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Op-Ed

‘Shine, Perishing Republic’

August 14, 2020

So it’s Kamala Harris who will help Joe Biden rescue our perishing republic from the La Brea Tar Pits into which we have fallen. That’s what the United States of America has become these three years and counting: a mess of dismembered bones, swirling around in sticky gunk.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

So it’s Kamala Harris who will help Joe Biden rescue our perishing republic from the La Brea Tar Pits into which we have fallen. The tar pits are naturally occurring asphalt seeps in Los Angeles, into which prehistoric animals fell and died. Their dismembered bones have been swirling around in tar for 1,000 centuries.

That’s what the United States of America has become these three years past and counting: a mess of dismembered bones, swirling around in sticky gunk.

Of all the self-demeaning venom spit from the White House after Joe Biden chose Senator Harris as his running mate, perhaps the most revealing was Eric Trump’s marking as “favorite” a tweet that called Harris’ nomination a “whorendous pick.”

What a class act: Racism, sexism, insult and degradation all at once — without the brains or balls to come up with it himself. (Are you happy now, Dad? Are you proud of me?)

And Pa Trump? Aside from calling Senator Harris “nasty” (four times), he told us that a Biden-Harris administration would ruin the suburbs (where white people live), because “low income housing [read: Blacks] would invade their neighborhood … in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge!”

No surprise that Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is Black, and that the pustulent prez couldn’t even spell his name right. Well, it is a tough one, for a semiliterate pus sac of prejudices: four letters, two syllables …

His Pustulence proceeded to call Senator Harris the “most liberal” member of the Senate, which is ridiculous. She was district attorney of San Francisco for eight years and attorney general of California for six years before she was elected to the U.S. Senate. 

As a prosecutor for 14 years, she sent hundreds of people to jail — many of whom were Black. This already has inspired attacks upon her from the holier-than-thou, so-called left.

So how is that Chancrous Bobblehead in the White House going to attack her?

With Mike Pence — a professional groveler?

And if that suppurating sore in the White House cites the only exciting moment in Senator Harris’ failed campaign for the presidential nomination this year, when she busted Biden for opposing school busing when Kamala was a little girl, Biden’s easy answer is: “I was wrong. But I can admit I was wrong and join with my critic to make a better America.”

There is no answer to that, from the Oozing Bacterial administration — where criticism of the mildest kind is lashed with insults from the Chancre in Chief.

Of course His Pustulence would respond to the first major-party nomination to the vice presidency of a Black, first-generation American woman with racist and sexist insults. It’s because he doesn’t understand anything else: not history, nor foreign relations; the Constitution, or how to run a business without going bankrupt; nor the least elements of common decency. All he knows is how to stiff people who worked for him, then preen his greasy tattered feathers and squawk about himself.

I had a parrot once, who loved me, and I loved him. Every other day I’d spray him with mist out of a squeeze bottle, and he’d spread his wings and flap them, then preen himself all over — neck to toenails — with his beak. It bought me an hour of rest until he’d fly onto my shoulder and start preening me …

Dudes and dudettes — my fellow Americans: This election is not about Us v. Them.

It’s about us.

Are we a republic, or a congeries of competing battlegrounds, all of them seeking to gain absolute control?

Are what’s left of the bones of our republic just bubbling around in tar — sticky junk?

Looks like it to me.

I prefer to think of us as a republic, though I don’t know if that’s true anymore.

I blame the Republican Party for this.

I’m not going to make that argument here. But it’s obvious.

Robinson Jeffers wrote, in “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1925):

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity

        heavily thickening to empire,

“And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops

        And sighs out, and the mass hardens,

“I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make

fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. …

“But for my children, I would have them keep their

        Distance from the thickening center; corruption

“Never has been compulsory, and when the cities lie at the

        Monster’s feet there are left the mountains.”

And the mountains, as Fernand Braudel reminds us, in “Capitalism and Civilization,” are where the trampled citizens retreat, to regather, and emerge again.

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