World

Putin’s Not So Willing Executioners

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Two anonymous “Russians with Attitude,” proud of “manoeuvring the globe-spanning American monoculture,” have been tweeting pro-Putin agit-prop about what they insist on calling the “special operation” in Ukraine. Their glorying in the power of Russian arms has been undercut by Ukrainians’ stalwart resistance. Not that RWA cop to the fact Russians have suffered thousands of casualties. Their triumphalism seems a paltry thing when they post odd snippets of video meant to wow their followers with wonders of Russian weaponry.

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Putin’s Dark Prophet: Aleksandr Dugin’s Theory of a Fascist International

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Should Vladimir Putin’s barbarous war of Russian expansion move beyond the borders of Ukraine into Moldova, Finland, or even Sweden, then expect to hear the name “Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin” far more frequently. A former philosophy professor at Moscow State University, Dugin has combined his obsessions with occultism and the neo-pagan philosophies of European fascists like Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist to derive his fervently nationalistic ideology of “Eurasianism,” promulgated in books with torpid titles such as Foundations of Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Theory.

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Unsentimental Internationalism

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One faction of neoconservatives were wittily defined as people for whom it is always 1938. Whoever so defined them may not have considered the possibility that there are also people for whom it is never 1938, and that for some of that latter group even 1938 is no longer 1938 (a very partial version of that last view can be seen in a recently released film in which Chamberlain is credited with having bought the time for Britain to rearm).

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The Irishman and the Ambassador from Potemkin

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Per Bruce Jackson: “In this wonderfully revealing 6-minute interview, the Russian ambassador to Ireland lies, lies, does a bit of slip & slide, and then lies some more. Irish news presenter David McCaullagh calls him on every single one. Now if there were only a brilliant hacker who could slip this into the Fox news feed while Tucker Carlson is doing his nightly Putin-suck….”

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Defund, Abolish, What?

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The people who call for defunding the police, and the smaller number who want to abolish the police, have a particular focus: they are interested in the cops who patrol the streets on foot or in cars, the cops who direct traffic, the cops who answer calls about domestic violence and robberies or assaults in progress, and the cops who deal with threatening or erratic behavior in public places. And they are also interested in the special forces, the SWAT teams, that invade homes, often without warrants, looking for illegal drugs or other contraband. Focusing this way makes perfect sense; these are the cops who too often escalate the violence they are supposed to control; these are the cops who kill innocent people. But there is a great deal of police activity that is missing here.

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Chill

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Outside our thick locked door, the air grows cold.
Fall plays songs of loss. For an encore, cold.

Cascade of tangerine and neon pink –
The dying sun departs in splendor. Cold

nights for the too-long married. The furnace
breaks. More than metaphor – the air grows cold.

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Ill Fares the Land

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  In my dreams, I was constantly losing my brother in the midst of World War III. In despair, I didn’t want to go on, but I’d go on. I’d see him then as he was as a kid of four or five. His sweetness got him killed. Whereas I, even at my worst and most lost, always had an instinct for reality. I’d felt from an early age appointed or called by something. But reality was a minefield, starting with my own somatic experience (failure to be held). Something, some threat in the biological or social world, was always poised to interrupt where I was meant to go (K’s theory early in our friendship about Spinoza, Proust, imperial time, and death, and years later when he told me about what Grace Lee said about James Boggs, how she’d never met a person who could sleep so soundly, the kind of sleep that comes from being a Black man born in Alabama who lives and breathes a revolutionary humanity).

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Epiphany, and the Flight into Egypt

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While quietly crossing the threshold from a most difficult year into a (hopefully) better year, I lit a simple fire in an old tire rim, and with Orion twinkling in the darkness above, I contemplated the religious icon that accompanies these words.

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The Last Irving

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The café had four octogenarian Irvings. Two have passed; one is infirm. The fourth, now 92, sat on a bench outside the Cheese Board. We spoke of every day being a blessing, of every hour.

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