A Call to Arms: Friends, voters, countrymen

For voters who believed electing a rich man would refill emptied savings accounts.

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SOURCENationofChange

[inspired by Antony’s famous funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar]

Friends, voters, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Trump, hardly praise him.
The evil yahoos do is limitless —
While goodness, like truth, has robust borders.
So where are we today? The noble Barr
Says Trump has shredded no institutions;
That would qualify as a grievous fault.
And is not Barr an honorable man?
So are all the king’s men honorable.
This mouthpiece of Trump obscures collusion
For that would indeed be a grievous fault;
Neither conspiracy nor obstruction —
Those crimes define grievous faults galore.
Thus Barr, one dispenser of high justice,
Declares his boss innocent, free and clear, 
As pure and white-washed as the driven snow.
For otherwise drastic impeachment looms
And that most unjustified consequence
Would fire up zealots bloated with kool-aid.
Impeachment makes Barr co-conspirator —
Unthinkable for an honorable man.

Bereft of real-world deliverables,
What options has Trump except battle royals —
And ceaselessly bellow his martyrdom?
Does not election award high honor?
Otherwise, how could the good people,
Or that weird College, lift winners on high?
What trance hides chronic rampages here and far
That abuse workers with trickle-down scams,
Oppressing the folks least able to pay —
Yes, old, white aggrieved males gulped the bait. 
Who else imagined a coarse billionaire
As messiah who “alone can fix everything”?
Playing to wounded, lower wage workers,
Full of opiates rather than health care,
Trump promised the moon to millions in woe
And withheld so much to those with so little.
Millions, backbones of small-town enclaves,
Who fought our imperial wars and built
Communal infrastructure now in ruins.
Are not fellow citizens honorable,
Trusted to know well their self-interest,
What leaders will best serve their common needs?
So many righteous, well-intended marks
Practicing their sacred right to be wrong.
What willful, arrogant billionaire
Ever got rich by sharing unspent wealth —
Or dishing out spoils to suckered clans?

Oh Trumpers, you believed a rich con man
Would refill your emptied savings accounts.
Behold harsh payoffs for buying snake oil:
Victorious as career Walmart greeters,
Securing crumbs from unfeeling tycoons.
So clear we now see how walking wounded
Embraced Trump’s soul-sucking status quo.
But sticking with deceit three years hence —
The sole glory there is sustained misery.
Like Barr, Trumpers hold honor high,
Despite costs to daily life beyond the pale. 
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And folks have lost their reason. What next?

FALL FUNDRAISER

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For over a decade, Robert S. Becker's independent, rebel-rousing essays on politics and culture analyze overall trends, history, implications, messaging and frameworks. He has been published widely, aside from Nation of Change and RSN, with extensive credits from OpEdNews (as senior editor), Alternet, Salon, Truthdig, Smirking Chimp, Dandelion Salad, Beyond Chron, and the SF Chronicle. Educated at Rutgers College, N.J. (B.A. English) and U.C. Berkeley (Ph.D. English), Becker left university teaching (Northwestern, then U. Chicago) for business, founding SOTA Industries, a top American high end audio company he ran from '80 to '92. From '92-02, he was an anti-gravel mining activist while doing marketing, business and writing consulting. Since then, he seeks out insight, even wit in the shadows, without ideology or righteousness across the current mayhem of American politics.

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