Deliver Us From Evil: Legal Opiates in Post-prohibition America

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“Is this just getting older?” The crying jags had become more frequent. Color drained from my life and usual distractions. Color drained from my face and skin. The days were interchangeable, tense, and brief. Hurry hurry til you crawl back home half-dead. But there was no cocoon of safety or “me”-ness to return to anymore. I watched the minutes domino mindlessly with no sensation more concrete than dread.

It wasn’t the getting older. And it wasn’t any of the problems (probably projections) I had with my loved ones. A light inside me had turned off. Motions were gone through but nobody was home. Maybe my struggle was part of something bigger, but mostly in a “class-action” lawsuit kinda way. I don’t think it was just the delusions and deficiencies coming home to roost in middle age. Or, it was probably all of that stuff too. But it was also the kratom.

I picked up a bag after reading it mentioned half-positively online.

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Decapitation Strike (December)

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Timothy Snyder asked his readers “to share this post with people who might benefit from reading it” and appended a note at the top of his essay: “I wrote this two weeks ago, on 15 November. This update accounts for things I have learned since, and for Trump’s further appointments, who confirm the thesis.”)

Each of Trump’s proposed appointments is a surprise. It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that. This is unlikely. He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan.

We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction. Who could have known? What could I have done? If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan. We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk. We don’t have much time. Nor is outrage the point. Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.

The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually. And we need this. With detail comes leverage and power. But clarity must also come, and quickly. Each appointment is part of a larger picture. Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.

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Impardonable?

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So quite the hullabaloo over Joe’s pardon of Hunter. And I get it, I guess. He said he wouldn’t. Then he did. Not a good look.

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Late October 2024

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Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.

Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.

But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.

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Staying Alive

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art is a track around which one pursues one’s best self.

The author in the process of awakening the morning after speaking with Eileen Ramos.

In September, a friend, the artist/electrician/musician Fran Holland showed me a work by Ramos, a Filipina-American from Piscataway, New Jersey, which he had purchased at the just-concluded San Francisco Zine Fest. After he did, I ordered an assortment of ten ($50, including postage) from her web site [https://eileenramos.com]. They arrived in a 6″ X 9.25″ bubble mailer. On both sides, black magic marker instructed the USPO not to bend.

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On Thanksgiving, I Miss My Family (I had a dream of being the only person in America receiving both Social Security and Chanukah gelt.)

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My grandmother, Gussie Belinsky Wadler, and my uncle, Artie, in 1950 in the Catskills.

I grew up in the Catskills, in a fading resort town called Fleischmans, where the population in the 1950s exploded in summer with refugees from Hitler.

There was, in fact, a story I came across on a Facebook group, that two sisters, who had assumed the other to have died in the concentration camps, discovered each other at the movies in Fleischmanns.

“Then everybody around them hollered, ‘Sit down!’ Herb says when I tell him about it.

Herb is not a sentimental guy, especially around families.

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What the Fuck!

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Once again, the polls got it wrong, and so did the media, unable to accurately capture an electorate that included so many “shy” Trump voters. None of the pros predicted the breadth of his victory. It was a dark comedy to watch them be bolloxed by the results. They were prepared for a nail-biter, but the election wasn’t even close.

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Now What?

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Well, you did it, America. You just filled the presidency with a man who felt it necessary to inform the public about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis.

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“It All Started at the Border”

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Back in May, Radley Balko spelled out the details of Stephen Miller et al.’s monstrous plans for a deportation army, (cholera) camps and “efficient” airlifts. (Per Miller: “So you build these facilities where then you’re able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico. Two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right. On Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries, right.”)

A swatch from the opening of Balko’s piece:

Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted.

But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan.

“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”

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Rojava is in Danger

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With Donald Trump set to return to the White House, the future of Rojava is in serious danger. The last Trump administration green-lit Turkey’s 2019 invasion, resulting in mass displacement, ethnic cleansing of Kurds, and a brutal occupation that continues to this day. Since then, Turkish President Erdogan has threatened to launch another such invasion but repeatedly failed to secure approval from the Biden administration. Reports of Erdogan’s conversation this week with his “friend” Donald Trump suggest that the tides could soon turn in his favor yet again, and another major invasion could be on the horizon.

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Choosy Beggars (Election 2024)

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By David Aaronovitch, Bishop William J Barber II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Susan Bergeron, Carol Cooper, Stanley Corngold, Kristi Coulter, Benj DeMott, Mark Dudzic (with Katherine Isaacs & Adolph Reed), Bruce Hartford, Ty Geltmaker, Bruce Jackson, Bob Ingram, Dennis Kaplan, Eric Laursen, Queenie Lawrence, Bob Levin, Leslie Lopez, Addy Malinowski, Greil Marcus, Richard Meltzer, Dennis Myers, Zuzu Myers, Ron Primeau, John Podhorzer, Jim Rising, Aram Saroyan, George Scialabba, Micah L. Sifry, Emily Simon, Tom Smucker, Alison Stone, Scott Spencer, William Svelmoe, Lucian Truscott IV, and Leila Zalokar…

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The Fields of Tanis (a reflection from Haiti)

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Dear Family and Friends,

The Haitian people are living through a fourth year of violent torment.

It is the tragic unravelling of the country, with vengeful political discord and the rule of gangs, keeping everything on a crash course.

Having been surrounded by gun battles for most of the past 7 days, and having helped many gunshot, traumatized, robbed, abused and humiliated people over these years, it is more than evident that a bullet easily destroys the whole person: body and mind, heart and soul.

So I had every sympathy for “Keket” yesterday when she, like so many, came to see me for any kind of help.

She was a strong, stocky market woman, in her sixties, until very recently when weakened by a stroke. Since so many clinics and hospitals have closed in the past years, Keket was “lost to follow up.” The whole country is lost to follow up. The whole country is sick in every sense.

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Plums

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Timothy Edmond was a year older than me, but during our childhood, it seemed that he was ten years wiser than me. For just about every milestone of my childhood, Timmy was there. We were the kickball and dodgeball champions of our street. Couldn’t nobody mess with us during a game of Red Rover. Moreover, he was a wiz at Hide-N-Go-Seek. And, he was the all-time champion of Tag or Not It, which was the last game we played right after the streetlights came on and it was time to go inside. As we got older, Timmy helped me to overcome my fear of heights to learn how to climb a tree. I had to learn because Timmy said the best plums were at the top of the tree, and Timmy would know.

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I Write What I Like: Thinking About “What Nails It” and a Few Nice Things

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“A Mile from the Bus Stop,” 1955, By Jess Collins

Why start a piece on Greil Marcus’s What Nails It with Jess’s painting of Pauline Kael and her daughter in a Berkeley park?

Not only because I want its greens. Marcus devotes the second of the three chapters in his short new book to Kael who taught him what criticism could be. His felt tribute to his friend (and fellow Californian) lies at the heart of his book.

Marcus hasn’t been a confessional writer in the past, but What Nails It goes inward, probing what’s behind his drive to surprise himself with his own words. Composed fast—after seasons when he couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs and nearly a year of silence due to personal health crises—Marcus’s comeback is freewheelin’ fun.

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Democracy and Feelings: Yoko Tawada brings Paul Celan into the Age of Fiber Optics

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Review of Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2024).

In retrospect, “bowling alone” ain’t even the worst of it.[1] At least then one retains a modicum of public interaction, an immunity-community[2] formed through the public choreography of shared shoes, balls, lanes. The AppStore at this moment boasts several games flouting “Bowling” and “3D” in their title, a rather perverse inversion of the textures of reality and its flattening by the culture of the screen. The increasing digitization of our live has ravaged social capital and concentrated private capital at a scale far exceeding what even Robert Putnam had in mind. We are becoming increasingly aware of just how devastatingly effective the pandemic of social loneliness—precipitated to hitherto unknown extremes by the COVID-era lockdowns—is for fostering political polarization and right-wing extremism.[3] During the COVID-era, our societies insisted that we remain isolated from one virus, even if that meant exposing us to the ills of whatever goes viral. Four years later, we’re still paying the price for pandemic populism.

In March 2021, I learned the lesson the hard way. It was the centenary of Paul Celan’s birth, and Pierre Joris—gifted poet and translator—was set to speak on his recently completed masterwork, a weighty two-volume translation of Celan’s collected poetry, replete with commentary. Being the dark days of the yet unrelenting pandemic, the talk was naturally on Zoom. Celan’s face loomed on the shared Powerpoint as I introduced Joris. No sooner had he thanked the organizers than it began: the n-word scrawled across the screen; a shrill cartoonish scream invading the speakers; rancid GIFS with gobs of semen extruded on co-eds’ expectant faces; and then, there it was: line by line, the swastika drawn in red ink over Celan’s face. It was thus that I—along with Joris, the other discussants, and the 50 some-odd people present for the talk—were made privy to the phenomenon known as Zoombombing.

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Girls Lunch

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An excerpt from the novel When I’m With You It’s Paradise…

…Leila was run down. After her trip east, as summer gave way to fall, she got sick again. And then, for a whole month, she didn’t get better, or she didn’t want to get better, which amounted to the same thing. She didn’t see friends, didn’t write, stopped going on walks. She spent the days, and the evenings, in bed. She saw a few clients, dizzy and ill in San Francisco hotel rooms. She looked at porn, edged for hours on end to fucked-up fantasies. She felt dysphoric (got off on her dysphoria), started looking at the blackpilled trans subreddits, felt herself getting uglier, or plateauing in her beauty, which amounted to the same thing. She made a lot of money from men by telling them to kill themselves, then she sent some of that to an online Domme in Canada, whose beauty and sexual power, whose body, whose pussy, hurt her in some supremely pleasurable way. Well past midnight, she took baths, and before bed she listened to the new Sally Rooney novel on audiobook (numbed with pleasure but dimly aware that all this bourgeois heterosexual drama, the drama of so-called human life in the twenty-first century, had nothing to do with her), with rain sounds on in the background, cups of rose tea she barely touched on her bedside table.

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