Murder has changed the city’s shape—this stone

                                                                 is a child’s head—

and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs.

Each thing recites its exile . . .                a sea

                                              of blood—and what

do you expect on these mornings except their arteries set to sail

into the darkness, into the tidal wave of slaughter?

–Adonis, trans. Khaled Mattawa

***

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover….

–Marge Piercy

Lately, I’ve been struggling with writer’s block. It’s hard to know how to speak, where to begin, how to find the words, the right tone, syntax, form, and genre to wake the sleeping to the news that too few in the U.S. want to confront: that the world is on fire, the country is skittering toward fascism, and we have precious little time to MacGyver a response to the avalanche of crises.

Yes, friends, fall, election season, and climate collapse are upon us, bringing with them both beauty and existential dread, and most certainly tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, landslides, bombs, and weapons enough to decimate universities, schools, and hospitals in Gaza. Weapons enough to burn people alive in war crimes and supremely callous acts of wanton destruction. And, of course, it’s that season to once again try to negotiate with our corporate captors to decide which of their handmaids will sit at the wheel of the global death mobile that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower euphemistically termed the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC in his famous 1961 farewell address.

The American War Machine

With John F. Kennedy’s Camelot myth-making machine poised to sweep its way into the White House, the outgoing president warned of the dangers that the MIC poses to democracy in the U.S. The industries that sprang up alongside the military and were fueled by tax dollars during World War 2 were never “demobilized” but instead continued to grow and expand in influence such that the U.S. spends more on the military “than 144 countries combined,” and more than its top 10 competitors combined, including Russia and China.

Sixty years later, after American-made coups and catastrophes too many to number (though the Howard Zinn co-authored A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation is a great place to start), the MIC has grown exponentially. Its carbon- and mineral-sucking Windigo tentacles now fan out in all directions, across industries, agencies, and institutions. We’re talking everything from fossil fuels, steel, aluminum, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, to food, phones, computers, media, and universities, not to mention some 800 military bases in 80 countries, spewing oil, carbon, and petrochemicals worldwide. For insights into how the U.S. corporate media spin washes U.S. imperialism, check out Norm Solomon’s new book War Made Invisible.

The taxes we’ve paid year after year have helped to build up this Windigo thing, this menace at home and abroad. If you’re unfamiliar with the Doomsday Clock, which is brought to you by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, trust me when I tell you that the clock registering 90 seconds to midnight should definitely be keeping us up at night.

It may not be a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, but It seems Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated both a law of nature and of capital when he warned us in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The daily business of deluging Gaza–not to mention Lebanon now–with massive American-made bone-crunching, child-annihilating bombs, missiles, and drones also has serious climate impacts from which no border walls or iron domes can insulate us. A January 2024 study in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) conservatively estimates the carbon “emissions from the first 60 days of the Israel-Gaza war [as] greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.”

Every major U.S.-supported military assault causes explosive, metastatic growth to industries that excel at fomenting surveillance, death, and destruction. And the cycle of destruction demands ever more extraction, ever more land- and resource-grabs. Colonialism, extraction, and war without end. The American Liturgy of Death.

Knowing this, who doesn’t want to turn up their nose at the electoral shit sandwich we’re being force-fed by our corporate captors? At the fact that in response to our demands for bread and roses, the state continually cries austerity but has unlimited cash when it comes to wars? But the oft-quoted mantra on the left that Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of a society drifting toward fascism is just as true of Kamala Harris as it is Donald Trump.

Cornel West and Jill Stein, no doubt, have far more palatable, and – but for being third party candidate in what can legitimately be called the most important presidential race in U.S. history – more humane and rational platforms than either Harris or Trump. But this election is not a moral referendum. At best, it’s an opportunity for harm reduction, a chance to choose our captors, a chance to decide which of the two major party candidates we stand a better chance organizing against.

Who can blame anyone whose families have been burned or buried alive by 2,000 -pound bombs, if they cannot bring themselves to vote for Harris? And when it comes to the Israeli hostages, it seems pretty clear also that the continual supply of weapons Biden has provided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to turn Gaza into a hellscape has also been disastrous for the Israeli hostages, not to mention the nearly ten thousand Palestinian prisoners, including doctors, nurses, and other medical workers journalists, and writers, being tortured and sexually abused in Israeli prisons. As so many of the Israeli hostage families themselves acknowledge, Netanyahu has repeatedly put the hostages in harm’s way, whether by bombing them in the tunnels, by starving them along with the rest of Gaza, or by prolonging the war for his own political gain and survival. But politically, and morally, Netanyahu and Trump may as well be twin sons of different mothers.

It’s important, though, to recognize that the reign of our American-made wannabe Mad King Trump is in some very real ways, as wikileaks helped expose in 2016, a monster the DNC helped create: a greedy, amoral, sadistic high tech American Frankenstein. King Kong with better weapons. The Democrats thought that even Republicans would be repulsed by the beast and run screaming into their arms. Instead, they helped move the country and the Overton window more firmly in the direction of fascism and placed us all closer to the boot.

But domestically, at least, Harris has demonstrated far more restraint, far more respect for democratic norms than Trump has, and they will both be driving the same American War Machine, one with some semblance of breaks, the other without. More than twenty years post 9-11, we are, as NSA Whistleblower William Binney has argued, living in “turnkey totalitarianism” wrapped in a gauntlet of militarized surveillance (American and Israeli technologies intertwined) that’s just waiting to be fully unleashed, and Trump is just the guy to not only assent to it, but to revel in it, to enjoy it.

Trump’s complete disregard for both Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution gives him ample motivations to want to gut environmental regulations and go full bore on “Drill, Baby, Drill.” If U.S.-based fossil fuel companies have a strategic stake in Israeli control of the levant gas fields off the coast of Gaza, Trump is almost certain to want a personal piece of the action in ways that Harris, as an ex-prosecutor, is likely to see for what it is–rank corruption. Per Patrick Wintour’s coverage in The Guardian, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is among the developers gunning for the removal of Palestinians and “prais[ing] the ‘very valuable’ potential of Gaza’s ‘waterfront property.’“

Is anyone surprised that U.S. support for Israel, which long co-existed alongside a host of discriminatory anti-Semitic laws in the U.S., has never been about anything but getting a foothold to use the Middle East as its personal gas pump, as markets to be cracked open by bombs, missiles, and drones – Palestinian, Iraqi, and Iranian lives, bodies, and cultures be damned? To the financial elites, the Middle East is one big Green Zone. John Cusack’s 2008 film War, Inc. pretty well nails it. Blowing shit up is the most reliable American export at a time when oil and weapons manufacturers are busy blowing through the money you and I could sure use for food, housing, healthcare and education.

When War Comes Home

Harris and the DNC know Trump is a loaded gun. They know he’s the personification of James Baldwin’s white supremacist “moral monster,” and they’re watching, mouths agape, as people back away from the party, morally repulsed by Biden’s seemingly limitless tolerance for Netanyahu’s genocidal, morally bankrupt strategies and tactics, repulsed by the DNC’s refusal to platform a single Palestinian speaker, by the DNC’s refusal to acknowledge the basic humanity of Palestinians, Muslims, and Arab-Americans. No meaningful investigations for journalist Shireen Abu Akleh or Aysenur Eygi (both assassinated by Israeli snipers), no personhood. No promise or prospect of it but for the moral courage of Palestinian-Americans, anti-Zionist Jews, and allies, putting their bodies on the line to stop it.

But as it’s been to organize against the genocide in Gaza under Biden and some semblance of democratic norms, it will be far harder under Trump. As Christopher Ketcham has reported in The Intercept, Trump’s white supremacist followers­– including “the Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, [and] Oath Keepers,” have long been egging him on to follow in the footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, the murderous dictator the U.S. helped install in Chile in a September 11, 1973 coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. The t-shirts of the “very fine” fascists Trump publicly embraces sport images of people being tossed out of airplanes, a terrifying form of summary execution practiced by the U.S.-supported troops under Pinochet, and more broadly by U.S. trained and funded troops in Latin America more broadly, and during the American War in Viet Nam. Notably when the U.S. instituted an arms embargo against Pinochet in 1976, Israel ramped up their own weapons sales to Chile.

It will be far harder when Andrew Tate is greeted with open arms, alongside other misogynists, xenophobes, and white supremacists at the aptly named White House. It will be far harder when the entire fraying regulatory framework is gutted under Project 2025, and civil servants are replaced with handpicked loyalists. It will be far harder when millions of Brown, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color are swept up in the mass deportations Trump promises, far harder when Tribal Nations are once again terminated, lands up for sale and lease to the highest bidder.

It will be far harder when not only cops but armed fascists are empowered to routinely assault BIPOC, queer/trans people and women in the streets, far harder when women are routinely scrambling to contend with far higher rates of sexual violence, of forced pregnancies, DIY abortions, and an uptick of violence at home. It will be far harder when people with disabilities are treated as wholly disposable burdens on the state. It will be far harder when union organizers, dissident professors, students, musicians, journalists, and writers who support Palestine and BDS against Israel are not simply disciplined, fired, beaten, and/or blacklisted, but imprisoned, tortured, and forcibly silenced or disappeared, as has so often happened under U.S. and Israeli-supported fascist crackdowns.

So these are the choices we face going into the final weeks of the election. The Democrats, let’s not forget, played a key role in setting up the dangerous game of electoral chicken in which we’re now engaged. But Maya Angelou’s dictum “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” ought to hold double for politicians who tell you their favorite book – assuming they read at all – is Mein Kampf.

Let’s vote accordingly and get back to the all- important work of organizing, educating, challenging, divesting from, and dismantling the American and Israeli war machines while there’s still time.

***

The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent the views of my employer Washington State University Vancouver.

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