Introduction to Misfit 21

As I write this, almost mid-way through 2017, the country is in near chaos.  Every day you can read an editorial comment such as: Every political scandal is compared to Watergate and they are never in the same league with that particular debacle. Until now.  Even more alarming, the former head of the NSA appears on CNN and says something to the effect that the president is at war with our system of checks and balances.  None of this should be surprising, as his campaign CEO, an avowed ALT right demagogue idea of governance is to deconstruct the government. By which he means to make in non-functional. As most of the loyalists of the president have no clue what deconstruct actually means or what the long-range implications of making the government fail will mean. They elected him to “shake things up” or to “blow it up” never once asking, and replace it with what?  So here we are shaken up but not quite blown up, though he is working overtime to see that this happens, and where are we headed? This is what anarchy looks like, the perfect storm result for a self-destructive man such as the president.

That this country is no longer a true democracy seems self-evident. Trumplandia is a plutocracy. That is a government for the rich, by the rich, and only for the rich.  They determine who are leaders are, and they make sure that what they to need, happens.  Well up on the top of these wish list are massive tax breaks for the rich: personal and corporate, dismantling of the social welfare networks and safety nets for the less fortunate. That means for Us. 

Not surprisingly, Trump’s foreign friends, the Russians, our sworn, long standing enemies is also a plutocracy. That their style is more autocratic is only a difference of degrees. A strategic firing here, an executive order there, and our so called democratic formerly United Sates of America will become more and more like the Russians.   As Janis Joplin sang in the 60’s, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I suggest all those Trumplandia lemmings that feel (I do not say think, as thinking is rational, and their feelings are clearly based on irrational emotional content) he can do no wrong look up the definition of treason. The part about, giving aid, and abetting the enemy, seems more appropriate the more we learn about the Russian connections. 

I have always believed that poetry is larger than politics, that it can encompass political thinking, moral outrage and spiritual truths, sometimes in the same voice. And much more besides.  Poetry is as diverse and as all encompassing as the history of Man.  Hopefully, our poetic efforts, that our literary effusions, can continue to exercise our rights to freely express. Hence my essay this issue “Dystopia Now”.  We are living in a science fiction novel now, a futuristic vision where the worst we could have imagined twenty years ago is tomorrow’s headline.  Thank the mythical Ronald Reagan for popularizing the idea that government is bad, and for his vicious, repressive policies, social and economic, that spawned the trickle-down economy. Remember when the trickle stops there is nothing but an arid waste.  As Ed Sanders once mused “After the atomic bomb and there is nothing left but poetry......