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In 1922 Maxfield Parrish produced a cover for Life magazine which showed a knavish character taking the letters L and E off of the title “LIFE” which then left “IF” as the title. The illustration was a visual representation of the sentence, “He is a rogue indeed who robs life of its ends and fosters doubt.”

I recalled the above image as I was pondering the idea that proud, selfish pillaging seems to now be openly celebrated as the chief virtue of those who still assume that there is something uniquely exceptional about those who identify as “americans.” This self-serving arrogance is commonly expressed as “american interests” and it is the basis for more and more devious and often vicious attacks on people who live on lands which the “americans” have decided to pillage. These same interests also have a long history of instigating legalized schemes in which the representative “americans” attack “america” in order to reinforce private power for the richest people and those who would join the club. The richest seem to believe that they become richer as they eat their servants futures and far too many of their servants are willing to gamble on the same.

The “If” has become a mainstream imperative. For too many, the ends of life have become the elimination of any ends beyond a sort of survival of the most financially devious. Forget about the illusion of the concept known as america being a democracy of human rights. Human rights are being bipartisanly reduced to a celebration of deception, warmongering, and thievery and the hordes of us schmucks who are merely capable of picking pockets are reduced to unvaccinated sheepdogs for rounding up other schmucks to do the dirtiest work for the most creative deviants of corporate capitalist domination and vanity.

This is the latest version of the same old imperialist predations which have inflated and collapsed for the length of human history. Genghis Khan would approve of the deceitful scheming on Wall Street and power play manipulations from the sadistic palaces on the Potomac (and elsewhere).

The difference with this version of the same old same old is that, for several centuries, the abundant resources of the “americas” has been used as fuel to distract the majority of the religion of capital’s thieves into not seeing that eventually the gas-filled american ballon was going to collapse like all the other empires of thievery and murderous domination. Egalitarian justice, in which all people are held to and guaranteed the protection of the standard of the truth, has little support in the requisite (as they see it) state religion wherein privatized monetary accumulation is the ultimate expression of spiritual devotion. The real motto has become “By Whatever Means Necessary.” The allied capitalist worshippers are also all quite adept at maintaining the illusion that they are the guardians of a variety of nations while they use their various nationalities to forge the same chains of bondage for the benefit of the greediest minorities of their faked affiliations.

The great cynicism of the capitalist religion which drives the current presidential campaign in the faking USA adamantly insists that there are two major political parties therein. The majority of media vainly reinforces the message by distorting the reality of the overwhelming shared agenda into an illusion that there is a great “partisan” divide. All the while, the supposed partisan fronts continue to unify under the rightward push of international aggressions at the cost of truth and any remaining semblance of equal justice for all. Bait and switch.

Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and their allied devotees of privatized, capitalized american exceptionalism have – over the decades of their malfeasance -consistently displayed their chief characteristic to be the ability to use words to mislead and to camouflage their shared disregard for human life and the environment in order to serve the desires of their greediest and most militantly aggressive colleagues. Of course it seems hard to imagine someone greedier than how it is expressed in Trump’s vanity.

The republicans and the democrats need their supporters to be gullibly impassioned. Together they gave us Trump, but he is now too obviously representative of their vain lousiness. There is no misrepresentation they will not use for private, corporately-endowed thievery. They barely tolerate those who will not fall in line and embrace the program of intensely felt desperation and insecurity and they loath anyone who tries to push them to see the growing number of stress-induced cracks and leaks which are the inevitable results of their shared, disturbing, dumbfounding hubris. To say they are pathetic is to be generous.

So, the point of this stupid diatribe is in the question mark of the title above. The political “If” is now a down to a singular unknown.

There has been a good deal of speculating around the belief that Joe Biden is wanting a woman to be his running mate. Many people are fascinated/enthused by the idea that his choice might be a woman of color. This is so reminiscent of the hoopla about Obama – the great faking enabler of predatory obfuscations who rewarded Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry with increased power after they proved their devotion to the same corporate imperialists corruptions as Dick Cheney and his predatory puppet president. The trickle down becomes more and more pumped up and the cracks kept growing. Biden’s “If” has taken on a patina to cover over its corporate certitude before there is a figure upon which it will be applied.

Whoever Biden is allowed to announce as his supposed choice of running mate, there is one person who I believe will be the real measure. If Biden’s history of lousy corporatist fealty and warmongering is allowed to be seen as a likely predictor and if the overarching desire of democratrepublican unification within their cathedral of corporate capital is recognized as his real priority (which it has consistently been), then whoever he has by his side must be compared to Condaleezza Rice.

No matter the words spoken, no matter the skin color, I will find it difficult to not look for Condaleezza Rice’s priorities seeping through the illusion. There is little reason to not suspect that Biden would love to choose Condaleezza Rice herself. They have so much in common, even though she uses much more discipline in her condescension. Perhaps her mimic, Susan Rice, will have to do until their corporate takeover is complete and the various, privately held torches will finally ignite the pyre which will inevitably burn down the rest of the supports within their delusion-filled cathedral of privatized heaven.

It is too late to be careful what you wish for. The ifs, ands, or buts are not of your choosing. In case you haven’t noticed, the democratrepublican religion will only allow your submission to its agenda.

Citations

[1] Against Charity - CounterPunch.org ➤ https://store.counterpunch.org/product/against-charity/[2] The Big Heat - CounterPunch.org ➤ https://store.counterpunch.org/product/the-big-heat/