As US Military Coup Looms, “Joker-fied” Progressives Must Come to Biden
After joining Saddam Hussein and Adolph Hitler in the ranks of dictators who’ve fled to bunkers, Trump has made our awful, dreary duty crystal clear.
Right now, in the “very online” culture of the progressive left, the term “Jokerfication” is making the rounds, describing the mental state of citizens who are content to “watch the world burn.” Based on the Joker villain from the Batman canon, the neologism is a work in progress on the internet. Some would assert that a person who is Jokerfied has given up on America’s political system and has adopted an absurdist attitude toward the entire process.
The “Honkler” meme is the basis for that slant. I won’t get into the weeds here, but the Honkler is simply a version of Pepe The Frog in a clown getup, often depicted whimsically honking his bicycle horns while rolling along on his beach-ball through scenarios of social injustice or political and/or cultural turpitude. On 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” discussion board, the Honkler is, of course, racist, homophobic and all those things.
Others, myself included, would say that Jokerfication is a more proactive concept, invoking Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the character in the 2008 movie The Dark Knight. Jokerfied leftists refuse to accept that Biden and Trump are the only real choices in the 2020 presidential election. They’re fighting to spread the word that it just isn’t so, and if they can’t have that, the country can have Trump II, and thus the arguably more expedited destruction of the republic. At the moment, some of those people are getting a bit rough with others on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere on the internet. At the top of their cyber-lungs, social media doctrinaires on the left are staking their reputations on the dictum that all progressive voters should write in Sanders/Stein/name-goes-here. For the record, one shouldn’t write off those voters and activists as “Bernie bros,” because there was never really any such thing; they simply tend to read more stuff than most.
How did Jokerfication happen? Because the failure of the current 2-party, red-vs-blue system is now complete. It has been proven beyond all doubt that neither party is willing to change any of the rules of the regressive, Industrial Age-minded capitalist game under which the majority of working people suffer.
I can’t dismiss anyone who appears to be Jokerfied; it’s simply a more wide-screen version of the “blaze this whole thing” mindset hatched and cultivated by unrelated groups of foreign agitators, Republican-paid trolls and discouraged voters on 4chan, Reddit and elsewhere during the run-up to the 2016 election (If you’re wondering, Trump’s support on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board is generally unimpressive at the moment, and trust me, some of those guys regret having created their Frankenstein).
Only problem with writing in Sanders on Election Day is that after Trump’s recent tin-pot stunts, any sane adult who wants to stave off the very real threat of a US military coup at home has no choice left but to vote for Biden. As has been made clear by the growing chatter about the dissatisfaction of America’s retired military leaders with Trump, the president is down to his last strike. Those former bosses have friends who are currently serving, after all, and it’s a sure bet they’re listening. The military and intelligence arms of the government have every reason to be nervous these days, and not just because of the redundant rantings of book-hawking niche-pundits on CNN and MSNBC. America has reached the point at which the right smartphone video could plunge the country into a refreshed and dangerously increased level of chaos within a day, if that long, after which Trump, after predictably pouring jet fuel on the problem rather than offering any positive words, could almost certainly be removed by a panicked military/intelligence community.
It would make sense. Trump has made the perfectly wrong move at every turn. When presented with Covid 19, his first instinct was to capitalize on it by selling snake oil (I work for a research chemical supply house, and I can tell you that the company has had exactly zero inquiries from labs for hydroxychloroquine in the past four months). When faced with the wrath of the real Silent Majority over George Floyd’s murder, instead of stepping up and endeavoring to mend the smallest fence, he tweeted like an unhinged, paranoid lunatic and hid in a bunker. I could bloat this paragraph with other examples, but you know them all by now. Trump is end-stage free-market capitalism personified.
Meanwhile, unbelievably, there does remain that chunk of voters — closeted bigots, bitter boomers, evangelicals who believe Trump is indeed the Beast who will bring on the Rapture, etc. — who remain unswayed by any of it. There’s no rational explanation for it, but they persist. I don’t know, maybe there’s an unusually high level of testosterone or something present in truck-drivin’, Gary Cooper-type guys who expect no clarity from their nation’s leader, just shut up, cock your Glock and wait for it. I don’t have that, but I’m man enough to know that a lot of worried American citizens desperately need coherent messaging and honest, constructive direction this minute. What bugs me most right now is that people aren’t getting any of that. Aside from 9/11, I can’t think of a worse time in recent history to have a desperate, persecuted Mad King clutching the wheel. I’d almost approve of his removal by the military just to get Trump thrown into Leavenworth, which he absolutely deserves for his emoluments crimes alone, but something like that has rarely led to anything good.
And so, Biden it is. It sucks for us progressives, but them’s the breaks, only — repeat, only — because the frothing kook in the White House absolutely has to go as soon as possible, lest the country be plunged into bedlam after the next poorly managed catastrophe. As progressives, we no longer have the luxury of voting our conscience, because despite the prevailing meme, a write-in vote isn’t a vote for Trump, it’s a self-defeating waste of energy, a non-vote that will only make you a bit late for dinner. Why? Because as things stand now, the corporate media, which owns and operates the culture itself, simply will not allow a third party to get any traction with the vast majority of overworked, under-served voters who don’t have time to enlighten themselves and instead settle for goggling helplessly at Facebook and Twitter, ingesting mind-numbing parades of unconnected, randomly skewed propaganda until it’s bedtime.
Unpleasant as it will be, in November, our duty will be to drag our tired, utterly disgusted asses to the polls to vote strategically and robotically, without emotion or enthusiasm, for the good of the civilized world. Progress will have to come later, again, but there’s a tangibly different vibe this time: The Man knows everyone’s on to him.
Sure, be pissed. You have every right. I sure am. Biden’s history of racist, anti-worker, misogynist, venal nonsense hasn’t been negated by, well, pretty much anything he’s said in the last few months. He needs to shut up immediately, get some rest, and hopefully gobble enough ginkgo biloba to keep himself from drooling and yelling for pudding during the debates.
He won’t, of course, and it’ll be cringey, in line with his recent pratfalls. His saying that “10 to 15 percent of Americans aren’t very good people” was as thickly, triumphantly stupid as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016. On the “can this dude even function” front, Biden is so addled with early-stage Alzheimers or dementia or the side effects of licking battery tops or whatnot that he actually said, during an interview on The View, that a coronavirus cure will “make the problem worse,” after which he made no immediate correction, as usual blissfully allowing that train to crash right into the tanker-truck factory at full speed. That sundowning stuff is beyond pitiful, and much more is to come, so keep the peanuts handy. Meanwhile, his massive screwup during a Zoom interview on Charlemagne Tha God’s Breakfast Club streaming show is still causing divisive ripple effects (yes, if you hadn’t heard, Biden actually said to the black show host “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black!”).
Great, right? With Biden, we get a less cozy, less clearheaded Reagan with basically the same neoliberal agenda, only worse. Yep, it’s a bummer, and don’t even get me started about the DNC/MSM’s brutal cancelling of Sanders, who, let’s be fair, didn’t help his cause by crazily bandying the scare-phrase “socialist” about, as if Joe and Flo Cheeseburger would never immediately think of Stalin’s murder squads. If Sanders had instead identified as something less dangerous-sounding, like an “FDR Democrat” for example, I sincerely believe the scenario might be different today.
But, onward. Biden is terrible, agreed, but We The People Who Read Chris Hedges For Enjoyment know in our hearts that any real political progress has been effectively cauterized by corporate-technocratic Democrats and their colossal, all-powerful propaganda machine. Whether we like it or not — and we sure don’t — we have to accept our dormant status for the moment. The only logical next move for all citizens, and that includes hardcore, righteously disgruntled leftists, is to vote out the Bad Orange Sociopath at this point, not because MSNBC is telling us to, but because the entire world is praying that things don’t get any worse here. Only after Trump is gone, banished by our own hands, without any military intervention, can we focus our energies on letting Biden know, at every opportunity, through massive displays of protest and civil disobedience, exactly how deeply he and his party are detested, and, after that, proceed to vote out every corporate Democrat we can get our hands on.
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