Phil Rockstroh, who nails the current U.S. zeitgeist:
"The pathological soil of US society is going to continue to seed fascists in the form of the clutches of bloated cowards strutting the streets and public spaces (and shopping for Cheetos and Mountain Dew at Stop-And-Go outlets) clad in camouflage and brandishing automatic weapons and the election of Trump-like demagogues.
The nation refuses to face both its history of and present day manifestations of White supremacy. The nation was formed and expanded by a settler-colonialist culture wherein acts of violence, to the point of genocide, were rewarded with social advancement and lasting advantage. Of course, members of the majority culture, by atavistic habit, will reach for deadly weaponry when they feel threatened when minority people push back against the US societal structure — an architecture that is forged and is dependant on racism and its inherent police state violence against minority members and the White underclass. Moreover, members of the latter haves been induced, by the operatives of the capitalist overclass, to displace their angst and rage on minorities struggling for self-determination.
Rightwing demagogues understand the situation and exploit it while liberals fuel the fires of rage by their classism-based condescension. The combined phenomena of societal/cultural/government corruption and concomitant, internal rot and class/racial polarity are tearing the nation apart. From all indications, it appears there is no turning the situation around. The tatters that will remain after the coming and exponentially increasing upheaval will have to be woven into a novel cultural fabric.
As a general rule, when things come undone, the dynamic unfolds, at first, slowly — then all at once. Then unfolds the long slog involved with the reinvention of both an individual and collective humanity. Novel forms arrive from reconfigurations of the rubble of collapsed systems.
And no, Biden — like Trump, the very embodiment of the failing order — does not possess the will nor capacity to bring remedy to the situation. The hideous system produced Biden. He is an agent of change only insofar as he, again like Trump, is a two-legged, half-senile catalyst of the system’s irrevocable undoing."
