The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times
Issue 12
“Fish always flop around before they die.”
Former republican congressman David Jolley describing Trump’s recent behavior on MSNBC, 7.31.20
In a morally and politically “arresting” column last week, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg noted that unidentified federal forces were snatching protesters from Portland’s streets without warrants. “Can we call it fascism yet?”she asked citing the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning, in his truly arresting On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, that “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
It has come, indeed, unless we stop it en masse. Now. Not from behind our computers but in the streets and in public buildings and in massive but disciplined non-compliance with government edicts that flout the rule of law. But disciplined non-compliance requires organizing and communicating effectively enough to dissuade protesters (and outside provocateurs) from giving Trumpists and sensationalist media reasons to call the protests “riots.”
Resistance for Real: The Time Has Come, Jim Sleeper in Moyers on Democracy, July 26, 2020.
Dignity statue created by artist Dale Lamphere to honor Dakota and Lakota Sioux women.
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“I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the part became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today’s Republican Party.” –Stuart Stevens, We Lost the Battle for the Republican Party’s Soul Long Ago, NY Times, July 30, 2020.
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White House senior adviser Stephen Miller lost his grandma to the virus. Her son blames the White House.
“On July 4, David Glosser, the brother of Miller’s mother, posted a Facebook note announcing the death of his mother, Ruth Glosser, who was Miller’s maternal grandmother,” Mother Jones reports. “David Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist and passionate Trump critic who has publicly decried Miller for his anti-immigrant policies, and he contends that Trump’s initial ‘lack of a response’ to the coronavirus crisis led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans who might have otherwise survived. In an interview, he says, ‘With the death of my mother, I’m angry and outraged at [Miller] directly and the administration he has devoted his energy to supporting.’” The White House, in a statement, claimed that Miller’s grandmother didn’t die from covid-19, saying she “died peacefully in her sleep from old age.” But David Glosser shared his mother’s official death certificate. It lists her cause of death as respiratory arrest resulting from covid-19. Reported in the Washington Post, July 24, 2020
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James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and sometimes referred to as "the father of global warming," has concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken—including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades—the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with. “This particular problem has become an emergency,” Hansen said. (via The New Yorker)
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There are Bob Dylan song lyrics appropriate to almost any occasion. Here’s what amounts to an ode to Donald Trump written more than 50 years ago.
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
--Visions of Johanna, Bob Dylan, Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music
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Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, inspiring young women from across the UK have been using lockdown to fight climate change from home. Here's what they have to say...
‘Lockdown shouldn’t stop us caring about the climate crisis. It should make us more active about pushing for change – there is no time to waste’, says Ayla, a 13-year-old environmental activist from London.
Far from wasting time over lockdown, Ayla has used it as an opportunity to reduce food waste in her local area – by creating a community larder.
‘I’ve learnt so much about the impact of consumerism on the natural world over lockdown. It has really inspired me and my family to rethink some of our consumerist habits and research sustainable alternatives’, says Ayla. — Niamh McCollum, Marie Claire (UK), July 22, 2020
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A little ditty sung by the Orange-in-Chief every day:
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me
I think I'll go eat worms!
Big fat juicy onesEensie weensy squeensy ones
See how they wiggle and squirm!
--(a 13th century children’s song from Tonga)
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David Wilk
Love song – for those who are lost and those who are found
I write this to you
thinking, believing
I will never be home
lost lost again
lost at sea
lost in the spaces between words
at a loss for words
and grieving for the spaces between us
those places where grief is born
this terrible aching
for a new beginning
always a new a new
and where you will read this
believing I am lost
and you are found
believing in the words
that cross the spaces between us
and the words carry me forever
from this place
to the next
thinking believing
I will never be home
but never lost
or lost again
wherever you are
there
I am found
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August 1 Reading List
On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder
Why Bob Dylan Matters, Richard F. Thompson
Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference, David Shimer
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hammalainen
An American Sunrise: Poems, Joy Harjo
