Revolution Blues
by The Alf
"I ain't no rent payer
Ain't no rent payers son
But I can pay a few rents
Till the rent payer comes"
_lightning Hopkins_
Paul Krugman has called to our attention the fact that Mr Trump is an imbecile. Maybe he's Jewish Only a Jew would mention such an obvious fact. But they are used to speaking rationally It has led to no end of problems and misunderstandings.
Anyway Paul was one of the brothers in the wasteland, that is to say, prior to the present Republican madness there was another madness accepted by all and especially by "the serious people." Being an economist (and a good one) Paul sought to refute such crazy ideas as Supply Side economics, ideas we hardly hear about any more, although like states rights they keep rearing their nasty little heads in the most unexpected places.
Having spent more then a few years in the wasteland myself I can testify to his intellectual courage. Most of you don't remember or want to remember the 80's and 90's but it was a lonely time for the liberals.
IN recent years Mr Krugman has narrowed his focus from a more general discussion of economic realities to the specific ways people, often Republicans, seek to subvert, or avoid them. It goes without saying the subversion s are motivated by personal greed however it may be masked in the cloak of altruism.
Needless to say in this case Mr Trump is a sitting duck, ripe for the plucking. I might also add that those of us from the New York City area have been listening to Trump stories for thirty years - and they never have a happy ending. They go like this Trump offers fantastic deal, Trump defaults, Trump settles on fifty cents on a dollar and moves on to the next triumph.
In actuality this is not crooked business - this is the norm. It began with savings and loan where a half billion dollars disappeared, mostly in Texas. It proceeded though the internet crash of 2000 and who can forget the great housing crash of 2008. These were all fortuitous for someone and disasters for the taxpayers.
So why do we single out Trump for appropriation?
The over riding factor in the current day is not that our rulers have suddenly become venal and corrupt- it is that they are running out of ways to do it and are forced into more and more creative accounts
It's only fair to mention that, as far as it goes, I believe Paul when he stresses the soundness of the economy. I'd even go so far as to say that Clinton at least did not destroy the economy. He was not nice to working people, or the poor and he was heartily embraced by his alleged adversaries for this but I can't say because I don't know how much credit or blame he deserves for his time in office.
As I've indicated it is only in the last few years that Paul has directed his fury at the Republican party. If anyone remembers New Gingrich, he was a tremendous force in mobilizing the Democratic opposition to his "Contract with America"
Ir was a clever idea - Send out focus groups to identify hot button issues with the voters, use them to get candidates elected and then forget about them until the next election when the same issues can be reused.
It was clever, but it was not leadership.
And Paul Krugmans complaint is that, in essence, Trump will bankrupt the country and manufacture a few years of prosperity after which the US will have permanently lost it's place as the worlds standard currency. This he sees as a bad thing.
If it sounds like Reaganism redux it is. The not so secret secret is Reagan in his way was a Keynesian, eg will to spent money that isn't physically present. This fact slipped by the recipients of the largess and was gratefully embraced by Wall Street and the south.
They were conservatives but only with other peoples money.
It is here that Mr Krugman and I part company. He supports the ancient regime and I favor the sans culottes. His side will most likely win, possibly in a landslide, unless I miss my guess but in the long run the picture changes more to my viewpoint.
We ought to realize as well that Mr Trump is not the disease - he is a symptom. To repeat he wants to shatter our relations with the rest of the world and drive the economy into the ground causing widespread dislocation and poverty. I suggest it may be better for something like that to happen now, that we still have some assets rather then later.
But let me cut to the chase and bring in the heavy artillery. Prior to the Russian and French revolutions there were periods of a half century when it was obvious the old regime wasn't working and good hearted people voiced dissent in the popular, and sometimes underground press.
They were responded to by equally sincere voices of the reactionaries who defended the monarchy with all the emphasis a censored press could provide. To be honest the forces of repression ebbed and flowed, at times the peasant landowners made out and at times pogroms swept the land. It was at the very least unstable.
Some, like Gogol, became cynical, or like Voltaire, sarcastic, but it is difficult to believe that either of these men of the world deluded themselves as to the direction their nation was heading in. I find myself in a somewhat similar situation. I joke about the mainstream presses unwillingness to allow those voices such as mine exposure, but in reality I do measure my pronouncements lest I step over the imaginary line and for instance provoke some kook into violence. Such things have happened.
Let me then conjure the devil incarnate, V.I.Lenin. From his sinecure in Geneva he dreamt the Russian Revolution and what is more so he dreamt the Communist Revolution, something so extreme it was eventually deemed unworkable.
What concerns us though is how he did it. He did not insist on ideological purity but rather accepted the many voices of dissent in the late nineteenth century. There was a crucial difference however between him and the dissenters. He did not for a moment consider a accommodation with the Czar.
Even had the Czar been of such a mind as to allow something akin to democracy his supporters would never have allowed it. Sir Walter Scott was a favorite author. This was one of the last courts to pay lip service to divine right of ruler ship. The revolution was not a singular event but actually several revolutions. It reminds me of Bob Dylan's comment to the effect that he ran away from home several times and all but the last he was brought back.
Let's remember that revolutionaries are not as a rule nice people. Che' was photogenic and makes a nice tee shirt but he lived as he died. Ergo it was a given that the royal family was doomed.
Lenin's crowd in Switzerland were not political scholars or professors. They were DADA which is to say escapees from the madness of the first world war, a war the to this day defies rational explanation.
And this is a good way to break into what I wish to say. Today we have many who wish to explain the phenomenon of this or that. They tell us people are motivated in order to cause this or that. In Lenins day he called such people "useful idiots" because they believed that the tiger could change it's stripes, that it could grow up with human children and resist the temptation to devour them. Lenin did not believe this.
Anyone who is certain of anything in this world is either a fool or an idiot. It has been suggested (by me) that we best judge a man by what he does not do. Now years latter I modify that to say that we best judge a man by the amount of uncertainty, or doubt, he can bear.
In the light of this it is not difficult to encourage Mr Trump, in the full light of the disaster he will invoke. And it is also easy to encourage the opposition to Mr Trump since it is unable to deal with success.
And somewhere out there the future Lenin is making a deal with the enemy. He's going to get on a train to the Finland station. He will betray the lords of the land of his birth and there is nothing that can be done because that's the way things are done.