Reverse Logic: No “God Bless America” But Damn America for Its Deeds

It’s as if a moral and cultural bomb has been detonated now that this guy tweets and says things not allowed in school. I have youth in my ‘behavior room’ saying stuff right from the president’s mouth. These words and statements we do not allow children to say in school. Racist and sexist and anti-disabilities things, we don’t tolerate but the president is spouting off these horrendous statements. I’ve already got my hands full with young people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities that put them in the behavioral and defiance categories. With Trump, my caseload of high school youth spouting off hate and racist comments is skyrocketing. – said a social worker/counselor at a very big high school near Portland, Oregon

So the beat goes on, as Americans try and handle the boorish and perverted nature of a billionaire (sic) with some absolutely shady and possibly felonious history. He’s an easy mark, really, Trump, and he is not the president of the USA, in any sense of the George W way, if you barely delve into the voter fraud deployed by his conservative, wacko-Zio-Christo henchmen. Simple facts, and I guarantee, if I brought up these facts as a teacher to my youth as a social worker, and if they went back to mamma or papa or my bosses, I would get sacked.

Because, liberals only pout and pucker their mouths and touch their cheeks in abhorrent shock when something slightly right of their middle of the road sensibilities get ruffled.

This country is in the 17th Century, in many ways in the Dark Ages, when it comes to almost EVERYTHING, and our voting, vaunted in the minds of our own leaders as the number one system in the world, well, it’s as corrupt and flawed as can be on many levels, the least not of which is teaching all children that politics is not for them or bad and to stay un-involved with City Halls and State Legislatures.

Greg Palast has covered all sorts of the shenanigans of this country’s most recent voting crimes:

Unlike the rest of the world, the U.S. and the [local] sites are not swift at all to publish the votes that never get counted or the votes that they rejected. It’s huge — the number of provisional ballots in this election will number in the several million … the number of rejected absentee ballots will number in the several million.

Keep in mind that chance of your vote spoiling — that is, you cast it but it doesn’t get tallied — is 900 percent higher if you’re black then if you’re white. And that’s the [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’] statistical analysis.

So, in that case, we’re looking at… from the experience of looking at the Arizona numbers, previously — and I can go back, there are other purge numbers, and provisional ballots — there is little doubt that Arizona is basically decided not by votes but by votes not counted, or the people turned away from the polls or purged from the voter rolls.

Same with North Carolina. Michigan. North Carolina … without question Michigan, without question Arizona, without question Florida. Probably — I don’t want to go out, because I’m looking at preliminary numbers — I would say probably North Carolina, and possibly Ohio. And, of course, we haven’t looked at Minnesota yet. But I don’t think there’s any question in these states. Pennsylvania.

This is how this country rolls, though, with Botoxed on-the-air non-news deliverers confused, lusting after Hell-fires in the night, clicking tongues about the most innocuous things, absolute reflections of education – journalism-communications schools – gone really bad at the colleges they supposedly attended. Plus, the detritus that is the Democratic party, Hillary lovers, spouting absurdities around Russia changing-affecting-influencing-making the election of this, what appears to be, a fourth-grade reading grade level New Yorker to the US presidency. All this misdirection and miseducation plugging up the emotional-intellectual and religious pipe work that is the collective American toilet system of consumption.

This high school social worker and I talked about two of my youth on my caseload, and in the end, the many youth he is working with, well, young white boys, fidgeting and twitching, they are not all there, so to speak. All these burgeoning yearly populations of special needs youth, creepily vapid and vacant – and this is coming from me, someone who’s worked in prisons, recovery centers, homeless programs, memory facilities, day programs for adults with significant developmental disabilities.

Get into the bowels of our school system, of how wrecked many youth are, and how many are teetering on disaster or criminal injustice interludes, and, well, we have to wonder what exactly is in the water, Marge? What is in those skyscrapers full of Cheetos and those billions of ounces of Coco Puffs and lake-size vats of Red Bull?

To say that Trump is Bandito Numero 45 is as absurd as saying Bush was voted in legally as The 43rd Made Man, yet I have people yammering away – some on DV and Counterpunch – saying, to “get over it . . . the American people have spoken and voted in this Mafia-connected Donald!” And, the power of voter suppression to put in some racist, thug, pro-war, anti-social services, pro-tax theft for the elite senators and representatives guy named The Donald? Do we spend time asking that one?

Bishop William Barber, II: Yeah, I’m very concerned that while we should focus on the Russian hacking, but that we’re missing that the greatest hacking of our system was racialized voter suppression. Let me give you some numbers for your audience.

Eight hundred and sixty-eight. That’s the number of—the number fewer, that we had 868 fewer voting sites in the black and brown community in 2016, black, brown and poor community.

Twenty-two. Twenty-two states passed voter suppression laws since 2010. That’s where 44 senators were represented, over nearly 50 percent of the United States House of Representatives. And at least 16 or 17 seats in the Senate—rather, in the House, probably would not be where they are partisan, if it was not for voter suppression.

Today is 1,562 days—1,562 days since the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Now, Strom Thurmond only filibustered the Civil Rights Act of ’57 for one day. This Congress, under McConnell and Ryan, has filibustered fixing the Voting Rights Act for 1,562 days. We talk about Trump winning in Wisconsin by 20,000 or 30,000 votes. There were 250,000 votes suppressed in Wisconsin. In North Carolina, we had over 150 fewer sites doing early voting.

So it is amazing to me that we’re having a conversation about Russian hacking, but we’re not having a conversation about racialized voter suppression, which is systemic racism, which is a tool of white nationalism, which is a direct threat to our democracy.

Yet, this country is flummoxed daily with the false flag shooting in Vegas, with the impending three months of unfettered mass consumption, as Homo Retailopithicus charges those neurons to feed the financial shekel collectors in this country of service workers and shoppers.

In Salem, recently, I was one of five male social workers in a group of 60 female social workers. It’s clear I am in the business with broken people, and I was only one of two men speaking up, and confronting the sexism and some really loopy thinking by several Trump female social workers.

We have 16 to 21 year olds, in foster care, and my job is to connect them to school, connect them to their own untapped abilities, to show them life outside of homelessness or the drudgery as burger flipping. There’s a hell of a lot more that we do, and in any given week, there’s some real life changing things I precipitate. Way outside any rotten feel-good TED Talk mumbo-jumbo. Real life saving stuff, too.

So, one of the more senior social workers tried to put her racist, sexist, fourth grade Trump spin/logic to work – the state is tracking our youth who now, over a twenty year span, are in larger numbers working in their teens. This yahoo stated, “It’s because of our great president Trump. He’s helping Oregon’s economy.”

Well, Oregon’s economy has been on turbo charge for five years, and there are hard, toiling jobs in logistics – warehouses – that need backs and brawn. Lots of part-time and temp jobs. And, those 111 people moving into this place a day, well, they need their Krispy Cremes and Carl’s Juniors like the rest of US of Israel. Plus, the world of foster youth is filled with financial obligations, in the legal arena, debts tied to charges and crimes, and in many cases, they owe for bad debts just trying to survive. Some owe child support. Plus the school debt load, is that a real great prospect in young people’s lives, a college degree to serve lattes? The cost of rentals in Portland area are akin to San Francisco’s, so, just to take a shit and burn a bagel and lay out a twin mattress costs big time. If Trump indeed has anything to do with youth in Oregon opting to work in greasy fast-food joints over choosing to go to community college to be pharmacy techs or welders, it would be his ilk’s anti-education, anti-smarts, anti-trades mentality that pushed them into minimum wage hell. Of course, I pointed this out, and my fellow female social workers, many of whom are Hillary Lovers, they gave me as big of a stink eye for confronting this senior social worker as I would have gotten if I had told them how criminal Clinton and Obama are.

This is the magical and see-hear-speak no evil thinking that has taken over the white race in the whiter liberal camp, and it has decayed youth from the inside out. Truly. White social workers go on and on about LGBTQI and sex trafficking, but they nary say a word against the pigs-cops murdering black and brown people or the evil that surrounds them and is them in the form of the industrial military complex.

America murders daily, nanosecond by nanosecond, and we have to talk about which restroom is appropriate for this or that self-identified young person.

It’s the Rachel Maddow and Oprah Winfrey Effect, and the Marvel Comic Hollywood Effect, and the denuding of adult thinking and adult action that comes from a society that is perpetually hooked to the IV drip of college/pro sports-Disney-All-You-Can-Eat-Buffalo-Wing Mondays and Thursdays. It’s the very seed gone weedy from years of mind control by Madison Avenue and the perversions of lies as truth, make-believe as history, a red-white-blue belief that there is some hard-assed Rambo God looking over the USA.

Even the Trump haters can’t rise to the occasion and shake out the crows eating the eyes of our youth from the thrushes that represent a country that is afraid of its own shadow, its own bankers, its own police force and its own military.

Trump, right:

David Cay Johnston: Well, Donald Trump is not at all who people think he is, and I’m very surprised that conservatives are embracing him. For example, Donald’s most famous building, the Trump Tower, instead of building it as a steel girder building, he chose to build it out of concrete, a 58-story—he says 68 stories—a 58-story concrete building built by a company called S&A Concrete construction. And who owned [S&A] construction? “Fat Tony” Salerno, the head of the Genovese crime family in New York, and Paul Castellano, the head of the Gambino family. Trump used the same company for other projects that he built, even though they were more costly than using steel girder construction.

When he tore down the Bonwit Teller building to make way for the Trump Tower, he had about a dozen union house wreckers on the site and about 150 Polish workers, all of them illegally in the country, who he paid $4 to $5 an hour and who did not have hard hats. And Trump claimed in a lawsuit that he had no idea that these workers were there in any way other than an appropriate way. And a federal judge mocked him, pointing out that they were easy to spot because they were the ones who had no hard hats.

Donald’s personal helicopter pilot, Joseph Weichselbaum, was a convicted major cocaine and marijuana trafficker whose criminal case landed before, of all people, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. Now, Judge Barry recused herself, but she also, in the process, made every other judge in the federal system aware of the sensitivity of this particular case.

And in addition, Donald Trump has been found in the past repeatedly to have not paid people he owed money to. It is a standard business practice of his. He has let people think that he fixed Wollman Rink in Central Park for free. He was paid $10 million, but some of his contractors were never paid, because he told them this was a public service project. And he’s been sued innumerable times for racial discrimination of his businesses. He’s been found to have engaged in racial discrimination. He’s not at all who he appears to be.

Which is an understatement and the defining characteristic of ALL corporate heads, ALL politicians who self-identify as money-groveling products of the interlinked (matrix of) lobbies that get perfectly good Christian and Orthodox Jews to turn into prostitutes for the war-toxin-structural violence Kingpins.

Think hard about the absurdity of a Putin Pushing the Levers of All Those Ballot Boxes. Think of that, and the continual attack on his dictatorial nature, and how great those Pussy Riot freaks are in the scheme of things. This is from a country of perversion – drone joystick killers, flyovers during football games, false flag operations and PBS propaganda shows on Vietnam and America’s Illegal War on Vietnam. Putin as the bad-guy, controlling leader. From a country that hired Obama, this multi-million dollar tin soldier for Wall Street. This is a country based on Thugs, Big Time Criminals and Little Men, and one steeped in the Little Eichmann Syndrome, and a population in Battered Spouse Syndrome with this Trump in High Crimes Office. Stockholm Syndrome, and Little Big Man, all wrapped up in this is god’s country Prozac psychosis.

There’s white racist DNA running through the synapses of his or her brain tissue. They will kill their own kind, defend the enemies of their kind or anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of the milky white way of life.

— Jeremiah Wright

I’m listening to Wright now, on Bill Moyers’ show, and goddamn it, we need this person in the role of leader of whatever religious pot this country has to throw our spirituality into to stir up and throw onto the warring leaders of our United States of Corporations.

This is the big hole in America, in that female Trump supporter social worker down in Salem, thinking Trump is supreme, God-blessed, rather than the rodent breeder that he seems to be, nothing but a cartoon, a jumping tweeting thing, a brand or product of the lowest common denominator, denigrating any notion of honoring a smart mind, a sound body, and a confident spirit.

One big hole where youth are put into segregated classrooms when things go south; where teachers are one paycheck away from ditching that profession and selling Mary Kay products; where the entire administrative systems in cities-counties-states are staffed by bureaucrats who could squeeze the last tear out of a rotting onion.

I am faced with workers, careerists, and those like me, social workers, who have a professional turn-over rate higher than NFL second-string quarterbacks. This role we play is like a marionette play, jumping to the bureaucrats’ sadistic numbers game, statistics combing, bean counting and data mining. Hedges, Truthdig:

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

What do we tell the school counselor, the advisers, the teachers, and what role do we have as the villagers in It Takes a Village, as uncles and brothers and grandsons and fathers and nephews?

Here I am in Spokane, visiting my 21-year-old daughter, who is working as a coffee barista, living now on her own, $600 a month studio apartment in an old part of town inside a 1920 house cut into threes as apartments.

I ran down the hotel hallway looking for coffee, and there’s convention rooms, and lo and behold, a six-hour training, “Building Self-Regulation in Children with Autism, ADHD, or Sensory Disorders.” This is a common scene these days in my field, and in attendance are parents, I can see. This is the new normal, Sensory Processing Disorder, Sensory Integrative Dysfunction, Sensory Integrative Dysfunction. SPD, SID, ADD, ODD, ADHD, an unholy alphabet soup created by the pesticide society we have invented. Plastics in milk, fumigants in burgers, hormones in cheese, glysophate in bagels, and an entire organic chemistry dictionary’s worth of things killing the womb, sucking the sanity of our unborns’ central nervous systems.

As we know, the evil chickens of military-chemical-prison-financial-surveillance-legal-energy-big ag/big pharma-education have come back to roost. There’s no way of getting around that! Rev. Wright:

And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian decent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese decent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African decent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no. Not “God Bless America”; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!

Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.