.

Love for this country is something conservatives seem fond of claiming as solely their own. Throaty evocations of patriotism laden with star-spangled imagery come off as Republican as pickup trucks and tax cuts, and right-wing pundits routinely reduce liberal criticisms to simple America-hating. In my experience, though, most liberals feels just as strong an affection for their homeland as all the rest. The difference is that liberals love their country not for its Godliness, economic dominance, or military might, but because America has been striving since its inception to live up to its promise of acceptance, justice, and opportunity for all who come here, regardless of ethnicity, class status, or gender identity. In short, liberals love America because hate-baiting, fear-mongering, and fascist nationalism ultimately don’t work here. Or at least they weren’t supposed to.

Thus, liberals are frightened of Trump for essentially the same reason as establishment Republicans: He was not supposed to succeed like this. An angry, xenophobic campaign in America is supposed to collapse under the weight of its own nastiness, and it hasn’t. But while politicians are worried about what Trump will do to the political system, everyday liberal Americans are more frightened by the cultural implications of Trump’s success; by what it means about the nature of our fellow citizens. Liberals are left battling amorphous fears that sound much more conservative in tone: Are there fascists amongst us? Could violent racists be living next door? What has happened to our country?

So now liberals are doing what they always do when something scares or angers them: they are protesting. Each and every Trump event is now accompanied by some kind of sign-waving, slogan-shouting attempt at disruption. Just today I saw where several people had chained themselves together to block the main highway leading to a Trump rally in Washington state, holding up traffic for over half an hour. Protests have become so expected that Trump rally security is now preemptively ejecting or denying entrance to just about anyone dark-skinned or Muslim. And though my personal sympathies certainly lie with the protesters, I have to say that these protests are not helping the situation. At all.

The reason for this is very simple: By protesting Trump, you are playing right into his hand. Trump has built a successful campaign by promoting an “Us versus Them” mentality, and each and every protester who shows up confirms the narrative by providing a “Them”. Shouting at Trumpeters that they are Nazis only serves them proof that they are being persecuted for their patriotic ideals. Or-- to the worst factions of Trump’s followers-- it could even be taken as a compliment. Sarah Palin, onstage at a Trump rally, referred to the actions of protesters as “thuggery”, saying “they’re here to deprive you of your right to peaceful assembly”. Of course, Trump’s assemblies are far from peaceful these days, and Sarah Palin is an attention-seeking moron who is likely to say anything if it will make the crowds cheer for her. But cheer they did. They cheered wildly at her marginalization of those who disagree with them.

The fact is, if a bunch of angry people gather at a Trump event because they have all been secretly wishing they could beat up a black guy, the worst thing you can do as a black guy is show up to get beaten. Give a mob an enemy, and they’ll make themselves a movement. I understand that something as disconcerting and vile as Trump’s message often provokes knee-jerk reaction and seems to demand that something be done to counteract it, but pissing people off is how Trump gathered his army, and blocking traffic on the way to the rally is not going to change their minds, it is only going to piss them off more. Protesters trying to douse the fire directly are only shoveling more coal into the engine of the Trump train. To lift a line from Stargate SG-1, “When confronted with an evil too strong to resist, the only way to win is to deny it battle.”

This is not to suggest that we should simply knuckle under and allow ourselves to be steamrollered by Trump and the other cynics. By all means, vote against Trump and encourage as many others as you can to do the same. Despite the fact that, to me, Hillary Clinton does not represent the best way forward for this country, I fully intend to vote for her if it means voting against Trump. But I feel it is worth pointing out that a Trump presidency itself is not nearly so dangerous as the sentiments he thinks he can tap into to score a win. Both the border wall and the Muslim ban are ludicrous proposals, thoroughly economically and logistically infeasible, but by proposing them Trump has brought together hordes of White Persecutionists and allowed them to discover power in ideas that were heretofore unacceptable to express. If Trump fails to get elected (or if he fails to deliver on his promises once elected), there is a dangerous possibility that these mobs will decide to cash in on their newly discovered solidarity and take matters into their own hands.

If that happens, we might see yet another previously unthinkable phenomenon: civil unrest and brutality on a scale Americans are used to seeing on international news reports, not on their own Main Streets. Then will come the time for direct action-- for blocking roadways so that ICE cannot truck away half our labor force, for chaining ourselves together to prevent the torching of neighborhood mosques, and for doing everything in our power to see to it that innocent people do not end up suffering and dying for misplaced frustration and misguided fear. But until then, we must remember that attempting to fight Trump on his ground only makes him stronger.

Greetings and Salutations!

WELCOME!

...a little unsure? Can't say I 

blame you. That's a pretty sketchy looking doorway there. But if good music, interesting people, or strange adventures are among the things you seek, you are going to have to pass through some places you might otherwise avoid. 

I am Orpheo the OddRioter, and you, dear reader, have come upon a doorway into a vast, bizarre, twisted, and sometimes frightening place-- the mind of an underground musician and lunatic philosopher! Though this mind is home to more than its fair share of confusion and bitterness, I have worked many years to scrape together wisdom and joy that might bring enough light to counterbalance the darkness. As I share with you my verses, my thoughts, and my stories, I invite you to delve into my extremes and seek to understand what has led me to them, and what has led me back again.

Here, on these webpages, I am setting my words free to roam across the minds and the lives of you, my readers. Once I have released them from the bonds of my own brain, I can no longer control my words entirely. Each of you who read them take on a fraction of that responsibility. It is a responsibility we should not take lightly: humanity's most terrible weapons and most miraculous medicines are all just dead objects without our words to urge them into use. Especially in this faster-than-lightning Age of The Internet, our words are the most powerful tools at our disposal, and it is up to each of us to decide if this power will go to creation or destruction, unity or division, love or hatred. I know which side I am on.

Do you?