I come from several generations of Slovak steelworkers. My Great-grandfather sailed over in 1910, found work in Bethlehem and sent for the family. The rest is life.
For most of the previous century “The Steel”, as it was called by us townies, employed multitudes. My Grandfather worked there from the age of 14. In separate rolling mill accidents he lost a thumb and a chunk of flesh from his leg. His brothers worked there too - at the main plant, the shipyards, the “Coke Works”. They made bridges and skyscrapers and gun barrels and ships. One brother fought at The Bulge, one in the Pacific. All of them are in the cemetery and, in a fitting tribute to late capitalism, Bethlehem Steel is a casino.
Nowadays, as I listen to man-child billionaires talk of hard work and sacrifice I think of my Grandfather and his siblings and the lives they lived. None were saints. All were amusing when sinning. But they were good and decent and cheery people, and if Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ever told any of them they could afford to miss a Social Security check it's heartening to think of the precise instructions they would’ve given him on how he ought to bend to kiss their asses.
Of course, they came of age in an era where the Democratic Party had their back. An era where Franklin Roosevelt fought the forces of “organized money” and his “roll of honor” included “men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms.”
But where FDR welcomed hatred from the forces of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking,” the Schumers and Pelosis scamper to the whim of the top 10%, like butlers and housekeepers bearing trays of delicacies to mansion dumbwaiters, ever ready to ensure their monetary masters are unhesitatingly serviced.
Currently however, there is much talk of the Democratic Party finding common ground and uniting as one to seize the incredible electoral opportunity which the madness of Trump and Musk is hellbent on creating. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Where the Chinese have the same word for crisis and opportunity, the Democratic National Committee has the same word for inertia and cashflow. It’s why Democrats conducted the last two Presidential elections trying to avoid any conversation about economic status.
For if the Democratic Party honestly talked about class they’d have to acknowledge that they deliberately craft labyrinthine legislation with ludicrous phase-ins to placate the very billionaires and corporations they claim to oppose. It’s not personal, poor people. It’s strictly business.
In today’s politics there are only two entities entitled to constant reassurance from our elected officials: Wall Street and Israel. When equity vaporizes in a housing scheme or innocents perish in wilful butchery, the Congress of the United States will rise in empathy for the perpetrators.
But while the powerless and the working poor and the 40% of Americans who are not invested in the stock market also have need of certainty and stability, what they get from the Democratic Party is something far different. They get babble about looking forward, robust conversation, same pages, and generational change. They get hot pink and paddles and Corey Booker holding his urine.
For serious Democratic thinkers the lure of the euphemism is eternal, the powerless can be bamboozled, and swing state majorities are always one grouping of impactful-sounding words away.
Just how total is the Democrats' belief in the saying of words? Many, including Charles call-me-an-orchestra- leader Schumer, have met with consultants for cursing lessons! {SPOILER ALERT: When Republicans and the Josh Gottheimer wing of the Democratic Party cut Medicaid, Maestro Schumer will call Trump a scallywag. If Trump were to touch the carried interest loophole Schumer will call him a m**herfu**ing c**ks**ker.}
Don’t get me wrong. I’m trying, as the poet W.H. Auden advised, to “stagger onward rejoicing” because I believe history has reserved a special ash heap with Trump’s name on it. But life would be easier if Democrats were useful.
For instance, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia wants Democrats to have “a reinforcing social media army” which will “connect with voters on a cultural basis.” But Warner, who possesses a net worth of a quarter billion dollars and spends half his time in the Senate seeking to eliminate personal privacy and the other half in Davos Switzerland, is hardly an ideal cultural arbiter. What’s more, Democrats already have a reinforcing social media army!
I speak of MSNBC. A cable “news” station where actor/anchor Lawrence O’Donnell can say “We have never had a more decent person than Joe Biden serve as President of the United States.” and the key grip doesn't drop a lighting fixture in a fit of hysterical laughter. Where the green room teems with unquestioning contortionists who found Biden coherent in June and Harris savvy on election morning.
And what of the cute little fellows at Pod Save America? With their cute little matching outfits and their cute little unthreatening ideas and their endlessly lickspittle devotion to Barack Obama - the nation’s first African American President and its 20th Republican one.
Meanwhile, former CIA apparatchik turned Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin is trebling down on the cursing memorandum. She has devised “a military-style operational plan” to end Democrats being seen as “weak and woke” and to “fucking retake the flag” with “the goddamn Alpha energy” of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell.
Perhaps hardass Slotkin, in homage to her roots, will find a modern Mossadegh to overthrow? Or the cranium of a Lumumba or Allende in which she can personally place a bullet amid chants of “USA”?
The Slotkins of the Party don’t like the term “oligarchy”. They don’t believe the average person understands it. So why don’t they start referring to Elon Musk by what he is? Namely, a foreign-born terrorist. The most dangerous and powerful foreign-born terrorist ever vomited up on American shores since a certain member of the Mileikowsky family.
Musk is indeed a billionaire trying to upend the social compact and the Constitution for personal gain. But Roosevelt is long dead and the leaders of the Democratic Party now stand for nothing except organized money and I’m sure Elon can sense them at his mansion dumbwaiter, fervently hoping to deliver anything he deigns to request.
If there is any comfort to be found in the current situation it’s in the fact that it cannot last. The people know they are being fucked, while politicians of both parties and their staffs of opulently embursed advisors only know ever more circuitous ways to fuck them. In any startup country this would end in a frenzy of peasant generated throat slitting.
Perhaps the day is not far off when the poor gather around kitchen tables not to plan a food budget or calculate if a GoFundMe can pay for a cancer treatment… but with sharpening stones.