Lawmakers will band together to ban an app, raise their salaries or bomb Brown babies in a foreign country, but they will not lift a pen to end hunger, stop mass shootings or make college free.
By David A. Love, JD, Black Commentator —
The reelection of Donald John Trump to the highest office in the land – following two impeachments, leadership in an insurrection and all sorts of criminal indictments and convictions – is not an American crisis, but rather a symptom of a crisis that is called the United States of America. America’s problem is that it is an unserious nation. But for its violence – and we should remember that Dr. Martin Luther King called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – we should take everything this country does with a grain of salt, a grain of sand, Uncle Ben’s long-grain rice, whatever.
This is the most unserious country in the whole wide world, with the TikTok ban as Exhibit A. Trump wanted to ban the social media app in his first administration, but the initiative failed for a lack of interest. Then, when Biden took over, Democrats and Republicans united to get very little done except to fund weapons for Ukraine, bankroll the genocide in Gaza, and ban TikTok. Lawmakers who would take no action to address climate change, homelessness, or myriad other problems dropped everything they were doing and clamped down on free speech in the name of “Communist” China.
Supporters of the TikTok ban proclaimed it was necessary as a national security move to protect America from Chinese influence. But this move had nothing to do with China, which is a hyper-capitalist country with government controls that is eating the United States for lunch – and every single day. What the politicians did not say is that techbro billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg wanted the ban to kill their competition, and AIPAC and the ADL wanted to neutralize a leading venue for young progressive Americans to organize for Palestinian rights. Now Trump can return to power, reverse the TikTok ban and save the day.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans flocked to Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, the Chinese social media platform that has become the most downloaded app in the U.S. On RedNote, TikTok refugees have learned that China is not nearly as bad a place as their political leaders made them believe, and is plausibly a nation offering a better life than America – with sparkling new cities and dazzling architecture, highspeed railroads, superior electric cars and affordable prices. China is not a democracy, but then again, neither is America.
The Trump-Vance duo “running” the government Washington is in fact owned by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and a handful of unhinged, unstable, toxic, evil-scientist-looking billionaires who are masquerading as villains from the Marvel Universe. Republicans and Democrats alike are wholly-owned subsidiaries of these oligarchs, and America itself is an oligarchy. Oligarchy means the privatization of all the things, the gutting of democracy, and selling off the country for spare parts. Voters have the right to an opinion and little else, as their votes do not affect the laws, policies and politicians, who in any case were already paid for by oligarchs, complete with receipts. Three billionaires now own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population. Billionaires own the legacy corporate media, social media, and now the government. Musk has enough money to travel to the moon. Jeff Bezos can’t afford to give his employees raises, but has enough money to travel to space and buy a yacht so large that it has a smaller yacht inside of it. And America – the “land of the free” – is the most unequal nation on Earth, and the only developed country with a declining life expectancy.
How can we take seriously a country that invented medical debt and pre-existing conditions, where insurance companies kill people by denying patients healthcare for profit, and the dying start GoFundMe pages in an attempt to save their lives? America, the only nation without universal healthcare, could save 68,000 people per year and trillions of dollars by changing course, but lacks the will because it is captured by corporations and wealthy elites. Lawmakers will band together to ban an app, raise their salaries or bomb Brown babies in a foreign country, but they will not lift a pen to end hunger, stop mass shootings or make college free. They are thoroughly corrupt and unserious, and even Supreme Court justices are on the take with lavish gifts to keep them compliant.
America is unserious, and Trump and his minions are unserious. The crowd that rails against DEI and cries for meritocracy fills the cabinet with unqualified and mediocre White men and Fox News talking heads. Only in America – and Weimar Germany– can someone attempt to overthrow the government and return to run the whole thing. Other places would have forced Trump to flee to Russia in exile. But America, the most unserious place, criminalizes Black, Brown and poor people and immigrants, and normalizes criminality when wealthy White men are committing major crime. Thanks, Merrick Garland.
And here we are, in the final days of the American empire, just like a scene from Gladiator II, complete with dudes in the coliseum fighting lions and apes and everything. All of this is highly unserious.
Source: Black Commentator
David A. Love, JD – Serves BlackCommentator.com as Executive Editor. He is a journalist, commentator, human rights advocate, a Professor at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information based in Philadelphia, a contributor to Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, The Washington Post, theGrio, AtlantaBlackStar, The Progressive, CNN.com, Morpheus, NewsWorks and The Huffington Post. He also blogs at davidalove.com. Contact Mr. Love and BC.
