Brotherhood

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Early afternoon that Christmas, I went up to the Enlisted Men’s Club. It was already pretty crowded with the troops who hadn’t been rounded up to make an audience for the Bob Hope show down at the main post.

There was a spot at the bar, though, and I sat down next to Smitty, the black dude who was the clerk at one of the rifle companies. Smitty basically ran that company; he was a master fixer who knew everything there was to know about the workings of Camp Hovey, which was about 30 miles from the DMZ that divided North and South Korea.

We drank slow beers and bullshitted. I played a lot of cards with Smitty and the Hawaiian guys in his company and we were pretty tight.

“What are you going to do the rest of the day?” Smitty said.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Come on out to the Texas Club with me,” he said. “We’re going to have a real Christmas dinner out there – not that jive shit in the mess hall.”

“Jeez, will that be all right?”

“You’re with me,” was all he said.

There were six clubs in the village on the other side of the battle group gate. And then, way off about a mile over the rice paddies, all by itself, was the Texas Club. An old mama-san everybody called Agnes ran it; by use over time it had become exclusively for black guys and everybody in the battle group knew it. Smitty was the ex officio mayor of the Texas Club, and he had used his endless connections to extravagantly furnish it. It was a small legend. The MPs never went out there.

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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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Cultural Heroin

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I figured this might be my last chance to see Trump Live — or alive — before the November election. Maybe it’s because I’ve been missing the Americana of the Midwest or bummed for missing Dylan and Nelson up at Woodstock in July, eager to see a stadium show.

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Go West

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One way a union leader might have a chance in rural Trump county is to run as an independent. The escalating irrationality and nonstop contradictions are exhausting, so it’s been good to see labor leaders inserting some actual common sense in conservative counties. I’ve been following Dan Osborne’s campaign in Nebraska for a while now, and he appears to be gaining traction.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/30/could-a-mechanic-in-nebraska-determine-control-of-the-senate

Over the summer, I went to the annual Crowley County Days in Ordway, Colorado. My in-laws are 3rd generation farmers there, and still farming, so it’s a regular event we all do when visiting family. A bit about the county: in 2016, Trump won 70% of the votes (1,069) and the median household income there is roughly $40,000.

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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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