Losing with Dignity

IMAGE FROM UPSPLASH

Facing the Music

Can any non-Trump supporter really say that they are surprised that Trump would not concede the 2020 election to Joe Biden? This is a man who cries “fake news” every time a story that paints him in an unfavourable light is published. This is a man who calls members of the media “a disgrace” when they ask him a question that he’s not prepared to answer or doesn’t want to answer. It’s no surprise that this is a man who refuses to lose with dignity, or concede to losing an election that was a little too close for comfort.

So of course the election must be rigged because Trump didn’t win. That’s the only possible explanation for everything that’s going on in America right now. Trump lost and he’ll have to face the music for the catastrophic damage he’s done over the past four years, and he doesn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to deal with the consequences either. The thing that gets me is this: he knows that there will be consequences. That’s why he’s fighting so aggressively and creating so many lawsuits out of thin air to keep the Presidency. He knows he’s screwed without it. But if he knew that there would be consequences for his actions, then he must have known that his actions were wrong.

Transition of Power

IMAGE FROM UPSPLASH

With Trump’s refusal to concede, he is also barring a smooth transition of power. Note that a smooth transition was established by Barack Obama so Donald Trump could transition into the White House smoothly, and Joe Biden himself made sure there was a smooth transition process so Mike Pence could take his place. All of my sources say that this has been the norm for decades. That is, until Trump took office. Once again, Donald Trump has shown the world that he is fine with going against tradition to get his way. If he does get his way - he won’t - then there would be no end to his gloating and celebrating just to remind us all that he’s not going anywhere.

This is probably not going to be the outcome. The votes have been counted, and the fact that Trump actually wanted votes to continue in some states while he wanted the voting to be stopped in others with no evidence tells me that he’s grasping at straws at this point. Even Trump himself must know on some level that you cannot pick and choose which states get to have their votes counted and which ones don’t. Elections have never worked like this in America before. Proper Democracy has never worked like that before.

A New Beginning

Whether or not Trump wants to keep any shred of dignity he has left and concede that he lost the vote with grace, he is no longer the President after January 20th. This is when America can truly begin to heal. Even if Democrats don’t win the Senate in the runoff election in January, they still have the House and the Presidency.

But even if the dark clouds are clearing, scars from this time of America’s history will always remain. The Senate has a 6-3 majority, with the overwhelmingly unfair nomination that was Amy Coney Barrett, who is now sitting on the Supreme Court; America’s relationships with other countries are forever altered at best and completely destroyed at worst and America will be the butt of the joke for years thanks to Trump’s total disregard for everything except himself. By not conceding, Trump is only further establishing his legacy of having no integrity, no dignity, and will always be known for his cheap, underhanded way of getting things “done”.

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Garrett Forsyth

Garrett considers himself to be an average Joe who writes, plays video games, is an avid lover of The Golden Girls, and sleeps way too much. He also watches anime, and aspires to become a cat lady before the next apocalypse. He hates people who are misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and trans-phobic, people who wake him up too early, and things that smell bad.

The F-word: The Soft Face of Fascism

image from pixabay

The F-word is once again haunting the public discourse. For a while it seemed like the word was doomed to be thoughtlessly hurled at stingy parents and customer service representatives, its true relevance long banished from the western world.

But we aren’t seeing a resurgence in fascism – it never really left.

Fascism is less a political ideology than a way of life. It need not be strictly authoritarian – but it is always sadistic. It may not be outwardly racist, but it is often preoccupied with race. It may not be an iron fist it rules with but a green dollar. Fascism is all around us, ever has been - in some form or other it ever will be. We must learn to recognize its many faces.

For the Love of Country

Merriam Webster defines fascism as a philosophy, regime or movement which exalts the nation above the individual. There is the implication of autocratic control though this need not be necessarily a dictatorial rule. It may be rule by a wealthy elite (plutocracy), a corporation (corporatocracy) or, even the market itself (what some ludicrously call “anarcho-capitalism,” but what we’ll call market-fascism). It often romanticizes a mythic past. It rarely looks forward.

Fascism ultimately positions human rights (universal access to food, shelter, and freedom from harm) as subordinate to the glory of the nation in all its racial, geopolitical and economic forms.

In a fascist state, it is a crime to burn the flag but not to doom someone to homelessness through eviction. Racist police do not face legal repercussions for murder in a fascist state, but those who speak out against injustice do. In a fascist state the nation eats before your family does. There is much for sale in a fascist state, but little of it you need. There is much rhetoric and little truth.

Pay-per-rule

image from pixabay

The United States, now firmly in the world’s eye, with the f-word on many lips, has long been a consumer fascist state (and increasingly, so are we). Trump is merely the lump which belies the tumor. His failure to gain a second presidential term does not banish fascism from America, it merely drives its ugliest form back into the shadows.

Consumer fascism, or soft fascism, positions corporations’ ability to make money and monopolize resources in the name of a national economy as paramount to all else. You may not have access to the abilities of producing your own means of survival, but Amazon does. Loblaws does. Corporations lobby the state and private policy initiatives, they trade data with governments. Increasingly, the line between state interest and that of the market becomes irrelevant.

image from pixabay

People struggling to make ends meet continue to pay corporations for access to food, clothing, or diversion (from the fact that we are not free). We willingly relinquish our lives to be ruled, for the glory of the economy. For the good of the nation.

It wasn’t racism that elected Trump, though it helped. It wasn’t misogyny, though it was readily employed. It was by appealing to the concept of nation and attaching to it the corporate brand he carried. His supporters are quick to praise his positive affect on the stock market as, perhaps the only, sign that he has been an effective leader.

Fascism exists in the subservience of the human animal to the nation and it’s here in Canada too.

The Canadian military was recently found to be engaging in propaganda tactics to influence public opinion. These tactics, which included forged letters warning of wolves in Nova Scotia, are publicity stunts clearly inspired by corporate advertising strategies. This is the military trying to go viral.

What can we do?

The most direct way is to stop empowering corporations. Stop buying their products. Stop enabling their destruction of communities, their monopolies on natural resources. We all know Amazon is evil, but so is Loblaws, and Apple. There is nothing these corporations provide that a combination of lifestyle reconfiguration and local shopping can’t provide.

We can empower the individual by supporting universal basic income initiatives. With a guaranteed income, we are less vulnerable to corporate exploitation.

Trump may be on his way out of office, but he is not taking fascism with him. It surrounds us, everywhere. Beckons to us behind every waving flag, every corporate overreach, every piece of data mined. So long as there is patriotism without criticism, corporate welfare over social welfare, there is fascism.

Consumerism leads to fascism by elevating the national market above the human being. So as long as we continue to buy, we are all complicit in its rise.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Biden v. Trump 2020: The Circus of Infamy

1651 Frontispiece for Hobbes’ Leviathan by Abraham Bosse

There came a mount during the 2020 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden where, as the camera cut rapidly between the two septuagenarians, for a moment they appeared to blur together into one entity. I saw the similarities staring back at me: four empty eyes searching for approval in the camera’s lens, two sets of teeth bared, flaring into one nova of grin and grit. One moved rigid, puppet-like; face a taut mask pulled over nothing but rote snippets of policy while the other, gripped the podium and shambled above it in a familiar careless slouch, a narcotic posture of venality; lusting for the camera, recognizing it at his own mother. One represented a terrifying future in love with an unreal past, the other represented a very real past with terrifying consequences for the future. One actively slithered its heels across America’s already barely-functional democracy in order to turn the country into one big golf club: white, rich, and entirely synthetic. The other simply resembled that weakened democracy: skeletal, making empty gestures, representing no one other than people who look like him.

IMAGE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK

Following the debate, the major news sources were typically funereal. “The real loser is the American voter,” they said while the president’s slobbering goon squad of diet-Nazi thugs cheered in victory. And they were right to mourn; we all are. We have painted ourselves into a corner; economically, ecologically, and politically. America is simply the logical endpoint of representative democracy: where so few speak for so many that the politicians are drained of all traces of humanity to become the living embodiment of an ideal. They cease to be human and become ciphers; flashing signs which represent nothing but an appeal to the electorate.

Trump boasts and blusters, sneers and slurs, race-baits, and grabs for power because this is exactly what his supporters expect. He is merely a fulfillment of a wish that began with Reagan: the nativist, anarcho-capitalist’s dream of a tyrant entrepreneur who will replace democracy with a free-market Thunderdome; a wish filtered through the post-9/11 Islamophobia, wounded by failed neo-liberalism and dragged through the cesspools of 4Chan; a wish buffeted by the racist fears of a Black president which drifted in through the windows of Trump tower during a filming of “the Apprentice” and attached itself to the bloating frame of an ultra-famous faux-billionaire. Anyone can be president: the American dream.

And who has the left-wing produced to oppose this threat? To defend the pillars of the world’s oldest democracy? A lab assembled Kind but Firm Old White Man. The type of guy you can see wearing a checkered shirt, holding a beer at a backyard barbecue. Just as easily as you can see him cruising down the California coast, top down, shades on. Just as easily as you can see him mounting a horse or casting a line. Cut him open and he bleeds apple pie. He’s not racist, he’s got a Black friend, remember? He’ll give your hand a firm shake while waging war with the other. He is the reminder that you need government. You can’t do it on your own. Yes, you’re a pacifist but without a military how else can we defend your freedom to be a pacifist? Biden is saying the same thing with his smile, with his suit, as Trump is on his banners: vote for me and make America great again.

There was indeed no winner in the debate. There were only two sides to the same almighty coin for which America long ago sold all hope of true democracy.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline