Hate to be a Gloomy Gus, but it seems fair to say, Trump will not be tried on federal charges before the election.
Bur let’s say he gets convicted in New York or Georgia for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels or screwing with the electorate.
Nation
Driving in Circles
Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.
Being and Somethingness
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.
Quarantine Me: I’m Old
The road to Lisburn serpentines through rolling Pennsylvanian farm land. At its near start, it anchors a capital bedroom community etched out of GI Bill housing built after the war, what a war. At its far end, there isn’t much but a firehouse serving charity bbq chicken in the summer and a rope swing stretching out over the Yellow Breeches, also best in summer. Green grasses bathed in the smell of clipped chlorophyll, young corn just breaking to sunlight, dips that drive you into the earth and then just as quickly rise up to give you the illusion of flight: to travel Lisburn Road is to experience freedom, the soul-freeing kind of freedom, where you scream in your head that it’s great to be alive. And you’re right.
Or, at least it used to be that way.
The famous line is that you can’t go home again. That’s a lie, of course. You can always get there if you have Waze or Google Maps. If you look on one of those aps, Lisburn in all its glorious summer glow still lives. It’s just that Lisburn Road is gone: someone killed it with a rotary in the road’s rhythm.
Actually, two rotaries, one right after the other.
Fly Me To You
…The depressed whore wakes up for her flight before dawn. Nothing ever good comes from waking up this early, she thinks: funerals, surgeries, insomnia, and work. She slept in her makeup because fuck putting it on so early. Still, it’s important to look hot at the airport: a space of surveillance, commerce, vague intrigue. You never know who’s watching you, always traveling under an assumed, or fragmentary, or nightmarish identity. In the Lyft she subtracts the cost of the ride from what she’ll be earning, also the friend looking after her cat, the work she could have gotten staying at home, the unquantifiable toll on her physical and mental health, and yet to remain still is never an option, not anymore, in this world in which stillness equals paralysis, inanition.
…She’s going to a mid-sized, charmless city in the Deep South. She’s looked up things to do in the time she’ll have off, which really isn’t much, just a long afternoon before her return flight, but she knows she won’t step foot outside the hotel for her almost two-day stay, she’ll be swallowed up by that cold, bright glare (the glare that afflicts schizo-amnesiac killers in a David Lynch movie) that never leaves you even when you close your eyes at night. But it doesn’t matter. After a certain point every place, like every client, is the same.
Some Principles of the Commons
Linebaugh’s principles made your editor rethink my attachment to “public happiness” — a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that I’ve leaned on to evoke the excitement of (small d) democratic politics with its imperfectly human meld of egotism and solidarity. Linebaugh isn’t an Arendt man and he’s never been charmed by her hymns for the American Revolution. Aware our first Founding slipped slavery and the “Social Question” — all the challenges arising from mass poverty and de-skilled labor due to the Industrial Revolution — he’s unenthralled by America’s standard versions of democratic practice. Per Peter, public life/happiness in this country seems a straightened thing…
We distinguish “the common” from “the public.” We understand the public in contrast to the private, and we understand common solidarity in contrast to individual egotism.
While it’s probably wrongheaded to yearn for demos with no ego, Linebaugh’s distinction is coming through to me this morning. In my inbox today, there’s an announcement of the latest seminar aimed at (what one pale academic muckety-muck terms) “intellectual publics.” Like Linebaugh, I prefer more common things…
Breathless
SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)
Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.
On the Road to “Black Majority”
“Which of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies was more than half Black long before the American Revolution?” Retired Duke University historian Peter H. Wood finds that he can still stump groups of students, teachers, and parents with that question, even though it has been fifty years since he published Black Majority, his landmark study of slavery in colonial South Carolina. Today that book is taking on a fresh new life and proving more pertinent than ever.
“…and Cleveland’s Cold”
Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty”
I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.
Then Aaron Lange’s Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City landed.
SPLAT![1]
U.S. Telos
The author posted this at the top of 2024, before the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and the E. Jean Carroll judgment, but his forecast for ‘24 is still ripe…
Three years ago today we witnessed the natural end of the Republican Party. I don’t mean a chronological end. As long as there’s FOX News and people eager to tune in, there will be the ignorance and outrage levels necessary to nurture Trumpist conservatism.
I mean end as in the Greek term “telos,” which evokes a phenomenon’s essence — its reason for being. In that sense January 6 three years ago, in its lusty dance with violent ignorance, in its recognition, however dully, that the future of Trumpism did not line up with the future of democracy, indeed demanded its overthrow, all this was the completion of Trumpism, the full Donald.
Donald Trump and the Machinery of Fame
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.
On “My Libraries”
Renato Grigoli’s as usual right-on, witty “My Libraries: Finding a Third Place” (October 2023) sends me back in time to childhood visits at my working-class Peoria Public Library branch—the library card an important visa into feeling curious, smart, and grown up—taking books home to read under the summertime backyard pear tree or in winter bed, and on into high school there guided by our watchful nun librarian with permission also to amble—during free class time—to the nearby main public library, later wandering the stacks as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Hartford, getting into the habit of finding things I wasn’t looking for, like a year after 1974 college graduation while working in the basement Harvard Coop shipping room I wandered into Boston Public Library, discovering by chance Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (World of Yesterday), leading to a German course at Harvard Extension School!
2024: The Body Politic on Steroids
[01-01-2024] In light of the upcoming election year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved class-wide labeling changes for all prescription testosterone products, adding a new Warning and updating the Abuse and Dependence section to include new safety information from published literature and case reports regarding the risks associated with abuse and dependence of testosterone and other AAS.
Ghosts of Christmas past: Aspen, 1967
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.
UAW-D Beats Bosses (& the Doomy Left)
Rad twitterers stuck on gestural politics have missed what might turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of America’s class struggles. While nobody with any sense is proclaiming a New Millennium for this country’s workers, there may be a new conjuncture around the corner. Thanks to the UAW, as well as Teamsters at UPS, who have won the largest victories for American labor in a half-century. It’s imperative that would-be leftists NOTICE what’s happened in factories and warehouse (and delivery trucks). With a little help from Labor Wave radio, you can listen below to an interview with historian (and former UAW staff organizer) Erik Baker, who has addressed the UAW’s recent wins in Jewish Currents, “Revaluing the Strike.”
Peter Linebaugh’s “Great Act of Historical Imagination”*
“A commonist manifesto for the 21st Century…”
High praise for Peter Linebaugh’s 2014 collection of essays, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, went right by me. I missed the book when it came out and only grabbed it last month to pass time on the subway. My commutes went FAST! Though I didn’t ride the book into the ground. I savored the essay “Meandering at the Crossroads of the Commons and Communism” with a Negroni at an Upper West Side joint that does a damn good job of cultivating commons. (Fam style Italian dishes bring in big parties — happy b-day sung every 15 minutes…) A meet spot to muse with Linebaugh even if dollarism is in the equation. I finished his book as I rolled around the city gathering Thanksgiving provisions. A perfect read in the run-up to a fam-and-friends fête. I’m sure you’d’ve been swept away too as Linebaugh limns (with a feeling) one-for-all-all-for-one struggles to preserve people’s rights and resist privateers and hierarchs.
The late Mike Davis’s summative graph is on point:
From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, who advocated communizing industry and agriculture, to the twentieth-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital “commonist” tradition. He traces the red threat from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensable collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, “Stop, Thief!”
The Revenging Angels of Our Nature
I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”
Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse. As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime. “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
November’s Children
This past week, we’ve received a master class in the difference between polling and voting. There’s an enormous difference between an easy answer to a poll question, and the private choice in the stillness of a voting booth. And what we’ve witnessed is that when it comes to pulling the lever or marking the circle, Democrats are victorious in, at times, astonishing places and in astonishing ways. And MAGA Republicans are enduring so much … losing.
Heroes Are Gang Leaders
Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.
My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. Attack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me something very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.
Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.
And now for something a bit lighter: The great Garfinkel’s caper
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.