I Tried An AI Poetry Site And The Results Were Automatic

Not long ago, I began reading buzz about a growing profusion of Internet websites where one can participate, instigate, or collaborate with Artificial Intelligence-generated poetry sites. All anyone needs to do is press a few buttons, suggest a subject, indicate what type of poem you want--haiku, sonnet, for free verse--and like Brigadoon appearing before you as if out of a strange mist in the forest, a machine-manufactured poem ponders the mysteries of the universe, and love, beauty, truth, and what it means to be a human being.

I'm not a fool. I know how easy it is for a surrealistically rational psychopath to synthesize such phenomena into conceptual fabrications and facsimiles. I've even seen videos of "dogs that play piano just like Liberace".

One commentator who "investigated" this strange wisecrack of an idea from the world of internet technologists discovered how absolutely amazing it is to ask a computer to compose a short story similar to those by Ernest Hemingway. Mind-blowing. In only seconds, the commentator thrilled, AI had created a short story so professional and lifelike that, in his opinion, it was just as good as anything a human being could write.

Oh boy. I'm thrilled. While the techies are going all groovy over this new development, doesn't it seem that such recourse to machinery is dehumanizing? After all, what is human creativity in the form of poetry or literature all about? Pushing buttons? What about the intrinsic connection between a poem and real life? Do we really need a mechanical mediator for that?  

I network with a large number of American (and foreign) poets on Facebook.  It's a convenience I not only enjoy but one that has helped me to connect with likeminded human beings. We don't talk shop much on Facebook. But we do relate our human experience to other humans. For once, I know I'm not alone. Poetry seems easy to many people, but in many ways it's the living with a poetic mindset that is complicated, demanding, and sometimes even insufferably difficult. I doubt any of us believe that, with a poem, one is speaking for the human race. Rather, we are sharing actual experience, not something concocted by a computer that has been empowered to assimilate all the knowledge available online in order to concoct a mimicry not too dissimilar to what the famed ventriloquist's puppet, Charlie McCarthy, used to do in entertaining children on The Ed Sullivan Show back in the Sixties.

"Do a John Keats, computer!"

"Fido! Shake hands!"

Many poets struggle to become more human. That's not as easy as it might at first seem to those who don't fully understand the craft of putting one's mystifications, one's puzzlement, one's sense of paradox and ambiguity into words that, in many ways, actually defeat the limitations of language. There is far more to the craft of poetry than, as one journalist I encountered once asserted, putting some frilly words on a piece of paper. The life of the writer is in some ways bent toward becoming more vulnerable, more accessible to life in general, more open to experience, hurtful and frightening as it may be, and all in order to use language in an artistic way that, in turn, offers readers insights and frames of reference they've never before encountered.

Yes, readers confused by the above statements ought to know that "defeating the alphabet", so to speak, bending language into unique ways that squeeze free all kinds of sparks and insights, is one of many of poetry's purviews. How on earth can a computer do that?

Anyone reading this want to think about cheap tricks?

Most amazing to me is how the techies marketed this new stunt. It was as if all their STEM-related educational opportunities had mysteriously sucked all their humanity clean out of their skull cavities. A tech trick. Amazing.

Nope. Nary a thought about the outcome of poetry manufactured by machine, by the die-cut process, via mass production. I'm willing to put money on the table against the possibility any of those tech phenoms ever cracked open Walter Benjamin's famous (at least among people who read about art's relationship to culture) essay, Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.

Interesting essay. Benjamin, an early exponent of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School, infamously defamed today as the creators of "cultural Marxism", expressed concern over new forms of easily reproducible art such as photography and cinematography. His concern wasn't in anyway similar to the bouts of the vapors early 19th Century observers suffered over the advent of the locomotive. Rather, he was worried about the tacit elimination of the human concern in creating art in the first place. Further, Benjamin worried that the ability to mass-produce art could turn artistic creation into one more facet of commercialism, consumerism, and industrial productivity.

Benjamin was a pioneer in these critiques. In Benjamin's opinion--one followed by more famous lights like Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm--industrialization strikes at the very heart of the human spirit, taking it away to an extent, turning use value (how we value a work of art as meaningful) into exchange value (how much can we get for this thing?) to the point that subjective experience, the personal and the private, are turned into de facto slaves of commercialism and consumerism.

Granted, Walter Benjamin, a German Marxist who had to flee the supposed "moral crusade" wrought upon the country by the Nazis, found commercialization and commodification suspect. Seeking to reduce his ideas into mere "socialism", however, seeks to deprive his ideas of their simple commonsensical advocacy for some moderation in terms of the reach of industrial expansion.

Fat chance of that, right?

The techies, out to market their new doggie trick, ignored the consequences, the negative neighborhood effects, the unforeseen outcomes of AI-generated poetry and literature. Apparently, such unconsciously automated exponents of unintended dehumanization, doing well in advanced mathematics classes over at the college, or scoring high in electronics and internet technology, didn't quite carry them over to the civilizing effects of the liberal arts. Instead of pondering outcomes, these guys went full-on Madison Avenue. Why?

To sell a gadget.

Only naturally, many poets are miffed by the emergence of Big Brother’s automatic literature machine.  Few of us are even half impressed by the sheer goofiness of how online AI poetry sites can so command the English language as to give Rod McKuen or Rupi Kaur, today's most astounding Poets of The Saccharine, a run for, um, their money.

The Saccharine. These days, that term is translatable as "an ethnic group long oppressed by patriarchal monstrosities who laugh whenever anyone of the embattled ethnicity utters phrases like 'CIS gender' or 'my identity'." Actually, as Benjamin and his fellow Frankfurt School philosophers have it, saccharine is one of the unforeseen outcomes of too much commercialization and the application of art into what should be more exactly defined as "consumer science".

Consumer science. How would a poet address such a concept? The famed Romantic movement of the 19th Century was in part all about that: the individual human's freedom and ability to achieve agency against a growing ghetto of machinery is what Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is all about. Blake warns about the dynamics of industrialization. In fact, a great deal of contemporary art since the turn of the 21st Century is a commentary on consumerism in the arts. Poets are not alone in being a little worried about what the machine has planned for us.

This is not hard.

What is it, seriously, that so enthuses some people to believe that what is known as "the humanities" should be moved aside to make way for artificial intelligence? We could go back to the early 19th Century again to read, say, Jane Austen's subtle opprobrium toward what then was known as the bourgeoisie. Much of her famous "Mansfield Park" pits a traditional family of the British aristocracy against "the new kids in town", a bourgeois couple with almost instant wealth, and thus feigned prestige, wrought by their involvement in business relations. Culturally obtuse, the bourgeois couples create cultural havoc among a longstanding traditional family. Boors. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. All money, nothing but cultural pretense. Or so it seems. How could I really know? I don't know the inner workings of Zuckerberg-as-machine.

If one remembers, George Orwell’s "1984" portrays a brief encounter between the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, and a machine that instantaneously produces “ideologically correct” excuses for literature.  Of course, the machine-heads of the IT sector likely cannot comprehend that Orwell used the novel-creation machine as a metaphor for commercialization's spot on the best seller lists of his day.

Yup. On today's bestseller list, for 80 years in a row, commercialism is number one! Again! Isn't that just amazing? Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.

As a kid, when I first read Orwell's famous passages about the machine manufacturing culture, I found it frightening.  Dystopian, not Utopian.  But that to which Orwell directly alludes--how in a totalitarian system, independent thought is to be repressed, suppressed, and oppressed--is now readily available at Walmart. In totalitarianism, only one way to think about anything is permissible.

Hence, a conveniently totalitarian "alternative" is machine-manufactured. Ideas critical to the regime are tossed away. Only that which supports it is allowed.

In a totalitarian political system, you either go along or you get out. Czelaw Milosz called this problem "either--or". Either you get with the program, or you're THE ENEMY. Totalization is at the root of totalitarianism: totally this--or totally THE ENEMY.

Like, totally, dudes. History in the 20th and 21st Centuries is packed with examples of writers and artists who didn't fit into "the program". The operatics were fixed, rigged, monitored, and curried like the manes of hack horses.

Hacks. As in hackneyed. Overused, unoriginal, and trite. Or hacker: a person who gains unauthorized access to data. Or: one who brutally cuts into something.

Perfect.

I doubt many American poets, famous or not, would find comparing themselves to Solzhenitsyn or Dostoyevsky would play well in Peoria or even maybe Silicon Valley. Regardless, I know how it feels when a hack horse is foisted on the American public as the epitome of literature and poetry. Sure. It looks ridiculous to me. I'm certain it seems absurd to many who "work in the trenches" of actual culture on a daily basis.

Another essay: 1960's Masscult And Midcult, by critic Dwight MacDonald. While this literary and art critic is sometimes seen as a conservative today, his critique of mass culture and the commercialization of the arts is prescient to a degree, a trenchant analysis of what happens to the individual intellectual in today's commercialized consumer culture of commodification. The intellectual? Alienated. Considered superfluous. A tacitly excluded "enemy of the masses" as brought to you by your sponsors.

Interestingly, Saul Bellow's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Herzog, is all about this problem. No matter. Our official oracles have been advised to ignore the details while going all chirpy about Chat GPS and other AI literature computer machines.

I just went to my search engine's autocorrect when "Herzog" was flagged. The machine hath decreed I replace the word with "Scherzo".

In Orwell's example of a dystopian machine that mass produces crap literature that is "ideologically correct" in its support of the totalitarian order called Big Brother, the idea of "the machine" inveighs against a tendency of totalitarian regimes: Why bother with "alternative literature" if one can mass produce reading material and birdcage liners in an artificial way: formulae, conventional plot twists, or, in a more familiar way of putting it, click-bait?

A machine: Orwell is connoting a political regime. But how does such a warning fit into today's consumer mass culture? That shouldn't be too difficult to see. After all, the one use of coercive force so ubiquitous in 21st Century America is economic force. We may see libertarians and "conservatives" all upset about government mandates against masking during an epidemic because a mandate is "coercive", but the real coercion in the United States today issues from the commercial sector. It's the capitalism stupid. You either go along--or what? You don't survive. You must buy to stay alive. You must work to enrich people who don't even know you exist in order to gain the means of survival. This is a sort of "default position" of any form of economic activity. The natural law of survival has human life against the wall. And indeed, commercializers have capitalized on what no one can avoid.

This is also true of socialism. In the futile and pathetic stabs at state socialism we've seen in the 20th Century, the coercion is much more obvious. In the US, we all take it for granted. Commenting about that form of economic coercion is verboten. Or so it seems. Economic determinism is readily available on the shelves at "the marketplace of ideas" down by the corner drug store and medicine show. Libertarianism, by and large, suggests that property and capital are sacrosanct, and that all of life is generated by economic choices based on self-interest.

What does this mean in a practical sense? It means that an awful lot of propaganda attacking socialism is basically hypocritical guff. Freedom cannot be economized. The individual is not the basis of the political. When the political is a matter of relation, attacks on what some libertarian-minded meatheads call "collectivism", what is really under assault is the political. Regardless, most libertarians don't seem to possess the mental acuity to comprehend that the attacks they espouse result in an authoritarian mindset that leads us right back to totalitarianism.

Contrary to what the horse manure spreaders of "Official America" or "America 90210" have it, Orwell explicitly did not target Stalinism alone.  Orwell in his essays is quite clear that he opposes any form of totalitarianism–right-wing, left-wing, and even capitalistic forms of totalitarianism.  Why would anyone associate totalitarian outcomes with freedom? Why would anyone want to concoct something called "Public Choice Theory" to subject the political into economic choices made by individuals choosing via preferences, not "right"?

Preference is not "rightness". And that has a great deal to do with human-created poetry and its antagonist, machine-generated weirdness.

Orwell's 1984; examples of in 21st Century America: One book about the sight-unseen CIA’s cultural initiative to combat Soviet overtures on culture–”Who Paid The Piper?  The CIA And The Cultural Cold War”, By Frances Stonor Saunders, suggests Orwell himself would have been beside himself had he lived to see what happened when his novel was transformed into a movie fingering communism.  Not that he thought communism was a good thing.  But because he saw the danger of totalitarian thinking almost everywhere in the contemporary world.  

Orwell in Politics And The English Language reiterates this point about totalitarianism and what he calls “thought blocking” which is endemic in one value in mass media encapsulated in three words or less:  “Keep It Short”.  Sometimes, when I read opinions, even those by well-regarded newspaper columnists, what I see could be made into a great half-hour TV game show.  “Who Can Solve All The World’s Problems in 800 Words Or Less?” 

This is a game show all right. The official "oracles" have been paid to replace the ones who occur naturally in the natural world--even if some of these paid shills venerate "natural law" and "natural rights" in the process of defending their beloved money. Who’s the most macho in condensing complicated ideas into exceptionally small spaces?  

Ah yes. The famous sound byte.  I tell some people that only sound byte minds appreciate sound bytes as the overruling value of all ideas everywhere.  To be serious, sometimes sound bytes can be awfully misleading.  

One poet friend of mine, a true queen of the Portland, Oregon, underground, writes about “meat robots” and “human malware”.  Like me, she’s all about being human in an increasingly dehumanizing world.  We are allowed to express ourselves as individuals, right?  Why is our audience limited if we don't market ourselves like Tony Robbins on late night cable TV?

Tony's a hipster. You're a hipster. Everyone's a hipster. Those who suggest dissent against this mandate shall be tossed to the dust-devil winds surrounding Davenport, Iowa.

Mark Greif’s essay “What Was The Hipster” reminded me of the famed Onion lampoon headline, “Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other Hipster”.  

It's hip to let a computer call you an artist because you know how to push some buttons.

Why then did I decide to visit an AI poetry site to go through the “create o poem” routine? I was only being the normal American after all. Why should I bend over backwards to express some of my most puzzling mystifications? Why not “get the guy to do it”? 

Indeed. The United States is definitely under the iron heel of the Why Not Get The Guy To Do It? tyranny. Need to get something done? Call The Guy. Want a nice blue glass pitcher for your Rooms To Go kitchen table? Call The Guy. Our dependence on The Guy has turned our minds into twisted wrecks that are supposed to resemble minds. We hear a lot about "government dependence" in the rightist media. . . but what about "capitalist dependence"? Isn't that where a big problem really inhabits the very soul of the individual? Economic force is coercive force. It's not merely the government telling us what to do. Buy this, and you'll be happy.

No one sane has ever suggested such a thing.

AI programs: junior high school students are getting them to write their school essays.  The Guy is a machine. This even occurs at the college level.  Then all the big experts complain about “the decline of literacy”.  

Groovy, right AI boosters?  

So. How did my foray into the zesty world of AI poetry work out for me, the world, and posterity? To be perfectly honest, I’d like to attest, right off the bat, that I have a somewhat thorough grounding in Surrealism, also known as “dream logic”, the mixture of dream and actual consciousness.  Readers need to know this. One lumpy and pat commentator at The Washington Post suggested the way to resist AI poetry is to "think like a poet". Which he didn't. Even though he professed to be one. I checked his work as a poet, and nope, not too slick, Rick.

What does "think like a poet" even mean?

I think I've got it! "I am thinking in circles but speaking in squares!" Whoa. I'm thinking like a poet. Thus, thinking like a poet when I hit an AI poetry generator on the Internet–how else do you visit a site for AI poetry if you don’t “hit it”?--I typed this into the tiny little box:

“Vladimir Putin Dressed As Bozo While Firing Triangular Kitten Arrows Poisoned With Siberian Wolf Baby Disease While Shouting Through A Reticulated Duck Bugle And Blowing Donut Bubbles.”

I asked for a sonnet.  What I received for all my imagination was a poem of "The Dittyist School" of poetry that no one wants to read--ever--that sort of rhymed.  Sonnets contain 14 lines.  This one had four quatrains for a total of 16 lines. Already, the machine was failing me.

UBER FAIL UBER FAIL UBER FAIL. HIPSTER MEAT ROBOT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT!!!  

Once relieved after adding another notch to the bedpost of my oeuvre, I posted my results on Facebook. Where else? Acutely aware that some Facebook algorithm (the machine again, this time making complex value judgements to save Zuck few bucks) might find my post too noxious to be allowable on the social media platform.  

Noxious to an algorithm?  Does this mean I’m one of those conservative voices Facebook is out to erase?  

Nope. The machine and I were too groovy in the space of five minutes to be incorporated into Libertarian Pinheads International. More spontaneous poetry: The mall is waiting for us all.   

We already live in a world where primary, secondary and even college students are allowed to use calculators in order to complete equations.  I would have died for that opportunity when I was growing up.  But I was so wrong in my striving to be lazy as a cat on a sun-bleached porch. Once I thought about the chore of knowing my multiplication tables and using an actual pencil to work out quadratic equations and matrices, I came to the realization that, oftentimes, math is about teaching the mind to analyze, to synthesize and to actually T-H-I-N-K.  Button pushing is not thinking.  

“What did you get your master’s degree in?”

“Button pushing.  I was on the Dean’s List!” 

“Going to work at Fox News?”

Then everyone in mass media decries the decline of mathematics scores in our schools.  Someone is not only not getting the memo, someone doesn’t even know how to write well enough to get through a memo.  Who would ever have imagined that mathematics as taught in primary and secondary schools involves applying skill sets involved in solving math problems in order to strengthen something far more important: The ability to think critically and to analyze, synthesize and address complexities.

Who is the computer salesman determined to prompt me into weaseling out of writing a poem?  Using my surrealistic subject suggestions, let’s try AI: 

Here is “my haiku”: 

Tiny missiles fly

No match for anti-ballistic

Salad shooters win again

Have a nice day, you purveyors of computer love. . .

I Am A Reactionary And I Have Come To Tell You What To Do

In today's on-the-go world, a perplexing question pervades almost every single move we dare to make: What am I? Left? Or right? And an addendum to these pertinent idiocies is: Should I care?

Probably not. To put it in the mouth of, say, a Starbucks barista or a MacDonald's fry cook: I'm down with not caring about or wanting to be packaged like that. When far less than half of all American qualified to voter in elections, I'm almost certain that many Americans don't care about left or right--or even know what either actually means.

For the sake of convenience, lazy journalists who think a short-cut buzzword or catchphrase is going to tidy up complex political phenomena are actually mucking up our relationships to the world around us, especially if we're not careful to examine what such pigeonholes actually mean.

What actually constitutes left or right in a political sense? Or what does "centrist" or "moderate" mean? There are actual and specific definitions for words for these, but from what I've come upon, it certainly seems to me that what we've been told about what or who we are isn't remotely accurate. In fact, sometimes the stereotypes are designed to be misleading.

That's right: a sort of pigeonholing designed to round us all up into two antagonistic factions. Should we holler out a huzzah for that? Hear, hear! We're all in on that one, aren't we.

Stereotypes, according to Walter Lippmann, one of America's greatest thinkers in regard to mass media, are inevitable. Words are representations of reality, not reality itself. Language is a displacement that binds reality in the objective world and even changes the meaning of what things are in the subjective interpretations and value judgments of those who rely on indirect information to politically inform them.

We all resort to language. And this is why the misuse of language is dangerous in a political sense.

The personal and private lives of citizens involve vast expanses of busy busy busy, after we exhaust ourselves grinding the mill at our jobs. In one way of looking at work, we could say that we have been forced to do something to keep us busy and, in some minds at least, thus out of the way. How does one exercise the political omnicompetence essential to a healthy democracy if one is too tired to think at the end of the working day?

When many of us work at job positions we don't really like, or appreciate, or would choose if there were options available to us in the so-called "marketplace of employment opportunities", coming home to think quietly and to ponder extensively the meaningfulness of our lives--which is not confined to ideologies or partisan allegiances--of course seems too much to ask. The most useful part of one's day is already taken. We do have to survive. Thus work is also a necessity. In industrial society, work simply ain't what it used to be. Beyond that, life in the 21st Century is a miasma of all kinds of confusing, convoluted mumbo-jumbo to many people who are honorable, honest and normal in almost all aspects of their lives. How to understand any of the technicalities fostered by the US Supreme Court? How to make sense of how a president extorted a foreign country's leadership in order to "get dirt" on his political opponent? What is the essential difference between public interests and private ones?

It's a mess out there.

But our thoughts, most pertinently, are also deliberately being blocked by stereotypes, and blocked all the time. And as for the time, there is only so much of that. Hence, in order to fully encapsulate current events into conveniently "consumed" broadcasts, journalists are forced to take short-cuts--on top of the necessary recourse to representations that displace the objective world by reinterpreting it. As for the deliberate thought blocking, think of the number of times you hear things like "Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made". We only see what the mass media chooses for us to see. Who makes those choices for us? Who puts limits on what information gets in and what does not? Who is riddled by advertisers who insist that some choices to their benefit be held in higher esteem than even verifiable facts?

There are lots of reasons to distrust mass media. Especially in a current paradigm where the political has been "economized", that is, reinterpreted in terms of ideals like "market forces", "supply and demand", "government interference", and "the marketplace of ideas". That economization is everywhere, and it's quite reductive in nature. The political should, as an ideal, supersede mere economic ideas. But, since the mass media is privately owned, it should be clear to everyone that private ownership can have a weak spot--but only when economic interests take an antagonistic stance against the government does this really malign the interests of all of us.

The preponderance of mass media and news reporting in the US has likely never been higher, and worse, the troubling emergence of political terminology and legalese has siloed away much of the country's national and political discourse, sealing it away into an elitist's paradise where only expertise can thrive. Or so it seems. Many sociologists and linguists have decried the overreliance on terminology in today's excessively technocratic melange. The medical field "can't talk to" the legal field, which can't communicate with the financial or banking fields, and the cultural field can't seem to be allowed to talk to anyone at all without the consent of the moneymen.

Thus, one cannot really find the American mass media as entirely blameworthy. News reporters have jobs to do: disseminate facts to the citizenry. But if the facts are either restricted and ignored, or are "stacked" in such a way as to twist how we understand their upshots, what then? Worse, what happens when one news outlet supplies one set of facts in reporting about an issue or a controversy, while another supplies facts that are entirely different?

Suddenly, news consumers are left with a sense of ambiguity: which facts are the real facts? That leaves a hole in mass media's responsibility to inform the public that is so big it's not surprising that propaganda mills like Fox News have weaseled through it in order to take advantage of ambiguity in the minds of people who have to rely on indirect sources of information.

There's another strange dynamic that distorts the citizen's ability to get a more comprehensive picture of faraway events that can be transmitted to him or her only indirectly: The difference between print and the medium known as television.

Reading is active, but TV viewing is passive. When one reads a news story, one can read it over and again, read it slowly, think about what one has read, and then question all sorts of authority. TV is like a drive-by: It hits and runs. No time to think about what you've just seen on the tube. It's here one second, gone the next. Add to that how television affects a passive part of the brain that is more prone to react than rationally respond to stimuli, and yes, you've got a problem on your hands.

The next barrier to political unity where mass media tends to fail is the sheer ubiquitousness of it. The news is everywhere it seems. More people not only have access to news content than ever before, but more people also have a sudden onslaught of information with which to content they are not trained to fully comprehend. And, since all news on TV is bound to the "if it bleeds, it leads" or "click-bait" tactics of gaining viewership, one gets an awfully skewed understanding of the world beyond one's immediate locality: it's all bad, scary, dangerous, crime-ridden out there.

No it isn't.

But you know how it goes: If people are scared, they react to the danger. Reaction. That's what television is based upon. We are conditioned to react, not rationally respond. And our politicians? They're always ginning for a hit-and-run reaction. No wonder we have such a problem with reactionaryism in the United States, 2023.

Mass media's role also has become both bloated and overblown. Add to this the proliferation of Internet communications, and we are seeing the makings of a very real reactionary revolution in process even as I write.

Who reacts against terminology and stereotypes? Who is then conditioned to throttle that reactionaryism right at the federal government? What is it at the very foundation of a process that generates widespread public disenchantment, alienation, nihilism and worse? Who gleans a great advantage in shifting the blame for what economic interests to do people in the name of self-interest onto the government? How does self interest and its advantages undermine the lives of countless people? What happens when one group of self-interested people has so much economic coercive force that it can easily overwhelm not only the individual citizen but even organized groups of people? And how is it that economic force, powerful as it is in the US, is without any doubt at all wholly politically unaccountable. Who can dissent against a billionaire pouring $58 billion into a political season's campaign processes? Yes, we can complain, but where is our ability to make the billionaire stop trying to put his or her thumb on the political scales?

Nobody is stopping them. In fact, in 2010's Supreme Court decision in favor of the radical right group Citizens United, it looks like one faction has literally captured the High Court and is using it to dominate the average citizen even more than ever before.

Little Kings. Not just a brand of malt liquor.

Back to where I began this essay, I've long been critical of the all-too-convenient pairing of the two stereotypes known as right and left, mainly because they both have become so overused as to have been rendered meaningless. Most of us continually see, hear, read about and even use those two stereotypes in our daily attempts to comprehend the complex political and economic realities usually glossed over by mass media colliding with time and space limitations. But what happens when these stereotypes are used to the advantage of those economic coercive forces that are altogether not politically accountable at all?

Think about this: supremely powerful and wealthy individuals and groups have been empowered by the Citizens United decision to flood the American political process with money to the point that they now literally control public discourse at the governmental level, not to mention the strange phenomenon of libertarians buying up mass media companies and repurposing them into "free" market, no-holds-barred advocacy designed to obliterate the administrative, regulatory and welfare states. And no, they are not politically accountable at all. This in turn creates a vast void that stands between the reality such self-interested wealth and well-funded groups seem to desire to prevail--and the common sense and local realities of people who aren't included in that little game.

And yes. It's a game. Like a casino. All about winning and losing, the two main fascinations of capitalist activity. Who wins? Who loses?

Fascinating, right?

Left versus right is one of those cheap dichotomies that stands in, as I have mentioned, for more comprehensive explanations--particularly in a world where events are interpreted and even reinterpreted by the mass media. Apparently, it's really easy to declare a candidate, a policy, an ideology, or an activity as either politically left or right. Or economically left or right. Almost everything is now being divided along these oddly phantasmagorical lines in the air.

So convenient. I think my vacuum cleaner is a card-carrying leftist. The poodle next door is a staunch conservative or rightist--depending on the time of day.

I cite economics as a recent battlefield where left versus right has divided advocates of what could generally be summarized as Keynesianism (Left) and what is sometimes referred to as the Austrian School as populated by Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan Jr. (Right). The Austrians, beloved by libertarianism, continually scapegoats Keynesianism as "socialist"--while the Keynesians point to how capitalism has thrived under their ideas. Oh well. Everything is up for a political redefinition. Yet who's in the game, and who's not in the game?

The rightists complain about "Washington". Of course they do. The rightists aren't really about what is right in a political sense. They're only in it for the money. Hence, "economizing" the political is a tactic that works in their favor. Only "the market" is sacrosanct. Only "the market" is rational. Only "the market" provides a true expression of what it means to be an American. Only "the market" is at the foundation of civilization.

Exhausted yet? This dunderheaded retread of an idea is called "propertarianism": Property and capitalism are to be "top dog" and democracy gets to sniff its butt.

This incorporation of "leftism" or "rightism" into economic ideology is puzzling to see, but possibly not really all that puzzling at all, how the overuse of the two stereotypes has resulted in warring factions. If I'm part of a special interest pressure group founded by libertarian activists who don't like the government getting in between them and a stack of greenbacks, it's to my advantage to find a way to keep people divided. The twin termini, in other words, are silent urgings for people to take sides on one of two extremes. In a worldview defined by shortcuts, there can be no middle ground with those limitations overlaid on thought, on how we comprehend the nature of the political, or the social, or even the economic forces banging on the door right now like four year olds tagging our pants legs at the 7-11 in expectation of candy being delivered immediately.

If everyone is at everyone else's throats, how can everyone unite against these selfish special interests? That's an old rabbit trick.

Even though there is middle ground, middle ground held by over 50 percent of adults in the US who refuse to even bother voting, those people are not included in, say, a presidential majority during the 2016 political campaign. We heard Trump won three million fewer votes than Clinton in that race, but in reality, his MAGA faction composed less than 21 percent of qualified adult voters. That is a tiny minority. And look at the damage that minority did.

Some, of course, sense the madness of pushing all of us into extreme positions for the sake of mass media convenience, and the convenience of special interests that seek to divide us into rancorous adversaries, arguing for "centrism" or "moderate" positions. But even those points along a gradient have often been co-opted by those who mask their allegiances to capitalism as wrought against democracy in order to convey that they are "the adults in the room." They aren't. It's a masquerade party. "Centrism" and "moderate" typically vie for the "we're the reasonable ones". Actually, "we're the capitalist advocates" is more like it. Most of the time. After all, some of the less awake tend not to catch the drift.

Anyway, welcome to American politics, 2023. The mass media version. As seen on TV. Twenty-four/seven. Seven days a week. With specials on Sundays.

I've read how the ancient Romans employed such divide-and-conquer tactics in order to keep subject populations in various states of servility. It's a familiar tactic indeed. In a theological interpretation, one is either good or evil. One is "the good guys", the other is "the enemy". If we think about it, divide and conquer tactics like those kept Europe in submission for 1,300 years. And now divide-and-conquer is back--and for the familiar reasons. After all, another longstanding political and governing axiom among the wealthy and powerful is that the wealthy and powerful amount to far fewer individuals than does the portion of a kingdom, empire, state or nation that isn't either. Worse for such elites, those who aren't are usually physically much stronger than they are. Hence, the wealthy have long been viewed as afraid of "the mob" or "the masses" or "the undeserving poor". Beyond that, it's also known that if the poor are reduced to hand-to-mouth survival, those people are going to be inculcated into a deeply conservative outlook: Short term goals force them to abandon the long term hopes and dreams we tend to dub The American Dream.

Wow. A "conservatism" manufacturing tactic right before our eyes. Minimum wage, single-parent families are "consumed" by surviving and hence can't see the bigger picture. But how do the elites deal with this serious problem? They advocate for the wholesale elimination of the minimum wage. Worse, they go into contortions when, say, Seattle raises the minimum wage to constitute a living wage that is appropriate for the demands of rent and other expenses that face the city's citizens. Recently, the Governor of California, raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20/hr--thus turning the bald heads of moneyed elitists into ready-made thermonuclear explosions.

It's laughable that Republicans as of 2023 are convinced they are now "the workers party" because they've found a contemptuous means of conditioning the poor with a politics of grievance. Many in the US working classes are financially desperate. It's a contemptuous lie that the GOP is the one party that will go to bat for them. Where's the record on that? Haven't they dropped a $1.7 trillion tax cut on their friends?

In the world of the average income citizen in the US, the big Trump tax cut got them around $150 extra dollars.

The GOP doesn't go to bat for the working classes. It's hogtied to commercial interests. In that light, the Democrats don't either. The left versus right scheme is more like a Punch And Judy Show than anything resembling democracy. And behind the scenes is the politically unaccountable horde of reactionary plutocrats who pull all kinds of strings from behind the little stage.

Ah yes, The Return of the Wizard of Oz.

Instead of left versus right, it would be quite interesting to see how the American political miasma would transform were the mass media to begin reporting that the big conflict between factions isn't right versus left but rather capitalism versus democracy. There's no reason to suggest that this pairing of antagonisms, which ideally should be more of a friendly rivalry than war zone, has anything to do with how capitalism versus democracy is an instrumentalization or application of a simple antagonism to promote socialism. Nothing wrong with democracy. No one in the conventional political scene is really trying to give the state ownership of the means of production. But again, there are many very powerful economic interests that are determined to "economize" the political into an instrument of their self interested economic force,coercion, and projection of power.

Another ominous tool growing in familiarity here in the US is ideology. In mass media, ideology is often inaccurately associated with "political approach". But ideology is actually apolitical. If politics means that individual citizens participate in the activities of the state through compromise and agreement, ideology, which insists on a narrow program of policies, the departure of which is considered verboten by ideologues, citizen interplay is hijacked because, once again, thought is both blocked and packaged into narrow, often extreme, avenues, If one departs from the ideology, one is cast out as "ideologically incorrect" in a mockery of discourse where compromise is also prohibited.

No compromise for you. That's what ideologues say. In other words, a cardinal and foundational principle of political discourse is frowned upon by those "irritably grasping" for "something solid" in terms of a reliable tool to whack their way into some more money.

I use the term ideological correctness because it is much more precise than the boilerplate "political correctness". Many are familiar with the buzzword--political correctness--but unaware that the right-wing overuse of the stereotype originated as a dig at Democrats, Liberals and Progressives.

According to the ideologues along the fringe that likes to label itself "conservative", Democrats are lampooned as "socialists" who practiced what the SDS called "political correctness" tactics modeled after Maoists. Conducting criticism/self-criticism sessions, the SDS, like Maoists, sought to keep all Party or group members in tow with the ideology, not the political.

I suppose the propaganda masterminds of that rightist nut-job alignment believed such a slur is funny. What's left unspoken is that the Democrats, according to the very same propagandists, demonstrate "ideological incorrectness", albeit a different ideology.

Lovely. A war of war machine ideologies. Is that freedom or what?

Even if Liberalism is more pragmatic and practical in seeking viable outcomes that help the largest number or people, the supposed "conservatives" project their own ideological fealty onto something that isn't. And thus Czelaw Miloscz's formula that defines totalitarianism kicks in:

Either/or.

Either you are "ideologically correct"--or you are The Enemy. So say the propagandists of the fraudulently labeled "conservative" lunatic fringes. It's almost interesting how these propagandists follow a cardinal rule of propaganda: accuse "The Enemy" of manifesting what you and those who are your overseers are doing. Another routine tactic of propagandists is to corral all political activity into oppositional silos.

But what is all of this siloing and either--or positioning really doing? It's a form of reactionaryism. Say, the Democrats or Liberals, or Progressives act upon a policy or a law. The opponents can either debate on the up and up--or they can react against it. If one is "ideologically correct", one is likely enslaved by ideology, and compromise and realistic debate is rendered impossible or much less likely than they could be were one not an ideology slave.

Ideology is fixed, rigid, frozen, static, intractable, and thus not reflective of the continually changing process of simply existing in the real world. If one is bound to ideology, one cannot dissent. No, one either goes along or becomes The Enemy.

Totalitarian mindsets are all over the United States in 2023. What's most troubling about such developments is that propagandists are hardbitten to force citizens into reacting. I think some of this has to do with both capitalism and marketing. If one watches television, one sees if one looks that most television content is little more than a vehicle for advertising. A TV drama, for example, besets viewers with garish violence, suspense, and demonstrations of pain and blood. This heightens a viewer's normal and natural hunting instincts. Any human being is going to be alerted into a kind of hyper-vigilance at the mere sight of blood, real or not. This vigilance triggers an instinct that must be satisfied, and this satisfaction is proffered by subsequent advertisements. The content amplifies adrenaline and cortisone, and the advertising floods the system with "rescue" in the form of dopamine.

Americans have been conditioned into becoming reactionaries. I don't know if this is a purposeful act of conditioning, but it is nevertheless occurring, and our political infighting reflects the reactionary mindset quite clearly.

Reactionaryism can be simply rendered by a few examples:

One involves a faction of very wealthy capitalists who have discovered an ideological (and absolute) dislike and opposition to the federal and state government's ability to regulate their commercial behavior, activities, and competitions. This group has used a great deal of economic force to engender a large-scale backlash against the government. Whether it's Charles Koch trying to exact some revenge scenario because a corrupt judge once gave his father a hard time in a long bid to ferret out whether or not he had committed patent infringement, or whether it involves people like Peter Thiel, or the Mercer and Sciafe families is of no consequence. What is of consequence is the economic coercion being brought to bear to literally eliminate the government from the activities, etc, of the commercial sector in the US.

Oddly, many of those wealthy actors (reactors) are using force to coerce--while at the same time trumpeting libertarian values which proscribe the use of force to coerce others. Grover Norquist, an extraordinarily reactionary extremist, through his Club For Growth, wants to defund the government because he doesn't like taxation. Why not? Because, he'll claim, if he refuses the mandate (coercion), the government will apply police force against him. The monopoly of the legal use of violent force is a scary thing for people who have conveniently embraced libertarianism. When I was a kid, I accused my mother of "oppression" after she "mandated" I empty the trash or be punished. Oppression. Coercion. Anyone anywhere at any time can make those accusations. And, with the help of a large propaganda system, one can make the accusations, false or fraudulent, stick.

Coercion, oppression. Both value judgments are subjective. As actual phenomena they can be very real.

Yes, it's terminally weird that at the same time they are declaring government use of coercion and oppression against them, these libertarian fools claim that all value judgments are subjective (this is true), and hence anyone who seeks to judge (or balance their behavior to adhere to various standards, principles, guidelines or guardrails) is "biased", "self-interested", and "socialistic".

Is it a matter of right and wrong instead? Much of the ideas underpinning libertarianism involve assuming that political choice is a matter of preference. We prefer one product over another. But that's fallacious and restrictive. The political is a matter of what is right versus what is wrong. Preference involves economic choices.

Imagine it: democracy is actually a function of economic interests. Whatever could go wrong with that one? I'm actually not laughing.

If I choose to make a decision that will affect not only my own well being but the well being of others around me, this is not me choosing a preference between options so much as deciding on what outcome is the right one. And oftentimes that's a very hard call. Political action is a matter of relations between people, not absolute self interest in competition with the absolute self interest of others.

Crazy, eh? But lots and lots of money is pouring into think tanks, interest organizations, push groups, and advocacy to make that creepy mindset seem real. It doesn't matter if Charles Koch's father, Fred Koch, eagerly built oil refineries for both Stalin and Hitler; he's an anti-socialist. Right? Really? For sure? How so?

The big word in Charles Koch-style libertarianism is "liberty". How can anyone be even remotely interested in "liberty" when what is to be liberated is an economic preference?

Liberty--the absolute preference.

We could turn to Friedrich Hayek, one of the Austrian School economic theorists who suggested that any governmental "central planning" of economic matters amounts to "socialism". Indeed, that one's quite common among the punditocracy. Even though it doesn't hold water at all. Hayek believes that if a business or a business sector is under regulatory authority, its liberty has been diminished. Apparently, protecting the public (Hayek questions the existence of the public) from both the excesses and negative neighborhood effects of too much capitalism, in forcing the commercial enterprises to give an inch, is the "diminishment of liberty".

Coercion! Mom wants me to empty the trash and my liberty has been diminished!

The fan base of Friedrich Hayek finds it quite helpful that the only absolute possible in Hayek's interpretation of the world is "liberty". The absence of any and all obstruction. According to some of the more loony free-market economists, "natural law" means "I can do anything or say anything no matter who gets hurt". That might sound fatuous as a comment on what those economic ideologues are pushing, but it's relatively close to the truth. In Natural Law idealism, life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, because they are possible in the savage world in that there are no limitations exacted by either reality or any creator god, can only be "imprisoned" by laws, even the protections of civil and human rights.

If one uses law and law enforcement to curtail what can be done by default of existence in the natural world as a savage, a troglodyte, a cave man, this violates "natural rights", little confections concocted by two-legged hothouse tomatoes who have never once experienced any absence of their civil rights at all.

Natural liberty is widely available in the savage world. In civil society, i.e. society run by a government responsive to the will of the citizenry, natural law is untenable if the goal of any law is to allow people to live together in close proximity to one another. This is the difference between liberty and freedom. Liberty is the state of affairs whereby one is unfettered by limitations to one's actions. Freedom involves the ability to act upon what one thinks is right.

Of course, the experience here in the US and elsewhere has already shown us that unrestrained or "feral" capitalism left unbound to any standards, principles, regulations or advisories gets out of hand quite quickly. In fact, unbridled capitalism was the fuse to what became Marxist-Leninism: a revolution out to destroy capitalism altogether. Luckily, the saner minds we know as Liberals and Progressives prevailed. Some limitations are fine. There is no reason under heaven that could justify certain forces within a polity having no obstructions at all. Why would some of us place ourselves above all others?

Reactionaryism. That's why.

What's interesting here, particularly in terms of the Austrian School economic ideology being instrumentalized by wealthy reactionaries is that it's a reactionary set of ideas itself. Simply put, in the 19th Century, as an unrestrained version of industrial capitalism was beginning to rise, both Europe and America saw this: spikes in homelessness, hunger, joblessness, urban crowding, labor exploitation, child labor exploitation, owner/labor animosities, and altogether a social displacement so vast that some countries could not recover without some changes in the laws.

At the time, few were anxious to eliminate capitalism; rather than do that, opting instead to reform capitalism, those with cool heads chose to apply a grid of regulatory laws, rules, and principles to help keep capitalism's propensity to excess from overwhelming the citizenry. This is a historical fact. However, in terms of Austrian School reactionaryism, "socialists" seeking to destroy capitalism erected "barriers to entry" and piled on all kinds of injustices, all to hobble capitalism.

How is a guidepost oppressive if one sees the sense in it? If one follows the suggested rule-of-thumb, one isn't violating the law, and hence, the law might as well not even be there in terms of your sensible, practical concerns.

Limitations to "liberty", so the Austrian economists claim, violate the capitalist value of endless expansion:

"Control your appetite!":

"Quit oppressing me!" Imagine basing your ethical standards on the stomach and ignoring the mind altogether. That's what economic reactionaryism amounts to: a quantification of an imagined liberty that ignores all others and their concerns. Which is political surrealism. In the real world, Progressive and Liberal reforms of capitalism actually saved capitalism from a rising tide of communism. And this, more than anything else, is what won the Cold War.

Libertarians, whether they masquerade as conservatives or classical Liberals, are all about their own appetite for central planning. Where does current reactionary capitalist propaganda seek to point the citizenry? For one thing, it's desirable for those very real self-interested ideological extremists out to "centrally plan" their way to capitalist dominance of democracy. Diminishment of government power and reach involves a central plan. Taking the country back, as it's often put, back to the 1870s, is a central planning exercise. Worse, the libertarian central planners want common Americans to believe their own liberty has been stolen from them by the government as well.

Don't you just love the little lies on which those fools found their ideas?

Most employees and lower-wage workers actually have benefited from reformed capitalism. Capitalism under Liberal and Progressive reforms has gleaned the benefits of increased worker loyalty and trust in ownership, and has also increased public trust in commercial operations. Reformed capitalism has actually been beneficial to commercial growth and thriving. The great strides "free" market capitalists proclaim only occurred once capitalism was reformed in such a way as to protect the polity and the demos.

Only an idiot would want to fix what isn't broken. Only an even more idiotic idiot would break something in order to demand it doesn't work.

If one looks closely at the issue of employment in a political sense, one discovers easily that employment constitutes using other human beings as means to self-interested ends. Sure. Employees ideally sell their labor to employers. There is an exchange, an economic exchange, and hence, all is supposedly fine. That's what Hayek and his libertarian hordes proclaim. But one issue, the notion that most employees cannot negotiate wages with their employers, or negotiate in favor of some reforms in the workplace, often puts the lie to the notion of employment agreements as exemplary of the vaunted economic exchange. A second issue has to do with "usefulness": An employee's life beyond the workplace is of little to no official concern to an employer. Rather, it is the employee's usefulness for purposes that do not consider the quality of his or her life. Furthermore, capitalism and all commercial activity also regard the consumer as something to be used as a means to an end.

So. If liberty is the absolute value according to the Austrian School that provides all the ammo to wealthy reactionary capitalists, what about those refusals of employee liberty? Hayek suggests employees can lump it. He actually suggests that employees can simply find another place to work. But what happens when wages are set across the board for various skill sets in a situation where employees cannot negotiate wages on an individual basis with employers who don't even know they're alive?

Lump it. That's F.A. Hayek saying, "Dude, I've got nothing here. . . . "

It gets worse, Hayek virtually ignores the socialist prime directive of "democratization of the workforce" in favor of identifying any form of central planning as "socialism". This is where the mental midgets of the "conservative" mass movement, a collective, come in. And it's hilarious for them to suggest that the 15 to 30 million market capitalist enterprises in the US are "under attack" from "socialism".

There. Another little float for the Idiot Day annual parade.

In 21st Century America, there are two different kinds of reactionaries. One involves someone who is directly instigating a set of reactionary ideas. The other is one that isn't doing so much as anything even remotely similar to that, but is instead a sort of trained dog that reacts due to operant conditioning. As seen above, and as brought to us by the sponsors. Who, by the way, are totally commercial. One is "centrally planning" the demise of the administrative and regulatory states; the other is being "centrally planned" by those out to use them as means to selfish ends.

Reactionary emperors need reactionary troops.

A lot of the widening reactionaryism that is barely visible here in the US unless pointed out by a mass media that sometimes seen as ardently committed to ignoring its existence is an odd turn of events: a vast number of practically zombified citizens have been subjected to a line of thinking that suggests to them that they too are the victims of government coercion and oppression. Let's say you're an employee of a company that doesn't pay you enough to pay the rent, keep the lights on, maintain food in the pantry, and supply yourself with clothing, transportation and some mad money. And you're really angry about the fact that, every single time you turn on the TV set, what you see amounts to beautiful human specimens with smiles on their faces gloriously enjoying luxury cruises, fancy cars, expensive pharmaceuticals, and more, and more, and more. All of which you have been told by an ownership's actions in regard to your wages that you cannot have.

Feel oppressed? Coerced? What if you feel both but don't know how to put it in words? Don't worry. If you can't think for yourself, someone else will do your thinking for you. Yes, you're a conditioned reactionary created by central planners who do not want you to align yourself with your government and instead desire you to align yourself with those who put you in your bad financial position in the first place.

That is a con job, not conservatism.

Sometimes I think about the forces that somehow "coerced" a young Charles Koch into funding a veritable archipelago of libertarian "think tanks" in order to persuade the working classes to embrace his lousy attitude toward the federal government. His multimillionaire father, in the early 1940s, willingly built a large oil refinery in Hamburg for Nazi Germany. Fred Koch, one of the founders of the John Birch Society of crazy cupcakes, was thus called to the carpet by the FDR administration via the Trading With The Enemy Act. Apparently, both he and his son, Charles, found that "coercive" and "oppressive".

After all their "liberty" had been compromised and limited. This sort of attitude, one that leads directly to fascism, is something George Orwell called a haven of the spoiled brat.

How then does someone go from feeling hurt by the law and into a fully anti-government position? Something tells me there is something horribly wrong with that choice to obliterate the very forces that called Daddy-O to the carpet for putting his self-interest against the betterment of the United States at the beginning of a war that eventually killed 60 million people based on one idiot's self interest.

But how does this conditioned sense of oppression manifest in people like those who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021? Choosing to react against a government, or against the people's decision to elect someone that is not your choice, is far different from being a little dirt robot conditioned by even bigger dirt robots to react, react, react.

Some of the recent pabulum that poses as thought along the fringes of the American right suggests that only the individual exists, and that "the enemy" is based on Marxist-Leninist "collectivism". Which is one of the most patently insane things ever publicly aired even by people whose brains are infested with boll weevils. The actual political scientists who study this phenomenon of basing all on self-interest and on using "the lesser or less deserving" as means to one's self-interested ends suggest that absolute self-interest leads directly to authoritarianism, and from there, to totalitarian tyranny.

It's the Hobbesian Nightmare writ large: All self-interested individuals are in pitch competition with all other self-interested individuals in what the Enlightenment philosopher called "a war of all against all", and slowly, as winners and losers to those competitions either rose to the next level or withered away into nothingness, eventually, at the very top, the final winner emerges and then lords his self-interest over all others.

This does not sound like a reasonable plan. But, if one points this out to advocates of self-interest as the prevailing social/political value, you hear this: "What was the question?"

I also think of Immanuel Kant's proscription against using other people as means to one's end. Kant powerfully observed that no human should ever be treated as a means but only as an end in him or her self. This is a foundation of Enlightenment ethics.

You condition already angry citizens into believing they're being oppressed and coerced by mandates and vaccines and by the government, turning them into an army that only thinks your concerns are also theirs, and vice versa, and not only have you a powerful voting block that is conditioned into a fictional reality tantamount to a totalitarian mindset, but is also militant and militating against the forces you want to eliminate, and then you call that "liberty"?

Orwellian is not a strong enough word for that horrific distortion.

I sincerely doubt the many people who participated in the rally that developed into a coup attempt on January 6, 2021, had the slightest idea they had been so deftly manipulated by mass media disinformation and propaganda and conditioning and simple reactionary savagery. They were used. Yes, many were financially desperate. The government did not do that to them. "Right To Work" laws did that. High rent did that. Low pay did that. Economic exploitation did that.

And then reactionary capitalists, a faction of capitalism, capitalized on that anger, resentment and disenchantment and turned it loose. Certainly, those who played a direct role in what happened need to go to prison. But those far behind the scenes in a masquerade that almost smells like the Great Pretender in the Book of Revelations deserved to be called out on their fraudulence. They are neither conservative nor advocates of anything but more money.

Many Americans feel powerless today. In part, this powerlessness derives from people being intelligent enough to see they're being given a raw deal but do not have either the access or the power to change their financial situations. They can't manipulate or negotiate the rent. They can't negotiate their wages. And yes, the rightfully lash out--in misdirected--purposely misdirected--rage.

Let's call it what it is: Rage At The Wrong Machine.

So many Americans posture as if posturing and bullying means they're powerful. And, if the history of Nazi Germany is an accurate measure as a "revolution of half-educated bullies", the US could be headed for some very intractable darkness. And scapegoating Trump for all of it is nothing but another deflection. The roots of the problem haven't been addressed, and what's especially saddening to me is that those who do have the power to change some of these circumstances believe that all they need to do is shrug before the cameras and politely try to shame the malefactors, many of whom live in palatial mansions way out in the countryside where.... ...all so typically, they think no one can get them.