Covidicah

and

The Message of the Miracle of the Mayonnaise Jar

It was the time of Covid, in the year 2020. The land was quiet. Too quiet for some and, yet, too loud for others. The landscapes without people were eerily beautiful, but also apocalyptically depopulated.

For several decades before Covid, the country’s leadership was, shall we say, below average. And even the presidents who showed some real ability to lead were unable to unite us all and often proceeded timidly, when they needed to be brave. But the particular president serving in office at the time of Covid was even unable to surpass the low bar set by his predecessors.

He was a buffoon some said. A fat head, said others. More serious minded folks,called him a white supremacist, or a misogynist, or both. Some who were less serious, or fatalistic about the chances of the country surviving Covid, made fun. His hands, they said, loudly and repeatedly, were very small—baby hands. And he had a little, tiny dick, they would say, though history is mostly agnostic about the size of his penis.

So, okay, then. Enough about that. I just didn’t feel like this would be good, full, truthy story, if I didn’t mention the diverse speculations about the president’s tackle. Little tackle. Tacklette. Whatever.

We can say that then, as now, there were other centers of power, and some of them had more influence than others. There was one center of power that was like a fox ranch, or something like it. The foxes on that ranch were big supporters of the otherwise helpless—did I say, helpless?—I mean, hapless president. The foxes on the ranch were big supporters of the hapless president. Some of the foxes were sleek and blond and talked nonsense, but you wouldn’t have expected foxes to be fountains of wisdom, would you?

Regardless, it does appear that fox babble was a big source of ideas for the hapless president. That was never going to turn out all right and, let me tell you, history shows that under the president’s leadership, shit did hit the fan, the air, the water, everything.

To make matters worse, there was a constitutional assembly, called the House of Elitists (or something—history is vague on the name), which was led by another woodland animal; the morose, turtle-faced Mitch, who had a deep and strategic objection to democratic process and a fondness for incompetent judges. Turtle-faced Mitch, it is reported, ended up in the soup.

It was definitely a no-good, very bad time. In our city, the zip codes that suffered the worst violence, also recorded the most deaths from the virus. The same zip codes also had the largest air-polluting railyards, the highest number of industrial air-polluters, the most kids suffering from asthma, and the fewest number of people with health insurance. The whole country hit the deep do-do lottery jackpot.

Local and regional governments didn’t invest much in public trans, creating vast profit opportunities for private trans. The same ideological indifference to the idea that we could all succeed together that characterized policies that crippled public health and public trans plagued public education. The opportunities for individuals to profit off of the kinds of needs that we now enshrine in our code of human rights (our Code of Human Rights) made a hash of public education. We were throwing away lives and achievements and whole communities of skills and talents with which we could have built (and, eventually, would build) the Beloved Community.

As if all of this was not bad enough, the earth itself was heating up—I mean like in giant, biblical degrees. And the policy response to this—well, let’s say it wasn’t science-based.

People hoarded, which is to say, they bought extra amounts of things they didn’t need. Especially in the early phase of the pandemic. This was no surprise. In an environment when many people didn’t have work, and many jobs were dangerous, and the good things in life seemed so unachievable, people were scared.

They were afraid to get sick and suffer and, maybe, die. So they took care of themselves by buying more than they needed of things that were available and seemed affordable. Now, we know, of course, that they didn’t need so much stuff. And they bought some of that stuff in quantities that were sufficient to ensure that their families wouldn’t run out of whatever they hoarded for generations.

That’s why we own so many pencils. Somebody, your great-grandfather, maybe, hoarded pencils. They were cheap, I’m sure; available, I’m certain; and he liked pencils, I’m guessing; so, our family is never, ever going to run out of pencils.

That’s what happened down the block with Ms. Alice’s family, I think. Someone thought that having a lot of plastic forks around would be a comfort—I know, go figure—so now she owns thousands of plastic forks. That’s why she’s always going, “Here. Have some plastic forks.”

Some people even hoarded toilet paper, which they used for wiping their butts. A lot, I guess. That bit of hoarding makes a little more sense because, as we know, everybody poops.

Unfortunately, the toilet paper hoarding apparently caused widespread inconvenience, or emotional distress, maybe. Eventually, people realized that there was enough for everybody and started sharing their toilet paper. That’s when people started saying that, “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus,” which eventually became the third and, I think, most important meaning of our greeting, “Salaam.”

At any rate, people started mobilizing. That’s what happens when people start realizing that change is in the air, and that they have the power to shape that change. They mobilized to kick the scary and notorious Orangish Man out of the People’s House.

And though we seem to have lost interest in the exact identity of the Orangish Man, we do know that they voted him out of office. And after he was out of the way, they started voting pretty much nonstop for things they did want. They voted for universal health care. And for decent housing for all. And for good, green jobs.

They voted and voted and voted. They voted money out of voting. Boy, did they vote. They voted good public schools until public schools were where everyone wanted to go to school. That project took a long time. A lot of voting.

Eventually, they were all, hell, let’s just vote socialism and be done with it. But here’s the thing. You’re never done with it. Democracy is not perfectible. Notwithstanding the attitude of the old-school, uber-powerful, lifetime-appointed judges favored by the Orangish Man and Turtle-faced Mitch, democracy changes as the people will it to change.

And how do they express their will? They vote and vote and vote. They even voted that forever after we, all of us, must vote to heal the least of us, heal the body politic, heal the air and water, heal the earth, our mother, heal our mother who was here before Covid and has been here ever since and will always be here and will always love us. We vote to love our mother back.

So that’s what this holiday is really about, to remind us to vote to love the earth back. That’s why at this holiday celebration, around this community table, we tell about the Covid miracle of the mayonnaise jar that held only enough mayonnaise for a single turkey sandwich, but miraculously lasted to make enough turkey sandwiches with fresh lettuce and mayo to feed every hungry person that lived here before the Beloved Community and would live on to be a part of that new understanding of ourselves.

So, there’s the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise. And the Message of the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise is this: We heal what we can and deepen our understanding of that which we cannot heal. And we pledge to each other that down the road we will try to heal that which we cannot heal now.

And now we close this Covid night with the recitation of the Four Covidicah statements:

 “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus.

“The social surplus belongs to the people.

“The anti-social surplus was the way of things before Covid.

“The surplus is the path to and the purpose of solidarity.”

Amen

Strategically speaking, it's time to rise up

The Left ought to aspire to relevance

With some awareness of the grandiosity of my ambition, I recently assigned myself the task of describing the way the U.S. Left has wandered through the wilderness these last 40 years or so and what, exactly, the Left ought to start doing about it besides acknowledging its own existence and finding ways to build unity. One critical requirement for writing about such topics is a bit of clarity about where the country is now, how it got that way, and what writers on the Left think about such things.

In "Strategic Thinking on the U.S. Six Party System," socialist and veteran peace and justice activist Carl Davidson puts it this way:

"Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, particularly gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture, of all the political and economic forces involved (Earth) and what they are thinking, about themselves and others, at any given time (Heaven). It's not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed and revised," Davidson wrote.

Davidson's "Heaven and Earth" metaphor might seem gimmicky, but it grows out of the very useful understanding that strategic thinking requires the broadest possible look at the variables affecting the universe under consideration and that universe is always changing. Davidson's piece wants to take a hard look at that part of the universe conventionally understood as the two-party system; in reality, he argues, "that we live under a six-party system with two labels [Democrat and Republican]."

In the process, Davidson also notes that many would argue "...that the US has only one party, a capitalist party, with two wings, the bad and the worse."

That is, more or less, the position that Chris Hedges, a journalist widely respected by many on the Left, takes in "Our Invisible Revolution." Hedges doesn't even deign to mention Republicans in his piece, but Democrats of all descriptions "are effective masks for corporate power," he writes.

I prefer Davidson's take: The notion that we are actually living under one-party rule "is reductionist to a fault," he writes, "and doesn't tell you much other than that we live in a capitalist society, which is rather trivial." Of course, the point isn't trivial, at all, but Davidson is focussed on describing a complex reality here that includes the Tea Party, the Republican Multinationalists, the Blue Dogs, the 'Third Way' New Democrats, the Old New Dealers and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (and the Progressive Democrats of America). The last grouping, PDA/Congressional Progressive Caucus, lies at the heart of Davidson's assertion that it is reductionist and misleading to claim that Republicans and Democrats are simply two wings of one party fronting for and managing on behalf of corporations and capitalism.

The PDA/CPC's "...policy views are Keynesian and, in some cases, social-democratic as well. Its recent 'Back-to-Work Budget' [would serve] as an excellent economic platform for a popular front against finance capital...it has opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," Davidson writes, using such slogans as "'Healthcare Not Warfare' and 'Windmills Not Weapons'." That congressional progressives haven't gotten very far with their agenda doesn't seem to be a function of their alleged role in one-party rule, but the result of political weakness on the Left, the absence of a movement of any sort that could force Congress to take such policy positions seriously.

And speaking of "a movement of any sort," a recent Nation article, by Greg Kaufmann warned about impending food stamp cuts that would adversely affect 48 million people receiving benefits. The piece, titled "This Week in Poverty: No Time to Wait on a Movement," argued that "...when it comes to responding to the struggles of the more than one in three Americans who are living below twice the poverty line—on less than about $36,600 annually for a family of three—we prefer to look the other way."

This is true, of course, but the problem here is that there wasn't anything that the Left could do about the cuts when Congress passed them and the President agreed to them, and there wasn't anything anybody could do to stop them last week, either. On Friday, the budgeted cuts became reality in the lives of millions of households around the country. But as a title for the piece, "No time to wait for a movement" is misleading. We can't just "wait" for a movement to come along, of course, but until we build one, we're going to see more safety net cuts, more government shutdowns and more healthcare debacles.

Hedges seems to feel that a movement is already on the way. "...once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt [against the corporate state] is coming." Hedges has more to say, but most of it raises a single set of questions in my head: How does he know this? And, where is the evidence?

As a journalist, Hedges has great skill, courage and instincts for the kind of news that the rest of us need to hear and read. But when he's merely sharing his opinion, he's rather like a lot of the rest of us on the Left, full of stories about how we're gathering strength, about how we stopped an American attack on Syria, about how we prevented the appointment of Larry Summers as head of the Fed, or about how Occupy was "...ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state."

But if anybody or anything stopped a Summers appointment, it was the Congressional Progressive Caucus' ability to swing at least a little weight against a possible Obama appointment before it became a certainty. There was a popular outcry on the Left against armed intervention in Syria, to be sure, but ordinary Republican resistance to anything Obama, as we have witnessed repeatedly for the last five years, would have been (and was) more than sufficient to force Obama into a different course of action. Further, if taking away Occupy's tents was, overall, about what it took to crush that movement, then, yes, the corporate state behaved ruthlessly.

It might be past time for a movement, but it ain't gonna happen in advance of a strategy to build it. At the end of his piece, Carl Davidson quotes Alvin Toffler: "If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."

For a long time now, what has happened to the Left in the U.S. has been part of someone else's strategy.