How listening for two hours to the lying rants of someone whose whole shtick is to divide, mock & spew hate and fear can, by any definition at all, be a "BALM" I have exactly no idea. It time some MAGAs kind of took a cold shower, peeled off, deprogrammed. America needs you back.
@JonathanSimon14 1/ There is an illness at the core of modern American culture I don't know what caused it (I have theories but not for now & here) but I think Trumpish Tea Party bellicosity is the blossom on the noxious weed that drives it (I'm making a metaphor salad) #RepublicansAreTheProblem
@JonathanSimon14 2/ The weed's been growing for a long long time and like any plant has parts to be seen and roots underground. There's a Palin leaf, an opioid cluster, Ailes has a whole branch and so on. The roots go deep and are as complicated as the foliage above.
@JonathanSimon14 3/ One passes thru Farm Aid and plunges to the Joads and the Dust-bowl before a big root branches East all the way to the poor white (often immigrant) sharecroppers of the Jim Crow South. They were the victims of the wealthy landowners and merchants of the day - ex slavers mostly
@JonathanSimon14 4/ It's worth noting that the elite of the South used that desperation and pain to slowly grind the ex-slaves back into abject submission but the white farming poor never got their slice of the pie... they stayed poor and angry Another roots starts at the Union halls
@JonathanSimon14 5/ conceding more with each contract, shrinking, ever shrinking. It goes thru the raucous crowd beating on a Japanese import with sledgehammers and meets Springsteen at The River The Guthrie of his day, he asks "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true Or is it something worse"
@JonathanSimon14 6/ Springsteen 09/22/84 "There's something really dangerous happening to us out there. We're slowly getting split up into two different Americas. Things are gettin' taken away from people that need them and given to people that don't need them, & there's a promise getting broken"
@JonathanSimon14 7/ The bank scandal root starts with the Great Recession bends to the S&L Scandal, the Mutual Fund Scandal each "the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich" in US history, each a tale of millions of lost louses, savings, dreams. retirements and more Yes, the weed is old
@JonathanSimon14 8/ The weed is complex with many roots but it wasn't always this big. Sure, there are places where it has always loomed large like Appalachia, the poor South, urban ghettos and so on, but in recent decades it has grown to cast shade on the Rust Belt, the Northeast, the West
@JonathanSimon14 9/ The whole damn country is now shaded by this awful weed and we wonder "How did it get so big, so nasty, so fast?" It's been being watered and fed by one amoral implacable sole interest force... Unregulated capitalism, the owner class, and its captive government.
@JonathanSimon14 10/ Taken as one, the group is sharklike. It has one simple goal... Audrey like, it cries Feeed Mee and the only food it needs is profits Since the 70s the cords that used to restrain it have been untied, anti-trust, media-ownership, equal time, campaign reform, etc, all undone
@JonathanSimon14 11/ End With every Chamber of Commerce member, all the press, all their tame pols, all their influencers & their media - all pressing their pedals all the way to the floor, the country is in a frenzy, a battered & distracted wounded beast, it is roaring and someone will get hurt
