So... yesterday I was the MC for an "Impeach Trump" rally. I'm liking the political MC thing, but it is weird. My natural inclination is to whip up the crowd myself, and to do it in an unexpected way, buy in these situations my real job is to just keep things moving along. I'm enough of a playwright that I'm always looking for an angle.
The event is about impeaching Trump? So I want to talk about all the other people who need to be impeached. You want to talk about our corporate president? Well I'm going to talk about the corporatization of our government that has been going on for the past decades, about how Trump is just a symptom of a for-profit mindset that has infected every American when they think about government.
As much as some people want every speaker and every moment to be the repetition of a demand for the impeachment of Trump, I just find that too self-congratulatory, redundant, and boring. Impeaching our current Capo di Capitalism will not overturn the system that oppresses and robs so many. What this current cycle should make clear is that the political system itself needs to be cleansed of a for-profit mentality that is antithetical to any government Of, By, and For the People.
So, ya know, that's what I expanded upon between each speaker. And of course I got complaints from people who wanted us to only talk about IMPEACHMENT!
I was once asked to speak at a rally about war. This was back when Trump was first elected, and because he is such a "I love war" kinda guy there was understandable fear that he'd tuck his bone spurs under a desk and send the peons off to get killed to break his boredom. So okay. But I spent about 30 seconds talking about the war they wanted to hear about, and the next 15 minutes talking about George Orwell's theory that every war is actually a war against one's own citizens; War as a means too destroy all the labor and materiel that could make the lives of the citizens comfortable enough that they might have the time to question whether or not they even need a ruling elite. War is a way to utterly destroy that opportunity for revolutionary thought.
This was not what I was supposed to be talking about, and in that situation I don't think the Labor Council was exactly happy with me.
Ah, well. I gotta be me... contrary as that may be.
