The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space
Issue 3
June 1, 2020
“Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny”
--Bruce Springsteen, Rosalita, 1973
“I been down so long, it seem like up to me”
--Furry Lewis, I Will Turn Your Money Green, 1928
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
--Antonio Gramsci
***
This week: Politics and Poetry. Profane and Sacred.
The Profane first, only then do we get to Beauty.
American politics – democracy in ruins.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
--James Baldwin
“George Floyd is dead. So is Breonna Taylor. And so are more than 100,000 victims of a deadly pandemic.
The news is overwhelming. It is designed to be overwhelming.
This sort of chaos and confusion destabilizes society. In that confusion, as tempers run hot, people who are desperate for certainty return to old patterns and divide along traditional lines. Many are willing to accept a strong leader who promises to restore order, or simply are so distracted and discouraged they stop caring what their leaders do. They simply hunker down and try to survive.”
--Heather Cox Richardson, May 29, 2020
***
Hypocrisy, lies and false representation are the stock-in-trade of just one of our two major political parties. Its functional leader is Mitch McConnell, while its titular head and blowhard-in-chief is in the White House, at least for the moment.
(Perhaps he is, as Hilary told us, just a puppet, but we have yet to identify the real puppet master.)
American political institutions are working in a highly undemocratic way, partly because of a deal struck in the very early days of the republic—the creation of the Senate (much like the Electoral College) constructed at that time to protect the small population states from being overwhelmed by the big population states like New York, Massachusetts and Virginia (at that time). This purposely imbalanced system worked more or less until recent years, when the rural/suburban/urban demographics of the US became far more extreme than ever before. States like North Dakota (762,000) and Wyoming (586,000) each wield as much power in the Senate the state of California, a nation state now with almost 40 million residents and the fifth largest economy in the world (ahead of the United Kingdom!)
This disjunction became visible recently when the idiotic Mitch McConnell claimed that “Blue States” were seeking a bailout for their economic failures pre-pandemic. At which point Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York State stated the obvious fact that the so-called blue states in need, New York, Connecticut, California and Massachusetts, just as examples, pay in far more to the Federal treasury than they take out, while red states like McConnell’s own Kentucky, and the entire former confederate states, pay in far less than they take out in Federal subsidies. Not to mention the continual bailouts by we, all the citizens of the United States of red state natural disasters. That is what a cohesive country does – take care of its citizens in a form of mutuality that should not require explanation, and should not be undermined by a country’s very own leaders.
This tension is a real one. If you have not read Ernest Callenbach’s classic novel Ecotopia, find a used copy and read it in the context of where we are today. Callenbach imagined California/Oregon/Washington forcing their secession from the United States, and the creation of a new and better country, Ecotopia, separated from the corrupt United States, and living a far better life.
My grade school friend Rick Kinnaird recently wrote a blog piece about truth and politics, and said this:
“I think Los Angeles County should be given fair representation. It has more people in it than at least half a dozen of the western states so why not give them twelve Senators? What too radical? Okay. How about this, let’s stop having the states that keep taking money from the Federal government and never paying back, let’s have them survive on their own, live within their means. Aren’t you sick and tired of those welfare states always crying and bitching? I am. Let them go free; be on their own economically. It’s the land of the free. I want to see them be brave. Stand on their own two feet. I am sick and tired of those liptards having to bail out them big tough talking “we did it ourselves” states. First off, you didn’t do it yourself, If you did you wouldn’t need the help of New York and California. I’m talking to you Welfare Queen States. You know who you are. Stop hiding behind Mitch McConnell’s skirt. I’m talking to Montana, North Dakota, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming. Look – Don’t Tread on Me. Stop with your silly live free or die crap because it you were set free you’d die.”
I could not have said this any more eloquently. Red states and Republicans might do well to take a moment for self-reflection before they continue to feed the fires of wedge politics.
--DW
The Orangeburg Massacre: Remembrances and Reckoning (SCETV)
***
Political Links: Dust and Mist
Dark Money: every time Trump raises an issue, you can assume he is just doing the work of the Koch Brothers, the DeVos family, the Mercer family or Putin, or all of them. His attack on mail in ballots is completely aligned with Koch family interests, a fake organization called “Honest Elections Project.” Their goal, demonstrated in detail by Nancy Maclean in the important book Democracy in Chains, is to place choke points and controls on democracy, since these right wing libertarians want to protect their business interests from any form of control or regulation.
Nancy Maclean website Democracy Unchained for more information and research.
“Trump is lying to undermine the election” (Washington Post article). Are we aware enough to stop him? More evidence of Putin’s hand on the wheel.
The End of Something: On Radical Change in a Time of Pandemic– Ben Ehrenreich imagines a better future. I am glad someone does.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, Letters from an American
The uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis:
The Minneapolis Uprising in Context, Elizabeth Hinton, Boston Review
This is What You Get, Ashley Reese, Jezebel
Yes, Black America Fears the Police. Here’s Why.Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote this piece for ProPublica in 2015. It remains relevant today.
***
The Sacred Beautiful:
If ever
the end of the world
should arrive
--Vladimir Mayakovsky, from “The Brooklyn Bridge,” translated by Dorian Rottenberg
let us not be deceived by what passes
for life in this place
--Lara Lorenzo
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
--Audre Lorde
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of time that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching. Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
--Blaise Pascal
***
Karl Gartung
All but seriously
their needs all their needs
be said there be said
‘some(where)
one is
gone’
I can
still
see my
father’s
dimple in
his
chin in
my
green son’s
seen
my
mother gone
thirty
years later
part
of the
legacy
none of
them
actually speaks
to
me and
they
never can
though
in times
of
crisis they
enter
the room
***
The Audacity of Hope, Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect
I Just Want to Live, a beautiful, heartfelt song by Keedron Bryant (a 12 year old gospel singer)