A Website of the Radical Imagination
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.
I want to thank C. Liegh McInnis for commending The Burial — the new movie streaming now that’s based on true events in the 90s. The film tells how Jeremiah Joseph O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) — a white Mississippian with a legal team led by a black lawyer, Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx) — sued Loewen funeral company, a Northern corporation looking to establish monopoly control over the death-industry in parts of the American South. Along the way, one of O’Keefe’s lawyers, Halbert Dockins Jr. (Mamadou Athie), amped up his client’s case by zeroing in on the full ugly of Loewen’s deals with clergy who sold overpriced funeral packages to black churchgoers.
From Thomas Hardy’s “Departure”
“How long…
Must your wrath reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand?–
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”
***
***
Yuval Noah Harari has been on tv and the web often since Oct. 7th. He sometimes seems too smooth for this moment. (He’s come across as glib to more than one sharp observer.) Yet and still, I hope he’s a voice for the “saner softer polities” that Hardy once invoked way way back at the beginning of the 20th C. Harari has allowed in his brief talk below that most Israelis and Palestinians are too immersed in their own pain right now to care about the suffering of anyone outside their own tribes, but “outsiders” have no excuses: “Don’t be intellectually lazy. Don’t be emotionally lazy. Don’t just see part of this terrible reality…Keep a space for future peace, because we can’t keep that space now…”
Here’s Harari’s recent essay in The Guardian.
Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.
Maybe the most crucial news is that there’s no reason to be confident that we know much about what’s happening.
There are three new buildings being raised right around our co-op, primarily by workers who come in every day from the West Bank or Gaza. A few days ago I spoke to one of them in the little grocery store. Tall, shy, a teenager, he could speak only Arabic and comes over the border every day. From Gaza, he comes through the Erez crossing.
But I won’t be seeing him for a while. The crossing was destroyed yesterday when hundreds of nearby residents were slaughtered in their shelters.
The demonstrations were cancelled last night – most of the pilots, the soldiers, the navy, the doctors – were in the sites of the catastrophe, trying to clean up the remains of the slaughter, to treat survivors, to find some of the terrorists who may still be around.
Watch Adam Hochschild’s book talk here. This is a version of the presentation Hochschild gave last month at Princeton which Stanley Corngold termed: “the most nearly perfect lecture performance I have attended—modest, courteous, and full of intellectual gold—of unforgettable news, very nearly life-changing.”
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.
There was a time in my life, back when I was in my thirties when I was a crime reporter. Perhaps you are familiar with them from the movies: they are always two steps ahead of the cops, they put their lives at risk, and they are awakened at their crummy apartment at 6 a.m. by the lead detective, with whom they were in the army.
“Got anything to drink in this dump?”, the detective says.
Then the detective and the reporter toss back a scotch and the reporter does not worry one bit about not having any cheese or nuts in the house to go with it.
This was never me. It violated Wadler’s first and most important rule of journalism: Never put yourself in a situation in which people might shoot at you.
Many of you were here for this event (and many actually organized it with true Tiemann tenacity), and some weren’t here but were in the utter vanguard of this ferocious tenants’ rights organization. We and you all were saluted on Saturday, on the event of the 35th annual West Harlem Coalition Anti-Gentrification Street Festival, with the unveiling of the street sign co-naming Tiemann Place as “Tom DeMott Way”!
For a long time I used to get up early on the day of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival. I’d join the crew that set up traffic barricades on Claremont, Broadway and Riverside and lug tables from International House—the dorm for foreign students on Claremont—down to Tiemann Place. I’ve tended to flake off lately though. My nephew Jamie and his gen seemed to have taken on the job after my brother Tom died—retiring elders like me. Yet this September I’d been more involved in prep since we’d arranged with our Councilman’s office and the DOT to schedule the “unveiling” of an official sign co-naming Tiemann Place “Tom DeMott Way” on Festival day.
Thanks to a prompt I could not refuse from an Irishwoman, Anah Klate, on September 16th I was up and out on the street by mid-morn (as grey went blue).
This photo graces the cover of Bruce Jackson’s new book of essays, Ephemera 1995-2022. Don’t be fooled by the self-diminishing title. Jackson’s dog earned her paper monument…
Thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin
Saint Peter has grown horns,
and Dionysius, wears Italian moccasins.
Peasant are crowned, and kings revel
in shovelling manure.
Sparing you the seconds of time speeding by as the Pentagon’s unauditable bloated budget speeds us toward dead oceans, dead corals and a million species lost…
