A Website of the Radical Imagination
How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life. — Marcus Aurelius
that was a base mob wannabe move,
a Bergin Fish & Hunt Club on 101st Avenue move,
a turncoat who forgot to wear his 80’s Ozone Park overcoat move,
a he had a deal move, a farcical mob extortion move
(ICYMI), Brooks confesses to feeling “moral shame” as he watched the beatdown in the oval office. His revulsion seemed up to the moment…
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
(When asked if he would visit the crash site, Trump replied, “…what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”)
The helicopter and the airplane crash.
The crash site is outside of Washington.
Who will visit?
The air is dangerous. The land.
The water.
Do they want me to go swimming?
Websites are crashing.
Who will visit?
What’s the site?
Hopes are crashing.
We see
the crash site is expanding.
Our eyes are sore.
Who will visit?
Who will see?
Do they want me to go swimming?
I am frightened.
I am crashing.
The water is rising.
The waves are crashing.
Who will visit?
Who will comfort?
Who will die?
This land is American.
This land is our land.
This land is a crash site.
The water is full of words.
The water is a crash site.
The water is American.
Water can change its name.
Words are crashing.
Will you visit?
We are living in a crash site.
I can’t swim.
David Aaronovitch ended his Saturday post — an elegant miscellany that took in audience tittering at a London performance of Richard III, MAGA world’s pro-fascist cosplay, the Trumpite Christers’ takeover of the Kennedy Center — with a note on the latest coup by the Center’s new director and a dive into the depths of the Friday afternoon massacre…
Grenell & The Tates
The Kennedy Center’s new director Ric Grenell wears many hats, none of them remotely artistic. Several involve being a fixer for Donald Trump’s exotic sidelines. So it was that Grenell went to the Munich security Conference alongside J.D. Vance, and while he was there took the opportunity to pressure the Romanian Foreign Minister into releasing the Tate brothers. The Tates were awaiting trial on charges of sex with a minor, rape and sex trafficking, but even if they hadn’t been are two of the most notorious and immoral misogynists in the Western world.
Last year, after First began publishing Erella Dunayevsky’s stories about her encounters with Palestinians in South Hebron, one engaged reader demurred (gently). The pieces struck him “as what the French call ‘angelism,’ casting the victims of an atrocity in an almost holy light.” This next story, composed by Dunayevsky in 2018, is beyond such caveats. (See the epiphany that follows Dunayevsky’s admission of her pique at the plaints of one Palestinian woman: “She tired me and I tried to ignore this, making a great effort to hide my own fuse, shortening as her speeches lengthen…”) First will be posting more of Dunayevksy’s letters on the Occupation in upcoming months…
You must call out to the world in our voice.
I. Coping. Trying. San Francisco
Designed to accommodate living across the country from the New York teams I’ve once again come to love, my aspirational strategy of using sports to insulate myself wasn’t entirely working: I found pockets of untarnished beauty, but not anywhere near a Trump-free zone.
Charles M. Payne — author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle — gave a deep talk at Jackson State’s Martin Luther King Day celebration, tuned to the state of our union today. You can watch his twenty-minute presentation above (and the choir that closes the tribute is ((per Dr. Payne)) “out of sight” too).
Greetings our friends all,
Bertolt Brecht had already said that “when crimes pile up, they become invisible. When suffering becomes unbearable, the screams are no longer heard.”
This was exactly the reason for our visit to Khalet al-Dabe two days after the Civil Administration and the Israeli army, two loyal arms of the Occupation, changed the appearance of this village completely – 7 houses were demolished, 3 caves severely damaged, solar panels broken and electricity cables cut so no light, water tanks smashed so no water – and then they left.
Demolished, collapsed, broken, smashed – even if I used more of the words describing ruin, I could not describe the sights and the heartache. They become lost in the general chaos of the Middle East and the entire world.
We don’t need to make peace with friends.
It is crucial to make peace with enemies.
This war in Gaza has brought nothing but injury, death, grief, destruction and the deliberate perpetuation of the eternal Israeli victimhood syndrome.
…..We talk endlessly about Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization – which it is – one equally concerned with preserving eternal victimhood among Palestinians.
…..We don’t talk about settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinian farmers in the south Hebron Hills in the Jordan Valley, as well as in many other areas in the West Bank, farmers who are not terrorists, who do not constitute a threat to the State of Israel.
…..We don’t talk about the indiscriminate destruction perpetrated by the IDF in major cities in the West Bank under the guise of “security.”
What Hamas did on 7/10 erases all words.
What the Israeli government is doing to us and, through the IDF and the settlers, to Palestinians, is beyond words.
This is an essay I wrote on the night train from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia a week ago. Please feel free to share this with those who might want or need to hear this. If you are thinking as I am about how to help Ukrainians just now, consider Come Back Alive (Ukrainian NGO that supports soldiers on the battlefield and veterans), United 24 (the Ukrainian state platform for donations, with many excellent projects),RAZOM (an American NGO, tax-deductible for US citizens, which cooperates with Ukrainian NGOS to support civilians), and Documenting Ukraine (a project I help run that helps to give Ukrainians a voice, also tax-deductible for Americans).
I am on a night train from Kyiv, bound for Zaporizhzhia, a city in the southeast of Ukraine which is about twenty miles from the front. Russian missiles take about thirty-five seconds to hit the city, and the take civilian lives. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In September of 2022 the Russian parliament proclaimed the annexation of the region as a whole.
That front is a line that runs through Zaporizhzhia region, and indeed across the east and south of Ukraine. My train rushes southeast, towards that line. Its passengers, civilians and soldiers alike, know what lies on the other side.
Given the nature of Russian occupation, Ukrainians are fighting not only for their lives, but for a certain idea of life in freedom.
Monument to victims of Nazi massacre in St. Julien de CrempseThe Munich Security Conference may as well have been held in the infamous Berlin suburb of Wannsee given the way that our sterling Vice President stepped into the shoes of Reinhardt Heydrich as he told the assembled European security officials that his boss Donald Trump had come up with a solution to what he might as well have called the Ukraine Question: sell 40 million people off to Trump’s murderous pal, Vladimir Putin, let him order a great big Bucha and be done with them.
Reports from the conference said the attendees were in shock as Vance told them that they couldn’t count on the United States to stand by its NATO treaty obligations in defense of its European allies. Vance might just as well have called out “so long Article 5” to his stunned audience on his way out the door.
It was left to the Security Conference Chairman, Christophe Heusgen, to try to make sense of what had just happened. Calling what he had heard from United States spokesmen a “European nightmare,” Heusgen lamented that “This conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.” His voice breaking, the conference chairman could no longer continue. Beginning to cry, he walked away from the podium and embraced his wife in the front row of the audience. The conference attendees, who had begun applauding as Heugsen broke down in tears, fell silent.
…Leada came up from L.A. to escape the fires. She talked about electromagnetic fields, the ex-Mormon guy who gave her chlamydia, pyros and tweakers, the Rothschilds, the imminent Earthquake that would destroy everything, the entire state of California. She picked Leila up in her car that smelled of old Taco Bell and vape smoke and perfume and just drove, blasting different cloud rappers she’d fucked or tried to fuck or who’d tried to fuck her, who were too ugly to fuck, etc. Talia was in the front passenger seat. They crossed the bridge, weaving manically in and out of traffic, drove through the TL, ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf on a cold, desolate night.
‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood / When blackness was a virtue…
I didn’t wake at 6am to face the winter’s dim dawn. I would leave the capital and its grand tradition of peaceful power to the deep chill of fridged temperatures and unforgiving winds. I pulled the bed covers higher and rolled over onto my left side.
Eight years ago I threaded my camera through the Virginia Avenue crowds to enter the mall and climb that shining monument on the hill. A crowd of hundreds (no more) ringed the giant vision. They clapped as their leader took an oath in light hard rain.
Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.
I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.
Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.
A possible title if Sergio Leone directed a film about Trump’s first weeks in office. Who knows? Clint Eastwood might even agree to star.
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
There’s one poem credited to Bob Moses in the grand online archive of Civil Rights Movement poetry here. Moses put his own spin on an Odetta spiritual as he bowed to one of the Mississippians, Willie B. Wazir Peacock (1937-2016), at the core of the Movement in the early 60s. Moses’s song calls out in all CAPS to his Brother Willie who went under the hill with scarcely anyone outside Black ‘Sippi knowing what he gave them and this fuct country…
IT WAS WILLIE
WHAT GOT FREEDOM
IN THE DEEP BLACK ‘SIPPI
