The Weird Times

Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces

The Weird Times

Issue #9: July 12, 2020

"Pandemic time is perhaps best understood as a relentless series of decadal weeks that will last months on end around the world, forcing reconciliations in historical ledgers of karmic debts and credits, accumulated over centuries, in ways we can only begin to guess at."--Venkatesh Rao, Noema

"And worse I may be yet: the worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" (Edmund, King Lear)

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, Harper’s Magazine

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“When any white man picks up a gun and utters the word ‘Give me Liberty or give me death’ the entire white world applauds. But if a black man says exactly the same thing…word for word...he is judged a criminal, and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him.” – James Baldwin, interviewed by Dick Cavett, May 16, 1969 (thanks to Summer Brenner for sending me this great video).

The virus was never of interest to the President, and once he realized he didn’t know how to stop it or make a buck off it, he moved on to the fun part, turning masks into symbols of political extremism. –Jesse Kornbluth

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Trump Pushed CIA to Give Intelligence to Kremlin, While Taking No Action Against Russia Arming Taliban, Ryan Goodman, JustSecurity.org

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If we look around and don’t see the Beloved Community, then our work must be to build one and bring it into existence. We must do this without metaphors. We cannot continue to comfort ourselves with storytelling and remembering the past. Our survival is dependent on discovering the shape and forms of things unknown. We must find the faith to love. The faith to give birth to a future bright and spilling glitter into our hands.

—E. Ethelbert Miller, “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” in AWP Summer Newsletter.

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Scary to read and to think about, but absolutely crucial to our thinking about what we are experiencing now:

“How Trump Could Lose the Election and Still Remain President” (Newsweek)

My own take is that events are already unfolding along these lines. Make note of the fact that the Orange Demagogue commuted Roger Stone’s jail sentence on Friday July 10. It is important to note that he did not pardon his old buddy in crime, because if pardoned, Stone would no longer be able to not testify to what he knows about Trump, Wikileaks and the Russians. Which must be a lot, since as soon as Stone asked for his sentence to be commuted, noting carefully that otherwise he might have to talk, the Demagogue-in-Chief acted. Damn the political costs of committing bribery in public sight. It is crucial that all Americans stay on guard and ready to put our bodies on the line, literally, when TrumpBarr makes their move to finally overturn democracy. It is almost a certainty that terrible things will unfold, now that it is getting more likely that Democrats will win bigly in November. (DW)

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We are second-rate. This is our second system failure in twelve years. We came into this crisis as a Potemkin village, a series of movie backdrops pretending to stand in for a society. And the virus just pushed them over like a mild wind, revealing all the cracks, all the faults that we preferred not to see while tuning into game shows and superhero reboots.

--David Dayen, The American Prospect, Unsanitized: The Covid-19 Daily Report, July 9, 2020.

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Carl Reiner’s Fairy Tale Ending, Vanity Fair

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Three Haiku from the little book of e by E. Ethelbert Miller, with Hebrew translations by Rafi Ellenson.

#60

early morning walk

it seems the world is still here

black lives still matter

בַּבּוֹקֶר מֻוקְדָּם

הָעוֹלָם עוֹד כָּאן וְחַיִּים

שְׁחוֹרִים נֶחֱשָׁבִים

#66

the hunting season

black men running in circles

looking for their wings

עוֹנַת הַצַּיִד

גְּבָרִים שְׁחוֹרִים בְּלוּלָאָה

מְחַפְּשִׂים כְּנֵפָם

#67

blood flows in the street

a man is a fragile thing

why do they break us

דָּם זוֹרֵם בָּרְחוֹב

אָדָם הוּא דָּבָר שָׁבִיר

לָמָּה אֲנַחְנוּ

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Last night I had a dream
That the world had turned around
And all our hopes had come to be
And the people gathered 'round
They all brought what they could bring
And nobody went without
And I learned a song to sing
The revolution starts now — Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now

It means that I won't give in,
Won't give in
Won't give in
Cause everyone I love is here,
All at once,
And I'll show you how to get here — The Finn Brothers, Won’t Give In