[Disassociated blogspew ahead; pro-Bernie; proceed at your own risk. :) ] If you listen to the Chinese navy, encirclement might be the strategic issue of our time; we are about to see a massive flex of the Democratic Party machine to try and encircle Bernie. I expect we will see signs of this at Sunday's NBC News-YouTube Democratic Debate in what issues Hillary brings up, and how the commenters comment. I love Hillary but I haven’t forgotten Mark Penn and I am not friendly about the machine that failed to sell Gore to America. Encirclement may also be what works best (and has always worked best) for suppressing the poor working white vote, and keeping it voting Red. We know this will all come down to turnout in the primaries.
If you watched the State of the Union, great Dems in the audience were stilled, thinking, conscious of the magnitude of the occasion and the rich meaning of Obama’s words. For those of us Bernie supporters (like me) who plan to fight for his candidacy in a Dem stronghold (Los Angeles), this is Dem on Dem, an insurgent grassroots (and bloggers) who do not sense a personal franchise in the Dems’ machine. The “Political Revolution” would hopefully be the birth of a new machine, future-friendly, people-powered. So back to encirclement.
“Many bulls have surrounded me; Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me,” is Psalm 22, verse 12, the one Jesus referenced on his cross. Being encircled is how Chinese have lost Weiqi/Go matches for over a dozen centuries, and principles of Go apply to how to “combat” encirclement. Without devolving to the level of hostile conflict that the word combat implies, the idea is to grow through the changes and with them, so that changes in the environment around you do not strangle or choke you. Aside from its application to strategy, some of this is just old farmers’ cosmology. It is also part of what Bernie’s supporters need to win. Some folks believe Jesus’ punishment as a criminal has a happy ending. Whether “fighting” for Bernie or just supporting him, I’d like to see us protect our ability to break out, just like Chinese naval spokesmen describe their long-term stake in the South Sea. As voting Americans, the way things look right now, Bernie + Political Revolution = happy ending (and rainbows, unicorns, and I can pay my bills).
For Hillary supporters reading this — I love her and admire her but she has an accuracy problem. For Bernie supporters here, somebody should bell the cat and try to make a list. I didn’t notice this in the Benghazi hearing but I definitely spas — I actually spas, a muscular spasm / twitch — at some of the things she says on the campaign trail. To be provoking and inaccurate is unpleasant strategy, but I’m only accusing her of politics and I am not accusing her of GOP-ishness. At Sunday’s event, we’ll need to keep keen ears open for phrases that are tools of inaccuracy. But on to what others and the media are going to do and say about this and why it does not matter.
It does not matter because this is all about voters and not anybody else, so anybody who wants or says anything about this race and won’t turn out does not count. We know youth turnout could win it for Bernie and that youth doesn’t mind the Socialist label on the right side of Democratic Socialist. Anything done by the media or by pseudopods of Hillary’s team like David Brock will ultimately be looking to keep the insurgency demoralized and committed to nothing more than their zombie march as we struggle to live. This economy is way too close to after-the-bomb, and it is that bad now for many Americans. Many Americans who could vote, potentially. And many more who are just a few thousand bucks away from utter misery they might never be able to crawl out of; that might be a fitting description of some readers here. It kind of applies to me and more than half of Americans. So encircling Bernie means encircling us, choking our will to be hopey-changey, depressing our optimism about what we can achieve together (as described adeptly in the SOTU). I expect we’ll see signs of this. And we must not attribute to Hillary what we see as the wicked deeds of her henchmen because that’s politics and if Howard Dean is to be believed, Bernie has ways of poking back when he gets poked.
IMHO Encirclement has been the primary tool of the “Establishment” and has been less a matter of class than a broader way of life, partly built on Americans’ upbeat go-to attitudes about work, when it is available. Do you feel me?