Charles M. Payne — author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle — gave a deep talk at Jackson State’s Martin Luther King Day celebration, tuned to the state of our union today. You can watch his twenty-minute presentation above (and the choir that closes the tribute is ((per Dr. Payne)) “out of sight” too).
We Insist!
Greetings our friends all,
Bertolt Brecht had already said that “when crimes pile up, they become invisible. When suffering becomes unbearable, the screams are no longer heard.”
This was exactly the reason for our visit to Khalet al-Dabe two days after the Civil Administration and the Israeli army, two loyal arms of the Occupation, changed the appearance of this village completely – 7 houses were demolished, 3 caves severely damaged, solar panels broken and electricity cables cut so no light, water tanks smashed so no water – and then they left.
Demolished, collapsed, broken, smashed – even if I used more of the words describing ruin, I could not describe the sights and the heartache. They become lost in the general chaos of the Middle East and the entire world.
Double Truths
We don’t need to make peace with friends.
It is crucial to make peace with enemies.
This war in Gaza has brought nothing but injury, death, grief, destruction and the deliberate perpetuation of the eternal Israeli victimhood syndrome.
…..We talk endlessly about Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization – which it is – one equally concerned with preserving eternal victimhood among Palestinians.
…..We don’t talk about settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinian farmers in the south Hebron Hills in the Jordan Valley, as well as in many other areas in the West Bank, farmers who are not terrorists, who do not constitute a threat to the State of Israel.
…..We don’t talk about the indiscriminate destruction perpetrated by the IDF in major cities in the West Bank under the guise of “security.”
What Hamas did on 7/10 erases all words.
What the Israeli government is doing to us and, through the IDF and the settlers, to Palestinians, is beyond words.
Crossing a line…
This is an essay I wrote on the night train from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia a week ago. Please feel free to share this with those who might want or need to hear this. If you are thinking as I am about how to help Ukrainians just now, consider Come Back Alive (Ukrainian NGO that supports soldiers on the battlefield and veterans), United 24 (the Ukrainian state platform for donations, with many excellent projects),RAZOM (an American NGO, tax-deductible for US citizens, which cooperates with Ukrainian NGOS to support civilians), and Documenting Ukraine (a project I help run that helps to give Ukrainians a voice, also tax-deductible for Americans).
I am on a night train from Kyiv, bound for Zaporizhzhia, a city in the southeast of Ukraine which is about twenty miles from the front. Russian missiles take about thirty-five seconds to hit the city, and the take civilian lives. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In September of 2022 the Russian parliament proclaimed the annexation of the region as a whole.
That front is a line that runs through Zaporizhzhia region, and indeed across the east and south of Ukraine. My train rushes southeast, towards that line. Its passengers, civilians and soldiers alike, know what lies on the other side.
Given the nature of Russian occupation, Ukrainians are fighting not only for their lives, but for a certain idea of life in freedom.
Tears for Fears
Monument to victims of Nazi massacre in St. Julien de CrempseThe Munich Security Conference may as well have been held in the infamous Berlin suburb of Wannsee given the way that our sterling Vice President stepped into the shoes of Reinhardt Heydrich as he told the assembled European security officials that his boss Donald Trump had come up with a solution to what he might as well have called the Ukraine Question: sell 40 million people off to Trump’s murderous pal, Vladimir Putin, let him order a great big Bucha and be done with them.
Reports from the conference said the attendees were in shock as Vance told them that they couldn’t count on the United States to stand by its NATO treaty obligations in defense of its European allies. Vance might just as well have called out “so long Article 5” to his stunned audience on his way out the door.
It was left to the Security Conference Chairman, Christophe Heusgen, to try to make sense of what had just happened. Calling what he had heard from United States spokesmen a “European nightmare,” Heusgen lamented that “This conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.” His voice breaking, the conference chairman could no longer continue. Beginning to cry, he walked away from the podium and embraced his wife in the front row of the audience. The conference attendees, who had begun applauding as Heugsen broke down in tears, fell silent.
I’m Not There: observations from the inaugurations
‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood / When blackness was a virtue…
I didn’t wake at 6am to face the winter’s dim dawn. I would leave the capital and its grand tradition of peaceful power to the deep chill of fridged temperatures and unforgiving winds. I pulled the bed covers higher and rolled over onto my left side.
Eight years ago I threaded my camera through the Virginia Avenue crowds to enter the mall and climb that shining monument on the hill. A crowd of hundreds (no more) ringed the giant vision. They clapped as their leader took an oath in light hard rain.
Martyrs Then and Now
Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.
I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.
Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.
The Stupid, the Incompetent, and the Ugly…
A possible title if Sergio Leone directed a film about Trump’s first weeks in office. Who knows? Clint Eastwood might even agree to star.
Urged by Evangelical Christians, The U.S. Returns to Her Rapist (January 20, 2025)
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Willie B. Wazir Peacock (We Will Remember You)
There’s one poem credited to Bob Moses in the grand online archive of Civil Rights Movement poetry here. Moses put his own spin on an Odetta spiritual as he bowed to one of the Mississippians, Willie B. Wazir Peacock (1937-2016), at the core of the Movement in the early 60s. Moses’s song calls out in all CAPS to his Brother Willie who went under the hill with scarcely anyone outside Black ‘Sippi knowing what he gave them and this fuct country…
IT WAS WILLIE
WHAT GOT FREEDOM
IN THE DEEP BLACK ‘SIPPI
Co-Existentialism
GAZA,1974
I
After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.
I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.
I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue
Because we are women.
Co-Existentialism II (Addendum on relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel)
I really didn’t want to write a piece for First of the Month about Arabs and Jews. Every article I’ve read talks about the terrible discrimination – even hatred – and I am burnt out on hatred and stereotypes. I’d asked Hillel Shenker what he felt about the change in relations between Arabs and Jews and he listed the organizations working for cooperation, and how there’s less in some organizations and more in others.
Sohrab Hura: “Mother” (At MoMA PS 1 Through February 17)
Click on Read More for a bigger screen.
Doing Our High School Teachers Proud?
A surprise turn into rooms at MoMA PS1 presenting Sohrab Hura’s oeuvre—far from art-wank—electrified our old friends’ winter break reunion trip to the museum.
The day was too good: arepas in Jackson Heights, Central Park night walk, a warm, free crib at the apartment where Dash was dog-sitting.
Now, we’ve come back together to mull over how Sohrab Hura’s work affected us that day and how he might get you going too…
Perception
The first-floor windows of the Life Sciences building sit one step above sidewalk level, flush to the floor. They are recessed far enough in from the outside edge of the building to allow an elderly woman in a heavy, hooded blue coat, a black “I (Heart) SF” sweatshirt, and a patterned dress over jeans to sleep there.
The woman sleeps surrounded by her possessions, which, so far as Goshkin can catalog from his seat in the café across the street, consist of a shopping cart, several stuffed large plastic bags, a yellow blanket, a rug depicting a horse on hind legs, an umbrella, two tubes of glittering steel pipe, and a crooked, leafless tree branch as tall as she is. Once she has awakened, the woman begins to move her belongings to the sidewalk.
She arranges them as if assembling a train. What connects the cars of the train is unclear. So is how it will move forward. She takes her time, sometimes removing an item from a shopping bag and adding it to the exterior, sometimes shifting items she has placed in one position to another.
Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius
Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.
You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”
How to Mourn a Famous Friend
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
First Pomegranate
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
My 115th Dream & An American Family
WTF? Waking with an aching toe…left foot or right? The one I broke in the Bronx? Has the cold cut to the bone? Hope so. Huh? Well, IF it’s just this I.C.E. age, sleepy/creepy me will hibernate…
Then again, I might be at the mercy (all over again) of my own damn head. I’ve been getting worked over lately by a long manuscript. Upshot of a bad habit—call it “diligent indolence”? Years ago, I found I could cheat when I got stuck on an essay. Instead of hard-slogging through, if I’d been truly working—I could fade-to-bed and my brain would dream a solution to whatever was holding me back. All I had to do was trace the meander of the last dream I had after a natural wake-up. With piece-work, my mind wakes me up with the Answer after four or five hours. Lately, though, things done changed. I’ve been chasing a big bear of a book (?) and once I’m hunting, my head only lets me sleep for a couple hours and KEEPS waking me on the regular until I think I’ve taken my last shot.