The Weird Times

Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces

The Weird Times: Issue #16: August 30, 2020

End of Summer Blues?

64 days to Election Day

Do you know where your ballot is?

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And as I walk on through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong and who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?

'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away
Just makes me wanna cry

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?
What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

--Nick Lowe (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding lyrics © Plangent Visions Music Inc. Elvis Costello sings it.

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“Whenever you’re confused by something Trump is doing, remember: he’s less a politician than a propagandist. Don’t look to the policy for the logic driving his actions - look at the pictures. “ --Douglas Rushkoff

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“But don’t underestimate Trump. His campaign marries the Republican professional media messaging that goes back to Nixon with the dog whistle racism of Lee Atwater and company, and Trump’s own demonic talent as a demagogue.

Forty percent of Americans are enthralled with a cultish freak. The rest of us need to work overtime.” -- Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, August 26, 2020

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It’s always seemed that Donald Trump was somewhat intellectually lazy (to put it nicely), but now the Republicans have proven themselves his match as they have failed to bother to write a new party platform, and are just copying in the “planks” from 2016. Which can be pretty funny, in practice.

These are just a few of the now stupid looking platform that the RNC has decided to keep:

• “The huge increase in the national debt demanded by and incurred during the current Administration has placed a significant burden on future generations.”

• “The current Administration has exceeded its constitutional authority, brazenly and flagrantly violated the separation of powers, sought to divide America into groups and turn citizen against citizen.”

• “The current Administration has abandoned America’s friends and rewarded its enemies.”

• “The President has refused to defend or enforce laws he does not like, used executive orders to enact national policies in areas constitutionally reserved solely to Congress, made unconstitutional ‘recess’ appointments to Senate-confirmed positions, directed regulatory agencies to overstep their statutory authority, and failed to consult Congress regarding military action overseas.”

It’s not like Trump has any capability of understanding irony, of course.

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The Republican Party is dead. It’s now the Trump Party and the TPC (Trump Party Convention) was, to use a favorite word these days, a complete and utter disgrace. The authoritarian in chief was on full display and his Himmler, Goering and all the rest of the fawning party members disgustedly participated. Every network that broadcast it was being used to support the public debasement of democracy on full display. America is a frog in the water and the temperature is about 210 degrees. By November 4, we will be at full boil.

“Reality looks a lot less triumphant than tonight’s tawdry performance in the house that has sheltered Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and which belongs not to the Trumps, but to the American people.” – Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, August 26, 2020.

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“We begin with the land. We emerge from the earth of our mother, and our bodies will be returned to earth. We are the land. We cannot own it, no matter any proclamation by paper state. We are literally the land, a planet. Our spirits inhabit this place. We are not the only ones. We are creators of this place with each other. We mark our existence with our creations. It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-​grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.” Joy Harjo, from When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Copyright (c) 2020 by Joy Harjo

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Singer songwriter Justin Townes Earle died this week at 38 years of age, probably from a drug overdose, according to Nashville police. He was a terrific songwriter.

“I think I was dealing with a lot of things I didn’t know how to deal with, between my father leaving and my mother bringing in a slew of drunken bastard boyfriends to live with us for a little while … by the time I emerged from my parents’ household at 15 years old, I was a very fucked-up kid,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I discovered very fast that my way of doing things was going to get me in trouble, and I kept going with it, because I believed the myth for a long time, and I believed I had to destroy myself to make great art.”

Turn the radio down,
Roll the windows up and say to myself that
I thought I’d be a better man

Sometimes I dream that I have found a place
Where I won’t feel so all alone
Am I that lonely tonight, I don’t know…

Sometimes I think that I could find a way
Where I won't feel so on my own
Am I that lonely tonight, am I that lonely tonight,
Am I that lonely tonight, that I don't know...

(Song, Am I that Lonely Tonight, by Justin Townes Earle)

Justin’s website, give a listen. Another lost soul lost.

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It is almost impossible to understand how Jacob Blake could be shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha, Wisconsin police officer.

LA Clippers coach and former NBA player Doc Rivers spoke about it on August 26:

"We're the ones getting killed. We're the ones getting shot... We keep loving this country and this country doesn't love us back.

"...If you watch that video, you don't need to be Black to be outraged."

Watch the clip, one of the most powerful statements we have heard about the lived experience of the ongoing racism of our country.

Steph Curry responded.

And LeBron James.

Crickets from Republicans. They’ll condemn the protesters, of course. Meanwhile, armed white militias roam the streets with impunity.

"So many people have reached out to me telling me they're sorry that this happened to my family. Well don't be sorry, because this has been happening to my family for a long time, longer than I can account for. It happened to Emmett Till, Emmett Till is my family. It happened to Philando, Mike Brown, Sandra...This is nothing new." — Letreta Widman, Jacob Blake’s sister, August 26, 2020

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The price is great - Sublimely paid -    
Do we deserve - a Thing -    
That lives - like Dollars - must be piled    
Before we may obtain? 
-- Emily Dickinson

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What follows is the abstract from a recent research paper from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point: “The QAnon conspiracy theory, which emerged in 2017, has quickly risen to prominence in the United States. A survey of cases of individuals who have allegedly or apparently been radicalized to criminal acts with a nexus to violence by QAnon, including one case that saw a guilty plea on a terrorism charge, makes clear that QAnon represents a public security threat with the potential in the future to become a more impactful domestic terror threat. This is true especially given that conspiracy theories have a track record of propelling terrorist violence elsewhere in the West as well as QAnon’s more recent influence on mainstream political discourse.” (via ctc.usma.edu)

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I was kidnapped by police for nine hours for being a Black Lives Matter protester

For the 100 days since George Floyd’s death, police have replied to mass protests with chemical weaponry and repression tactics, most recently in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As this violence against largely peaceful protesters seems to have no end in sight, it scares me that when we talk about tear gas, we don’t talk about burning mouths and blinded eyes. It scares me that the bones broken by the fists and batons of police are “sustained non-lethal injuries”, not gruesome, splintered bones. And, officials offended by charged terms such as kidnapping would like us to instead use the term “lawful detainments”. But under federal and state law, kidnapping is commonly defined as the unlawful transportation and confinement of a person against their will.

By that definition, John Parks was kidnapped by police and armed federal forces on 29 July in Portland, Oregon. “I was surrounded by men in camo, and black,” he told me, with tense inflection, “They put me in the back of an unmarked vehicle and refused to tell me why I was being detained.”

--Aurielle Lucier, The Guardian, August 28, 2020

Police deploy tear gas during a protest in Minneapolis. Yuri Gripas/Reuters

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David Wilk

What Ails Me Today -- and Every Day

There is so much suffering in America today. What ails you the most? What troubles your soul?

What troubles me most is the half assed view of reality espoused by capitalists and wide-eyed libertarians who can’t recognize how they are being used by the ruling class – and yes, Marx was right in his description of capitalism. There is a ruling class. Capital exploits and uses Labor. In the twentieth century, Capital used mass media to brainwash Labor and the rise of a meaningful middle class co-opted many into believing they were different from and better than the Working Class, and the fluidity in American capitalism that allowed some of those in Labor classes to become members of the Capital class also contributed to a mythology we still believe in – a rising growth economy helps everyone. But it was always a lie built on a web of lies. The extraction economy mystifies reality. To work, this growth machine must be infinite but the world itself is finite.

Improved propaganda in the twenty first century has further shielded Capital from any sort of accountability for its ruthless exploitation and degradation of people and planet.

What troubles us now is our failure to understand our current reality.

A darkness rises all around us.

We mistake it for a dream, but disaster looms, and we feel its power all around us now.

So what ails you, what troubles your soul, is dream’s darkness brought forth in daylight.

The imminent destruction of the rainforest and the fires in Australia and California are signals from another world. In our beautiful, finite, fragmented world, actions have consequences.

Extraction is not a “gift of nature” from God, but a habit of humans that began in a world where survival was the goal of the species. We take the easiest path every chance we get for a reason.

The specter of the future is imperfect but absolute. A new day is coming, a different sort of rising tide that will reshape us all and change our ideas about reality, both physical and spiritual. Humans have a long history of adaptation and survival, but we are also short sighted and limited in our understanding of both the physical and spiritual realms and we are not prepared for what is to come.

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A note of hope: The North Carolina Republicans Who are Defecting from Trump

W. David Guice, Page Ives Lemel, and Mike Hawkins, all members of the Transylvania County Board of Commissioners, have left the North Carolina Republican Party and say they will not support Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Photograph by Rosie Brock for The New Yorker

In a year of rising discontent with Trump, an increasing number of Republicans are going public with their disdain for the President—and, in many cases, for the politicians and operatives who have cheered him, indulged him, or stood by without an opposing word during his Administration. These dissenters’ histories vary, as do their tactics, but they are united in the goal of denying him a second term. Groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump are delivering dozens of attack videos, often responding within hours to the latest Trump calumny. 

Article in the New Yorker by Peter Slevin, August 24, 2020

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And a note of inspiration: For Eddy Alvarez, dreams – plural – do come true.

He has lived the dream not once but twice, first on a medal stand, again in the batter’s box, overcoming no shortage of barriers both physical and implied.

Yet even Eddy Alvarez catches himself wondering sometimes.

“We all deal with our inner pessimist,” Alvarez said Thursday from the sanctum of the Miami Marlins’ visiting clubhouse area in Baltimore. “We just try to find as much positivity as we can find. Positive thinking creates positive results.”

And sometimes, it turns literal dreams into reality.

Alvarez made his major league debut on Wednesday night, at an unlikely age — 30 — and under unlikely circumstances.

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“Baseball is relentless," he says. “It’s an opportunity I worked a ridiculous amount of time for. I’m just going to make the best of it.

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