Kamala Harris: Deep State Avatar for President

Kamala is the hologram the MIC has always wanted

Image: Eli Valley: patreon.com/elivalley

In the film adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s trenchant play “Talk Radio,” some backstory is added about the benign old-school morning radio host that his proto-shock jock character had displaced. Later, he is confronted by a terrifying vision of the future in the form of an emotionally flat, intellectually stunted, listener that he lets into the studio for an interview. When Bogosian’s character is assassinated at the end, mirroring the real-life murder of radio pioneer Alan Berg by white nationalists, his replacement is naturally that same listener, representing the next step down in America’s cultural discourse.

It's easy to imagine that on his more lucid days, Joe Biden must feel much the same way as Bogosian’s DJ; gazing into Kamala’s empty eyes, as she became the nominee without one primary vote under her belt, he might have wondered what role his own basement campaign played in making such a thing even conceivable, much less acceptable. In many ways he provided proof of concept for the idea that they could run a candidate, and later a Presidency, with the absolute bare minimum of press conferences, interviews, and public appearances required to convince the public that the President wasn’t dead.

The descent from Kitchen Cabinet to Basement Cabinet, has led naturally to the Influencer Cabinet and the first AI powered collection of artfully assembled pixels to ever run for President. While we may concede the humanity of Kamala Harris the person, Kamala Harris the candidate is an avatar, no more real or substantial than a Nike swoosh, or Tony the Tiger. She is nominee as brand ambassador for a certain kind of cultural signaling and in that way dispenses with all the boring stuff that most people didn’t pay very much attention to anyway. And the greater part of those who did realized a long time ago that the promises of politicians grabbing at the brass ring of power, fame, and a lifetime of stupid pay delivering ghostwritten speeches to hedge fund criminals, aren’t worth the dingleberries that some poor bastard in Biden’s Secret Service detail has probably been assigned to remove from his ass before state dinners, lest the offending odor reach the nostrils of foreign dignitaries who are already looking sideways at China and Russia and wondering if they’d better hop on the BRICS train while there are still seats.

The Presidency, carefully designed by the Founders to be constrained in its powers lest the Republic devolve back into Monarchy, has always had a figurehead element to it, even as Presidents have attempted to slip the limitations of the office by using the “bully pulpit” to sway public opinion as a means of pressuring the Legislature.

But in modern times the real conflict is less between the Executive Branch, the Legislature, and the Judiciary, as the Constitution conceives, than it is between the Deep State and everyone else. Whereas at first by the tradition George Washington set, and then after FDR, by the 22^nd Amendment, Presidents serve only two terms at most, DC has developed a vast permanent bureaucracy that does not come and go with the election seasons. It is always there, and it has its own fixed policy agenda, whoever happens to come out on top in elections that increasingly seem more like ritualized performances than meaningful struggles over the future course of the country.

Seen this way, the power of the President is an illusion in most areas that matter. But it can be an inconvenient illusion when someone is elected who either willfully, or through ignorance, attempts to assert themselves, especially in the one area where the Founders granted broad authority to the Executive: matters of war and peace.

Eisenhower’s final address warned of the dangers posed to democracy by what he called the “military industrial complex,” and he often worried aloud to his staff about what would happen to the country when someone who didn’t know the military like he did held the office. Some say he was the last Commander-In-Chief with true authority, given what happened to his successor, who surely did not know the military like he did and may have paid the ultimate price for his naivete.

Donald Trump was the first President since that fateful day on Dealey Plaza to attempt a significant departure from the conventional post-war foreign policy wisdom of constant belligerence towards those who do not respond to any demand from the US, no matter how cruel, nonsensical, or genocidal it may be, with a hearty, “Do you want fries with that?” More than mean tweets, more than Muslim bans, more than Charlottesville, more than “kids in cages,” none of which the alliance of blue bloods and nouveau riche that run the West cares very much about, it was Donald Trump’s small rebellions against the foreign policy agenda of permanent Washington that really pissed them off.

None of this is to say that Trump was a dove, or that he didn’t substantially do their bidding, giving the Pentagon more money than they asked for and taking an even harder line on Palestine than his predecessors. But his overtures towards peaceful relations with Putin and Kim were way off the proscribed hegemon script, and ultimately Trump’s election delayed the proxy war with Russia that was supposed to begin in Syria with the assumed Clinton restoration. After the installation of loyal company man Joe Biden, the venue was switched to Ukraine, and the same shadowy psychopaths that surrounded Hillary finally got their war.

But a visibly sundowning Biden had never been part of the plan. Too pale, too stale, and too male, he represented a necessary last-minute improvisation aimed at stopping Bernie Sanders, who’s mild, European-style reforms might have cost the donors a nickel or two. The creature they had already lined up for the role of Trump-slayer was Kamala.

No sooner had enough people in enough of the right places decided that they’d sooner shoot Drano up their asses while singing the Star Spangled Banner than vote for Hillary to make a billionaire game show host the President, than her former handlers and financiers convened a meeting in the Hamptons, with none other than one Kamala Harris in attendance to be anointed as their great ethnically ambiguous hope for 2020.

The problem was, Kamala was so intrinsically repulsive that even with all their courtiers in the press pushing her candidacy, not only couldn’t she get traction with the suburban whites that make up the modern base of the Democratic party, but she was also performing terribly with blacks, partly due to a career built on their mass incarcerated backs. After Tulsi Gabbard went kamikaze on the debate stage, using her limited time to lay out that record, even the In This House We lawn sign people started to jump ship.

One mass resignation of her campaign staff, and several polls showing her coming in 4^th in her home state of California later, and Kamala was forced to drop out before Iowa.

But the small coterie of oligarchs, military contractors and DNC insiders that decide the acceptable range of opinions and candidates the peasants get to choose from were not going to be thwarted so easily. As Caleb Maupin lays out in his excellent book “Kamala Harris and the Future of America” the original schedule for the 2020 convention had one speaker’s slot for Kamala, and another for VP. A few grainy black and white photos of Biden’s Grandkids playing outside dropped off on his front porch in a manila envelope later, and this ghoul so lacking in political talent that she couldn’t even make it to the first contest without imploding, who’s record as a prosecutor was a horrific violation of everything the party claimed to stand for in that Black Lives Matter summer, who brought nothing to the table in terms of flipping any state or constituency, was suddenly running for VP.

Why? Because Kamala is something that anti-Democratic forces within the Republic have been working towards since the people elected Andrew Jackson, and then threw a drunken brawl of an inaugural celebration full of dirty farmers and low types just to prove they meant it: a perfect vessel, a puppet, a creature of their own invention that will never go off-script, that will never have a contrarian policy agenda, that will never withdraw troops against their wishes, or commit them without permission. A true figurehead, to be trotted out for speeches, to deflect attention from themselves and their agenda, and to embroil the nation in endless culture wars, leaving their hands free to run the world without interference from the people or their elected representatives. No uber-honky like Biden could do this as effectively as Kamala, with her ability to put down all criticism to racism, sexism, and bullying, and to an even greater extent than Hillary, make herself and her ascension to power the sole meaning and mission of her campaign.

Kamala needs no message. She is the message. And for most of the barking seals who still believe that the Democratic Party represents their interests, that’s enough.

Cover Image by Eli Valley - check out more of his work at patreon.com/elivalley