The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Space
The Weird Times, Issue #18, September 13, 2020
Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2007)
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The Tell It Slant Festival produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass., Sept. 14-20 goes online. The schedule includes a poetry masterclass with Jericho Brown, a reading by Ada Limón, presentations on Dickinson’s life and work, a marathon reading of her 1,789 poems and more. All events are free, but space is limited, and you must pre-register for each event here. Your tax-deductible donation would be greatly appreciated.
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Democrats are Girding for Post-Election Chaos: Trump’s embrace of the deranged QAnon cult and defense of vigilante justice only adds to fears of violence in November if the president loses and refuses to accept the results. Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair, Sept 8, 2020
“There are a lot of scary scenarios,” former Congressional candidate Sean Eldridge, who leads the grassroots Protect the Results coalition, told the Daily Beast. “We have to be prepared to mobilize in unprecedented ways.” But despite mounting concerns about the looming constitutional crisis and the possibility of a season of political violence, worries remain that the issue has taken too long to garner the appropriate level of attention—and that the defense against the Rittenhouses, Q-supporters, and other violent actors Trump is empowering remains unclear. “My fear,” as Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks told the Daily Beast, “is that we are still behind the eight ball.”
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Boiling Frog Syndrome: Fascist tactics are on the rise in Trump’s America:
Swept up in the in the Federal Response to Portland Protests ‘I didn’t know if I was going to be seen again.’ by Shawn Boburg, Meg Kelly and Joyce Sohyun Lee Sept. 10, 2020.
From detention to release, the four people whose cases were examined by The Post described experiences they found harrowing and unnerving. Three are speaking for the first time.
One was picked up and interrogated in an unmarked van, she said, and then dropped off in another location in the city. Two others, including Hacker, said they were held in jail cells before being let go without explanation or charges. Another, a U.S. citizen like the other three, was mistakenly identified as a foreigner and arrested on charges that were later dropped.
This is how authoritarian states operate. We are being overwhelmed daily by evidence of the decline and fall of American democracy, and somehow we must remain able to stand up and not allow ourselves to be afraid of the power of the State to restrain our voices. This is no small thing in a democratic system that sadly and subtly, we have come to take too much for granted.
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As many of you doubtless know, Jesmyn Ward is a brilliant writer. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, all of which are terrific books. Her husband died earlier this year. She wrote about it for Vanity Fair.
I have no words to describe her brilliant and empathy-inducing story.
On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic.
“Without his hold to drape around my shoulders, to shore me up, I sank into hot, wordless grief.”
(Photo credit Beowulf Sheehan)
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“It’s a shame I don’t get to see what happens. But everybody dies, and there will always be places and experiences missing from anyone’s life –the world has too much beauty and adventure for one person to see.” -- At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here's what I want to pass on, Elliot Dallen, the Guardian, September 7, 2020
Dallen died hours after the Guardian published piece that reflected on facing his terminal illness.
(Elliot Dallen with his sister Annabel at Lulworth Cove, Dorset. ‘We are incredibly touched by what people have said in the comments they posted,’ she said. Photograph: Elliot Dallen)
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The emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including drug-resistant bacteria, or “superbugs,” pose far greater risks to human health than Covid-19, threatening to put modern medicine “back into the dark ages,” an Australian scientist has warned, ahead of a three-year study into drug-resistant bacteria in Fiji. “If you thought Covid was bad, you don’t want anti-microbial resistance,” Dr Paul De Barro, biosecurity research director at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, told The Guardian. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say it’s the biggest human health threat, bar none. Covid is not anywhere near the potential impact of AMR.” (via The Guardian, BMJ Global Health)
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By simply counting coughs, a team of researchers found evidence that covid-19 may have been spreading in the United States weeks earlier than was previously suspected.
The team examined six years of electronic health records in Los Angeles, searching for reports with the word “cough,” a common covid-19 symptom. From this, they learned that respiratory failure hospitalizations spiked in late December last year and remained above historic levels for the next 10 weeks. “This is consistent with the growing body of data that suggests that there’s been community spread much earlier than we had anticipated,” one of the study's authors, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, told The Post.
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It’s one two three
What are we fighting for
Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s five six seven open up the pearly gates
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
--I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag (Take 1), Country Joe and the Fish, by Joe MacDonald
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Wildlife in ‘Catastrophic Decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn. Helen Briggs, BBC Wildlife Correspondent, September 10, 2020
Wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years, according to a major report by the conservation group WWF.
The report says this "catastrophic decline" shows no sign of slowing.
And it warns that nature is being destroyed by humans at a rate never seen before.
Wildlife is "in freefall" as we burn forests, over-fish our seas and destroy wild areas, says Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF.
"We are wrecking our world - the one place we call home - risking our health, security and survival here on Earth. Now nature is sending us a desperate SOS and time is running out."
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Sinister dream of a refugee ship
27 july 2020
plague year
On a huge ship and the ocean is dark. At each port a new crew and new passengers get on and the old crew and some of the passengers get off. However, most people who are passengers remain on the ship. The passengers are poets, composers, musicians, painters. Now we are in a port and I realize it may be a good opportunity to disembark no matter where we are. There’s a man I’d picked to be my partner who would be a caretaker for me. Desperately I ask him if he will leave the ship with me and stay with me in this unknown place because we can never return to America ever again. I told him I have a short list of places I would consider traveling to from here and Berlin is top of my list, a place I associate with healing from trauma: would he consider it. He never answers my question and he walks away.
My daughter and her boyfriend are in another part of the ship. I hadn’t fully prepared for the moment when we would disembark. And my daughter and her boyfriend haven’t packed up anything. When I look inside the cabin the three of us had occupied, I see all of my daughter’s writing notebooks on a top shelf and many objects from her childhood are strewn around on shelves and tables. I want to find them and ask them to pack those things up but it may be too late for that. There are also many of my own things I forgot to pack: the large objects are taken care of, but my tea cups from my aunt Etty are some of the things I haven’t packed yet.
Before we got to this port I had been lying on the ground in an area of the ship that was like a parking lot, first talking to the guy I called M and when he walked away I remained lying there as if lying in the sun. Only it’s the moon, not the sun and I have my legs over a short barrier fence, almost like something in a parking lot to keep the cars organized, only this is made of pipe, thick round pipe, plumbing pipe, like the pipe I used to make legs for my bed at the Riverside Drive apartment I lived in long ago or like pipe used sometimes for railings.
There are mobs of people on this ship and we are all refugees. Only most of the people I knew stayed behind in America—the people working in offices, the novelists, the journalists, the people who owned shops and restaurants—because they were willing to tolerate the circumstances. I’m not willing. Writing the dream, I think of the story of the frog in the pot of water who doesn’t jump out when the water is only gradually brought to a boil because there’s a new “normal,” little by little the water is heated up and the frog experiences no shock as gradually the frog is brought to its death. The name of the man, M, makes me think of a writer who was born in a camp in Germany after her parents were released from a concentration camp at the end of World War II. That writer knew that having a partner who’d stick by you through thick and thin was the way to choose a partner. Even if he wasn’t perfect, he was necessary for survival. Life is about survival.
—Annabel Lee
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America is Murder
Founded on murder. Murder of indigenous people. Murder of the animals, the birds, the fish. So many gone. Murder of the land. Murder on the land. Murder of rivers, of streams, and marshes, murder of mountains, murder of prairies. Murder of slaves brought to America for murder. Murder of the oceans. Murder of the air. Murder everywhere, murder within our souls, within our hearts a wound of murder. Blood of murder, flesh of murder. Murder within the body of democracy.
The names of people murdered. Tribes extinguished, reduced. Removed. Pequots, Catawba, Lenape, Kiskiak, Seminole, so many more.
Black bodies lynched, burned, torn apart in public brutality watched by Americans.
Millions of individual humans: murdered.
The names of species murdered. Buffalo, passenger pigeon, monk seal, the uncounted, unnamed, thousands more.
Alive in spirit or memory but disappeared from the land.
The names of earth and water murdered. Rivers dammed: murdered. Streams polluted: murdered. Mountains clearcut: murdered. Sacred spaces invaded: murdered.
The names of murderers. The faces of murderers, the murdered, the murdered bodies in the land. Murderers walking the land, breathing the souls of murdered earth.
Murder is the body of America, our heart is darkness, our soul is death.
(2)
America is broken
The heart of our world
is broken
torn apart:
This murdered
Empty shell of flesh
(3)
Immigrants crossing deserts to find America
Murdered by desire and distance
The purity of dreams burned to death crushed into emptiness
Murdered in sleep in daylight passing
Into hopelessness and loss: murdered
(4)
The names of the murdered, the raped, the disappeared:
call to them
give them voice
cry out to them to be forgiven
cry out to them that they will be known
given voice
given choice to tell or not to tell
their own stories
in this land of murder and pain
and shame
— David Wilk
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Darkness Written in July 1816
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
(Thanks Summer Brenner for sending this to me, thinking of the fires in California and the Pacific Northwest)
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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a move that many in the legal profession and laundry industry called unprecedented, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Department of Justice will start picking up Donald J. Trump’s dry cleaning, effective immediately.
Speaking to reporters at the Department of Justice, Barr said that the D.O.J. would assume full responsibility for dropping off and picking up “items including but not limited to President Trump’s shirts, suits, slacks, socks, and undergarments.”
Congressional Democrats howled in protest at Barr’s decision, arguing that taxpayers’ money should not be used to pick up laundry items that were purchased while Trump was a private citizen.
But Barr pushed back against that criticism, claiming that “the legal principle in question is not when the President purchased these items but when he stained them.”
To illustrate his point, Barr held up one of Trump’s red ties and indicated a clearly visible mustard stain—which, the Attorney General claimed, the tie suffered last week.
At that point, Barr abruptly ended his press conference, stating that he had to get Trump’s brown loafers reheeled.
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2020 is the one hundredth anniversary of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s summer sojourn in Westport, Connecticut, as documented in the book by Richard Webb, Boats Against the Current. Now his research partner, Robert Steven Williams, has released a documentary film, Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story. In the book and film, they show evidence that The Great Gatsby is set not on Long Island, but in Westport. The film was recently reviewed favorably in the New Yorker by Richard Brody. Buy the book here.
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My latest podcast is on Writerscast.com, an interview with Helen Zuman on her memoir Mating in Captivity, about her experience at Zendik Farm, a commune that turned out to be a cult.
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Scary and grim as the world currently is, the news is not all bad.
A group of teens have paired up with professional athletes in Chicago to transform a liquor store into a fresh food market in an inner-city food desert.
Teens Transform Liquor Store into Food Market for Community in Need. NBC News, Chicago.
Onward!