But if You Don't Vote For Hillary, Then What . . . . ?

By Paul Haeder

04 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

and the beat goes on as young and not-so-young women expect a vote for Hillary from spouses, significant others, brothers, you name us, we must vote for the stinky one

“But you're voting for Hilary, right? Not Trump, are you?” twenty-eight something says, stepping over homeless to get her double vanilla mocha.

“Let me repeat – Both are perverts. Perverted people, perverted thinkers, and a commentary on how blasphemed any semblance of democracy might be.” I am a 59 year old, with my client, a former meth addicted 59 year old who once was running the streets of Portland for decades, hundreds of violations of county and city codes, five addiction programs later, a rap sheet as long as Clinton's illegal and unethical funder list, as deep and lengthy as Trump's illegal and unethical tax dodging schemes and plain old usury in the Jesus-going-after-Jews-in-the-market sense. I was buying the bloke a coffee and roll for getting a job that day. One big road to recovery, at $10 an hour, after living the life of a dealer with a couple of grand cash in his pocket. I repeat, lightly: “There is no way in hell I am voting for Hillary.”

I get a smile, or smirk, from her. “So you are voting for Trump, and you call yourself a socialist?” She adjusts her NorthFace backpack, the cool matching bike helmet while dusting off her REI jacket as if I somehow molted some fascist anthrax.

“Excuse me?" I say jokingly. "Look, I am barely stomaching Jill Stein, who is so far more advanced than Bernie Sanders. Soc-ial-ist, in the Marxist sense. I am not voting for one of the two perverted people you call candidates. Bernie is working for Hillary. So goes the way of the fascist Democratic Party. Again, why would I vote for Hillary? Why aren't you at least working for Bernie?” My client laughs, adjusts his uppers to his new set of dentures we found money for so he might have a chance at a job higher on the Clinton-Trump totem pole of “warehouse picker at $10 an hour, refrigerated air free, thank you very much."

There she is, gleeful, humorous, the male barista pining over her classic blonde “good looks.” She doesn't know who Jill Stein is, and, somehow, socialist equates to being a man, and voting for Trump. There's a very good chance she works for a non-profit in Chinatown, maybe some green bamboo architectural firm, with solar panel contracts in China, where the people line up, with gas-smog masks, and sort of let it fly with the hard labor. Who knows what her small private liberal arts college degree is getting her, but hands down, the barista was smitten and she was just sure a white guy like me who deplores Clinton has only the other choice.

The barista piped up – “Well, I hope you don't think we're giving away that coffee and sandwich in some leftie socialist exchange here.” He was sort of joking, but . . . you know what they say about jokes.

“Funny, as a socialist I want YOUR coffee shop to succeed. I want YOUR business model to not got down the sewer as another Starbucks pops up and runs 24/7. And, shit, us socialists actually give twenty-percent tips and work for nickels as the very social workers trying to help people like this fellow who is all intents and purposes the victim of Clinton-Obama-You-Name-It-Get-Tough-On-Drugs political thing in the misleadership class. Good old Hillary and her backing of crime bill after crime bill after welfare cut after welfare cut until in her mind there are only super-predators and us left.” I am trying to engage, but I can see the Aryan liberal arts major is getting huffy, thinks Hillary is THE answer for her, our ages, and the best thing "invented" since birth control or Bumble Bee energy bars or Uber.

“But when it comes down to November, you have to vote for Hillary. Right? Compared to Trump, humph, well . . . .” She doesn't want to go any further as the foam from her drink is putting down a small mustache on her upper lip. The male barista mumbles something to the effect of . . . “First woman president, a democrat, backed by some really cool and smart people like Bill Gates, George Clooney, Rachel Maddow . . . plus my girlfriend . . . .”

I'd hate to be a twenty-something today, on the single scene, or dating someone, and having that sinking feeling that love just ain't enough to glue it all together, since the new normal is letting women call the shots now that we have a mass-murderer up against a wannabe mass deporter-murderer. But where the hell would I end up, dating, with this new paradigm, where I see young men jostling around with that sinking feeling where saying anything against Hillary will burn the marriage bed or poison the dating pool. What the hell, almost untenable dating, being straight, or gay, finding real socialists, real Marxists, people wanting a dating life and wanting the kind of change this country needs. For me, 30 years ago, maybe a possible “soulmate” that would possibly have a barista swoon over, until my true love opened her mouth and said: “Hillary needs to be tried for war crimes and locked up for eternity. Trump is a creation of your TV-loving, Madison Avenue infused value system, and he's a casino mafia and tax-dodging and labor sucking cheat who is the talk of the airwaves because both parties are not only corrupt, but perverted.”

I don't see this coming from the Portlandia crowd, the women, that is, and many of the men have thrown in the towel, because they have no belief in a system that says you actually can cast a fucking vote and statement by NOT voting for either of the perverted evils in this sick presidential campaign . . . and still be making a huge-huge statement by not voting for either killer.

“I don't know how you can call yourself a liberal and not vote for Hillary . . . .” she said with the mocha all yummy and warm. I have no idea where these concepts come from, but I had to laugh.

That's the entire argument in a nutshell – that this evil woman, perpetrator, war-monger, floating through the millionaires' castles and the billionaires 300-foot yachts, loving every deal, every rotten job killing, people culling neoliberal deal, with her evil seed daughter the love child of the Rothschilds a la Goldman Sachs, is the choice of capitalists, women, who voted for the other minority, even though his record spoke of all the evil he was, all by itself as the evil he is now: drone chief, commander of the undocumented deportations, this Wall Street loving neoliberal.

The death of intelligence may be tied to the vectors leading up to all the Round-up Ready flooding 90 percent of bread flour, and what many independent scientists see as a country dealing with possibly by 2030 50 percent of all births coming into life falling somewhere on the autism spectrum . . . or, maybe the result of the massive propaganda machine that is the big sell, the big lie, the big fake of who we are as Americans . . . or, yet, more causes: the education systems that teach nothing and drive the bottom line for corporations.

My-my: the clients I work for are hurdled/hobbled with mountains of debt, with thousands in fines, with hospital bills, ambulance calls at a thousand a pop, garnishments from hell, and, darn, how many are the very victims of the policing of addiction for a profit system of mass incarceration, all the dog and cat shit that the cops live for, charge after charge, until, beaten down, toothless, shaky, the massive disenfranchisement from family and community, until they finally drop to their knees and go kindly into the recovery addict's night.

This is the Hillary game, not Trump's, and she is complicit in everything that is American blood-letting everywhere. Trump, a child, embarrassment to American business, spoiled, perverted, mean but a sissy, but the reality of this country's elite – board rooms ad nauseam filled with Trumps, and sports team owners, Hollywood "things", that perversion of human kind, Sheldon Adelson, Chelsea Clinton, all of them, perversions with soap boxes, hundreds of millions stashed away, and they are policy makers, king makers, the elite? So, a woman slob and pervert, Hillary Clinton (now what did this chubby never-served-in-killer-military woman say about al-Gaddafi? ) is now the toast of all the town, the only choice now in 2016, one woman that other women, what, 28 and up, or is it, hmm, 35 and up, can't wait to see in the White House? In the words of Jill Stein:

All those reasons we were told we had to vote for the lesser evil, well what did we get, all of those things even under a Democratic White House with two Democratic Houses of Congress. . . the lesser evil paves the way and really makes inevitable the greater evil because people stop coming out to vote when they have been betrayed by the lesser evil, which is what lesser evilism is about. It’s about making that deal with the devil whereby the corporate money and powers are basically pulling the political strings.”

Whew, these liberals in Portland, women, loading up on caffeine at 4 pm, real hot yoga fiends, and all that book club stuff at Powells Books(I just found out that “independent” outfit bars people for life if they are homeless and come out of bathrooms, sort of, fixed . . . America, the punisher . . . ugly), and they Spandex with core strength harmony, step over homeless, look (sort of glare) at my clients who are getting their shit together, albeit with those Meth-sunken eye sockets, the false teeth and some jerky movements and loud voice (no inside voices for these Democratic nannies).

So, Trump, a slob, racist, broken, rotten gambler, uneducated, a bully, a weakling, a mamma's boy, a misogynist, classless, and a friend to lawyers, bankers, developers, the Clintons' friend, best buds, ally to what it is that makes the USA a stolen country, laughable, mean, on military-loving steroids (got endorsed by those sadists, Border Patrol-INS), broken, unfriendly and here we are, arguing about which of the potential presidents will do less harm, be less of an international buffoon (ahh, how many buffoons are getting into power in EU, UK, Australia, Japan, Canada?), and my guys and gals are looking to get shitty jobs in shitty warehouses because there are no second chances in the US for the poor, for the disenfranchised, yet there are a hundred second chances for the Trumps and the Clintons of the world. Wipe the crimes clean, expunge all felonies against the state, erase the evidence, shelter the incriminating stuff, hire the perverted lawyer class to take on defending the low life class, who are, burp, billionaires.

“Yeah, but you are voting for Hillary . . . .” It's a mantra of the new hip, tragically girted by the consumer class, anything that might fit their lifestyle, looking down on the Walmart crowd, while they spend stupid amounts for stuff still built and stitched and welded and manufactured by the Third World, but, oh, those triple and quadruple prices going right into the coffers of the elite, who love Sundance, ski at Telluride and kiss dolphins in Indonesia with the best of us.

What does Hillary do with all those people – men and women – who ended up on docket after docket paying for the crime of addiction? How many silver-tongued creeps like Clinton (Bill) or Kerry or you name it would have made it as a child left with cockroaches and meth labs in the kitchen near the Cheerios? Ya think they would have made it through puberty, into the streets, brains rewired by the violence of parents and the toxic brew of drugs and booze? Yet this criminal class lords over the drug-addicted classes, and the book is thrown at them a hundred times, and fortunes have been made by these privatizing penal system cheats. All the profits in the cell and in the system and, well, how many law degrees go toward putting addicts in jail twice, a dozen times?

There's a lot swirling around the issue of epigenetics, and how we are wired at the RNA and DNA level through the Long Journey into Night abuse that befalls us in life, outside the womb or while old mother is growing us. Turn blue yelling and throwing the book at people, but it's all in the wiring, hard wiring and the like. Yet, we are a lowly country run by PhD's and the elite who see the entire mess as one big pot full of choices – people wake up one day and say, “Damn, how about losing my kids, the pick-up, the home, the bank account, the significant other, cuz I want to be an addict!”

There is little choice for the abused – here, read on:

Traditionally, psychiatrists have cited family dynamics to explain the vicarious traumatization of the second generation. Children may absorb parents’ psychic burdens as much by osmosis as from stories. They infer unspeakable abuse and losses from parental anxiety or harshness of tone or clinginess—parents whose own families have been destroyed may be unwilling to let their children grow up and leave them. Parents may tell children that their problems amount to nothing compared with what they went through, which has a certain truth to it, but is crushing nonetheless. “Transgenerational transmission is when an older person unconsciously externalizes his traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality,” in the words of psychiatrist and psychohistorian Vamik Volkan. “A child then becomes a reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome parts of an older generation.” This, for decades, was the classic psychoanalytic formulation of the child-of-survivors syndrome.

But researchers are increasingly painting a picture of a psychopathology so fundamental, so, well, biological, that efforts to talk it away can seem like trying to shoot guns into a continent, in Joseph Conrad’s unforgettable image from Heart of Darkness. By far the most remarkable recent finding about this transmogrification of the body is that some proportion of it can be reproduced in the next generation. The children of survivors—a surprising number of them, anyway—may be born less able to metabolize stress. They may be born more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.

There is so much to learn, so much to teach, so much to absorb, on planet Homo Sapiens, with the biological wonders of this planetary system, in concert with, harmonious because of, and competitive throughout, but we are distracted by the plastic world, the screen of blips and bright arcs of nothing light, sucking the soul from our own history and futures. How in the world can we pitch ahead with this Dark Ages thinking about Everything, and yet, we will expend energy and greenbacks on the politics of fear, and the consumer addiction of more stuff, the right stuff, my stuff, the only stuff, the special stuff.

We have ebbed and flowed so far away from that special thing about humans – knowing and studying the culture we create (animals have their cultures, for sure, better than ours, but they haven't been writing books on it thought humpback whales and pachyderms sure have histories penetrating the vastness of oceans and savannas).

So, the simple conversation is some how, “You aren't voting for Trump, really?” This is the sadness of the consumer, the young and self-deluded “liberal” who is sleep-walking into the rest of the world's genocide, death.

I just had another bunch of conversations after the coffee shop with fellow workers 30 years my junior about how rotten Bill Gates is, or anything tied to that amount of money, influence and devolution sold as progress. The default is that he must be something. “Look, I'd rather have someone like Gates driving the discussions about the big issues than the common person. He is in power because he's a genius, and he must be doing it all as part of philanthropy, and the criticism is not warranted, because these guys are cutting edge, in the vanguard, with the brightest and most educated. We have to allow for a Gates or Bezos to have leeway. Billionaires are not bad people and they have kids on earth too, so how could they be wanting it to self-destruct?”

This is the breeding of American consumers. In the old days, it made sense to not trust rich people, to want the monopoly to be broken up, to really have no instantaneous respect for someone with the money. In the olden days, it was easier to find more people from all classes not trusting rich people, and even condemning them.

No, these college educated ones WANT to work for Gates or Bezos, and they love the toys and software and the progress of digital worlds. How could these geniuses be bad? Evidence has no effect:

The Unholy Alliance, Five Western Donors Shape a Pro-Corporate Agenda for African Agriculture, a new report released today by the Oakland Institute, exposes how a coalition of four donor countries and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is shaping a pro-business environment in the agricultural sector of developing countries, especially in Africa.

“‘Enabling Business’ has become a buzzword for development agencies, but it is vital to understand what this entails,” said Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute. “Our research shows that, in order to foster private investments, governments are being forced to open their agricultural sector to seed, pesticide and fertilizer corporations, release land for commercial agriculture, and reduce taxes and tariffs for agribusinesses. In short, facilitate the destruction of family farming and natural resources for the sake of corporate profit.”

“So, what are we going to do about it? I am just trying to make a shitty living in a very expensive town with rents out the roof. By the time I am done at work, I have no time or desire to do anything but collapse.”

These are good questions and frames of reference on what we face as a dying Capitalistic Nation. We have created a culture of giving up, believing in the power of the rich, and, basically, cynical and stuck in the consumer's neutral: “family is number one, personal actualization and fulfillment is the place I go, and just squaring away my shit when there is too much to think about is a feat to beat all feats.”

The elites love this self-flagellation, this self-effacement, this giving up yet forging ahead with consumer-consumer-consumer mentality.

Yet, the coffee shop talk is – “Man, you are an old guy, old teacher, radical, what, you say, Marxist, so, that mean you are voting for Hillary, right?” I have friends who say about that 28-year-old Aryan mocha Portlander, “Oh, well, she's naive, but at least she is engaged! We have to move over for the younger generation.”

Hmm, 28 or 30 years old, and, move over where? Can we imagine 8 years of a mad woman, Clinton? Imagine – Age 67 scares the living shit out of me, thinking of this criminal finishing off two terms, while I sag along this old decrepit road to extinction. The “you are voting for her” crowd.

Voices get weaker, and the tunnel vision is sucking us all into a corner, the lobotomized place where make-believe is all America gives to the world, in CGI, all bent by the pixels of these sad sacks who know the world as layers of software.

The barista, once the Aryan Liberal Leftie left, had the gaul to say, “Well, bud, she is awfully smart and beautiful. What else can you say to a beautiful woman but agree with her. Hillary is her time, and, you know, who are we to say as men why a woman shouldn't be elected president?”

My clients are so much smarter, all those mean streets, incredible lives cooking and being cooked, running from the law, all messed up, brains rejiggered and jumbled, but somehow, they make it, after five or ten recovery sessions, anything, but they are here, in the moment, trying to tackle a hundred strikes against them.

That Hillary Liberal Arts Major knows nothing of the raping father, and the heroin overdose mother, or all those mean, beating brothers, all the people stoned and scorched from endless brain re-wirings. The goal is to watch these sick and perverted woman lap and lull with the sick perverted Republican choice, and then, what about all those charges, the felonies, the no second chances, the, what: time to do the crime smarter, meaner and without getting caught?

America will listen to the intellectuals say Obama did good going to Hiroshima, but he doesn't apologize, and his War is Peace and Nuclear Weapons Gone Wild is Safety PR spin is deadly,, real deadly. I hear people talking about Oppenheimer, how he never apologized for the A-Bomb, but that he somehow knew that the targets were kids and civilians.

A polymath, someone tied to great genius, or historians who believe that Oppenheimer is genius, and that quantum physics and the bomb were inevitable, even natural outgrowths of where civilization was destined to go, should have unfolded.

Oh the elite, the genius class . . . oh how they are the gods of the globe, and how the Zionists are the super-gods, and the bomb was meant to be, and all that cold war hate, all that humanity lost, demolished by guns and bombs and economic flame throwers, all of it is inevitable, part of the human experience, the evolutionary force of what it is to be modern man-woman.

War is peace and truth is lies. We are here now, in this bigger slide after a giant one with the Wall Street President, Obama, and another eight before with Bush Junior and then the perverted other, Clinton, and, well, we are a languishing people, eight years for Reagan, too.

All the world is dead or dying or wounded by the unleashing of the people of the elite class, and Hillary is right there, and that woman looking for a warm mocha is there, cheerleader, smug and all-knowing, that the only choice is a Clinton in office, and she is great, crusader for women's causes.

"End of story, old man. Now, who wants to be bothered by another hundred stories of addiction? Old news, old man, old news. Drink that black drip coffee and just shut up. Shut up, and, yes, Hillary is supported by everyone, including the blacks."

Did she say "the blacks"? Hmm, Michele Alexander, please, help us:

To be fair, the Clintons now feel bad about how their politics and policies have worked out for black people. Bill says that he “overshot the mark” with his crime policies; and Hillary has put forth a plan to ban racial profiling, eliminate the sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine, and abolish private prisons, among other measures.

But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some of the policies adopted during the Clinton era, but would rebuild the communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie’s rhetoric because we must be “pragmatic,” “face political realities,” and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When politicians start telling you that it is “unrealistic” to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system, it’s probably best to leave the room.

Indeed, time to leave the room, or coffee shop, or grocery store, or the barber shop, or the movie theater, or wherever, but for me, at 59, I have no room to move over. I am a precarious worker with three college degrees and a boat load of experience and skills that would help any institution be better, more dramatically sound, humane, and, hmm, profitable. However, this is a society where everyone is pushed out of the room or away from the pie, if they are, one, radical in the change this rotten system sense, two, revolutionary in the get the rich out of the conversation, the courts, the legislative bodies, and, three, working toward imploding the casino capitalism, which is capitalism at the core, which is all about reshuffling and remaking neighborhood by neighborhood based on the profiteers' profit margins -- humanity and mother earth be damned.

So leaving the room, well, it's symbolic to all of this struggle, and I see it as one person at a time, for a small bit of the war against stupidity, and, eventually, massive remaking through revolution, upsetting the carts, and locking up the real chain gang ready folk -- just look at them in those star publications, those CEO and Executive journals, in the boardrooms and on the councils and throughout the ADMIN class. They are the real tyrants, and the toughest to eradicate. And sometimes, a mocha, a flippant conversation about presidential aspirations, in a town that is weird, or wanting to keep it weird, where youth is still hopeful of some sweeter version of parasitic capitalism, hell, that's a big conversation all in one microcosm. It precipitated this call to sanity, err, essay! Thanks, Hillary, for that!

Che -- “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”

“The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.”

“There is no other definition of socialism valid for us than that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.”

“Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.”
― Ernesto Che Guevara

Paul Kirk Haeder has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. A forthcoming book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber, looks at 10 years of his writing at Dissident Voice, and before, to bring defiance to the world that is now lobotomizing at a rate never before seen in history.