The Politicization of Stupidity (text by Roger Deff, tr. Dan Hanrahan)

Via a couple of serendipitous FB connections, in recent years I've made the acquaintance of a group of poets & musicians from Belo Horizonte, Brazil whose work ignites my imagination and inspires me greatly. One such artist is the remarkable MC, Roger Deff. I was introduced to his music through the poet and translator Leo Gonçalves and immediately connected to his poetry, the atypical accompanying beats/sounds by artists like Barulhista and the images of the streets & skies, BH street art & the poignant portraits of the residents of Belo Horizonte in Deff's music videos... Today I came upon a brief reflection by RD on FB on the "politicization of stupidity" in Brazil. It sounded all too similar to what we face here in the US in the waning days of Trumplandia. So, I got R. Deff's permission to translate it and I share it below. We are not alone in the struggle against this weaponized idiocy! Enjoy...

"One of the most maddening things to contend with these days is the politicization of stupidity. People have taken to labeling the most idiotic traits – denialism, selfishness, ignorance and the lack of basic common sense – as not just opinion (which was already a stretch), but as “political stances.” People defend with tooth and nail positions that are both irresponsible and idiotic - when what is at stake are people’s lives. In the past, I believed that this was only a question of people being ill-informed, but it is more than that. Beyond the kingdom of disinformation - in a world ruled by algorithms, where reason can rapidly recede, among people lacking the capacity to process complex ideas (reality is only simple in the confines of our heads) - there is the question of one’s personal character. To say that (Brazilian soccer star) Neymar and people who act like him or who see themselves represented in his blasé attitude of “fuck it” are just stupid is not the whole picture. There is also a lack of ethics to consider. To see such idiocy among those in power is quite serious – but it all begins, or ends, in those who feel themselves represented in such leaders. And that is what scares me most… because such people are not an exception among us. -- Roger Deff, tr. Dan Hanrahan

Never, Aye-ayes

 

Never

Oaks hoarding acorns

Rivers hoarding stones

Clouds hoarding raindrops

Flowers hoarding scents

We are among & within

The night moths flying

With giant-eyed wings

The frogs that chorus

the moonrise

I saw Jeremiah after the storm

After his motorbike propelled him

Into the concrete pylon

He was passing into

Something different

Transforming to be able to

Transmit into the next space

Only as an other

Could he even get there

While he was here

He was as much of Earth

As are ants anteaters aphids

Arachnids antelope anemones

Apes albatrosses angelfish and aye-ayes

Louise Bourgeois, Brooklyn, Stone

Back in the late 90's, I was visiting my friend Joe Kutchera one spring in Brooklyn. As we were heading up the dirty, pale blue, converted-factory stairway to the loft he shared with his jeweler roommate, he indicated a large pair of sliding doors. "That's Louise Bourgeois' studio," he said. All I knew about Louise Bourgeois is that she was a sculptor who made big objects that were odd and alluring, but that I didn't think I understood. I was able to get on my tiptoes and peer through a dusty, rectangular window to see inside. It was an open space, with New York City, factory-floor-afternoon light spilling in from outside. There were tools of various shapes and sizes scattered around and I noticed the piece she must have been working on at the time. It was a perfect, polished sphere made of a pale stone, that stood about 6-feet high. I concluded that she was working on the sculpture of a massive eyeball, but again, I felt I didn't understand why.

I noticed this morning that the Jewish Museum is hosting a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois' work that will open in April 2021. It made me remember that moment in Brooklyn of perhaps 22 years ago. I think now I understand why she was making a great sphere eyeball out of pale stone in her Brooklyn studio. Perhaps it is for the same reason that anybody journeys out to the margins, between what is and what is not, to listen and see and commune and finally to bring back something they have made. They do this – form giant round stones, transmit a trumpet through a wah-wah pedal, cast great pulsating color fields upon a stretched canvas or form baroque, crystal staircases and chandeliers of church organ melody -- so that someone may see/hear/smell/touch/taste - experience it and remember and tell you about it one day.

The Great and the Terrible in 1970s Pop Rock

There's something uncanny about a lot of 1970s pop and rock -- it walks the line so treacherously between being really terrible and really great. I was just watching an episode of "Daryl's House," where Daryl Hall hosted the Rockford, Illinois band Cheap Trick at his digs in Millford, New York. This was the heaviest rock Daryl Hall has likely ever played -- guitars, distortion, train engine drumming and vocals that test the gonads.

It must be said that guitarist and songwriter Rick Nielsen learned his Beatles lessons well. He could write a punchy chorus and he gave the band's best songs odd, little touches that adorn the tunes like the extra twirl of a vine or placement of a small metallic bug in the ironwork on the façade of a building. I'm thinking of the peculiar, ringing open chord that launches their teen anthem "Surrender" or the key-threatening B major to G major chords Nielsen plays in the pre-chorus to "I Want You to Want Me."

But Cheap Trick, being titans of 70s pop rock, also had some overcooked numbers in their repertoire and they played one on "Daryl's House" -- the hangover-inducing, "Heaven Tonight." Heavy, brooding and apparently drug-addled, it is a song that wears its Abbey Road influence on its sleeve. Though Cheap Trick is far from a prog band, the song showcases the most maddening feature of prog rock: an attempt at being deep and portentous that sounds somewhat ridiculous. The song's brush with The Terrible is reached in the chorus, when a group of rough and tumble guys chant, in falsetto, the coke-on-the-mirror line, "Do you want to go to heaven tonight?" It can fill a listener with despair.

Hearing the song today brought me back to an emotional experience I felt constantly growing up in the 70s: ambivalence. I loved and I hated that song by… Elton John, Jim Croce, Don McLean, The Commodores, Pat Benatar. I loved and I hated being at school – seeing friends and seeing girls was great, but I felt so restless there. Even my feelings toward my parents veered from affection to bewilderment. “Playing with those felt puppets you made was fun, Mom!” But who are you? Your old life with nine sisters in Boston is unknowable to me. “Playing catch on the sidewalk was great, Dad.” But I have no idea what you do all day after you leave the house and I don’t understand how somebody could smoke cigars.

Like many Gen Xers, my folks grew up poor in the city and rose into the middle class, riding the wave of the postwar boom economy. This meant that while I grew up in a bucolic suburb (fortunately for me, one that was home to eclectic and eccentric University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee professors and their families and within biking distance of the Milwaukee’s arty East Side), the urban village where my Irish Portuguese parents grew up in Boston felt like something from a different land and century to me. A sense of dislocation and rootlessness can take hold among children in such a family. This feeling can even extend to the suburban landscape. Ambivalence can arise with a fierce love for the extant wilderness that hangs on in the area existing alongside a revulsion at much of the bland conformity that defines the pavement and the manicured lawns.

Many artists of my generation, famous or simply loved and appreciated within their local scene, are already gone - the bewilderment, the malaise, and perhaps the ambivalence of their youth never resolved and they succumbed to suicide or drug addiction. I am grateful to have made it to age 53 where I find I’m able to sit back and enjoy Cheap Trick or Elton John without feeling pulled down by the aura of excess that tainted their music for me when I was a boy. We were born into landscapes defined by confusion, forged by markets. Good music, friendship, love and beautiful verse remain for those of us lucky enough to continue on.

We and Us: Then/Now

Science is continually adjusting the date of the first appearance of Homosapien sapiens on this planet. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, current consensus among paleontologists points to our emergence 315,000 years ago. A pretty long time back. First indications of agriculture (the start of the "Neolithic Revolution") appear 10,000 years ago in the the valleys around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Mesopotamia), located in current day Iraq, Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders.

The storage of surplus grain that begins with the Neolithic Revolution makes possible extreme social hierarchy and leads to what is sometimes referred to as the "Neolithic Package": the emergence of individual human ownership of land (private property), diets greatly reduced in their nutritional value, empires and armies, bureaucracy, *extreme* divisions of labor (my great aunt spent a couple of decades in a factory in Boston sitting in a clear plastic booth, tying ribbons onto candy boxes, for example), individualized competition replacing the sharing of resources, the formation of mass society (typically, hunter gatherer existence occurs in band society of not more than 150 people living together), the monetization of practically everything and a tragic distancing or estrangement from the web of life of the planet and the reciprocity that defines it.

All of these deleterious changes are accelerated with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. We now live within a global industrial consumer economy that can make the following elements, which are essential to our well-being, difficult to achieve: community or social connectedness; varied physical activity; a healthy diet with sufficient omega-3 consumption; light exposure -- hunter gatherers spend the day outside, where the light is 10 to 20 times stronger than indoor light on a sunny day; sufficient sleep; and anti-ruminative behavior – brooding, a self-recriminating cycle of thoughts can become deadly – pre-civilization modes of living involve many activities that interrupt such thinking. (This list of six elements found in hunter gatherer culture that are key to staving off depression are identified by Dr. Steven Illardi of the University of Kansas).

In addition to the chronic absence of some or most of these daily elements that evolution has made essential to our well-being, we find ourselves in 2020 bewildered by an ever-increasing list of circumstances never before faced by humans. I’m going to list a few of them below, with the goal of suggesting we all cut ourselves some slack when we feel shitty… because we were not designed to deal with this kind of nonsense and nobody reading this created these circumstances…

- Landscapes covered with asphalt and denuded of trees and other friendly species

- The novel idea that you have to pay money to occupy the space where you sleep, prepare your food and hang out

- The lack of knowledge of how to procure food for free and/or the unavailability of such food

- The consequent fact that we have to rent or sell our labor in order to obtain paper coupons that may purchase us the ability to occupy the space where we live and to buy the food that we need for sustenance

- The absence of frequent dance – communal, creative, often ecstatic and with deep roots

- The absence of direct democratic agency over what happens to us and our immediate world; electing representatives to do this, under current circumstances, has become an oxymoron: an unhumorous farce

- As Forrest Palmer has pointed out on recent occasions, the knowledge that the very things we are doing in order to guarantee our individual survival are contributing to the waning of life on this planet; this is extremely hard to “deal with,” nor should it be easy to deal with

- The fact that our perambulations are dominated by an awareness that the 3000-pound steel leviathans known as cars can swerve and eliminate us at any moment

- The absence of the perception of the non-human world as sacred, vibrating with mystery and, oftentimes, love for us

Well, this list could extend quite a ways. It’s time to take a load off and start my vacation.

The idea is that by naming these, we can begin to try to fill in the gaps and return to something less overwhelmingly difficult. Changes can be made now, under current circumstances, and more changes can be realized if we pursue greater social transformation.

(If you think of any other *unprecedented* misery-inducing things that we are all facing currently, feel free to leave them in the comments. I think it is an important thing to do on the road to reclaiming our humanity).

Sun Beast

All them elemental gases bunching up together, swirling amongst each other, something sparks, kaboom, what was dense and intractable scatters across infinity, trailing stars, planets, meteors, all manner of metallic fiber and rocks careening through space, screeching like eagles divebombing their prey, comes one bunch of gases bubbling, breaking, boiling and beaming, radiating, locking certain gigantic stones into its orbit, the sun, seven of the round spinning orbs got nothing going on, only their stark beauty, rings, red dust, pastel blue mass impossible to imagine suspended in the blackness, but there it is, like Christmas ornaments hanging in nothing space, come one round rock unlike the others, maybe an extra dried clove dropped into the gaseous soup and something happened to make water and something happened in the water, a cell, a life, life needing life, needing more life, as if the original bank of swirling elements before the explosion of the condensed elemental milk, maybe had will or consciousness or the ungerminated seed of the light spark that precedes conscious mind, now there is life in the oceans moving around, fish, beasts with rows of teeth like the serrated edge of a saw on a family farm hanging in the old barn moonlight, sun glowing, moon streaming, more movement, plates shift and mountains erupt from the sea like how you imagined it would be if you were an actor in a cop movie projecting your fist through a Hollywood paper wall, it is as if you dropped a penny in a shopping mall fountain and the most beautiful and glorious impossible paradise emerged, “a terra” they say in Portuguese, land, earth, Earth, we came from this place that was shot out of the heavens, this place that made the heavens, how can it be, walking, breathing, thinking, loving, shitting, fighting, yelling, singing, running, dancing, it was all too good to be true, but it was true, it is still true, we are still here, still running, still singing, still chanting into the roar of waterfalls that land in granite canyons carved out of wind and rain, an echo-sound you still can’t identify caroming off of the canyon walls, the cry of a night bird, the cry of a sun beast, it might be be, distant...

Dedicated to fellow travelers David Goldstein & Leo Gonçalves

Cat Pictures, Pepsi, William Blake

 

For years I've thought that I might be some sort of mutant because I don’t feel much when I look at cat pictures or cat videos on social media. And I really couldn't figure it out - because I like cats. Tonight, riding my bike home in the dark, it hit me: The reason I don't really feel anything when I look at a cat picture or a cat video is because there is something about felines that does not permit their essence to be captured on film. They are like ghosts in that way. Central to their identity are stealth, mystery, cunning & mischief. So, they know to recede just a bit, to become a bit more generic or anonymous when captured on film. When I am around a cat, I feel like a switch inside of me is activated; I can feel electric with fascination just watching them. Such is not the case when I see a cat picture. There is a flatness or, in the videos, an anodyne goofiness that I don't sense in person.

Cats inhabit their bodies the way a tai chi master does. The grace and flow of movement is multi-dimensional; it radiates something powerful that we can sense, but not only with our eyes. Their stride, their poise and their leap is what the dancer aspires to and what the painter seeks to embody in her brushstroke.

Cats are such riddles that they invite the wildest speculation. When I was a child, I believed our cat, Pepsi, was actually a small man dressed up in a cat suit who walked around on all fours. I always expected him to unzip the suit and reveal himself one day, but he never did.

The house cat does not prowl the jungles of India stalking prey. Nonetheless, in her we can recognize something of the fierce beauty and mystery that can be impossible to capture in a photo, but that William Blake captured in his poem, “The Tyger.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 

Make America

Make America good not great

Make America write dreampoems in the night

Make America rhyme

Make America forget to forget

Make America say my fault

Make America stop running

Make America ungreat our greatness is killing us

Make America talk to the children of the people

it tried to vanish

Make America talk to the animals

who are almost gone

Make America listen

Make America stop commanding God

to bless us

Make America let go

Make America kick a can climb a tree

jump into waterfalls

Make America exit the ring

For the first time

For the last time

***

Painting by Bob Watt. Bought from him on Center Street in Milwaukee in the 1990s.

Play or Money

Americans believe the possession of material plenty will equate to the experience of happiness or wellness. It does not. It is a misconception of the most basic, elementary sort -- one that children of six or seven years old can and do make. After a day spent playing outside in the park or the woods -- running, jumping, imagining -- they understand that this is joy and that they did it for free... 

It is the objective of marketing and all of the other institutional apologists for consumerism to convince you to forget this, to get you to betray your elemental self and to dismiss that ancestral knowledge.

The Yellow Rose of Texas

Weird American moments. A friend in Brazil posts a picture of a yellow rose blooming in his garden. I think of the classic song "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and look for a link to this song to share with him. The first thing that comes up on YouTube is a fife and drum version, accompanied by a 19th century oil painting of a bloody battle on horseback. I had never thought much about the lyrics; I only know a few words of the chorus. I look up the words to the tune and learn that it was written as a minstrel tune, to be sung by a white man wearing blackface and in a caricature of African-American dialect. The " yellow rose" of the title refers to the light-skinned black woman the fake black man singing the song left back in Texas.

Looking at the comments to the song, it is clear that it is seen as a rallying cry for the far right, neo-Nazis, and white "identitarians." Reading a bit more on Wikipedia, I surmise that this is due more to the fact that the instrumental version of the song became a rallying cry for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Fascists from Germany and Greece check into the comments section to offer their support to the American fascists commenting. I leave a couple pointed anti-fascist comments and exit the thread.

Our songs are like shards of pottery from an archaeological dig. They contain, in layers, the story of our history as a nation, as a culture. Mercifully, not all American songs carry such a demented backstory.

Samuel in the Desert (10-minute play)

 

Setting: A desolate patch of the Nevada desert, a short ways from a highway. However, the play can be performed in any open space – empty parking lot, alleyway, vacant theater stage, etc.

Characters:

Mr./Ms. A, aka Nathaniel: Middle aged man or woman. Can be portrayed by actor/actress of any gender and any adult age.

Mr./Ms. B, aka Samuel: Middle aged man or woman. Can be portrayed by actor/actress of any gender and any adult age. Actor ideally feels comfortable pronouncing a couple of lines in Brazilian Portuguese.

Mr./Ms. C, aka Felix: Middle aged man or woman. Can be portrayed by actor/actress of any gender and any adult age.

***

A: What are you doing here?

B: What am I doing where?

C: Doing here. In this land.

B: In this land. In this land.

A: That’s right. That’s what I’m asking you.

B: In this expanse of restaurants, gas stations, muffler shops and 7/11’s. Women’s prisons. (Pause). I’m passing through.

A: No, you’re not. You’re not “passing through.”

C: You’ll be staying here tonight, Samuel. (Pause).

A: Do you understand, Samuel? You’ll be staying here tonight. For at least tonight, I mean.

C: Perhaps longer.

A: Perhaps longer, Samuel.

B: (Pause). Perhaps longer. In this expanse of dropped coin sundowns and silver moon miles shooting west upon the asphalt. (Pause).

A: Uh-huh.

C: Uh-huh.

A: Uh-huh. Well, you need to get into the van now, Samuel.

B: (Imitating Mr. A) “Well, you need to get into the van now, Samuel.”

C: Yeah. That’s right. You need to get into the van now, Samuel.

B: “You need to get into the van now, Samuel.” Sounds like the title to a gospel song written by Marilyn Manson. (Pause)

C: Fuck you, Samuel.

A: Yeah. Fuck you, Samuel! Now get into the fucking van.

Mr. A lunges quickly at Samuel and Samuel dodges him. Mr. A misses and stumbles in the dust.

C: Samuel, when did you get here? To this town. When did you arrive?

B: Faz dois dias.

A: Faice what, you bitch? You dog. Speak English, Samuel.

B: Eu cheguei aqui faz dois dias. I got here two days ago. (Pause)

A: And you’re just passing through.

B: That’s right. I’m just passing through. And after this, I’ll just mosey on into another calendar sundown. I’ll project myself into the past - into the wagon wheel past. On through the Oregon Pass.

A: The Oregon Trail. Do you mean the Oregon Trail, Samuel? Have you ever heard of the Oregon Trail, Samuel? You freak.

C: You ne’er-do-well.

A: Have you ever walked the Oregon Trail into a sundown town, Samuel?

C: Do you think you’re a hobo, Samuel?

A: Or a drifter?

C: Are you some kind of a drifter wandering through the western states like a wagon wheel come off of its axel? (Pause).

B: I am a bobcat that’s left its den and now I’m in the Western plains, searching. I’ve lived centuries of sundowns looking for a way into the gray, distant dawn and now I’ve think I found it. (Short pause). I think you’ve given me my way. (Addressing Mr. A) How do you feel right now?

Mr. A mumbles pained noise.

B: That’s right. When you rushed me, I dropped a scorpion into your T-shirt.

A: What?

B: You’re dying, Nathaniel… (To Mr. C) Felix.

C: What?

B: Felix.

C: I said “what?” You hoo-doo son of a bitch.

B: The desert rises dark gold at night, Felix. It grows cold. And I’m going to walk west, backwards into the past, before any of this occurred.

C: So what?

B: So, I’m leaving you here today in the desert. You will not see me again.

C: Don’t say that. What if I said I love you?

B: You do not love me. You’ve forgotten how to love anything but pets. And I am not a pet. Goodbye Felix. I have the keys to the van and now I am leaving.

Samuel walks west disappearing stage right.

C: Come back, you hoo-doo motherfucker! Samuel! Samuel!

***

"Samuel in the Desert" is free for anybody to perform anytime, anywhere. It may be particularly easy to adapt to a Zoom performance. It is only required to let the author know about the performance.

An Open Letter to President Donald Trump

November 16, 2020

Dear President Trump,

Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you ready to finally sad-trombone walk yourself out of the White House? Because we are. We are done with you. You make us weary. You do not console us. You do not comfort us. With each crude phrase you declare, with each enraged message that you Tweet, it is evident that you lack even the tiniest drop of pity or the mildest feeling of concern for us. And that is why - after all of the thousands of questions you've been asked, after all of your displays of feigned victimhood, after all of your bullying and braying, your dodging and over-explaining, after the always-expanding ocean of your lies – there just remains one final thing to ask you: Have you left?

Silence. Does that word mean anything to you? It should. Because silence must be your next act. Precious little time remains for you to claim at least one brief moment of redemption, one moment free from the angling for advantage, from one-upping the other guy, from forging a false reality to dominate actual, lived reality. Precious little time remains for you to experience at least one human moment, however fleeting, of being vulnerable and open. For you to have just one experience not defined by a struggle for power, but by a struggle to listen, you must become silent and you must leave. Leave us to march on without you. You bring us down. There are many of us who’ve become much worse people because of you. It is time to end the charade.

It’s funny - your life has actually been one long and dramatic string of endings. Marriages ended. Affairs. Businesses built up in a flurry of midnight energy and then collapsed under the weight of their own fraudulent nothingness. Trump University. Trump Steaks. Trump Hotels and Casinos. The “Taj Mahal.” Mirages. Places where magic and success were on offer and where a crass swindle was delivered. A sleight of hand. Like games of Three-card Monte without the grace and subway elegance. 

It may be that between the ball kicking and the number subtracting, between the sand trap and water fables, between the brash declarations of, “I cheat on my wives, I cheat on my taxes, you don’t think I’m going to cheat at golf?” when confronted on your fairway trickery, that you had a moment or the slightest intimation of a moment that approached silence and a pause in the hustle… When the sun hit your back and the light through the trees in that New Jersey wood was honeyed, tinged with something that could not be explained, by memory, perhaps… This is to where are you must return now. To that moment that you sought to banish from your mind as soon as it occurred. For that to happen, you have to leave the presidency. Fortunately for you, you have lost the 2020 election. That fact cannot and will not change. It is a stubborn fact, immune to your gold plated BS. You’ve not made America great, you have made many, many graves. Now go. 

Sincerely,

Dan Hanrahan

Chicago, Illinois

Take My Country

 

They say they are patriots and that they love their country. But they do not love its lakes or rivers or skies or soil or Billie Holiday or Henry Threadgill or Toni Morrison or Ishmael Reed or a gift/a kiss/a moment of unexpected kindness between two people. They do not love the accidental thought that became a poem or a melody that was forgotten later. It was so powerful, like shimmering blue sound roaring out of a cave on the California coast. 

They do not love the song improvised in 3/4 time on a clarinet in a subway station or was it a stage, the Velvet Lounge perhaps, that made the listener picture a fawn walking out of the forest to the edge of a meadow covered in the mist of the morning to nibble on wildflowers. Mwata Bowden was the player’s name.

They say they are patriots and that they love their country. But they do not love whale song. They do not love the orcas swimming beside Kwakiutl long boats that break the waves, that break the rays of the distant sun. They do not love Michael McClure, Henry Miller, Richard Brautigan. They do not love Diane Di Prima. They do not love Fannie Lou Hamer. They do not love the Staple Singers. They do not love Bob Dylan. They do not love Mr. Tambourine Man or The Byrds. They do not love Woody Guthrie or Cisco Houston.

They do not love Mark Rothko. Not even the painting of his that hangs in the Art Institute and that emanates an almost unspeakable force that sometimes feels like love and that sometimes feels like loss. It is a force you can also hear radiating inside of your head like song.

They do not love the Fuel Café, which is now closed. They do not love the coffee at Fuel Café. It was coffee that everyone hated, but loved that they hated it. They do not love Dave at the Fuel Café, seated at the white formica table beside a tower of books. They do not love Deacon at the Fuel Café who sat reading zines, his eyeglasses hanging down upon his chest, suspended by a drugstore gold plated chain. They do not love Dano at the Fuel. Dano wrote 4000 limericks in the 1990s. And then they were gone. He went into the hospital and then the 4000 limericks were gone. He showed me the designs that he made with colored markers while in the hospital. They were curled and swirling shapes with colors that looked like they could have been painted on the backs of desert turtles. I still have the drawings and look at them. They do not love these drawings. 

The Immigrant

I administered a speaking test via Zoom tonight to a new ESL student who is a refugee from anti-Muslim violence and "ethnic cleansing" in a country in Asia. He will start in our Basic Literacy class, as he has only a few words of English presently. He was able to answer the question, "Do you work?" "Yeah," he said. When I asked him, "Where do you work?" it was more English than he knew and he could not respond.

It struck me how tough this mild mannered young man must be. Via text messages I exchanged with his roommate before the test, I gathered that he works full-time during the day. He is living in Chicago, getting to and from his job on public transit and working all day. This, after fleeing for his life from his birthplace. I tried to put myself in his position – torn from my country and in a large Asian city where I can only understand a dozen words of their bewildering language. Such circumstances could really break a person; I am not at all sure how I would fare. And yet here he was, registering to take English classes at night online.

One of the things he was able to communicate to me was his name. Out of concern for his privacy, I can't say it. I will say, however, that it is an English language word, with an altered spelling, that refers to a tool of survival that many creatures possess. It signifies strength. He is exactly the type person that Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Steven Miller are seeking to prevent from having refuge in the US.

Theirs is a level cruelty, stupidity and evil that beggars belief.

What About Gavin McInnes?

Gavin McInnes. He moved to Brooklyn in the 90s, dressed like a passive aggressive fool and fop, co-founded VICE and is credited with "inventing the hipster." His obnoxiousness gets him run out of VICE, he co-founds a hipster marketing company called Rooster and, shocker, he's asked to leave Rooster after a few years. Too much of an asshole and a sexist. Addicted to attention, Gavin forms a polo shirt army of desperate American men named Proud Boys, in a nod to a song written for "Aladdin" but not included in the Disney movie. In the song, the young Aladdin addresses his mother, telling her he'll stop causing trouble and getting into mischief and make her proud one day. The song was written by two Jews (a people Gavin hates) within a story borrowed from Arab culture (a people Gavin hates). Ah, but this irony is not lost on Gavin because, similar to his hero Donald "John" Trump, all is a big, cynical joke to Gavin. Isn't that cool?! He's a fascist hipster! He's ironic whenever it suits him! Moral and intellectual consistency?! That's for losers!

The all male Proud Boys are "Fight Club" without the mystery and complexity, are "Clockwork Orange" without the imagination and social critique. They are morally bankrupt chumps whining about trans people and trumpeting "Western chauvinism." Did you catch the final word of the last sentence? Gavin thinks it's cool to privilege a culture that can be credibly accused of being on a 500-year crime spree - plundering, marauding, enslaving people and fouling the natural world - and not defend it on its merits, but on "chauvinism."

No matter! Violence and misogynist rhetoric are all just one big jolly romp for Gavin! This is fascism for handlebar mustache hipsters. Mussolini for the craft beer and tattooed man set. Gavin speaks about violence as something recreational and therapeutic. Funny, I've not noticed its salutary effects. Anybody I've ever known who is really into violence either ends up dead or a deeply embittered psycho. For Gavin, the fascist ethos of "might makes right" is a plucky fashion statement. The cheesy, retro Proud Boys logo looks like a cologne brand for eternally adolescent men. Funny, Gavin still stinks.

HILLARY, J'ACCUSE

 

Hillary Clinton bears an enormous amount of responsibility for the election of Donald Trump. Her 2016 strategy was extremely cynical: to go as far right as possible and deliver for her 1% donors, while still hoping to squeak by and win, based on the fact that Trump is transparently a monster. It is a calculus based not upon principles, but upon profoundly jaded and self-serving thinking. Let’s take a look at how that strategy manifested itself in the presidential campaign and in her record as an ostensible public servant.

-- She offered no credible plan for combating climate change. She was proud to serve as Secretary of State under Barack Obama, who famously bragged about increasing domestic oil drilling more than any other president in US history.

-- She did not propose a credible plan for college debt relief.

-- She did not campaign on universal healthcare coverage.

-- Hillary Clinton did not propose any decrease in the criminally bloated military budget.

-- Her plan for the self-perpetuating and self-defeating boondoggle known as the “War on Drugs?” Stay the course.

-- Based on her Senate record and record as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was rightfully viewed as a hawk on military matters. Working class White, Black and Latino Americans have been disproportionately killed and unimaginably traumatized in Afghanistan and Iraq. A cheerleader for the insane "War on Terror" should not be expected to be popular in such communities. Trump was to the LEFT of her in his campaign rhetoric on military matters.

-- Many Black voters didn't bother going out to vote for Hillary Clinton because she never credibly showed herself to be an ally. Not being a performative racist jag-off, like Donald Trump, is NOT the same as being a proactive ally. She has said ignorant and offensive things related to race over the years; she backed her husband's garbage crime bill, a bill which extended the grim trend of mass incarceration; she offered no credible plan to address police killings of unarmed Black Americans. No support for reparations. No credible plan to address the savage economic, educational & health inequalities that are the result of our white supremacist history.

-- As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton jetted around Europe lobbying Prime Ministers to start fracking and allow American companies there secure the contracts to do so.

-- As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton championed the violent overthrow of the dictator Qaddafi in Libya - actions which helped to usher in the current failed state hellscape of Libya, featuring slave markets and the rise of Islamic terrorist groups.

-- On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton assured the voters that she would work hard to hold Wall Street in check, so the unprecedented plunder and funneling of wealth to the 1% might slow. She was then famously caught on tape assuring a crowd of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street flunkees that such talk was only rhetoric and that she would have their backs.

-- Hillary Clinton's disdain for working class Black & White folks was on display when she didn't bother to visit Wisconsin or Michigan, battleground states, in the heat of the campaign. Incomprehensible.

-- Hillary Clinton’s public statements on the woman who accused her husband of rape, Paula Jones, on Bill Clinton’s alleged paramour Gennifer Flowers and on Monica Lewinsky have been dismissive, unbelieving and disrespectful. If her statements about these women had come from a man, I would label such a man as sexist.

I have a particular contempt for people who think they can have it both ways in life. In this case, Hilary Clinton can be a toady for the idiotic and sociopathic policies of her 1% buddies and somehow also get the votes of the people that their policies, or lack thereof, are screwing. Life doesn't work that way. But arrogant people like Hillary Clinton like to think that it does. To act in this manner is galling enough, but then, to try to shift the blame for her loss onto the people she failed to offer anything better than "I'm probably not as bad as that maniac from Queens" and to actually write a book about the campaign titled "What Happened?" is insulting. What happened, Hillary? Well, a large part of the answer to that question is: You did.