As surely as the moon wanes and the dead leaves tumble, once every fourth October, it becomes downright chilling to be an American. That's because every four years, like clockwork, Americans prove every flamboyant third world boogeyman we've ever high roaded right by openly flaunting our casual embrace of evil in the highest echelons of imperial power. I speak of course of the autumnal American tradition of choosing the lesser of two evils from this foul nation's two-party oligarchy to run our horror show of a globalist menace. I feel like I talk about this subject a lot, but I never feel like I talk about it enough. That's because words consistently fail to express how uniquely revolting I find this twisted mindset to be. The lesser of two evils. The lesser evil. Nothing exposes the cruel charade of liberal democracy like the fact that what is commonly excepted by the general public to be our most cherished democratic right is commonly excepted by that same general public as a choice to openly consent to nothing less heinous than pure evil.
I don't feel like I'm being hyperbolic here and I don't see the concept of the lesser evil as being merely symbolic. We are literally advocating choosing evil. One has to look no further than any two major party candidates in the last century. Hell, one has to look no further than Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We are taught that it is perfectly morally acceptable to choose between a man who served as an architect of the modern day slave trade that is the post-Clintonian prison industrial complex and a man who imprisons children at the border in glorified concentration camps. These are both clearly evil human beings. Your average American recognizes this fact, and yet it remains perfectly mainstream to not only advocate giving one of these beasts a popular mandate for their crimes but it's downright traditional to bully and humiliate anyone with enough of a conscience to refuse to play along.
What kind of sick fucking message does this send to the world? What kind of sick fucking message does send to our children? Can you imagine using this logic in any other scenario? "Well, all the kids are getting high, so I guess huffing kerosene is morally preferable to shooting bath salts into my junk. I mean, its not like I can just not get high. What kind of a party guest would I be then?" Or maybe, "Well I have to go to prom, it's my moral obligation as a student, and even though Marcus does beat me, at least he's not a confirmed date-rapist like Ben." And I'm the irresponsible radical for voting for Jill Stein? If you still have to wonder how the terrorists justify murdering American civilians, go to your local Baptist church this November and count the American civilians shrugging their shoulders and casually consenting to brutality. Thank god most of this country still has the moral fortitude to stay home and get high.
But it always comes down to the same damn thing. Every time I write one of these posts on America's business-casual relationship with the Faustian bargain of two-party voting, it's always, "...Well, OK, but who is the lesser evil?" And as much as I want to scream at you dearest motherfuckers, at the top my fucking lungs, "IT! DOESN'T! FUCKING! MATTER!" As I punctuate each word with a frying pan against my skull, I can't fucking help myself but to ponder the stupid question. I'm a total geek for hypothetical moral dilemmas. It's why the only thing I love more than the evils of politics is horror movies and true crime literature. I have to know the worst. I have to see the last frame of the snuff film so I can study the light in the killer's eyes. The best way I can answer your stupid fucking question is to explain to you why I am still one of those insufferable leftists who maintains that Hillary would have been worse than Trump. It goes back to my symbiotic fascination with horror, to something I call the Multiple Miggs Defense.
I am a huge fan of Thomas Harris and his Hannibal Lecter series. The only movie to ever do the books justice was Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs. In one of the movies first scenes, young FBI intern Clarice Starling is sent to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to interview the infamous psychologist turned cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, about a recent rash of brutal murders that could be connected to a former patient of his. After making it past the hospital's morally depraved director, Clarice makes her way down a long dungeon-like hallway of prison cells. At the very end of the row she is confronted by two hideous creatures in adjacent cages. The first is a teemingly foul, wild eyed beast, known only as Multiple Miggs, pacing, glaring, and hissing foul obscenities. The second monster, in a neat and tidy, brightly lit cell, is Dr. Hannibal Lecter himself, calm, congenial, and completely still among the madness of his surroundings. After being carefully torn apart emotionally by the good doctor, Clarice leaves him to make her way out of the catacombs only to be horrifically assaulted by the semen hurling Multiple Miggs. The cruel doctor next door is beside himself with disgust for his neighbors barbaric manners. He apologizes to Clarice profusely for the "unspeakably ugly act" and finally consents to look over her notes
I always found the juxtaposition between these two monsters to be quite fascinating. Which one is more depraved? Who is the lesser evil? Who knows. Who cares. But it quickly becomes readily apparent which one is more dangerous when Dr. Lecter manages to convince Miggs overnight to swallow his own tongue, murdering a beast with whispers. In 2016, I couldn't think of a better analogy to Trump and Hillary than Miggs and Hannibal. On the surface, it seemed obvious that Trump was the fouler of the two. A maniacally unhinged, race-baiting, demagogue, aping for the cameras like George Wallace on black beauties as he filled his tiny orange fists with filth and hurled it in our faces. Hillary by comparison appeared perfectly rational and collected, but that's just it, what kind of creature can remain so sedate amongst the semen crusted dungeons of Pennsylvania Avenue? Trump may have been unhinged but Hillary was the clear sociopath, laying wake to entire regions of the globe like North Africa and the Balkans with a permanently perfect camera-ready smile on her mask of sanity. I have no doubt that Hillary would have launched a full-blown ground invasion of Syria and a successful coup in Venezuela by now, had she been elected, and she would have done it all with whispers. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, our Covid ravaged Multiple Miggs in chief has been too busy jacking off his ego to overthrow anything bigger than CHOP.
So what about this year? Is Biden the Hannibal Lecter to Donald's Multiple Miggs? Four years ago I would have said yes without hesitation. Biden has spent decades manipulating the gears of power to starve, bomb, and imprison children for profit. But I've had three grandparents fall beneath the cruel scythe of dementia. I know Alzheimer's when I see it and I suspect much of the rest of this country does too. So while the media does its damnedest to straighten Biden's tie, its become painfully clear that this year's race is a sticky contest of Miggs vs Miggs. But that doesn't mean it's a tie. The very fact that two thirds of our so-called journalists in the corporate media have unabashedly committed themselves to cleaning up Biden's trail of mess has revealed two very terrible truths about 2020. The first is that, unlike Trump, Joe Biden is a lunatic with a well-oiled machine behind him, ready to kill. Expect four gross years of second-term Reagan before Kamala comes in for the kill to play Pappy Bush and blow up the Gulf, a far more frightening prospect for world peace than four more years of the regime who couldn't shoot straight. The second and quite possibly most terrifying truth is that the American Empire has reached a stage of lesser evil so feverish that even it's puppets have become deranged. The machinery of the status quo had a dozen viable choices this year to put up against Trump, but they stubbornly stuck to forcing their silver-haired neoliberal favorite down our throats even after it became obscenely clear that he was completely unhinged.
Brace yourselves, dearest motherfuckers, come Trump or come Biden, the empire has gone full Miggs.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Goodbye Horses by Lazarus Q
* Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden
* American Nightmare by the Misfits
* Falling to Pieces by Faith No More
* It's No Good by Depeche Mode
* Crazy by Patsy Cline
* If I Ever Leave This World Alive by Flogging Molly
* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden
* Holiday Song by the Pixies
* Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers
Although I am in no position to judge Trump as less dangerous than Hillary (there is really no way to judge this until either one has started WWIII), there is one way in which Trump has been a long term boon for liberty. Trump has so tarnished the public image of the presidency, and, by extension, the image of the state itself, that, for the near future at least, perhaps there is some increased hope of a revolutionary spirit to grow. De-sanctifying the state is the first step on the road to revolution, and Trump has helped with this in spades.
ReplyDeleteThat revolutionary spirit, the opportunity in the crisis, is often the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. I'm a strong believer that once in every century or so there exists a fleeting moment between the collapse one empire and the rise of another in which phenomenal change becomes possible. Trump is but a garish sign of that coming moment. We must all be ready to embrace it.
DeleteAs much as I agree that the choice between Trump and Biden is a choice as to die by either tuberculosis or cancer, the problem is not between which executioner to prefer, but between accepting the mindless mayhem of a world society based on profit or attempting some kind of total reform of the dynamics of civilization to care deeply for its members. The latter choice is obviously so far from possibility that it becomes a naive fantasy out of Disney idiocy. A long history of mutual brutality has clearly demonstrated that humans are not that kind of animal.
ReplyDeleteJan, you have got a point. The explanation that history has always been a sequence of brutal events because human nature is brutal at first glance would appear to be the simplest explanation, and therefore the most likely one to be true. There may be more to it than that, however.
DeleteHuman brutality, it would seem to me, is amplified and enhanced by our refusal to explicitly acknowledge that the nature of the state is violence, in particular, a monopoly on defining legal violence. Most people of whatever political stripe, be they left or right, simply accept that this monopoly must exist, and all political and economic power must fit in this framework.
Let us step back a bit, and ask, what if people simply no longer gave their support to this violence, and no longer tried to violently prevent voluntary, mutually beneficial human interaction. It seems to me that whatever level of brutality human nature possessed, whether totally benevolent or totally malevolent or any place in between, abolition of support for monopolizing violence would cut down on the brutality tremendously.
One permanent aspect of human nature is that, to a large extent, humans can voluntarily choose right from wrong, if they can clearly see what those two concepts entail. And what is more wrong than aggressive violence? Self-restraint with regard to the use of violence is the key to eliminating massive degrees of brutality. And recognition that the state is the ultimate violent institution would finally give us a conceptual tool for expressing that self-restraint.
The simple concept that a population can easily tell the difference between right and wrong is most peculiar in current times wherein the hugely controlled information industries of the internet by direct means of the corporations whose main interests are involved in domesticating the audience to sell them all sort of peculiar nonsense and indirectly through corporate control of the central government which is pretty absolute in both major political parties. The results are so total that the nation is now pretty much controlled absolutely in its various persecutions of all sorts of minorities so that much of the population has lost its possible grasp of reality so that those on control can foster all sorts of horrible mayhem throughout the entire planet to the financial benefit of those in control. The concept that the huge number of farm animals that are raised primarily for slaughter are numerous enought to control their fates once they realize how badly they are being used falls into the same state of mind. That is what human civilization has consisted of for many thousands of years and the possibility of the major change necessary to keep life from self obliteration coming about is less than negligible.
DeleteSorry, meant this as reply. Forgive the duplication.
Delete"The simple concept that a population can easily tell the difference between right and wrong"
I never said it was easy. I completely agree that in the current environment of the corporate state, it does not appear likely that a genuinely different narrative will, or even could, take hold. That does not mean, however, that it is impossible.
"The simple concept that a population can easily tell the difference between right and wrong"
ReplyDeleteI never said it was easy. I completely agree that in the current environment of the corporate state, it does not appear likely that a genuinely different narrative will, or even could, take hold. That does not mean, however, that it is impossible.
Hey Nicky. I just popped in to say spot-on with the counterpunch article. Great analogy of miggs versus miggs. I didn't know that there was a liberal who would say trump is preferable over hillary. Kudos for that.
ReplyDeleteYou know what, I have long since grown to believe that your elections are stage managed performances and that it only reason that a corrupt senile far right wing war criminal was put up against der Twitterführer is that the former is the only one who can be depended on to lose.
ReplyDelete