Rusty Cage

You wired me awake and hit me with a hand of broken nails,

You tied my lead and pulled my chain

to watch my blood begin to boil.

But I'm gonna break, I'm gonna break my,

I'm gonna break my rusty cage and run.

-Soundgarden, Rusty Cage

One of my summer jobs in college was working on a production line in a soda bottling plant.  It was mostly the generic brands of soda and so the packing equipment was, shall we say, not top of the line.  Most of the machines and the factory itself were a bit antiquated and there were nearly as many mechanics as there were machine operators.  For over a month, I worked on the night shift, which was where I met John, John was a stout, bald black man, probably in his 50's, and he had worked in the factory, or in some kind of factory for a long time.  He and his partner Al, a deep voiced white guy with really old weathered tattoos all over his forearms were like some sort of sitcom duo, a loud black guy who wasn't shy with his opinions and a slow laconic white guy from the old school working class.  They worked right on the other side of a doorway from me, and I could hang out in the archway and watch my machine while I listened to John rant and rave his way through an evening and with Al occasionally firing back or telling him to simply shut up. It passed the time.

John was a lover of chaos, whenever something would go wrong, like the power going out, or the time a forklift driver took out a thirty foot stack of soda can pallets, or the time a pressure tank went haywire, John would laugh, really really loud, like you could hear him over the din of the factory, and even more so in the silence and darkness of a power outage. The chaos of unforeseen trouble, or antagonism of his own making was what kept him sane, through the long hours of watching machines do their thing, and through a lifetime of the sort of job that reminded me viscerally why I needed to stay in college.

His blase attitude about things was pretty contagious to a college kid who was pre-disposed to like thunderstorms and mosh pits.  Then I was at home with chaos, because I had very little responsibility and very little to lose. Now I am not in that sort of place, I have a job, a house, two kids in school and quite a bit that I would like to protect.  Now chaos doesn't seem like fun to me.

But I was trying to tap into that last week as I dealt with the reality that Donald J Trump is going to be the next President. The exit polls told us that the desire for change was the primary motivation behind the rust belt and the working class going for Trump.  It is honestly not possible to frame Hillary as anything other than the paradigm of a Washington Political Insider.  She is about as hawkish as you can get, I had no doubt that she was probably going to get us into some kind of new war or re-ignite an old one.  She is beholden to big money and old school politics.  She essentially would be very much at home if her name was followed by an R instead of a D.

I was trying to comfort myself by telling myself that at least Trump might shake things up a bit, and I thoroughly believe that things could use some shaking.  Then of course the racist stuff started to happen, and that worries me, and that makes me angry for sure, but who knows, maybe that will calm down soon, maybe they will even listen to Trump as he so eloquently told them on 60 Minutes: "just stop it."  Don't make me come back there.

Then Trump selected his first two peeps, and my heart sank lower.  Reince Priebus, as White House Chief of Staff, okay, how is that a bold, outside the box pick?  How is that going to drain the swamp? Priebus has spent the better part of his career waist deep in the political muck. Look up "Status Quo" in the dictionary and there is Priebus' picture next to it.  You might argue that Trump picked someone from the inside to guide him as he sought to deconstruct the system, but this doesn't look like that.  Priebus' prior claim to fame was as the chair of the RNC that essentially lost control of the primary process and trotted out 16 stooges, of whom Trump ended up being Moe.

The next was Stephen Bannon, of the Alt Right and previously of Breitbart.  Bannon has been appointed as some sort of adviser to Trump.  Bannon has a track record to being accused of racist and anti-semitic propaganda (nothing concrete to be fair, but in the current atmosphere any inkling is probably too much).  Trump needs to be distancing himself from the racist, sexist and xenophobic tone of his election campaign if he stands any chance of being an effective leader in nation where he lost the popular vote.

Either candidate was going to have some work to do to gain some sort of unity and consensus in this country after what went down in the election.  Inviting a character like Bannon to be the devil on your shoulder doesn't exactly alleviate the fear of all those who are terrified of living in Trump's America.

At any rate it does not appear, at least in the early going, that Trump really intends on doing any of this world shaking that he promised during his campaign. His advisers and nominations look to be coming from the most usual of suspects. I suspect that his ascension is going to be marked by some of the same futility that has marked Obama's administration, and that is really going to twist some jockey shorts.  I wonder how all those people who threw their votes to Trump because they felt ignored and unheard by the establishment are going to feel when he ignores them for the next four years.