THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
March 31, 2020
Dear Mitch,
If 100,000 Americans die because of your party’s criminal failure to protect the nation during this pandemic, America will fire you and your sycophants. It’s not about the money, Mitch; it’s about the sadism of your party; your reliance on Orwellian lies and the idiocy of Fox News. It’s about your party’s ideology of greed and the supposed superiority of rich white men in America. It’s about permitting Donald Trump to push his constitutional responsibilities off onto individual states and then demand supplication from their governors in exchange for federal aid. It’s about the insouciance of Republican governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s foot-dragging failure to protect their citizens. Mitch, it’s really the fault of your party that 100,000 or more Americans might die from this virus.
In response, Americans will send you into the desert for 40 years for some earnest self-reflection and intensive personal growth. America will fire you for what you have done to the lives of innocent people who believed in your morally twisted policies - particularly your refusal to use direct federal government intervention to halt this epidemic by providing critically needed equipment and testing to save the lives of vulnerable citizens – the lives of babies and the elderly. The proposal by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas that urged the elderly to sacrifice their lives to support the economy is nothing, if not the clarion call to mass insanity. It should be the last nail in your party’s coffin. Remember the Great Depression? America punished your party for malfeasance, greed, and its breathtaking callousness then by silencing the Republican Party for 40 years.
America could have had the most effective response in the world to this pandemic because we have the resources and the science necessary to reduce its spread. Instead, we have suffered the highest death count in the world and stand to watch our economy be driven off the cliff. It’s not the virus, Mitch, it’s your party’s failure to do its job. You and your party are incompetent, Mitch. And America must send you to the desert for 40 years once again - because an imploded democracy will rise up in revolution and say to each other:
“The Revolution will not be televised.
You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and drop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip
Skip out for beer during commercials.”
Mitch, if you don’t stop strangling American Democracy in the name of small government (or in this case, no government); in the name of regressive taxation, and money, profits and deregulation; in the name of white nationalism and Exxon; America will rise up and strangle you and your sycophants. Americans will try you for your attempts to dismember the very institutions that protect them from you: your destruction of the judiciary; your refusal to pass any and all legislation sent to you by the House of Representatives; your cultivation of the extreme partisanship of the Supreme Court; your rigging of our voting system by suppressing minority voting. And Mitch, you and your party will be tried for the most egregious of all your crimes: your depravity in supporting the rise of a sadistic dictator, Donald Trump - because an imploded democracy will rise up in revolution and say to each other:
“The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back after a message
About a white tornado, white lightning, or white people
You will not have to worry about a germ in your Bedroom
A tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight the germs that cause bad breath
The revolution will put the people in the driver's seat.”
Mitch, if you don’t stop suppressing the truth about science, the truth about the virus that will kill 100,000 to 200,000 Americans; the truth about the difference between faith and fact; America will punish you and your sycophants. If you don’t stop stealing from the national treasury to line the pockets of your big donors - instead of providing universal access to healthcare, protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security - America will rise up against you - because an imploded democracy will say to each other:
“The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruption
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
Blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell
General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
Hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.”
“The revolution…
Will not be televised, will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run brothers
The revolution will be live.”
Note: The title of this essay is taken from the 1974 song of the same name by Gil Scott-Heron at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
