If some enemy of the United States like, say, Vladimir Putin had come to me ten years ago and asked how to go about destroying America as a global power, I might have laughed and said, “Make Donald Trump the president.” If he’d asked the same about the United Kingdom, my answer could well have been Boris Johnson. It turns out, he didn’t need my advice.
With Johnson on the cusp of becoming the next prime minister of the U.K., the farce is almost complete. Trump and Johnson really are very similar in so many respects, and no self-respecting organization would look to them for leadership even when in the direst need. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we don’t have any self-respect left.
Johnson did run into an unexpected hurdle today, though. According to the Guardian, the police were called to his residence to look into a domestic dispute he was having with his partner Carrie Symonds:
A neighbour told the Guardian they heard a woman screaming followed by “slamming and banging”. At one point Symonds could be heard telling Johnson to “get off me” and “get out of my flat”.
The neighbour said that after becoming concerned they knocked on the door but received no response. “I [was] hoping that someone would answer the door and say ‘We’re okay’. I knocked three times and no one came to the door.”
The neighbour decided to call 999. Two police cars and a van arrived within minutes, shortly after midnight, but left after receiving reassurances from both the individuals in the flat that they were safe.
That’s not the kind of publicity Johnson needs right now, but at least it’s not as bad as the latest rape allegations against Trump which are credibly described in New York magazine:
The cover story New York published today details an encounter the writer E. Jean Carroll had over two decades ago with Donald J. Trump, in which the then–real-estate mogul allegedly assaulted her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan.
The encounter is believable on every level because of the way Ms. Carroll recalls it, because it’s consistent with more than a dozen other allegations against the president, and because it jibes with his self-professed mode of operation for making unwanted advances on women.
Trump: You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Bush: Whatever you want.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
That’s effectively what Trump is alleged to have done to Carroll.
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle.
It’s get more graphic and disturbing from there.
These men, Trump and Johnson, aren’t just colossal morons and dangerous demagogues. They’re also cruel and abusive men. Why they’ve risen to the top of the our two countries is a mystery to me. How did we get this sick?
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Why have these two men risen to the top? “Bread and circuses” is one of the reasons.
“How did we get this sick?”
I think almost all societies have been as sick as ours is, but they started to treat themselves for it 50+ years ago using Democratic Socialism, or whatever term you want to use for taking care of the entire population, because it was the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, US society has just been burying all of its disease symptoms underneath abstract rhetoric of American Exceptionalism…which is how most Empires end up crumbling from the inside while still trying to project outwards. Our society buried its symptoms because the people in charge wanted more money that would have otherwise went towards treating the causes of our sick society.
Now we’re at the point where our society is septic, and we are no longer able to deny it credibly. Some politicians deny it, but have to constantly lie without relenting in order to keep its chosen electorate lying to themselves that their society isn’t circling the drain. And a lot of the politicians who actually tell us the truth are demonized because they aren’t selling snake-oil cures, but a regimen of hard work that is required to save our society.
Britain kicked off the capitalist revolution and empire in the late 18th Century and then in the next 100 years was overtaken by the exploitative doctrine’s most devoted disciple, Gilded Age America. Ultimately capitalism lauds and rewards the most cruel and ruthless, and thus it must be kept watchfully in check by a just society, which was something Keynes figured out in the first decades of the 20th Century (i.e. democratic socialism).
Over the past 50 years, the reactionary American “conservative” movement destroyed the hard-won idea that plutocrats and their capitalism must be heavily regulated, and returned us to the era of (low tax) laissez faire, where the resulting billionaire families were worshiped as capitalism’s Gods on Earth. Plutocrats are perfectly willing to deal with unqualified reactionary fools as their stooges in autocratic misrule (see Mussolini and Hitler), so Trumper (a supposed billionaire and obvious stooge) and Johnson (a simple reactionary stooge) become the totems of the failed era of democratic collapse.
On the point of violence toward women, it is perfectly natural for reactionary males like Trumper and Johnson to blithely engage in sexual violence and domestic abuse, because such violence is viewed as the “right” of the male in a medieval hierarchical society—which is the is most cherished goal of all these “conservative” men and (unfortunately) many of the idiot women who seek to latch themselves onto these moral low grades.
As we now enter the era of man-made climate and the irreversible end of the only climate human civilization has ever known, the dead end of extractive capitalism has reached its inevitable conclusion. Presumably some type of male-dominated Dark Ages society will devolve, to the huzzahs of today’s reactionaries.
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