My late brother Tom’s second mother (in law) died on Monday in D.R. Teresa Prestinary, of Monte Cristi and New York City, made 105. She had five children of her own but she raised plenty more on both islands. Per her grandson Jamie who told me that on vacays in D.R. he ran into hombre after hombre who thought of her as his own matriarch. I lived up the block from Mama Pres (when she was in New York rather than D.R.) and was often underfoot in her apartment or at my brother’s and sister (in law) Maria’s place across the street. In all that time I never heard Mama Pres say a cross word to anyone ever. The last of 20 children she seems to have been treated as a late gift from God by her family in D.R. So she grew up to grace everyone she met. She had a special connection with my wife (who is the first of 20 children). I can see them now shucking corn on my parents’ porch in the Berkshires, taking the breeze, and laughing together. Maybe they were talking about the odd DeMott fam they’d somehow got mixed up with. Or maybe they were recalling rites they’d performed to ward off witchcraft by Santerian drug-dealers who’d made my wife’s life hell when she opened a $10 clothing store on 140th and Bway back in the ’00s. (The two of them had tested my two year old son’s pee to see if it had prophylactic powers after my wife found chicken blood spattered on her store’s door.)
World
Russian Shadows, Ukrainian Light (Arendt’s Lens, Babel’s Visions, “Come and See” & “The Brest Fortress”)
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est–‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.” Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s up ender to Origins nails what autocrats fear most about humankind. It speaks to why Putin went wilding in Crimea and the Donbas after stand-up Slavs made Ukraine new in 2014.
Imaging Ukraine: Poems by Maura Candela (with Photos by Emilio Morenatti)
Friday, April 22, 2022. Photo by Emilio Morenatti
Chernihiv
The caption reads, Firefighter takes a break
He sits on a swing, only thing upright
after the bombing. Hands clasped in his lap.
Lent, Ezekial, and the Valley of Dry Bones
Lent is about learning the best way to suffer, because we cannot avoid suffering, and because suffering the wrong way can be very dangerous.
Faith in Smith
One afternoon the mid-sixties my soon-to-be wife and I were in Seattle visiting Hazel, her old Graduate Art School advisor when, in the late afternoon, there was a knock at the front door. “Get that would you please, Michael?” Hazel asked. “Diane’s there. She has a fish for us”. Diane, the student at the door, was clearly of Mediterranean decent and so beautiful that I caught my breath. “Hi”, she said, “this is for Hazel. Tell her that I can’t stay because I have a few more fish to deliver.” On that she turned and went down the stairs to the street. I closed the door and stared at the salmon wrapped in wet newspaper that Diane’s boyfriend had just caught a few hours earlier in Elliot Bay.
Sometime later when I finally met Jim Smith he was working as a shipwright and had this small boat he fished off of in the waters of Elliot Bay, and its surrounds, which formed the liquid edge of downtown Seattle.
The first thing I remember about Jim was his apology. He would begin many conversations with people he didn’t know by apologizing for having such a common name. The irony was that he was one of the most uncommon guys I’d ever met.
Putin’s Not So Willing Executioners
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.
Desert Hearts
..Disappear into beauty, the desert whispered to me at the beginning of World War III.
Putin’s Dark Prophet: Aleksandr Dugin’s Theory of a Fascist International
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.
Unsentimental Internationalism
I
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).
Lenin’s Oriental Despotism (Excerpt from Vasily Grossman’s “Everything Flows”)
The evolution of the West was fertilized by the growth of freedom; Russia’s evolution was fertilized by the growth of slavery. This is the abyss that divides Russia and the West.
The Irishman and the Ambassador from Potemkin
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….”
Defund, Abolish, What?
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.