Pardon Me While I Rant

by Mike Davenport, Ex-Mayor of Prosperity, Pennsylvania

graphic by Rowan Procter

Came across this quote from one of my heroes, WW2 bombardier-turned-historian Howard Zinn:

From (a certain) moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country…something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of aa new kind of society — cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian

Howard Zinn

I’m there, brother.

I was reminded of what “the old order” is all about as I recoiled in horror at this new atrocity of a tax bill the Capitol Hill fraudsters are trying to pass: “Leave No Billionaire Behind.” The premise of this bill is that, when housing is ridiculously expensive and eggs cost eight dollars a dozen, the biggest problem we have is that people who make more than four million dollars a year pay too damn much in taxes! Gotta give ‘em a big fat $400,000 tax break, paid for by kicking eight million folks off Medicaid and depriving hungry school kids of their lunch! And we’ve gotta pry SNAP benefits out of the hands of folks who can’t afford groceries. We’re just wasting money by feeding folks who are starving! (By the way, a lot of supermarkets will go out of business when those SNAP customers stop coming in…along with food banks, like Daily Table in Boston, which just shut down four locations earlier this month.)

An anonymous park bench philosopher once said,

“There’s a big difference between not having enough, and having enough. There’s almost no difference between having enough and having more than enough.”

This tax bill makes sure that those who have way too much get even more, and folks who don’t have enough will have even less. Lots of people — our friends and neighbors — will die because of this legislative atrocity..…just like these evildoers are murdering millions of people in Africa who won’t get food or AIDS medicine because USAID got fed “into the wood chipper.”

I've been told my whole life to work “within the "system": an engaged citizenry and the free market will fix everything. So here's what that's produced in my 48 years on earth: ever-shittier health care, horrifying gun violence, predatory pharma companies murdering people by the thousands to hype their stock (looking at you, Perdue!), out of control global warming that threatens to incinerate all life on earth, and billionaires screwing the middle and working classes because they can, Oh, school kids being mowed down by psychos with assault rifles. But at least the politicians have a solution for that — $ 450 bullet-proof backpacks! Yeah, that’ll work! Who needs mental health checks to buy a supercharged bullet hose? That’s just wasting money!

The final straw for yours truly — when I finally pulled back the curtain and the Great and Powerful Oz was a fraud — was Afghanistan.

They told me they needed warriors to fight for freedom-loving Afghans desperate to turn their country into a secular democracy. Small problem — nobody told the Afghans. What they wanted was for us to get the hell out of their damn country. One thing — maybe the only thing — Trump got right: if you enlist in the military, you are a “sucker and a loser.” That said, this sucker/loser was the lucky one. My platoon-mate and best pal Dave Bratton suffered a brain injury saving my sorry ass in a firefight over there. He ended up killing himself with drugs (looking at you Perdue!) because the VA’s idea of “helping him” was to mail him a blister pack of happy pills and a drool cup.

What’s the answer? Turns out there is one!

Here in my home town of Prosperity, we decided to take Brother Zinn’s advice: give up on waiting for “them” to fix things “within the system” and take matters into our own hands. “Uproot of the old order and introduce a new kind of society — cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” The bigshots who pick our pockets to finance bigger mega-yachts for billionaires (and sending the deficit spiraling over the moons of Jupiter) want you to think this can’t be done. I mean, what are you poor deluded saps going to do? Create good jobs so that everyone can do work they’re proud of? Grow your own food? Serve that food to everyone in your town, to make sure people are well-fed and happy? Give everyone basic healthcare? Create, from scratch, your own society based on caring for one another?

Ridiculous, I know. We knew it was ridiculous as we were doing it. So welcome to my hometown of Prosperity, Pennsylvania. Our people wake up with a smile, knowing there’s not a single thing they need from those sociopathic greed bags that run our country. And guess what! All we did was harken back to that doc on the wall of our 4th-grade classroom, our Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Thanks Tom Jefferson, you rascally, wine-guzzling, slave-holding genius, you! All we’re doing here in Prosperity is pursuing happiness by instituting a new kind of government that works for US. It’s right there in our founding document: we have the perfect right to alter or abolish a government when it obstructs our ability to pursue our destiny. The new principles that produce this happiness are friendship, compassion, cooperation, service, joy, and love.

I opened with Howard Zinn. Let’s end with him as well:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn

AUTHOR NOTE: Mike Davenport is a character in the book “Prosperity, Pennsylvania.” You can buy a copy here and here.

You can find the Audible version here.

The book is about how an everyday collection of optimists transformed a downtrodden Rust Belt town. The town isn’t saved by a miraculous intervention of government or big business. The people save themselves by imagining a society that works together to work for them and then gets to work to make this vision a reality.

Here’s what reader Max Sand shared on Amazon about the book: “Against all odds, a ragtag collection of regular folks come together to turn their lives around. Powerful forces are arrayed against them, but what they do to push past them is surprising and clever and totally grounded in reality. If you like It's A Wonderful Life or Meet John Doe, you'll love Prosperity PA. Once the citizens of Prosperity PA realize no one is coming to save them, they save themselves. And in these dark and divided times, it's so great to read a story about people coming together and finding a way forward.”

The book is a ‘how-to’ manual for how we can all get beyond the stale ‘hate-your-neighbor’ red-blue, right-left narratives. What do we want? The love of family and friends, enough to eat, a home, health care, and a loving community where we belong. We can create these things for ourselves.

I didn’t make anything up. Everything in the book happened somewhere in the world. I just put it together in a new way.