Dystopia Nears
Image by Jessica Christian.
Who needs dystopian political science fiction in Amerika today? Real time nonfiction feels dystopian enough.
The other morning I was awakened by the sound of Interstate 80, two miles north. The constant dull shrieks of the trucks merges into one never-ending scream of engines and tires.
This death roar can be heard in every corner of this country. The carbon that spews out of these monstrous machines and all the cars, pickup trucks and SUVs between them and the jet planes crisscrossing the sky above is helping turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber.
This – fossil capitalist Ecocide – is the biggest issue of our or any time: there’s no justice, decency, “democracy,” or freedom on a dead planet. Nothing else we care about will matter on an overcooked Earth.
In 2000, the global warming pace indicated that average global surface temperature would hit 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in 2041. The 1.5C mark was just hit last year. It is a benchmark global climate science and policy experts said the world should never pass if humanity hopes to avoid catastrophe.
Just minutes ago, as I was writing this (in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 8th) CNN reported the following:
“Massive wind-driven fires in Los Angeles County have killed at least two people and left others with ‘significant injuries.’ The fires are 0% contained as emergency workers struggle to battle fast-moving blazes. Tens of thousands are under evacuation orders across Los Angeles County. The Eaton Fire ballooned to more than 10,000 acres Tuesday and is now threatening about 13,000 buildings. Meanwhile, the Palisades Fire, which has destroyed 1,000 structures and burned more than 5,000 acres, has been exacerbated by intense winds, which temporarily grounded firefighting aircraft. All fire hydrants temporarily went dry in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood overnight, according to local officials. The LA County Fire Department ‘was prepared for one or two major brush fires, but not four,’ the county’s fire chief said. There is not enough county personnel to handle all the fires, he said.”
It’s at least five dead and five Los Angeles area fires and many more torched acres and structures by now (the morning of Thursday, January 9th). Expect a higher body count as crews sift through the charred ruins across Los Angeles County. CounterPunch’s Joshua Frank three days ago:
“Schools are burning, libraries, restaurants, stores, churches, state parks, mobile homes, apartment complexes, horses, mountain lions. People will die. Lives are being destroyed. As I write in the early morning hours, fire crews aren’t working to stop Malibu from burning. Or the Palisades, Topanga, Pasadena or Altadena. They can’t. There is not time and no way to do so. They are attempting to save lives as the winds howl and embers fly through the canyons. I just got word that an artist friend’s home is on fire, many more are under evacuation orders. Hurricane-level winds of up to 100 mph make the flame’s path almost impossible to predict. I smell smoke in our home, even though we aren’t in a danger zone. A collision of climate factors – a record-hot summer and bone-dry winter are worsening matters. Fire season here typically ends by November, but it’s January, and we’ve had no significant rain in nearly eight months.”
In a frantic rush for safety, local highways and roads became impassable as people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot with suitcases, pets, and small children in their arms. Bulldozers cleared forsaken cars and SUVs so emergency vehicles could pass through.
The photography coming out of the latest epic climate change-fueled fires in California is positively apocalyptic – Hollywood dystopian imagery in real life. Pacific Palisades looks “like Gaza” now.
“Like Gaza,” where escape from a 15-month US- and Israel-inflicted holocaust of genocidal ethnic cleansing has been impossible for at least 50,000 murdered Palestinians, whose survivors are living under conditions the United Nations General Secretary calls “apocalyptic.”
The re-election of the malevolent eco-fascist Donald “Drill, Baby, Drill” Trump suggests that humanity will continue our ever more rapid descent into climate Hell. Trump has promised to dramatically increase U.S. fossil-fuel production and to further weaken federal regulations that limit Greenhouse Gas emissions.
Climate concern played essentially no role in the recent US elections. It ranks quite low in the standard polls on “voter concerns.”
Donald Trump, deranged orange ass-face of Amerikan fascism (the DOAAF) has absurdly blamed fires on California’s mythical “left wing” governor (the centrist Gavin Newsom) water-management policies and forest practices.
In reality, the biggest wildfire explosion in Los Angeles history is the product of a petro-capitalist system whose deadly planet-heating impact he wants to accelerate. The DOAAF wants to burn the world down faster.
That’s Donald Trump for you – the malicious DOAAF who will become the chief executive of the world’s most dangerous and eco-cidal nation again in ten days.
Trump, who mincingly says that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Hamas doesn’t release its last October 7th hostages – as if the US and Israel haven’t already turned Gaza and swaths of Lebanon into a living Hell,
That’s Mein Trumpf, the slithering, women-assaulting hate machine who wears more orange skin spray than a University of Iowa sorority princess and fantasizes about the size of the dead golf star Arnold Parmer’s penis.
That’s Donald “Shoot Clorox” Trump, the mass-murderous pandemo-fascist whose insane “presidential” response to Covid-19 was reasonably described as “pandemicide” by one leading disease expert.
That’s Donald “Shoot Shoplifters” Trump, who as president tried to use the anti-racist George Floyd Rebellion as his Reichstag Fire and who wanted the US military to drown the uprising in blood.
Trump, who as president told US Border Patrol officers he’d pardon them for shooting asylum seekers.
Trump, the adjudicated sex-offender convicted on 34 felony counts for criminally paying off a porn star to keep his affair with her out of the news.
Trump, who as president shocked military officials by pardoning the savage Navy Seals war criminal Eddie Gallagher.
Donald Trump, the virulent white supremacist who as president called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” while bemoaning the lack of immigrants from a blue-eyed Nordic nation.
Trump, the vicious racist who used the final days of his first presidency to kill a handful of federal Death Row inmates.
Trump, who has never admitted that he was wrong to scream publicly for the conviction and execution of the innocent and exonerated Central Park Five (young men falsely charged with the rape and murder of a white woman).
Trump, who applauded the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse for murdering two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Trump, who made a special point of returning to the site of Rittenhouse’s homicides on the last night of the 2020 campaign.
Trump, the malignant authoritarian who sent border agents and other federal paramilitaries to assault and disappear anti-fascist protesters in Portland, Oregon.
Trump, who as president called the federal extra-judicial execution of an anti-fascist (Michael Reinoehl) “retribution.”
Trump, the malicious xenophobe and arch-nativist who on the 2024 campaign trail promised to deploy the US military to conduct “the biggest mass deportation campaign in American history.”
Trump, the neo-Confederate who would make Hitler and Goebbels envious with the potency of his Big Lies including the preposterous and multiply disproven claims that: the 2020 election was stolen; climate change is a Chinese hoax; US higher education is controlled by “radical Left Marxists” (I wish!); Venezuela has sent its violent criminals and insane asylum residents to the US; “open borders” caused the recent terror attack in New Orleans; most US-Americans “wanted the abortion issue sent back to the states” (as occurred with the Trump-crafted Christian Fascist Supreme Court’s 2020 Dobbs ruling); Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio; and… list of Trump’s brazen falsehoods goes on and on and on and on.
Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, who wanted the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys armed with military assault rifles as they led a mass invasion of the US Capitol to try to block the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory on January 6 four years ago.
That’s Donald “Be Wild” Trump, who as president attempted to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy and establish himself as a fascist strongman. As Samantha Goldman reminds us on the latest Refuse Fascism podcast, January 6:
“was an orgy of violence planned by Trump and his closest advisers along with organized white supremacist gangs and militias and kicked off by Trump himself, all with the intention of retaining power, invoking emergency powers, and possibly killing a few of his perceived enemies in the process.”
Trump, about whom Noam Chomsky wrote this in January of 2020:
“Trump is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history… Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is.”
Trump, who on the 2024 campaign trail gave this as one of the reasons he wants to be “dictator for a day”: so he can order the United States to “drill, baby, drill” –– a promise to dramatically escalate oil and gas drilling and fracking even as the world has been pushed into a potentially irreversible climate crisis by the excessive and US-led extraction and burning of fossils fuels.
Trump, the deranged narcissistic maniac who adds epidemiological terrorism to the mix by nominating the bear-dumping anti-vax lunatic Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to head the nation’s department of Health and Human Services and putting up another such maniac (Dr. Jay Bhattacharya) to lead the National Institutes for Health. (How many of us will Trump, Kennedy, and Bhattacharya send to early graves when the next pandemic – the Californias bird flu transitioning to human-on-human transmission? – take off. No wonder some smart US-Americans I know are wondering if Trump is literally trying to kill off millions of his own nation’s citizens.)
That’s Donald “Jews Will be to Blame if I Lose the Election” Trump, who preposterously claims to have been victimized by “the weaponization of the criminal justice system” and who has nominated loyal running dogs who promise to use that system to persecute his political enemies for heads of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Donald “I Only Assault Women I Find Attractive” Trump, the demented maniac who has nominated the Pete Hegseth, an open blood and soil Christian fascist, to head the biggest and most lethal imperial military system in history – a military Hegseth will be only too happy to deploy against Trump’s “enemies within.” A longtime Fatherland News host and full-on white nationalist MAGA fascist without real administrative experience, Hegseth proudly wears large tattoos representing his identity as a Christian Crusader. He has been called out by his own mother for his serial exploitation of women and by former colleagues for alcoholic excess.
Hegseth sees himself and his fellow “true Christians” as enlisted in a holy war against “domestic enemies” he accuses of trying to take down God and country: LGBT folks, non-Christians, leftists, liberals, feminists, and anti-racists. The Christian Fascist theologian atop Hegseth’s religious order (Doug Wilson) preaches that women should have no authority in home or society and says that the years of Black chattel slavery were a time of welcome “harmony between the races.” The religious expert and pastor Brad Oshni recently told “P”BS that “If you want to be the kind of president who uses the Insurrection Act, to call in the military against uprisings in American cities, to use military force against protesters, Hegseth is the man for the job.”
That is very much the kind of president that Trump wants to be.
That’s Trump, the malignant ogre who openly channeled Hitler on the 2024 campaign trail, saying that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” calling centrist capitalist-imperialist Democrats dangerous “Marxists” and “communists,” threatening to arrest US mayors who dare to protect immigrants, promising to “clear the Marxist vermin” out of the country, vowing to deploy the military to crush protests against his rule, threatening to send troops to US cities to “end urban crime in one day,” and calling for the police to be given “one really rough day” to do whatever they want.
Trump, the nonstop hate monger who pledges to pardon hundreds of violent January 6 putschists, who wants to “take back the Panama Canal” and seize Greenland, who talks about annexing Canada, and says he’s going to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” – all this and more during a January 7th press conference in he denounced non-gas heaters for making people “itch.”
Donald “Proud Boys Stand By” Trump, the gaslighting brute to whom the Trump-crafted high Court last summer granted legal immunity from any crimes he has committed or will commit in accord with his real or supposed “official duties” as president (the MAGA Supremes’ “Reichstag Fire ruling”).
Donald “Why Can’t We Shoot Them in the Legs?” Trump, who avoided conviction in the US Senate after his second impeachment by the US House (a conviction that would have banned him from returning to the presidency) because Republican Senators feared violent retribution from his supporters if they had done the right thing.
That’s the DOAAF, who the dismal “in power” Weimar/Vichy Dems couldn’t promptly prosecute for trying to overthrow the republic.
That’s Trump, the neo-Confederate goon whose 2024 Electoral College victory the pathetic Congressional Democrats lamely voted to certify without a single objection (!) despite the clear language of the US Constitution’s post-Civil War 14th Amendment:
“Section 3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Just when exactly did the “Congress by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove” Trump’s “disability” for office in light of his leadership of the January 6 insurrection?
Jefferson Davis, John C Calhoun, Roger Taney, and Robert E Lee are smiling in their graves.
We are not at full dystopia yet. The real dystopia comes if we don’t get past the abject appeasement, capitulation, and “neoliberal” nothingness of the dismal demobilizing Dems and the crippling idiocy of US bourgeois electoral politics and rise up in the millions against this deranged maniac Trump and his fascist and exterminist regime, itself the malevolent spawn of a capitalist-imperialist system that will be the ruin of life on Earth if it is not overthrown and replaced with a revolutionary eco-socialist republic in the very near future.
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