The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space
The Weird Times
Issue 5
June 15, 2020
1215 King John of England signs the Magna Carta at Runnymede, near Windsor, England
1940 World War II: France surrenders to Nazi Germany, German troops occupy Paris
1965 Bob Dylan records Like a Rolling Stone
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“You wouldn’t take your knee off our neck”
--Rev. Al Sharpton, June 4, 2020
“And now the only piece of advice that continues to help
Is anyone that's making anything new only breaks something else.”
--When My Time Comes, Dawes
“Wake up, it's judgment day.”
--Bob Lefsetz
Best line of the week:
Trump renewed his threat to take federal action against demonstrators in a tweet to Washington State officials demanding that they crack down on protests in Seattle. “Take back your city NOW,” Trump wrote in a tweet directed at Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) and Gov. Jay Inslee (D). “If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”
Durkan replied: “Go back to your bunker.” Reported in the Washington Post, June 11, 2020.
Think the unthinkable. A warning we should not ignore. Umair Haque has been writing about the collapse of the US and the rise of authoritarian fascism for the past five years. Everything he has predicted thus far has come true.
Food as Medicine on the Navajo Nation – Civil Eats. Indigenous people are suffering from COVID at unimaginable levels. You can help.
Masks: WEAR THEM. From the Washington Post, June 10, 2020:
A new study shows that widespread use of face masks could push transmission of the virus to a manageable level and prevent a “second wave” of infections. Researchers found that wearing a face mask in public at all times is twice as effective in curbing the spread of the virus as wearing a mask only after symptoms appear. The study's authors wrote: “These analyses may explain why some countries, where adoption of face mask use by the public is around 100%, have experienced significantly lower rates of covid-19 spread and associated deaths.”
Reflections from a Token Black Friend, Ramesh A. Nagarajah, Medium
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Miggs Burroughs
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Robert Pennoyer
Here is the text of my Memorial Day speech, which a professional video team recorded at a podium in the middle of the beautiful cemetery near St. Peter's Church in Millbrook, New York. When the church had to cancel their annual ceremony at the cemetery, they asked me to do a video, which was patched into the service on Sunday, May 24, and can be viewed on the St. Peter's web site.
St. Peter's Church Graveyard, Millbrook
May 2020
At this hallowed site founded in 1801 we gather to honor the men and women who served the cause of freedom from the time of the American Revolution, including the sacrifices made by my generation 76 years ago on June 6, 1944, when the Navy amassed an armada of 8,000 ships to land American and allied forces on the beaches of Normandy. If you were a soldier in England that day, before boarding your ship to cross to France you would have heard Eisenhower's message, which began with these lines: "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces! You are about to embark upon the great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. "
The crossing was rough. Take a moment to imagine the bravery it took to step off a landing craft when it ran aground 100 yards from the beach, and wade through the surf in the face of withering German fire. 3,000 died that morning on Omaha beach alone. But by nightfall we knew their sacrifice was not in vain, for we and our allies had landed 150,000 men, gaining a beachhead along a fifty-mile front for the yearlong campaign that brought victory over Nazi Germany.
I followed the news of the landing and the ensuing campaign with intense interest. I was 19, at Harvard, training in the Naval ROTC with most of my classmates, about to receive orders to join a cruiser in the Pacific.
It is also most fitting to pay tribute to a son of the Hudson River Valley buried a few miles from here, Franklin Roosevelt, our Commander-in-Chief, who led us and our allies to victory over tyranny in Europe and Asia. I vividly recall the moment on the evening of April 12, 1945 when word passed among the crew that President Roosevelt had died. We were at battle stations heading north from the island of Okinawa, where days of kamikaze attacks caused over 10,000 casualties in our fleet, to meet remnants of the Japanese fleet coming down from Japan. A few weeks earlier my ship had been heavily damaged at Iwo Jima with almost 150 killed and wounded, and a few days later, when we were just offshore bombarding targets on Iwo ahead of the advancing Marines, I heard a great cheer and, looking up, saw our flag's broad stripes and bright stars moments after it was raised on the summit of Mount Suribachi, the four hundred foot hill at one end of the island. We did not know that we had witnessed a moment that would be recorded forever in the Nation's history.
Franklin Roosevelt embodied the spirit of liberty that has guided the destiny of our Nation throughout history.
We find it in those who signed the Declaration of Independence, "pledging to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, our Sacred Honor", as they declared that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States, absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown."
We find it in the Constitution which opens with "We the People" - not we the corporations - but "We the People".
We find it incised in stone at the Jefferson Memorial: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
We find it in the words of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman, a leader of the underground railroad, who, before the Civil War, at great personal risk rescued over 100 slaves: "If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there's shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom keep going."
We find it in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "It is for us the living . . . to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . ; that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
We find it in the speech given in Central Park before a crowd of 150,000 a few days before the landing in Normandy by the nation's most renowned jurist, Learned Hand: "We are gathered here to affirm a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same . . . . What was the object that brought us . . . to this choice? We sought liberty . . . liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. . . ."
We find it in Martin Luther King's Letter from the Birmingham Jail: "I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
We find it in John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what the country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
We find it in the brave children from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School leading the nation against the NRA.
And lastly, we find it in the Muslim father of the Captain killed in Iraq, Khizr Kahn, who came to America in the 1980's with his wife and young children, found freedom and rejoiced in the Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of association. He had come from Pakistan where, in his words: "[We faced arrest] for saying the wrong thing or associating with the wrong people -- or even with just too many people . . . ."
Years later, when told he had passed the examination to become a United States citizen, he writes:
"A rush of emotion came over me . . . . I was going to be an American. No. . . . I already was an American. In my heart, I had been for years."
Today I am filled with hope, knowing that, long after I am gone, millions of citizens of every race and creed, aroused by the encroaching tyranny, imbued with that spirit of liberty, will strive to save our democracy and freedom as they "trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."
End
I published Bob’s outstanding memoir, As It Was in 2015. He is someone I have come to respect and admire, and his life story is indeed, inspiring. My Writerscast interview with Bob Pennoyer is here. You can buy the book from independent bookstore RJ Julia.
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A June 2020 To Do List
Rethink and remake policing.
Rethink and remake our economic system.
Rethink and restore our relationship to natural systems.
Rethink and rediscover our bodies.
Rethink and reimagine our minds.
All of these concepts are interconnected.
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If you like The Weird Times, please tell your friends. If you are not finding these missives useful, please let me know. If you’d like to contribute work, please do contact me. Always, stay safe, be well, work for change. And make sure everyone in your life is registered to vote and knows where to go in November. It is never too soon to think about our duties to democracy.
Langston Hughes
(the last stanzas from) Let America Be America Again
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
