A Website of the Radical Imagination
Lucian K. Truscott IV The author posted this before the assassination attempt. It’s still on time…
Photo by Tracy Harris
I have been reporting on and writing about politics for 55 years, and I have never in all those years seen people so depressed about the state of our union, as they say.
May 24, 2024
Donald Trump invited two rappers who are members of the 8 Trey Crips gang onstage with him at his rally in the Bronx yesterday. Tegan “Sleepy Hallow” Chambers did eight months in prison on charges of gun possession and criminal conspiracy. Michael “Sheff G” Williams served two years in prison for criminal possession of a firearm. Both men were arrested last year along with 32 other gang members in a 140-count indictment for gang activity, murder, and conspiracy.
Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, we have entered that time of the year when yellow blossoms are coming to life on the forsythia and daffodils, and the dead limbs of trees are falling to the ground on the wind. It is one of the rites of spring that the flowers catch your eye, and the dead branches catch your feet.
Let’s take a trip back to June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced he was running for president the first time. I’m taking you back that far because I want to see if I can find something…anything…normal about it. Not normal psychologically – we all know how that search would go – but normal politically.
Christmas vacation when you were a cadet at West Point was all about how you got there. You could fly space available in uniform for half price, but even that was too much if you had to fly halfway across the country, so it was pretty common for cadets to look for “hops,” a free ride on an Air Force cargo plane that was going your way.
A friend of mine and fellow ski patrolman at West Point, we’ll call him Alex, discovered that his father’s former roommate at West Point had retired from the Army as a Colonel and took a job as the manager and groundskeeper at the Aspen School of Music. The main hall at the school, about 200 feet long and 20 feet wide was used for chamber music concerts in the summer and had two offices at one end of the building with convertible sofas. The School of Music was closed, and they were ours over Christmas, the Colonel said, if we could get out there. A lift ticket that year was $6.50. We could manage that. We found an Air Force hop and rode in some spare web-seats on a C-141 loaded with cargo headed for McConnell Air Force Base near Wichita.
My brother Frank
If you’ve known someone who died by their own hand, you walk around for the rest of your life with a question mark so real, you can see it with your eyes and feel it on your skin. Why? What drove them to do it? Even though people commit suicide all the time, no one wants to confront that darkness or our resentment that they have left us with the terrible knowledge that death is not just a reality, it’s an option.
I’ve known several people who have taken their own lives, but the two I miss most dearly are my brother, Frank, and my friend the folksinger, Phil Ochs. They were very different people, and their suicides were very different.
If this were a perfect world, to be a boy and 18-years-old would be banned, or somehow made illegal, anyway. I say this from experience, some of which is outlined in this story.
It was the early winter of 1964 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. when I and three friends, who were all long on energy and short on some essential brain cells, decided it would be a fantastic idea to pull off the greatest shoplifting caper in our young lives.
Candidate Trump’s stop at a gun store in South Carolina on Monday wasn’t just an offhand visit: His eight SUV convoy doesn’t do anything without advance planning days or even weeks ahead of any event Trump attends or location he visits. He made a decision to stop at Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina, because he knew that that specific gun store was where the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida bought the guns he used to kill three Black people at a Dollar General store in late August.
Green Street in 1969
The first loft I lived in was on the north side of Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette. I sublet it for the summer of 1969 from an artist by the name of Jack Whitten.
In his egregiously wrong Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice Roberts appended a sneaky little footnote exempting the nation’s service academies — West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy. Roberts doubtlessly thought he was being crafty when he noted that there are “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present” that necessitates exempting them from the decision. Earlier in his opinion, Roberts wrote that because the 14th Amendment affords citizens “equal protection under the laws,” it forbids discriminating between them on the basis of race. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote.
Truscott wrote this column at the beginning of May, but his piece remains on time. “Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it.” [1]
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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor. He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.
This is the way CNN commemorated Memorial Day in 2015, with a story they called, “The General Who Apologized to the Dead Soldiers on Memorial Day.”
“At the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno, Italy, Memorial Day 1945 was an elegiac occasion. Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., who had led the U. S. Sixth Corps through some of the heaviest fighting in Italy and now commanded the Fifth Army, gave a speech that is particularly relevant for today when the trauma of our long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to haunt so many vets.
This is the news photo used to illustrate the mass killing of five in Texas. AP photo.
Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m. shooting his rifle in his front yard. There have been more than 160 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, and this is the 19th shooting that killed more than four people, not including the shooter.
Jackie Curtis
In 1970, my apartment, four rooms on the 6th floor of a building on 12th Street and Avenue B overlooking a fried chicken joint everyone called Nodders, because junkies, whose habits made them crave sugar and salt, would hang out there during the day, nodding out over paper plates of fried chicken and cups of Coke. The place didn’t have a bathroom because the owner, an old Greek guy who wore a white shirt and a white apron and a chef’s toque, got tired of dragging overdose cases out of the single stall and calling the cops. He didn’t get rid of the nodders, however. They made up more than half his business.
I furnished the place completely off the street.
I was going to start with a question, whether it’s possible to be self-conscious about your hands, but of course the answer is yes.
A few years back Lucian Truscott tried on a writer’s experiment, posting chapters (as he composed them) from his non-fiction novel/memoir, Dying of a Broken Heart, at a word press website (here). Your editor was doing due delving since I’d always enjoyed Truscott’s stuff when I bumped into the following piece of felt history in Heart‘s second chapter. I should probably wait for some Iraq War anniversary but reposting Truscott’s memory of “Mission Accomplished” boosterism feels urgent. I’ll allow his report seems like it belongs in First as a warning to be permanently wary of consensual wisdom. Not that I’ll cop to having been a lap-top general around the time of W.’s wargasm. Still, to the extent First countenanced power of powers-that-be back then – even as this mag busted anti-anti-Islamism – me and all y’all need to suck on Truscott’s truths (all over again). He won’t stop saying it plain, btw. After you read him below, try his substack newsletter here. B.D.
