WOKE or ASLEEP; The Choice is Yours

The opposite of WOKE is ASLEEP. If you are not WOKE, you are asleep. So, either wake up and smell the fertilizer the GOP is spreading or go back to bed and sleep until Big Business Capitalists (BBC) take over the country. Members of the BBC group like Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy are trying to lull America to sleep while they try to enrich themselves even further at your expense. They abhor any capitalistic endeavor that seeks to acknowledge a need for social conscience. Their new mantra is to make WOKE a four-letter word of derision. Those who are WOKE are EVIL; lather, rinse, and repeat.

I can just hear the revised Edwin Starr chanted lyrics now:

WOKE, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing, uhh

WOKE, huh, yeah

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing

The GOP’s patron saint, Ronald Reagan, wanted to allow the Big Business Capitalists to get and keep all of the money they could by cutting into the existing social safety nets of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, free public schools, etc., by removing regulations that cost businesses money, and by lowering taxes on the upper echelons. Anything that benefitted the middle and lower classes of society was a tax on the wealthy. He sold this idea as his “trickle down” philosophy where the rich get even richer, and whatever financial scraps are left over will trickle down on the middle class, drip by drip. Forget the poor.

Yes, the mantra has shifted from trying to Make America Great to STOP WOKE. In this case, WOKE is a catch-all for anything that limits big business from having a free and unregulated reign to make as much money as possible. Some of that will be at risk for the health and safety of their workers, customers, and the general population. Taxes rob big-business of some of their profits so any of those monies destined for healthcare, education, housing, food security, clean water, and clean energy are evil.

The real opposite of WOKE is a condition of closed-mindedness and ignorance. The anti-WOKE position is generally associated with a not-so-hidden agenda of racism and religious piety. In the culture wars WOKE is seen through the lens of intolerance of all views that are not your own, a preference for an authoritarian rule to enforce the “correct” views, an abhorrence of anything deemed “un-Christian,” and a xenophobic denial of previous racial discrimination.

The term WOKE appeals to a groupthink mentality and polarizes people over issues both real and imagined. It is a manufactured hysteria. The mentally frail among us love such buzzwords as they require no explanation, no sound argument, no solutions, and no rationale. It is the schoolyard bully calling someone a name with the inference that it is a derogatory term.

The G.O.A.T. bully of all time, is Donald Trump, winner of the Tamerlane* the Great Trophy. Trump has used terms like Sleepy Joe, Jeff Flakey, Lyin’ Ted, Meatball Ron, Low Energy Jeb, Pocahontas, Gretchen Half-Whitmer, Little Marco, Joe Munchkin, Nasty Kamala, Sleepy Ben Carson, Shifty Schiff, Coco Chow, Low-polling Liz, Crooked Hillary, and (Leakin’, Lyin’, Sanctimonious, Shady, Slimeball, Slippery) James Comey. I guess he really didn’t like Comey. Perhaps this simple-minded approach is part of his appeal to the simple-minded among us.

Conservative “wokeness” is not new. In Great Britain, it can be traced back to 1846 and the Sugar Duties Act that followed the emancipation of Jamaican slaves. Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House which invented the “woke” stereotype where misguided philanthropists caused the formerly enslaved to not diligently continue to work the plantations but decided instead to reunite with their families. To Dickens, this would be inconceivable as only white Britains could have such feelings of kinship. While Dickens often championed the poor in his writings, he had no such feelings for the racially inferior “others.” To Dickens, Africans, Indians, and the Irish were racially inferior people.

Fast forward from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and we see what conservative wokeness did for Great Britain with Brexit. It has so far been a financial and social disaster. Will Americans fall for this new racial epithet of wokeness to their detriment? Will the GOP continue to excite their base with this MAGA buzzword replacement? Will WOKE Mountain be the hill upon which the new GOP fights and dies? The 2024 elections will tell. If you can find a Republican politician who hasn’t used the term WOKE as a scare tactic your research skills are to be commended because I can’t find one.

Earlier in this post, I referenced a person named Ramaswamy. If you are unfamiliar with him (as was I) perhaps I should introduce you. He is Vivek Ramaswamy who is a favorite of Tucker Carlson (what does that tell you) and he has been dubbed by the New Yorker as the “CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.” He hopes to be the new Trump, an outsider from politics, who can promote his vision for an American national identity.

He has written a book, Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He is against stakeholder capitalism defined as a system where corporations serve the interests of customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and local communities. Now, how horrible is that? Ramaswamy’s view would emphasize profits at all costs and social responsibility be damned. This sounds like something the GOP would support. He is still an outsider, but so was Trump.

The recent Norfolk Southern Railway accident in East Palestine, Ohio, might be an example of where under-regulated capitalism has been at the expense of the under-protected citizenry. Should the wheel bearings of cars carrying toxic chemicals be better maintained? Would more heat sensors have allowed the conductors time to stop the train before the derailment? Were the heat sensors they had even operational? Would the braking system regulations that were enacted by Obama and removed by Trump make a difference?

Was setting the vinyl chloride cargo on fire the best way to mitigate the risks caused by the derailment, or was it just the cheapest way of disposing of a problem? Will there be a meaningful investigation or will this just be a matter of paying some settlement to the “inconvenienced” townspeople whose homes have less value than before, whose future health may be at risk, and who have suffered from a massive loss of community?

Norfolk Southern is one of the largest in North America with operating profits, according to Alan Shaw their chief executive, “at the best it’s been in more than two years.” Profits are up and accidents have risen in each of the last four years. They have lobbied against new rules that would make trains safer. They are running longer and heavier trains, have cut their workforces by nearly a third, and closed railyards where cars are inspected and maintained. This may account for the $18 billion shareholders earned through stock buybacks and dividends over the last five years.

The answers to these questions and others have no place in an Anti-Woke America. The new GOP boogeyman lurks and must be exorcised. Time to break out the torches and pitchforks to eliminate anything that stands in the way of profits. Then on the other hand, if you don’t want to be WOKE, perhaps it is time for that nap.

* Tamerlane, a successor to Genghis Khan, used misinformation and name-calling as part of his methodology, along with mass slaughter, torture, and other fun pastimes.

Keep Them Barefoot and Pregnant

So goes the chauvinistic phrase from the early 20^th century about keeping women at home and curbing the threat of divorce.  This was apparently taken from a British proverb that held, “Keep her well-shagged and poorly shod and she’ll not wander far.”  Aside from being tasteless, it has at its roots a desire for dominance by taking away choice.  A newer push from the political establishment seems to be to keep them ignorant and proud of their fate. 

How else do we explain the unbridled support of our underclasses for billionaires who flaunt the need for government austerity by cutting social programs?  Those programs often provide relief for hard-working families in times of crisis.  When man-made or natural disasters strike, it will generally be the less financially fortunate among us who suffer the greatest.  Cuts in the areas of medicine, housing, and food welfare are threatened while tax breaks that more widely help the wealthy, are promoted.

We regularly see some of our poorest states reelect leaders who wrap themselves in the flag, yell about the need to protect their right to carry weapons of war, and raise the specter of fear of disease and oppression from immigrants.  I haven’t mentioned a particular political party, but I think we can guess. 

Economic stagnation is the latest form of "barefoot and pregnant."  The 10 states with the lowest per capita income levels are Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, and North Carolina.  Donald Trump carried all 10 of these states in 2016.  Then, in the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump carried all 10 states again.  After 4 years of Trump’s Republican leadership, they were still the poorest folks in the nation.  In 2022, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Kentucky all got Democratic governors, but they are still majority Republican at lower levels of government.

The flip side of this is that nine of the top ten states with the highest per capita incomes voted Democratic in the presidential elections of 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.  The exception to this was Alaska, a traditionally red state.

Republican leaders hold an American flag, a Bible, or an AR-15 in one hand leaving the other hand free to pick the pockets of their less fortunate constituents.  Like any good magician, they distract with the pretty baubles while working their true magic of self-enrichment.  They fool the poor and reward the wealthy.  The poor continue to vote for them and the wealthy contribute a portion of their winnings back to the “dealer.” 

My favorite quote from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show was from her boss, Lou Grant, who explained his success in management saying, “I know how to delegate blame.”  The GOP uses this tactic by blaming liberals, immigrants, people of color, Jews, and certain select (liberal) wealthy individuals, for housing shortages, lackluster job opportunities, inflation, poor education, and inadequate healthcare. 

The GOP will say they are protecting your freedoms while taking them away.  Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis wants to micromanage the school system.  He has gone so far as to emulate Adolf Hitler who banned all books that were deemed “un-German” on cultural, religious, or political grounds.  In 1933 Nazi Germany, Hitler publicly burned such offensive books.  DeSantis just adopts a vague policy whereby he outlaws certain books and then threatens school administrators and teachers with loss of employment, fines, or even jail time if he finds books they didn’t remove from libraries that offend him. 

The Florida school employees are among the worst paid in the nation and now they must filter through millions of books to find any that would make white heterosexual students feel uncomfortable.  >In Florida, the terms are CRT and WOKE.  Any books that reference social conscience in terms of race (Critical Race Theory) or hint at systemic injustices that may exist in our society, must be removed.  DeSantis wants to end anti-white bigotry, at least that’s the red meat he throws out to his audience.  He wants to outdo the efforts begun by the team of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and their America First Legal group.  Just keep people ignorant of history and distract white voters with another shiny bauble.  DeSantis can then advance to the final round in the American political game show, aka his run for the presidency.