Americans have been steaming for years, and late 2024 shows how it can blow up

Wanted to forward a great column from Denny Carter that was written in the wake of the seemingly targeted killing of United Health CEO Brian Thompson in New York City, and how Carter finds it symptomatic of a country that is seething with resentment against the privileged classes.

Carter mentions a passage in the Thomas Wolfe book Bonfire of the Vanities involving Reverend Bacon, who is an African-American preacher who received $350,000 in city funds that were supposed to be for a new source of services, but the Reverend tells them the real purpose is to redirect the legitimate rage that exists in his community.

When Bacon is asked by city officials to account for $350,000 given to his church for a new daycare center that was never built, the reverend implies that money was a down payment for his efforts to control Harlem residents and how they express their displeasure with the city and those who run it.

“If you people were worried about the children, you would build the daycare center yourself,” Bacon says when asked about the missing $350,000. “No, my friend, you’re investing in something else. You’re investing in steam control. And you’re getting value for money. Value for money. So what I’m telling you is, you best be waking up. You’re practicing the capitalism of the future, and you don’t even know it. You’re not investing in a daycare center for the children of Harlem. You’re investing in the souls…the souls…of people who’ve been in Harlem too long to look at it like children any longer, people who’ve grown up with a righteous anger in their hearts and a righteous steam building up in their souls, ready to blow. A righteous steam.”

Carter fast-forwards to today, where there is loads of unresolved anger against the rich and ruling classes, who have seen great gains in the last 30 years while the rest of us haven't gained much at all. Especially when many of the gains at the top came from exploiting loopholes in the law without any consequence for that lawlessness and scumbaggery. Which helps to explain the flippancy and celebration that many have had after a health insurance executive was gunned down on the streets of New York.

Everywhere you look, there’s steam leaking from the pipes that can no longer contain the boiling hot vapor. And so we see it again this week, with an executive from a health insurance company infamous for denying claims at a stunning rate gunned down in the middle of the street. Respectability politics never entered the picture afterward. There was only the bleakest, most blackpilled outpouring of joy anyone has ever seen. Happiness animated the online discourse of the Brian Thompson murder; even UnitedHealthcare’s Facebook post about the killing was roundly laughed at by those who said in one voice: We will not feel empathy for someone who has so readily contributed to our suffering. There would be no tears or feigned sadness for the head of a company that exists to deny people life-saving medical care.

There have, of course, been half-assed attempts at steam control. Think back to the weeks and months after the COVID pandemic shut down society and threatened to plunge the world into unprecedented economic turmoil. To save the markets from such a fate, American politicians banded together and sent some cash to working families who might be low on funds with workplaces shuttered as morgues overflowed with the COVID dead. The child tax credit instantly reduced child poverty levels across the country during the early part of the pandemic. European-style social welfare had come to the United States for a fleeting moment before corporate supersoldier Senator Joe Manchin, reflexively lying about low-income parents using the tax credit to buy cruise tickets and pot and booze, helped congressional Republicans end the program and put holes in the bellies of poor kids once more.

The Affordable Care Act was a good-faith try at steam control. Barack Obama used eight years worth of political capital to barely get a right-wing healthcare plan through a Congress with overwhelming Democratic majorities. The ACA, naturally, lacked the ultimate in steam control: A public option for those who wanted to avoid the high costs and Kafkaesque tangles of private healthcare insurers. So-called Blue Dog Democrats – known more commonly as Republicans – killed the ACA's government option because everyone knew Americans would flock to it and tank the vampiric insurers whose bottom line is bolstered by human suffering and only by human suffering. The watered-down ACA did precious little to control the public steam.

At the same time, we've not dealt with the true horrors that may be facing America, partly because our "leaders" in DC didn't want to rock the boat and do the tough work of making the rich and connected pay, which results in this country bringing back a racist idiot who wants to "terminate" the Constitution. The wreckage of our country's government and the associated idiocy involved seems fine to many people as long as it changes the losing hand they've been trying to play for years.....until they find out what it really means.

Trump confirms that he plans to deport US citizens who have undocumented parents

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 8, 2024 at 9:20 AM

That might come as some news to all of the young Latino guys that moved toward Trump in 2024, likely because some thought "Trump doesn't mean people like me." Nope, sorry guys. They mean all brown people, and they're not going to differentiate between the "good ones" and the "bad ones".

Once that reality of what a second Trump term truly will be sinks in to Americans that simply wanted lower egg prices and cheaper housing (and will get neither), will we finally get some of the rightful steam to blow onto the repressive evildoers that really are holding this country back?