The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times, Issue 8
July 5, 2020
This year, I could not in good conscious wish everyone a “Happy 4th of July” - it seems a vacuous and empty expression right now. Instead, I’ll suggest “Let’s work together to firewall democracy and the institutions we take for granted when we celebrate America.” I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me that we might need to do something many Americans have done, including most especially indigenous Americans, which is to offer up our lives in defense of our society. Sadly, this is not at all an unlikely prospect anymore. So today, let us honor those who have done so in the past, and hope we can change direction soon enough to avoid disaster.
In the meantime, how about some art, poetry and music?
Phil Ochs: Power and Glory
Gil Scott-Heron, We Almost Lost Detroit
Brian Morgan
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Robert Creeley
America
America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.
Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world
you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.
People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.
Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back
what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be
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We're heading for a revolution. Or complete authoritarianism. Don't keep telling me it can't happen here. Or shrug and say you'll be fine no matter what happens. Look at the history of the world, the American experiment has been relatively brief. When are we going to take the temperature of the youth and stop the insanity? If not now, when?-Bob Lefsetz
“We are not leading. We are not following. We are lost.” –Thomas Friedman
“Many of the root causes of climate change also increase the risk of pandemics. Deforestation, which occurs mostly for agricultural purposes, is the largest cause of habitat loss worldwide. Loss of habitat forces animals to migrate and potentially contact other animals or people and share germs. Large livestock farms can also serve as a source for spillover of infections from animals to people. Less demand for animal meat and more sustainable animal husbandry could decrease emerging infectious disease risk and lower greenhouse gas emissions.”--Coronavirus, Climate Change, and the Environment: A Conversation on COVID-19 with Dr. Aaron Bernstein, Director of Harvard C-CHANGE
How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There is a Growing Consensus. Wall Street Journal.
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All the young dudes (now you bring him down)
('Cause I want him)
Carry the news
Boogaloo dudes (I want him right here)
(Bring him, come on)
Carry the news (bring him)
-David Bowie. 1972
“Native people have a different term for public lands: we call them home. We call them our sustainer, our library, our pharmacy, our sacred places. Indigenous identity and language are inseparable from land. Land is the residence of our more-than-human relatives, the dust of our ancestors, the holder of seeds, the makers of rain; our teacher. Land is not capital to which we have property rights; rather it is the place for which we have moral responsibility in reciprocity for its gift of life. Here is the question we must at last confront: Is land merely a source of belongings, or is it the source of our most profound sense of belonging? We can choose.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potowatomi, excerpt from a letter that will appear in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, eds Buntin, Dodd and Sheffield, Trinity University Press.
According to Adweek, TikTokers are encouraging fellow users to employ a tactic called “shopping cart abandonment” in which they go to the Trump 2020 campaign’s online store and fill up their cart with a whole bunch of merchandise they have no intention of purchasing. (Daily Dot)
Earlier last week, TikTok and Twitter users started posting videos and messages claiming that by leaving these items in the cart indefinitely, they are making them unavailable to other visitors. (The Verge)
These images were shared in an email I received, taken from the web and I do not know whom to credit. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
My final thoughts for the week:
For those calling on Trump to resign (which he will never do), unless Mike Pence resigns with Trump, what’s the point? Do you want a Poodle as president or a Puppet?
Thanks to our Founders for creating the Electoral College that gives inordinate power to small population states. Let’s abolish the Electoral College. The Founders got a lot right, but the structure of our republic was the product of compromise with small states and also slave states, and we are still living with the downside results of those alignments.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson pointed out yesterday that only 130 years ago “Republicans … set out to make sure no Democrat could ever win the White House again. They rushed South Dakota into the Union in 1889, along with North Dakota, Montana, and Washington—all Republican regions-- to pack the Senate and the Electoral College. The next year, they rushed in Wyoming and Idaho, too, boasting that they would dominate government for the foreseeable future.”
So why not statehood for DC and Puerto Rico?