Bertold Brecht's heroine in his 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, connived to keep the Thirty Years War going in the 17th century because selling food to the soldiers was the way she would survive. In the end Mother Courage loses her three children to the war. Comparisons are inviting. During the twelve year Iraq War voluntary enlistment has been a route for underemployed or jobless younger Americans to access paid work and some training for the future. It cost 4,424 of them their lives but made lots of money for the top one percent.
King Hussein of Jordan, a U. S. ally claims we are already engaged in WW III and Pope Francis has said as much. Evidence is not hard to find: indeterminate borders, war crimes on a growing scale every day in Aleppo with hospitals destroyed and hundreds of children slaughtered; elsewhere scores upon scores of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and soldiers are killed by terrorist attacks when they are not being killed by U. S. friendly fire. Add the fleeing refugees sometimes drowning at sea and women who survive landing in Italy but are then forced into prostitution.
These tragic events are not being discussed at all by the presidential candidates preoccupied as they are with their personal futures. The drowning refugees make a mockery of such politics.
The real possibility of a Trump presidency cannot be dismissed in spite of recent polls because it is tangibly growing from a different set of priorities that Americans barely understand; priorities with affinities to the sharp razor wire wall Hungary has spread across its Southern border to block further refugee entrance. It includes affinities with the defeat last week of Columbia's peace agreement with the FARC guerilla faction which pollsters didn't predict; and involves affinities with Brexit, Vladimir Putin, and the peril Germany's Angela Merkel faces as the nationalist Right grows across most of Europe.
Economic stress is now so wide and deep in the U. S. that tactile connection with it has become intangible to the thriving tech and engineering castes from Silicon Valley to Mumbai. Political writer, Thomas Frank, [Listen Liberal (2016), What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005)], points in scalding terms to what he calls the Democrats who have become"limousine liberals," live among the top 10 percent, claiming for themselves the honorific of being concerned about the bottom 90 percent. It is their party not their candidate that blocked Bernie Sanders campaign.
Frank cites the Democratic Leadership Council which "thanks to the deeds of Bill Clinton" now knows how to reduce inequality
Fiscal discipline, global competition, flexible labor markets, transparent capital markets, deregulated business, rapid communications, and limited government interference in markets.
This essentially Wall Street agenda intends to drown out the reality of Mike Griffin, a union activist at Caterpillar in Decatur, Iowa-where jobs have been disappearing. Franks tells what's really happening. "His workers, if they still work
understand that they're working two or three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can't own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they're working at Hardee's or McDonalds to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that."
Hence the turn to Trump and to the political Right even with little evidence that Trump will serve their self-interests.
While the bad news is that it is possible to attend religious services in many traditions and places these days and never hear a word or a prayer about saving people from inequality or ending the horrible warfare in Syria and Iraq, there is this good news: that perhaps helped by the prospect of dismal election outcomes a new day of radical, drastic social justice reform is tangible and dawning. A modern rising never before seen in U. S. history is happening. Traditionally inactive Christians, evangelical Christians, radical Black Christians, White intellectuals, Black Lives Matter, radical Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, GLBTQ and Women's rights groups and many others are beginning to express solidarity and participate with each other along with secular groups who are organizing new labor movements across the country; environmentalists blocking fossil fuels, and the list goes on.
Mother Courage could grow out of fashion.
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