Or this?
This?
What about this?
I'm thinking about the protest music of this generation. I'm thinking about how strong these messages are, how smart and polished they are. I'm thinking about white rappers and black rappers and old Irishmen and all the rest.
This President has inspired an epic resistance. The last Republican President took us into a war that killed 100,000 people in and from a distant land, on false pretense no less. Americans cared more about the 5,000 dead Americans, (even though they returned in boxes under press blackout.) He did not even account for the trillions of dollars spent making war in the national budget. George W Bush is in fact a war criminal.
However, Donald Trump's Presidency inspires a much deeper sense of dissatisfaction and disgust. By comparison his actions thus far in terms of Presidential actions, the business of being President, have not been resulted in so much death or destroyed our economy. Yes, he has set a path to destroy the cabinet departments from within and in that regard he is a Republican dream come true. Yes, he gave large tax breaks to corporations who in turn showered the money on their CEO's and shareholders while giving a pittance to the stakeholders knowing and trusting they would interpret the largess as a sure sign this is the best of all possible worlds. Yes, the economy appears to be healthy.
Obama bit the bullet and accounted for the previous administrations war while also bailing out Wall Street, which had essentially lied and gambled the world economies into unprecedented peril, to the tune of $700 billion. The entire eight years of Obama's Presidency Republicans castigated him as if he caused the mess when in fact he was the adult coming in after the fact and making the hard choices to restore order.
After eight years of Obama acting responsibly, what do we get? Donald Trump. More military spending and a wall. Cabinet heads hell bent on destroying their own departments. An FCC Chairman who is opposed to net neutrality. A Department of Education Secretary who would prefer to hand her budget over to religious schools and all other manner of magnet head start charlatans and snake oil salesman while destroying the notion of public education. The Head of the EPA is positively opposed to the environment and in favor of big business. Mentioning these three of course is shooting fish in a barrel. the sum total of Donald Trump's appointments is equally destructive. Still, it is not 105,000 dead human beings in Iraq. It is not the world economy on the brink of collapse.
At my ripe old age these actions look like a cycle to me. We will have Democrats in office soon and they will responsibly go about fixing this mess we have brought on ourselves by making hard choices to fund the commons and so on. The Republicans in turn will blame the Democrats who will then be in office as the corporations cut off bonuses and wages stagnate, (meanwhile shareholders and CEOs continue to prosper-they're immune to virtually any turns in the economy.) Dumb Americans will lap it up and vote Republican at some point thereafter and the cycle continues.
Donald Trump is reviled and not just by Eminem. The ire he draws is certainly related to the policies of destruction he is beholden to. It is more though. Even Americans who are not attuned to the harsh realities of this Presidency are disgusted by Trump's personal nature. He is a bad criminal. He has succeeded in the most temporary manner there is, sucking dollars from fame like a dog at a garden spigot.
Yes, a lot of people like Donald Trump. Bis businessmen and Christians and mean people mostly, but maybe a quarter of Americans actually like him in spite of any sense of decency or decorum. Of course there were those who were opposed to freeing the slaves, those who believed in earnest the women of Salem were witches, those who did not want women to vote and so on.
And yes, the economy is basically good right now. The tax cuts however mean less social safety net, less services, less of the commons. Americans ultimately like those things. We don't like opioid addiction. We don't like rampant homelessness. We don't like people living in their cars and in their RVs. My little town in northeastern Los Angeles county has seen a large increase in homelessness recently. This in part due to the arrival of mass transit, (the gold line made it to Monrovia.) Equally startling and tragic is the number of people I see living in their cars or RV's.
What we don't seem to get as a people, or society, is that in choosing capitalism we choose a competition. Competitions have winners and losers. This means both upward and downward mobility exists. What happens to the losers in our societal competition? Mostly they end up in prisons, or mental health institutions or homeless. The homeless are those who could not compete successfully.
Our society is not completely capitalist however, nor has it ever been. We have always had a blend of socialism mixed in; the commons if you will. Government, prisons, cops, firefighters, national parks, the military, highways, these are just a few of our common endeavors our taxes are used for. As Americans we do not like to see people suffer the indignities of poverty. And so it is when the Republicans get their way and services and commons are cut so that those who would can capitalize, until children are again in the workforce or wages are just so low the masses will no longer tolerate it, when the separation of the classes begins to look like an apartment renter class and an apartment homeowner class, when the homeless themselves rise up, we will vote again for the policies of those services. The travesty of this cycle is that it is often the impoverished who are the true believers in upward mobility. They often believe the empathy of society manifested in the form of social services and such is the cause of their bad fortune, (never even considering the military budget, which if they did consider it they would credit for protecting them from other bogeymen who would stifle their imminent success.) So it is as Trump carries out the plans of the right, of the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, (men who spend billions of dollars to influence public policy so they can wield ever more power,) As the President who is accomplishing this sinister plan at present he is certainly heroic. Even if they mock Trump for all of his foibles in private they also praise their good fortune he was elected, even if the only wealth he cares about is his own.
And so it is in spite of the overtly destructive nature of George W Bush's presidency and the relative prosperity of Americans at present Trump's presidency is in fact far more destructive and vile. His presidency is meant to seal the fate of the lower classes. If Trump is to be impeached or prosecuted it simply cannot happen soon enough. The voice of the artists is the voice of the people and it will only get louder and increasingly pervasive.
