Peas In A Pod That Continue To Rot

The Summer of ‘68, the Summer of 2023

 “An Aristocracy of talent…superficially an attractive idea, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on heredity perhaps–turns out to be a contradiction in terms…The talented retain many of the vices of the aristocracy without its virtues.”

-Christopher Lasch

Two months and two days after Martin Luther King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy suffered the same fate.  When MLK was shot I was in eastern St. Louis and a riot was pursuing.  When Bobby died, and I am going to call him Bobby, he was always Bobby to us in the 60’s, and it distinguishes from his addled mind son, I was back in Indiana.  I had come home from a day’s work in the foundry and had discovered on the radio that Bobby had won the California primary and clinched the Democratic nomination for president.  I had never been overly fond of his brother,  But I’d been reading Bobby’s books and for some reason I had become enthralled with him. I guess you could say Bobby was my first political mentor.   In fact on that day I had checked out The Pursuit of Justice.  I had read it a couple of years earlier but I thought to read it again that evening. After finishing the book, I dozed off for a few hours and woke, as I generally did, around seven a.m.  I worked second shift, so I had five hours before I went to work.  I usually put on a stack of LP”s  and would write for several hours.  My first book i am your Christ had come out but not made the bookstores and had even been rejected by our local library for being too obscene when I had attempted to donate a copy.  I mean Tropic of Cancer had been declared unobscene four years prior but was still not available (maybe in bigger cities it might have been) and I had had to mail order my copy in a plain brown paper wrapped unmarked package.  So I’m sure my book was obscene to small town Indiana.  But I was working on my second novel (that would take thirteen years to complete).  I chose the records to stack and wandered into the kitchen.  I rented a room in the house of my foreman and he was sitting at the kitchen table.  “They shot another Kennedy,” he said.  “Huh?” “Bobby was shot this morning.”  We went into his living room and he turned on his black and white TV. Color TV’s had existed for a decade but I had still never seen one.  And so that day there was no music, no writing.no normalcy once again.  Why had the country gone so mad?  I tell you I was more angry than sad.  When Martin had died I had cried out all of my tears, but when Bobby was shot, there was no grief left in me.  Only anger.  Too much anger, too much goddamned anger!!  If I knew who to destroy, who to take vengeance upon, I might have done so.  But when I returned from work that day, a day I don’t think I functioned too well, I was lethargic and unable to have the energy I usually exhibited, running my molds to the shifting lines, running back to my station, running to other stations to help carry other’s molds if they were falling behind. I was just so angry.  I wanted to smash in heads.  But whose heads?  Not my co-workers.  Black men all except for me and one other, and they were still angry over Martin’s death.  1968, remembered as the summer of love?  Or the summer America fell apart?  The summer that ended King’s dream.  The summer of futility.  The summer that destroyed once and for all the American dream.  It has never recuperated in the eyes of the working class.

But  when I got home that midnight, after showering off the foundry and becoming a white man again, I picked up my handwritten crib of Martin’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, and I reread the library copy of The Pursuit of Justice yet again. I dozed off finally an hour before I had to leave for work that day.  But dammit I was renewed.  I had to make sure the dream came true—the dream of justice.  I never cared about the middle class life but I cared for the justness to create it.  I would shortly throw myself into campaigning for Humphrey.  Like my fellow workers, I saw nothing of substance in the student preferred candidate, Eugene McCarthy.  I didn’t know a lot about him, but he came off as aloof and as unconcerned  about the plight of workers.  I wrote letters to magazines and newspapers, I contributed money to the Humphrey campaign for the first and only time in my life.  I drove to Chicago on weekends and tried to shout down McCarthy supporters.  

But why did Bobby mean so much to me?  Unlike many of the youthful protesters, only interested in Bobby’s anti-war campaign, well, I didn’t think they knew much about him.  His fight against corruption that’s what attracted me.  His obsession with honesty in business–but also in unions.  His demand that public servants serve the public and not themselves.  His demand that business corruption be stamped out and that excessive profits be eliminated.  His concept that business would profit more when workers profited more.  His stance against communism as a government but not as an ideology which he did not see threatening to America (by the 60’s).  His concepts that what was needed for America to thrive was to lock up the business cheats with prison time  for individuals, and not by fining the corporation.  His arguments that we were responsible for each other and not only for ourselves.  As attorney general he brought more anti-trust suits since Howard Taft.  (Taft would make something of a pro-business shift as Chief Justice). Bobby also took a strong stance during his tenure as AG  against corporate mergers and trying to dig out businesses who colluded with each other to fix the supply and price of goods to eliminate competition.

Just a few lines from Pursuit of Justice:

 “Father made sure we saw the difference between rich and poor and recognize the irresponsibility as use of power.”  He says that though he recognized they had a privileged life, they were frequently taken to the lower class areas of New York to see the poorer neighborhoods and told that such neighborhoods and the injustices experienced by those less fortunate was the responsibility of those who had enough to insure everyone had enough. “The cause of our current discontent,,,poverty of goods and poverty of understanding.”

“Separate institutions sharing power. Systems of corrupt power eventually fall.” On why our institutions work, or the way they should work. “Men who rise to power must believe in Madison’s diversity of men.” “Let us not suppose we can freeze society in the present or into a generation ago.”

“Antitrust laws are pro business.” Because without combatting the few having too much power  creates a society where none but those few have power. “Do not grant immunities to individuals because business pays fine.  Businessmen who cheat are as “evil” as racketeers and should be prosecuted.”

“Extremists deny the rights to others they proclaim for themselves.” That to move against others denying their rights to proclaim one’s own rights, i.e. if you deny the right to others, yet want to have the right yourself, if men want to deny women the right to autonomy but proclaim their right to rule women, if you want to deny equal access to a business for LBGQT but have the right to access any business you want to participate in yourself, if you want end affirmative action and still proclaim your right to access universities. Finally, and most importantly, “National action  is not enough because the law is not enough. The Right defined by law is not enough”

Bobby Kennedy is as relevant today, I believe, as he was in 1968.  So to complete what Christopher Lasch stated in Revolt of the Elites that we quoted at the top of this article  “An Aristocracy of talent…superficially an attractive idea, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on heredity perhaps–turns out to be a contradiction in terms…The talented retain many of the vices of the aristocracy without its virtues…the state can no longer contain ethnic conflicts, nor on the other hand, can it contain the forces leading to globalization..Those who count membership in the new aristocracy tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with international markets…It is questionable whether they think of themselves as Americans at all… Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world, not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.”

So the very idea that Bobby was telling us this  was the danger of the elite when he wrote Pursuit of Justice in 1965 is thrown into our faces today by Lasch.  It is not really about how much anyone has, it is about how much power over anyone has.  It is not about what one owns but whether one gives what he has or takes what he has.  Microsoft was a useful and valuable gift to people but it has been used to take as much as possible from people.  How do we view this?  That they have a right to take as much as they can from others, that they have a right to control access to their invention?  Well then fine.  Let them keep it.  If they are going to make me dependent on them, if they are going to demand my allegiance to them, then the gift takes away more that it has given me.  And while Bill Gates cannot (probably) be camped with the Peter Theils, Harlan Crows (didn’t even know who he was until we all found out about his personal shoe shine boy on the supreme court), the Koch Brothers, etc., what exactly do they do for us but try to continue to persuade us they are more valuable to us and that we have absolutely no value to them.  Of course they see them above us as long as they can buy our minds by making useful tools into necessary toys.  Don’t get too smart on the computer–let us decide what you watch next, let us numb your minds with computer written essays  and answers, let us wear down your physical strength with games, let us choose friends for you. 

And so they bankroll candidates with their fortunes who will do their bidding and encourage antagonisms and hatreds and fears that express their own fear that those they are taking from might begin to challenge their methods of maintaining their control.  And of course that fits nicely into their attempt to numb minds by turning politics into a cultic experience not about fulfilling personal needs but about obedience to the cult.  It is easy to accomplish when people have already been split into meaningless political alliances that no one can possibly agree with all of their positions.  But there was a time in my memory when democrats could be racists from the south and unionists from the north, when republicans could support the social welfare of individuals and businesses.  There was a time in my memory that the distinctions between the two clubs were the individuals and not a particular club ideology.  But the most absurd statement I continue to hear is we are free because we have two parties to give people a choice.  What if neither A nor B is satisfactory as nearly half of Americans now feel, but the parties themselves game not only who gets money to campaign but ofttimes who has access to being on the ballot; and if someone sneaks in that is not a member of the two clubs they game the “voter” once again by confusing him with the idea that only the democrat or republican can have a chance to win.  

So where do half of the voters go to vote for C?  They could, if there were a C, but C is gamed against and they vote for A or B but want neither.What the people want is the end of the political clubs.  But one of the clubs, we are told, is now controlled by a cult.  Of course that was inevitable.  Didn’t our very first president warn us that eventually the clubs would become more important than the individuals and would prevent us from succeeding in our “democratic experience”. Didn’t our sixteenth tell us a nation cannot stand divided against itself?  Didn’t Lyndon Johnson tell us if we didn’t end our tomfoolery of segregation and the poverty of people that becomes both the poverty  of mind created by a poverty of goods.

But don’t we have more goods than we ever had?  So that can’t create a poverty of mind. But do we have goods we own or goods that own us?  And if the goods own us, are our minds not impoverished?

And if our minds are impoverished are we flourishing in our democracy or becoming obsessed with our goods and our lacks.  And if we are obsessed with having more goods and fewer lacks, are we not ripe to be diverted by our own fears that those who have the most have been transporting into us.  And if we are fearful, who are we fearful of?  Are we fearful of those who own the goods that make us dependent on them or are we fearful of those who might want what we are competing for?  Of course the goods we have are seen to be given and we are confused into thinking those who are attempting to take what we have are not those who have taken away our ability to resist the offerings that we create and then pay them  to have and then become obsessed to keep?  The black person (as a general rule, unless he becomes a shoe shine boy for the elite instead of growing into a man) is not the enemy of white person, but the white person is often deluded into thinking the black person is the enemy of the white man.  

There is something circulated on the internet that blacks commit most crimes against whites.  Someone even posted this to me as being truthful because he saw it on Reuters.  Actually, I told him, finish the article.  After posting under the refrain: currently circulating on the internet, paragraph 2 states “FACT CHECK :FALSE: Whites commit almost three times as many crimes  against blacks as blacks commit against whites.”

So Bobby was right, the law itself is not justice.  The law cannot give us a Right.  Only when we  abandon our fears can we give ourselves  the rights we wish to have.  The law can give or take rights. There are no more ghosts of the unknown.  We know that now.  But the fear of the ghost of loss still overpowers us and prevents our  becoming unsubservient.  I will not be subservient to google spell check and I will say unsubservient no matter how many times spell check tells me to become fearful of creating my own words. I could say non-subservient but that is not my meaning, I definitely mean to undue my subservience.  

The elite amongst are the most subservient to their own fears and no one is more a caricature of the wannabe elite, than Donald Trump.  But he has no understanding of the role of the elite as unmartyred.  He cannot represent himself  as a non-taker  but he can tell everyone who feels they have been taken, that he can give them what they lack if they allow him to take more of what they have, he can take more of what others perceive the elite has.  A little bit like Ronald Reagan, but presented as a martyr for the masses.  And the cult is born for those who still see ghosts at their doorstep. 

I, who have nothing, fears nothing, I, who has something, fears anyone else having as much as I have.  Fear of something is ripe for distrusting minds shaped by political clubs to become a political  cult.   And a cult is always the means of the one who has had himself ripped into mental confusion  to become confined into the chains of complete control.  And so the republican base, as you call them, yes, they favor autocracy because they have completely lost their autonomy.  Yes, they will look at no facts.  Yes, they will not care if Donald Trump is confined.  

But before Donald Trump, the stability of survival was stolen from them by the instability of the unfulfilled promises that America never actually delivered to them.  Those promises remain potentialities, but unfortunately evaporate entirely if one’s mind becomes cleared from recognition of the potentialities.  So let us now pray.  To Jesus, to L. Ron Hubbard, to Jim Jones, David Koresh, et. al.,  or to Donald Trump.

Or let us realize the potentialities.

https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+kennedy+the+pursuit+of+justice+internet+archive&rlz=1CAPOUW_enUS1072&oq=robert+kennedy+the+pursuit+of+justice&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l2j69i61j69i60.23822j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

https://archive.org/details/revoltofelitesbe00lascrich/page/n5/mode/2up