I n this decade of maximum peril, a prankish God delivers two maximally
detested candidates to lead the faltering nation as events run ahead of all
the convenient narratives. For instance: the idea that Republican “insiders”
can block Trump’s path to the nomination. The insiders may be phantoms after
all. For instance, the loathsome Koch brothers have already made their move
onto Hillary’s side of the game-board. Trump won’t miss their campaign
contributions for a New York minute (while Hillary might find a way to stuff
the cash into some Cayman Islands lock-box of the Clinton Foundation).
Events played right into Trump’s smallish hands last week when protesters
outside a Donald rally in Costa Mesa, CA, waved Mexican flags and placards
calling for the reestablishment of Aztlán del Norte. Kind of proves his point
about illegal immigration, don’t it? Trump also supposedly blundered in
saying that Hillary had only “the women’s card” left to play in her donkey
trot to the election. I’m not so sure he’s wrong about that — though the
indignometer needle danced through the red-line after he said it.
Has it come to this? The women’s party against the men’s party? What kind
of idiot psychodrama is this country acting out? Mom and dad mud-wrestling in
an election year hog-wallow? A Reality TV show writ large from sea to shining
sea? Are there no better ways of understanding the difficulties we face?
Lately Hillary has been boasting of her ability to bring Wall Street to
heel, theoretically after Wall Street installs her in the White House. Voters
(especially women) might want to pay attention to Hillary’s lavish praise for
President Obama’s handling of the banking turpitudes still unresolved seven
years after the crack-up of 2008. What did the Dodd-Frank Act (signed by “O”
in 2010) accomplish except to provide more lucrative work-arounds, by
Too-Complex-To-Comprehend legalese, for Too-Big-To-Fail banks. It was written
by bank lobbyists and lawyers and was about 2,270 pages longer than the old
Glass Steagall Act that Bill Clinton vaporized in 1999. Do you suppose that
Bill and Hill might have talked about the repeal of Glass Steagall back then?
Do you wonder what she thought about it at the time… being a lawyer and all?
This week attention is fixed on the Indiana primary where Devil Bat Ted
Cruz desperately makes his last stand against the Trump juggernaut. It seems
that former House Speaker John Boehner actually succeeded in driving a wooden
stake through Cruz’s hypothetical heart by casually remarking that he was
“the most miserable sonofabitch I ever worked with.” Kind of hard to explain
that one away, though Ted tried by sending out his new attack dog Carly
Fiorina and claiming that he never worked with the Speaker of the House — a risible
claim for a national legislator in the same party.
All of this would be amusing if the USA wasn’t sliding into the twilight
of what many people call “modernity” — which is code for the
techno-industrial hyper-complexity we’ve been enjoying lately as a species.
We have yet to comprehend the diminishing returns of heaping more complexity
on what is already too complex. Exhibit A for most of the common folk must be
the Affordable Care Act (also signed by “O” in 2010). Whereas the shrewd
stylings of Dodd-Frank surely mystify the public, most full-functioning
adults understand what it means when their health insurance premiums go up by
20 percent and the new deductible makes it unthinkable to even consider going
to the emergency room.
The sad truth may be that rackets of this kind are unreformable, and that
we can’t begin to do things differently until they collapse. It should be
obvious, for instance, that American health care needs to move in the
opposite direction from where it has been going — from giantism, as
epitomized by colossal merged mega-hospital corporations, back to some kind
of local clinic care in which doctors and their subalterns are not burdened
by an oppressive matrix of Charge-Master grift. There may be less
razzle-dazzle technology in that future model, but much more hands-on care,
plus an end to the kind of financial pillage that bankrupts households for
relatively routine illnesses (the $90,000 appendectomy).
Likewise in virtually all other areas of American life, the real trend as
yet un-discussed in this election campaign, will be unwinding and downscaling
of the onerous, toxic hyper-complexity of the age now passing and finding our
way to a workable re-set of what used to be known as political-economy.
In the meantime: a clown show.
