In Spite of it All, 2016 Was a Year to Celebrate

At the end of 2015, looking ahead to what 2016 would bring, I found myself saying to one and all, "2016 is going to be ugly."  It did not disappoint.  Ugly it indeed turned out to be.  Far uglier than most mortal imaginations could have envisioned.
       Yet, looking back, one event offered a truly pleasant surprise.  After endless, unrelenting efforts by the mind watchers of the American people to bury socialism, communism, or even New Deal ideology, trillions spent on propaganda and fear mongering that continues to this day, millions of Americans--unfazed, heads unbowed, with perfect equanimity--voted for an old Jewish guy from Brooklyn who moved to the woods of Vermont and came to represent the state in the U.S. Senate proclaiming himself to be--are you sitting down?--a socialist and an advocate for a political revolution in America.
       All those dollars and frenzied exhortations expended against socialism, yet millions of Americans blithely went to their polling places and pulled a lever (or whatever one does nowadays) hoping to propel Senator Bernie Sanders into the White House.  And his wasn't just empty rhetoric. He proposed taxing the rich, free college tuition, a national health service and a lot more that Americans had long been told were policies that were the work of the devil.  Even the demise of the Soviet Union, the turn to cowboy capitalism in China, and the moribund condition of holdouts like Cuba and North Korea seemed--shockingly--not to strangle the last breath out of those who stubbornly held onto their hopes for social justice, basic fairness and equality, and a smidge of dignity, who still clung to the quaint notion that schools and health care and transportation and infrastructure--let alone stuff like prisons and our water should be seen as public trusts and not opportune targets for the profit of a few.
       As the votes rolled in, in state after state, for a while we dared to hope that a miracle was about to occur.  That, in spite of what soon became clear was a concerted effort by mainstream politicians and media to disappear Bernie.  The Democratic Party had taken all necessary measures to assure a victory for Hillary Clinton.  She was the default candidate of the DNC.  The first primaries were scheduled to take place in the deep South and the political map of her early support replicated the borders of the old Confederacy.  She was armed with delegates committed to her in advance of the primaries. The mainstream press and its editorial writers considered her victory a foregone conclusion.  As Bernie's campaign drew tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters while Hillary often spoke to nearly empty auditoriums, the press--beginning with the nation's supposed "newspaper of record"--did its best to bury the Bernie phenomenon.  Largely, it disappeared Bernie from its pages, with the Times instead daily publishing a bar graph indicating odds in excess of 90% that Hillary would be our next president.
     With endless ink and electrons spewing forth to present careful analysis of the campaigns in the mainstream media, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon went without any real acknowledgement of what it actually meant about the political landscape in the United States.  Even if they did not talk a great deal about it, they knew, and it made them visibly nervous.  In spite of their best efforts, not just a handful of quaint leftists, but millions who had proven immune to the Kool-Aid were out there.
     In the end, 2016 left me proud to be an American--and, dare I say it, with just a little bit of hope.

What Bernie and the Donald Have in Common

What Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common is that neither man is entirely owned by the plutocrats who populate the oligarchy that runs the United States.  Bernie has long been an outlier, an "announced socialist" who was tolerated because he was quaint and not really in a position to affect policy from his Senate seat except through whatever moral suasion he could achieve, and in the Senate, that ain't much.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, while himself a plutocrat, is a bit like the wildcat oil drillers of 1940s Hollywood epics.  He is a capitalist, but not really a member of the club. For many New Yorkers, he is most memorable for expressing frustration with how long it was taking the city fathers to renovate the ice-skating rink in Central Park.  He was asked to take over the task, and then got it done in record time.  Here was a guy who could cut through the red tape.  He knew the cast of characters, knew how to get around them and get a job done.  His television persona, ("You're fired!"), enhanced his image as a man who could spot talent and had no patience for time-servers.  In this, he was reminiscent of Robert Moses, another man who took no prisoners and could get a project pushed through (with an occasional exception like the highway that would have run through lower Manhattan had it not been for the organizational skills of Jane Jacobs).  In the course of one interview, Moses stated that people bring him all sorts of wonderful ideas all the time.  He wasn't interested in your fancy ideas ("a dime a dozen"); he wanted to know what you could do.
       If their public personas bear any relation to who these men really are, neither man takes orders from the permanent government types, the Bilderberg crowd and their network of associates who, while they have as their first priority the preservation of their wealth and prerogatives, like to believe that they know what is best for the U.S.--and the rest of the world, too, of course.  Bill and Hillary, on the other hand, have never shown any reluctance to take orders from their betters.  Whether in Little Rock, New Haven, Oxford or Washington, Bill and Hillary have everywhere courted the bitch goddess success with a fervor that would have impressed even their fictional model, Jay Gatsby.  Had Jeb Bush snuck in as the Republican candidate, there would have been no problem at all for our rulers since, going back to Grandpa Prescott Bush, the Bush family has been part of the permanent government.
       It would be nigh impossible to count how many times the mainstream media expressed surprise that the 2016 election would be anything other than a race between the two representatives of the oligarchs, Clinton and Bush.  It is possible that they miscalculated.  Bush was quickly dispatched from the Republican roster of candidates and, in the Democratic Party, enough Americans appeared to have lost confidence in the oligarchy that they were willing to give their enthusiastic support to a Jewish Senator from Vermont who is a socialist and calls for a political revolution in the country. Not since the days of  Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas had the country seen a prominent socialist run for the White House.  All that right wing effort to bury socialist ideology so deep that it could never be resurrected appeared to have gone for naught.
      Most Americans anticipated that the 2016 presidential campaign would get ugly; no one anticipated just what a circus would ensue.  There is now the very real possibility that both parties will see brokered conventions, a spectacle we have not been treated to in a long time.  No doubt there will be more fun and games to follow.