Hi, Yves. Some readers have been upset by the constant criticism in the Team Dem comments section. I encourage you to read this post and think about it. The Party has treated workers, trade unionists, the poor and otherwise, as recipients of cheap slogans and crumbs. The Party has increasingly become a vehicle for the needs and wants of the so-called professional-managerial class, and everyone below them should know they deserve their privileged status and put up with it.
Mind you, Common Dreams is a staunchly left-leaning publication, and author Phil Wilson has a long history of writing for progressive publications. It takes a lot of abuse to make a former follower react in the way they would betray a lover or break away from a cult.
Phil Wilson is a former mental health worker who has contributed to publications such as Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire and The Hampshire Gazette. Phil’s writing appears regularly in Nobody’s Voice. Originally published below: Common Dreams
In the madness and refracted light of distorted and broken images, Kamala Harris can be part of an administration that sends billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces while also mourning the innocent people trapped under the rubble of Gaza.
I painfully endured the better part of three nights of the non-reality TV show called the 2024 Democratic National Convention. I saw almost everything. The jugglers, the acrobats, the gladiators, the cockfights, and the dancers. I sat mesmerized by the endless bounty of bread and circuses, the lions and the Christians, the tightrope walkers and the card-playing. I may have been the only person on earth who watched nearly the entire presentation.
Not all of it. Walking the dog, checking the baseball score, daydreaming and thinking strange thoughts. Emily’s PoemsDickinson— but I found myself returning to the Democratic National Convention, just as musicians would return to certain themes and motifs, and what a magnificent, and damn good show it was!
It was like an extended commercial, an infomercial, but it also felt like a funeral, with people staggering onto the stage to share their memories, stripped of any objective content. At funerals, no one wants to hear about DUI arrests or domestic violence. All we want to hear is the good news about the person who climbed a tree and rescued a kitten.
Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris She was sent off in style to a land beyond the sun. We left knowing that she was, at worst, a saintly woman, at best, a daughter of God sent to save us. We heard more than just praise: blessings, confessions, tears, and wonder, interspersed with songs by Stevie Wonder, Pink, John Legend, and Sheila E!. But what does it mean to end a funeral with the dead person telling their story in the flesh? And what a story she told, born into Calcutta-like poverty in a Berkeley apartment.
I know a thing or two about West Berkeley’s rough streets, having lived on Channing Way between Bonner and Browning for over a decade myself. You can now buy a home in the Berkeley Plains for just under $1 million, if you’re lucky. But I lived there in the ’80s and ’90s, and by the time my wife and I moved to the West Coast, Kamala was long gone.
The Berkeley apartment (the one I experienced 40 years ago) doesn’t fit into the usual system of class divisions. Berkeley existed just outside the normal boundaries of our four-dimensional universe. In some weird overlapping glitch of the matrix, Berkeley exhibited working-class, middle-class, and upper-middle-class characteristics all at once. On our block lived two doctors, a factory manager, a kindergarten teacher, a single grandmother on welfare, and a drug den owner. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Kamala tried to pretend that she was once a lower-middle-class kid oppressed by the disrespect she received from her parents, two immigrants of color.
Kamala surprised us all with her class-bending, casting a family led by two PhD academics as the embodiment of disadvantage. The rhetoric at the Democratic National Convention that day was never about class, only about race and immigration status. We were expected to be shocked that Kamala and her sister Maya, against all odds, excelled in school and went on to a top law school.
Of course, this is an American myth that has corrupted our national soul: we live in a meritocratic democracy, where every level of status reflects a pure work ethic, and where privilege has no bearing on outcomes (i.e. Donald Trump I would have a lot more respect for Kamala Harris if she had looked the nation in the eye and said, “I want to be a part of this.
I was born wealthy, you probably weren’t. My parents each had PhDs and held high positions in research and academia. Your parents probably don’t even have a bachelor’s degree. Still, I try to imagine what it would be like to grow up in a home without a single book, despite being encouraged every day as a child to study hard and succeed, and try to put myself in the shoes of someone who is forced to navigate school life without any guidance or expectations. Of course, that’s not easy for me, because my parents were so overeducated that it was almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to feel like an outsider at school. But I’ll try my best to get myself out of my comfort zone and put on your Nikes from five years ago.
In the mirror of the American political theater, we need to know that every moment of the election show is a pile of bullshit. In the insane, refracted light of distorted and broken images, Kamala Harris can be part of an administration that sends billions of dollars of weapons to the Israeli Defense Forces and at the same time mourn the deaths of tens of thousands (according to hundreds of thousands). LancetThe number of innocent people trapped under the rubble in Gaza is as high as a million. In the physically impossible dream world of the Democratic National Convention fantasy, Kamala Harris can say in a single paragraph that she will feed the military-industrial complex like a zookeeper putting buckets of meat into the cage of a starving tiger, while also fighting climate change.
While trapeze artists, ballet dancers and magicians mesmerized us with their virtuosity, two things were conspicuously missing from the Democratic National Convention: a voice for the Palestinian suffering and Kamala’s father. I assumed economics professor Donald Harris must have been long dead, but a Wikipedia search revealed that he still lives on earth. Is Dr. Harris Kamala’s Mary Trump, an alienated family member who keeps family secrets? If so, he testifies curiously in silence, never openly compelling himself to reveal his obscure secrets like Dr. Mary Trump does. Does his absence speak of something sinister? Mary Trump spills the beans without hesitation and with little enlightenment. She tells us nothing beyond what we already know.
But what is even more worrying is that the failure of the directors and producers of the Democratic National Convention to produce a single sympathetic Palestinian voice in a circus that promises to lift all of humanity out of the mire of despondency and fear cannot be dismissed as an oversight. Somehow, the Democratic Party brass, who must have agonized over meticulously about a Palestinian speaker willing to utter reassuring words to dispel our doubts about Kamala Harris’ role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, could come up with none.
In a mass manipulation case that would have cost as much as a nuclear delivery system, the DNC failed to clear a very low bar that it absolutely had to clear as millions waited in vain to hear that Kamala Harris would break with President Joe Biden over the issue of supplying bombs to continue the genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians.
The great fear of many potential voters is that behind the opaque curtain, the Wizard of Oz is wearing a Donald Trump puppet in one hand and a Kamala Harris puppet in the other. A vote for either side is a vote for more wars, more police spending, a military budget big enough to attack every habitable planet within a hundred light years, and burning every last drop of fossil fuel buried in the geosphere. Every vote is a vote for Oz.
There’s another theory I can’t completely dismiss: that Donald Trump is a monster who turns run-of-the-mill mass murderers into Fred Rogers. Maybe he can choose between being cruel, ruthless, and destructive, and something far worse. Trump is creepy in a way that Kamala Harris isn’t, but maybe that’s just my paranoid distortion. I worry about falling into a pond and coming face to face with a saltwater crocodile sunbathing in an orange wig.
Noam Chomsky Calling Trump the most dangerous man in the history of mankind, or whatever. How long will right-wing Democrats put off the problem under the guise of Franklin Roosevelt, knowing that they will get no universal health care, no safety net, no endless wars and carbon emissions? Most people I know will agree with Chomsky and vote for Harris. I don’t blame them. Trump scares most people, but they’re smart.
We live in a time of contradictory truths. Donald Trump is a corrupt psychopath with no more inner complexity than a bullet. Kamala Harris can mimic human emotion, but I don’t believe she truly feels pain.
Maybe it’s a matter of accepting that you have no choice. Welcome to America.
