[What's the Message, Mr. Gardiner will be back next week. I'm using the Open Thread this week to discuss the upcoming Inauguration, because, well, I think it's important, and I obviously needed to write it soon. And don't worry, Lookout, I got your message and next week your suggestion will be featured! By the way, if anybody else wants to send me suggestions for movies or television shows or books to review, have at it!]

First, a disclaimer: I believe absolutely in the right to peaceful protest, including the form described in the first amendment: petitioning the government for redress of grievances. So, yes, I believe you should BE ABLE TO go down to Farragut Square or wherever, and protest against anything from Donald Trump to factory farming. Hell, I even believe that the pro-lifers who annually clog up the Metro while singing annoying Christian hymns at the top of their lungs in enclosed cars underground should BE ABLE TO do exactly what they're doing. (I wish they'd do it with a little more consideration for their fellow citizens, but that's another matter.)

But I also believe that anybody using their rights--not to mention their time and travel money--to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump is on a fool's errand. There are many reasons for this, but here's the main one:

NOBODY MAKING LESS THAN 450k/YEAR SHOULD BE PROTESTING IN SUPPORT OF ANY POLITICIANS OR POLITICAL PARTIES, WHICH ARE NOT, AND NEVER WILL BE, UNDER THEIR CONTROL, RESPONSIVE TO THEIR INFLUENCE, OR SYMPATHETIC TO THEIR AIMS.

I accept this as an axiom, and will continue to do so until we manage to invent, at the very least, a new Republic which affords everyone in the society some measure of imperfect representation. That means reducing institutional corruption AND institutional racism to the point that the idea of writing your Congressman to weigh in on national policy doesn't amount to the punchline to a very tired joke, and to the point that the expectation of colorblind justice isn't a total absurdity.

I'm putting this as carefully as I can, because I have been helped by a Congressman's office in the recent past. Believe it or not, there are still a few good people left in the system, though I hear that more are retiring or making a career change every day. And while they usually can't help you on matters of policy, which, it increasingly seems, arrive in Congressional committees like those pre-fab sandwiches you get out of vending machines--already assembled in a sealed container, all decisions already made--they can sometimes help you in matters of constituent services.

I don't want to insult those peeople who are still attempting to do their jobs aboard a sinking ship, especially given that some of them have been decent and even kind to me. But on most matters of policy, it is useless to simply appeal to the government, or to anyone in politics, and it has been for some time. In fact, the main purpose of political parties is to provide a graveyard for such appeals. It is also one of the three main jobs of government: providing a military for the use of the wealthy, redirecting money into the hands of the top 5%, and deflecting, obstructing, and re-defining complaints from the masses (I include "redefining" because sometimes, when a complaint or appeal has a great deal of intrinsic power or justification--when it is, as Jefferson said, self-evident--it's necessary to perform, essentially, a character assassination on the appeal itself. For instance, if Wall St busts the economy by gambling on whether people can pay their mortgages or not and a lot of aggrieved homeowners and workers complain, you might need to redefine the problem as a bunch of workers buying houses they can't afford.)

Because the primary function of politicians and their parties is to provide a graveyard for the appeals of anyone without power, it is a fool's errand to engage in any form of protest or political action which supports any politicians or political parties. Those institutions and people are not working for you. You're asking them to. Asking them to is unlikely to work. They're far more likely to keep working for the people who are paying them and who can end their careers through well-placed media hatchet jobs. Why are you giving them your time, energy, and support?

Of course, everyone is claiming that when they organize (for instance) a Woman's Protest against Donald Trump that that protest can't be assumed to express support for Hillary Clinton. They're not supporting politicians or political parties--they're just opposing some. But this is disingenuous in the current political context, and only retains its power as an argument because we are, as a people, both individualistic and atomistic in our thinking, by which I mean that nothing is seen contextually, systemically, relationally. If we looked at things in relation to one another (like, for instance, how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump politically relate to one another, and indeed, depend entirely on each other's existence for the fragments of political credibility they possess) it would be obvious that, while the election is over, the campaigns are, horribly, ongoing. The national discussion is still revolving around Hillary vs Donald, like a planet circling a dead star. The election failed to sever the campaigns' spinal cords, and so they totter onward, desiring mainly to eat our brains.

All you have to do is look around my home town to see that the electorate's disgust at being saddled with Donald Trump is being expressed through increased support for Hillary Clinton. There are far more Hillary bumper stickers today than there were in October or November. In my home town, support for Hillary is now being used as a way to say "I oppose Trump," "I'm not racist!" and "I'm not sexist!"

The Clinton political machine has created a situation in which you cannot criticize Donald without benefiting Hillary. They accomplished this mainly by creating a dualistic system of thought with delusions of inevitability, and by manipulating the public into accepting that inevitability as fact. It has gotten to the point that a politics which seeks an alternative to both Donald and Hillary is almost inconceivable. Suggesting that you want such an alternative is tantamount to saying you want to grow wings and fly. People nod sympathetically--yeah, we all wanted that when we were young--and then return to the "real world" in which Hillary and Donald are the only options, without, apparently, any understanding of the fact that this "real world" has more in common with an Ed Wood movie set than with the law of gravity or conservation of matter.

There currently is no political context, no neurolinguistic context, no cultural context, which makes criticism of Donald Trump separable from support for Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter whether you intend your criticism of Trump to be independent of support for Clinton--it won't be heard that way by the vast majority of people. (This deserves an essay of its own; freedom of speech is basically useless without a likelihood of being accurately heard.) The few who can hear a criticism of Trump and not immediately leap to support of Clinton are generally those who have the least exposure to the mainstream press--and guess what? Most of those people are probably already on the same page with you. They don't need you to tell them that Donald Trump is horrible. In order to reach a larger number of people with the message that you're protesting Donald Trump but you also think Hillary is a horrible lying warmonger who works for Wall St and thinks it's funny to kill a man by jabbing a bayonet into him, you have to create the political context that will allow them to hear your message as meaningful. Otherwise, what they'll hear is I want to grow wings and fly. Maybe take a stroll on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit... That's a best-case scenario. Probably all they'll hear is argle bargle argle bargle bargle...

If not to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton's reputation and re-emphasize the idea that American voters should not be trusted with the choice of leadership, what do people expect to accomplish through this protest?

What distinguishes protests from other political acts is that they bring people together physically in the same space, so that they can see the real live people who agree and disagree with them. Because of this, protest has a visceral impact on the people who are in that place in that time. If, for whatever reason, the media decides to put the protest on the air, the impressive quality of an assembled crowd will probably also have, for good or ill, an emotional impact on those watching. This is the part of protest that aims to educate and persuade the populace, and in the current case, it will do little or nothing outside of funneling power and credibility to Hillary Clinton and her allies. The legacy media will report on the protests in such a way that does exactly that, as they've been doing with everything they report for the past 10 months. Some of the electorate, after being pummeled with horrible messaging and demoralizing political outcomes for 10 months, has accepted the duopoly as the bounds of the political universe, and they will accept the media's framing of the protests without question. Many of the protesters will, in fact, intend to be heard in just that way, because they too have accepted those political bounds. Those among the protesters who see a larger political universe will be reported in exactly the same way as those who don't, and their message will be reduced to the same thing: America made a mistake in not putting Hillary in office. Bad America. No dog biscuit.

Second, protests involve an implied threat that future action will be taken if the protest is not heeded. This is the part of protest that aims to influence the powerful and change policy. It hasn't been working very well for the past thirty years. Most American protests rest on the assumption that politicians need the support of the people in order to get and keep their jobs. They implicit threat is that politicians will lose their jobs if they don't pay heed when the people get angry enough to protest. But that threat requires both visibility (currently under the primary, but not absolute, control of the legacy media) and a functioning electoral system to be made good. In other words, if the media can prevent most constituents from knowing about a protest, probably the protest won't end a politician's career (a well-placed phone call from a rich man who owns the network could end a career much more easily).

Of course, we at C99 have an answer for this, as do all those who use new media to express dissenting views. But as supporters of Bernie Sanders recently found out, it takes more than independent media to break the duopoly's grip on American politics (or, more to the point, the wealthy's death grip on same). If the legacy media can't keep voters in line, you can rely on manipulations of the electoral process at multiple levels--everything from hacks of voter registration data to exclude people from voting in Democratic primaries, to outright purging hundreds of thousands of voters off the rolls altogether, to reducing the number of polling places immediately before the election, to lying and saying your candidate has already won the nomination when she hasn't (turns out this is great for depressing opposition turnout). Remarkably, that's only a few of the means that were used to manipulate the results of the last election.

Politicians are not particularly concerned with pleasing protesters, or even with fending off their anger, because they know that the wealthy are a far greater danger to their careers than the masses are. People will, no doubt, point to the incredibly brave Standing Rock Sioux and their allies as proof that protest works and that politicians still respond to it. But the truth of that matter is twofold: first, the victory that was won constitutes a bureaucratic speedbump, not an end to the project. The fact that the Dakota Access pipeline workers are still present and the bridge between the camps and Bismarck still blockaded makes that obvious. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly: the Army Corps of Engineers denied the permit only when it became clear that military veterans were adopting this issue as their own to the extent of putting their bodies between the protesters and those attacking them. Now *that* is an implicit threat the system is likely to wake up for. They don't care how the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies vote. They don't care what they're using their freedom of speech to express, or what their appeal to the government is. They care that pro-government, pro-DAPL forces might end up on camera firing on decorated soldiers. That would present them with several problems they don't especially want to deal with. In other words, there was a non-electoral threat to the establishment at work in that protest--so the establishment made a tactical (and probably temporary) retreat.

Is there a non-electoral threat at work in the anti-Trump protests? If so, what is it? That people will refuse to accept a peaceful transition of power? If that were true, I'd be stunned that the same people who refused to revolt in 2000 and 2004, when there was actual, proven, verifiable election fraud and voter suppression in the general election, are now willing to declare for revolution. I'd also be disgusted that the same people who barely acknowledged the evidence of election fraud and voter suppression in the Democratic primaries this year are similarly willing, now, to declare themselves ready for revolution. But quite apart from that: if people are ready to engage in revolution, what is their revolution's aim? I get that they don't want to transfer power to Trump; who *do* they want to transfer power to? What do they mean when they say he's not their President? If he isn't, who is? Are they asking for an entirely new election (not unreasonable, if you took it all the way back to the primaries and banned any further campaigning), or do they have someone picked out to annoint?

I determined during this election that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump was worth losing one real friendship. As I wade through this dystopian aftermath, I'll state it even more strongly: neither Hillary, nor Trump, nor any politician, nor any political party, nor any of the wealthy who own them, is worth a single hair on my fellow citizens' heads. (Even the ones I don't like.) I look at the inauguration protest, and I see an establishment-sponsored Punch-and-Judy show, with the "deplorable" Trump voters as one puppet and, I guess, leftie activists like me, especially those who are also feminists, like me, as the other puppet. For the record, I decline to participate in a prefabricated semi-astroturfed Civil War 2.0, or any potential kickoff event for same, because egging ordinary people on to hate and hurt each other is a particularly ugly version of political flimflam. My fellow citizens who make less than 450K a year, even the ones I can't stand, are far less to blame for the destruction of our future than any of the multimillionaires and billionaires and politicians and media personalities who created, at great expense, the political world I am expected to swallow as the only possible reality.