(This piece was originally published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser under the title “John Trudell and Me”)
John Trudell made an appearance at the Caspar Community Center a few weeks ago. I have listened to his provocative CD DNA a number of times, and I have admired him in the movies Thunderheart, Smoke Signals, and most recently as Coyote in Dreamkeeper. His impromptu 90-minute talk reiterated much of what he says on DNA, with one fabulous (for me) digression about Obama. This digression stated almost word-for-word what I have been saying to people for some months now, but coming from Trudell such intuitive analysis was greeted with applause rather than the snorts of derision that tend to greet my elucidations of “what’s really going on here.”
Trudell is big on thinking. As he says again and again, when we’re believing, we’re not thinking. When we limit ourselves to believing something, we close our minds to the possibility that the thing we believe in may have changed or disappeared. Trudell is skeptical that we have a democracy in America. If we believe we have a democracy, we will be closed to the possibility that we never had a democracy or that our democracy may be swiftly turning into something else.
In his digression about Obama, Trudell asked us to consider the possibility that Obama was installed as president by the ruling elite to further their ongoing agenda, just as Bill Clinton was crowned in order to complete the stalled works of his predecessor George the First. These works included the passage of NAFTA, the dismantling of Welfare and other aspects of the social safety net, the hastening of deregulation (of everything), and the demolition of unions. Trudell did not say what he thought Obama was installed to do, but he asked us to think of the economic meltdown and the government response to it as part of a larger plan, a plan that is working precisely as it is intended to work. He does not think the meltdown and the ensuing breakdown of our local and state governments are merely the repercussions of “some bankers making mistakes.” He thinks the overlords have installed Obama to oversee the next steps of their plan, though he did not specify what he thought those steps might be.
So I’ve been thinking about everything with new zeal, feeling validated by Trudell, and this morning my wife Marcia said something that crystallized much of what I’ve been thinking about. We were talking about the seemingly moronic proposal by the governator and his Republican minions to close our state parks. Such a plan makes no economic sense in the short or long term. It will hurt low-income vacationers. It will hurt local economies nurtured by state park use. And, Marcia said, it sets the stage for the privatization of the parks.
Think. All those wonderful state parks left unattended. Here come the armies of the newly impoverished to squat therein. What can be done? Call out the gendarmes. No gendarmes available due to budget cuts? Call out the National Guard and then privatize the parks. Lease them for, oh, a hundred years to private companies who will manage/protect them with private security forces. Entry fees will have to be exclusively high and those entering cannot be on any list of any sort of suspect. And then to pay for all this (to protect the park for future generations, of course) luxury homes must be built, tennis courts and a golf courses installed, with chic bistros riverside and lakeside and oceanside so the campers/residents won’t have to travel beyond the walls to dine. There will, of course, be high walls encircling the enclaves, er, parks. Far fetched?
Not at all. Consider the latest leaks reported in the mass media. It now appears Obama won’t have enough support in Congress, even among Democrats (imagine that?) to include a public option in any healthcare proposal. In which case, the healthcare situation will worsen and create more recruits for the army of the poor, as will the firing of eighteen thousand California public school teachers, a firing that will leave most inner city schools in California understaffed and essentially unmanageable, except as de facto jails. Oh, yes, and Obama himself has just announced he wants to cut over 300 billion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, thus impoverishing many thousands more.
Meanwhile, there’s no budget shortfall for the military. In the absence of decent paying jobs, military recruiters are swamped with volunteers and we are swiftly growing a huge and robust military for wars abroad and quelling unrest at home.
As Trudell said several times during his talk, “I’m crazy, okay. I’m just talking. I don’t know anything. I’m just saying…think.”
School just got out for the summer, the kids shouting their goodbyes from the school bus trundling through Mendocino. And a year from now, school, what’s left of it, will be getting out again. If you believe the economy and our schools will be better than they are now because the experts on NPR and in the mainstream media say the economy seems to be stabilizing and a recovery is on the way, you are, to quote John Trudell, not thinking.