For Zelensky and Ukraine:a fight for the future

 

 

 

Gratification to the survivors of daily damnations

Thanks to the clouds on fire, the burning sunset,
and every diminishing as beautiful as time.
Thanks to the moments that are not yours,
the soft part of the world you are in
when you tiptoe to your mother’s room,
the unending seconds until you hear her snore
because the lost lyrics of the living
will always escape through the mouth.
Thanks to the quietness she drew from the well of nights
and bottled for you by dawn—for the lilacs,
the roses, and the thorns blooming in your mouth.
We pocket the heart until we know what to do with it.
Nature introduces spring to us like visitors.
Living and leaving, we multitask at our best.
When you get home, stare around like it’s another man’s.
Like this can be here, like that can be beautiful.
Cigar this life and light it with the sun.
Breathe this poem in. Own a spot on a cliff or an edge
or somewhere that can carry a stamp of your body.
Become. Open a book and see this trapped time
I left for you to live all over 

BY
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

American weather

 

Weather, Jenny Offill

Ironic points of light/Flash out wherever the Just/Exchange their messages: an affirming flame

 

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

 

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

 

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

 

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

 

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

 

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

 

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

 

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show
an affirming flame.

 

W.H. Auden 

written shortly after the German invasion of Poland, that marked the start of World War II

David Lynch:

“The old is dead, and I don’t know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there’s something that can come out of experimentation. It’s somewhat unsettling, but it’s a hopeful thing in a way. I’ve been here before, lots of times.”

In the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of its wonders, is an endless form of ruin, […] that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us heirs of their long undoing ( Invisible Cities,Italo Calvino).

 

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.

 

[...] there are people who believe they are flying, but it is already an achievement if they can get off the ground flapping their batlike overcoats.

Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage.  

 

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

 

from Columbia Business School: ******elections have consequences. According to an analysis by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, the Trump administration's environmental policies resulted “in more than 22,000 extra deaths in 2019 alone,” largely from worsened local air pollution. In terms of the total damage done to the climate, the Rhodium Group estimated in 2020 that “in the absence of new federal policy, Trump's rollbacks will increase US emissions by 1.8 gigatons cumulatively through 2035.”

******Even under another Trump presidency, the reframing of climate as an economic issue will help to ensure that many of today's positive trends continue apace. Texas farmers are not going to turn off their wind turbines; roofers are not going to unlearn how to install solar panels; and contractors will not suddenly go back to recommending gas furnaces over heat pumps that are 3-5 times more efficient.

****** The question is not if the world moves off fossil fuels, but how fast. The renewables revolution is inevitable.Fundamental market forces are at play. Attempts by Trump to stand in its way would amount to little more than another wall that never gets built.

a fellow villager committed to the well-being of our community

illustration from:

The Wolf And The Sheep, Once Elected, I Will be Vegetarian,
Asif Mehmood

 

 

the continuing unraveling of empathy

Plane Wreck at Los Gatos
(also known as "Deportee")

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Martin Hoffman

---

© 1961 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)

 

How this day will be remembered in history

 

How to call this thing that is coming to America in a month?

 

We are gonna need a lot of drinks this New Year's Eve....

 

Meanwhile, in Washington, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that billions of dollars could be saved by eliminating empathy.

“Given that Mr. Musk is the most powerful person in the U.S. government, you would think it would be easy to find someone who voted for him,” he said. “Something weird is going on.”**Borowitz

[...] a very essential element of the collapse. One weakness of democracy in the United States has always been public health. The lack of a national health system brings us shorter lives, greater anxiety, and less freedom.***Snyder

 How to call this thing that is coming to America in a month?

"Administration" seems inaccurate, since it assumes that the elected president just administers a government for four years, whereas Trump clearly wants to rule indefinitely. It also seems wrong since the people he has appointed will chiefly break things rather than run them.

And so "regime" rather than administration. But whose?

It's not Trump's. He's a poor man, compared to Musk. And he owes Musk a great debt, more than he owes his voters or his other donors. Looking ahead, it will be Musk, not Trump, who pays for all the lawsuits to quiet the rest of us, or for the campaigns to primary dissenting Republicans.

It's funny to say "President Musk," but that's not quite right: we face a situation in which the officeholder has less power than than the moneybag. In another post I called this "Trumpomuskovia." But perhaps Musk’s name should really come first, before Trump’s. Mu…mp…

And so "Mump." The Mump Regime.

And that recalls a very essential element of the collapse. One weakness of democracy in the United States has always been public health. The lack of a national health system brings us shorter lives, greater anxiety, and less freedom.

Now, with RFK Jr., we face the rollback of vaccinations, and thus a return, precisely, of mumps. And rubella and measles, which are halted by the same vaccine. And much else. The rest of oligarchical cabinet will weaken government by law through incompetence, spite, or avarice. But RFK Jr. will break society by making us sick.

And, thus, another reason to call this thing the Mump Regime. Get ready.***

**The Borowitz report 

image: here 

***Timothy Snyder 

The image of the ungraspable phantom of life: that is the key to it all....Melville

The Trojans dragged the Wooden Horse inside their Gates, consecrated it to Athene, and started wildly celebrating their victory.

"Now is not the time to despair, but to act."

 Authoritarian strongmen attain and maintain their power because they assuage our fears of an uncertain future by telling us that they know how the story will end. But hope for the future lies in that still open space of unknowing. After being imprisoned for criticizing his country’s regime, Václav Havel wrote, “Hope is a dimension of the spirit. It is not outside us, but within us.”  Jamil Zaki notes that "hope isn’t just a mindset—it’s the plan."

Anything is possible. What we dream of is already present in the world. We don’t know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.

It is a nightmarish time. We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act."

According to writer Rebecca Solnit, "Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe."

"Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​" Solnit contends. "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage. Our hope and often our power.

Walter Benjamin locates hope in remembrance. He calls it "awakening to history." He describes history as a crime scene that can show us that the past is made of turning points. Anything can happen and will. 

in the dead silence of the night, Odysseus raised his sword and ordered Epeius to unlock the trap-door. Agamemnon’s army stormed through the open gates. Not even the gods could save Troy now.

Memory is attached to place. We use human experience to define place, not physical characteristics. Power is contingent on forgetting - on displacing the past, covering over the ruins of history and erasing significant places of our lives.

Placelessness matters as Bill McKibben reminds us in his review of Solnit's Storming the Gates of Paradise. When there’s no there there -- no Bastille to storm -- then confronting power becomes so frustrating that it’s easy to just give up and play another round of Doom.

“the scene of the crime ... has vaporized,[...]into a maze, echoed in the Web, with its endless branchings and resisting[...] an unlocatable and unimaginable crime is difficult.”

"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggemann notes - a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope."

The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant stays asleep.

Social, cultural or political change does not work in predictable ways or on predictable schedules. The month before the Berlin Wall fell, almost no one anticipated that the Soviet bloc was going to disintegrate all of a sudden.

It is an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation.

Sometimes empires crumble and ideologies fall away like shackles. But you don’t know beforehand. People in official institutions devoutly believe they hold the power that matters, though the power we grant them can often be taken back; the violence commanded by governments and militaries often fails, and nonviolent direct-action campaigns often succeed.

Every now and then, the possibilities explode. In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a “we” that did not until then exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency; new possibilities suddenly emerge, or that old dream of a just society re-emerges and – at least for a little while – shines.  

Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

In one of the best essays in this sterling collection, activist Rebecca Solnit describes Silicon Valley as “a decentralized, diffused region: postindustrial, postcommunal, postrural, and posturban -- postplace.” Nothing so new in that observation, but in the pages that follow she explains the reasons that placelessness matters. When there’s no there there -- no Bastille to storm -- then confronting power becomes so frustrating that it’s easy to just give up and play another round of Doom. Silicon Valley is the very image of “postmodern control, in which power is transnational, virtual, in a gated community, not available at this time, in a holding company, incomprehensible, incognito.” It becomes a maze, echoed in the Web, with its endless branchings. If you track that corporate power diligently across the globe, she insists, you will find all the victims -- Third World peasants uprooted by agribusiness, the bewildered homeless of her beloved San Francisco, the impoverished imaginations of an entire civilization. But “the scene of the crime ... has vaporized, and resisting an unlocatable and unimaginable crime is difficult.” Bill McKibben review of Solnit's Storming the Gates of Paradise.

excerpts:Jamil Zaki here 

from The Guardian Rebecca Solnit

see also Solnit's Hope in the Dark, 

and Storming the Gates of Paradise

Lucy R. Lippard: Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power from: Art afier Modernism, Rethinking Representation.

 

 

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." Francis Bacon

                     We are all in the dumps

For diamonds are trumps

 

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, Maurice Sendak

the sadness of the zoo

 quantifying complicity/strongman

 

Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. Moshin Hamid

Driven by the terror “of time being split, of the course of the day being suddenly interrupted, of the whole world irretrievably disintegrating,” we seek assurance in an order that can “overwhelm the discontinuous."(Calasso) Our perceptions of time and space are mapped into imaginal geographies determined by fixed boundaries to sustain these hopes.

The public buys into an abstracted and mythic vision of the future (MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN) held in place by a fear of impermanence that is “so tormenting as to make the continuity of time seem an improbable gift, and one that is always about to be taken away." The production of the future is thus relinquished to an omniscient narrator who sees history as a necessary chain of events and so claims to know how the story will end. He recounts a future that has already been determined by past events, one that is thus predictable and “overwhelms the discontinuous.” Charting the territory ahead into a single determined future, he inscribes a path over previous maps reducing all sightlines to a single trajectory.

[...]the illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation.  But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't.  He will define one group after another as the enemy.  This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line.  But now fear is the essence of life.  The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends.  

Most likely you won’t be killed or be required to kill. But amid the dreariness of life under dictatorship is dark responsibility for others’ death [...] the knowledge of having been utterly complicit in the very worst in human cruelty but being without tools for quantifying that complicity. 

The Strongman Fantasy, Timothy Snyder

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world. Marginalia

 

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society. Leonard Cohen

• Roberto Calasso, Ardor, Transl. by Richard Dixon, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2014) 208-9.
  
• Marginalia 
• Cressida Leyshon, “Moshin Hamid On the Migrants in All of Us,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-mohsin- hamid-2016-

 

marking time

 

 

Our freedom is interdependent. Prisons — indefinite detention, parole, concentration camps — exist inasmuch as we allow them to.

There is no doubt that concentration camps are in operation on US soil once again.

"Dehumanization is no excess or exception it is the very premise of the American prison."** 

Trump’s election win sends private prisons stocks soaring as investors anticipate hard crackdown on migration. His pledge to crack down hard on mass migration promises to mean big business for private prisons. Fortune

Jesse Krimes: At the MET

Apokaluptein:16389067 was conceived and executed within federal prison.  The title references the Greek origin of the word apocalypse meaning to ‘uncover, reveal;' an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale; the numbers reference Krimes' Federal Bureau of Prisons identification number. He smuggled the contraband works through the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Postal Service, piece by piece, over a period of three years, resulting in a forced Exquisite Corpse with himself.  The resulting work is a series of 39 disembodied prison sheets sutured together, making up a collective installation as vast as the history and timeline represented  over his seventy-month absence.Apokaluptein:16389067

Marking Time

**Laura K. Wallace on "The Prison & the American Imagination" 

The Horror, continued. Closed ports: the things they carried

 

 

 

Judith Ortiz Cofer: "The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica"

Presiding over a formica counter,
plastic Mother and Child magnetized
to the top of an ancient register,
the heady mix of smells from the open bins
of dried codfish, the green plantains
hanging in stalks like votive offerings,
she is the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain
that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan
than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here,
and to Cubans perfecting their speech
of a "glorious return" to Havana--where no one
has been allowed to die and nothing to change until then;
to Mexicans who pass through, talking lyrically
of dólares to be made in El Norte--

all wanting the comfort
of spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portrait
of her plain wide face, her ample bosom
resting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interest
as they speak to her and each other
of their dreams and their disillusions--
how she smiles understanding,
when they walk down the narrow aisles of her store
reading the labels of packages aloud, as if
they were the names of lost lovers; Suspiros,
Merengues, the stale candy of everyone's childhood.

She spends her days
slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper
tied with string: plain ham and cheese
that would cost less at the A&P, but it would not satisfy
the hunger of the fragile old man lost in the folds
of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items
that he reads to her like poetry, or the others,
whose needs she must divine, conjuring up products
from places that now exist only in their hearts--
closed ports she must trade with.

Deportation Nation (audio): The Consequences for You of the Trump-Vance Plan

 image: New York Times

The Voices of Latino Culture: Readings from Spain, Latin America, and the United States, ed. Daniel S. Whitaker (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1996), 265-67.

 

The horror, the horror.

 

 

“In the dark times 

 will there also be singing?  

Yes, there will also be singing. 

 About the dark times.”

Bertolt Brecht

 from instagram

VOTE. VOTE. VOTE. DO NOT YET REJOICE IN HIS DEFEAT.

 

 

            Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
            Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
            The bitch that bore him is in heat again. 

Bertolt Brecht, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”

2024

 

Remembrance of Things to Come: Le Souvenir d'un avenir

                        'Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right  

The French had a far-right government before, one that collaborated with the Nazis. When casting ballots even today, that is not an easy thing to forget.

Behind the surge is a collective memory of the national trauma of the Nazi occupation of France 80 years ago, which has been shaped by France’s centralized national education system and by what parents and grandparents have passed on to younger generations. Elected officials interviewed said it was not just distant memories of World War II but the experience of having lived under the collaborationist Vichy regime that helped mold voters’ perceptions in national elections.

“Happily, in France, we have that memory,” said Mr. Barusseau. “And I think it was memory that saved us. You see, we have already known that,” a reference to far-right government. “We had that collaborationist regime. And also happily, we have public education that is still vigorous. You can’t really understand until you have had a war on your own soil.”

“And by the way, Hannah Arendt is very much taught and appreciated, the ‘banality of evil,’” Ms. Mesnard said, referring to the German American political scientist and her most famous doctrine about Nazism.

She has vivid memories of her grandfather’s tales of being a police officer during the war, forced by the Germans to hunt members of the Resistance, and quietly refusing to do so. “He deliberately didn’t find any,” she said.

The war “is still relatively close,” said Maurice Perrier, the right-leaning mayor of nearby Loulay, pop. 760, who also swung to Mr. Barusseau’s side. “Something remains from that dark period. It’s the memories, the memories of my parents. They talked to me about all that. I was very afraid of arriving at a situation of authoritarianism,” he said. “So, it was out of the question that I vote for the National Rally. These are extremists.”

“It seems that nations on the verge of war make a point of parading their wealth.”Denise Bellon

Chris Marker, Le Souvenir d'un avenir. Film trailer