Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I think the countries you singled out, along with others in Western Europe, are confronting two enormous, overarching problems that largely explain what’s going on. One is that the extended era of affluence following World War II created standard-of-living and quality-of-life expectations that aren’t fiscally sustainable in many cases. The other is a velocity of religious, racial and ethnic diversification over the past quarter century that has exceeded what many longtime residents could easily make sense of and comfortably adapt to. Combine those dynamics, add the frustrations of young people who rightly feel that they have fewer opportunities than their parents did, and you wind up with a critical mass of Europeans of various ideological stripes who feel destabilized, dissatisfied — threatened, even — and who are demanding that their elected leaders answer for that. But those leaders lack answers, and that’s true whether they belong to the political left, right or center. France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Germany — they have different governments failing at the same challenge. Which speaks to how daunting that challenge is.

— Frank Bruni & Bret Stephens in Conversation / “The Only Thing We Can All Agree On Is That the World Is on Fire” / The New York Times

The core of the problem is that Trump turned the federal government against American democracy in a relentless effort to challenge, subvert and undermine the nation’s election infrastructure. All in an effort to disrupt the conduct of free and fair elections and hold onto power in the face of popular discontent.

— Jamelle Bouie / “Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.” / The New Tork Times

your god chews sky,
can’t count the promises
he’s broken.
he’s laid down love.
his religion:
land & aching.
turns his head
leaving us trapped
in a coward’s image
or his in ours.

— W.J. Lofton / “Biting Iron”

One of the reports said overshooting the 1.5C target “will bring large-scale and in many cases irreversible impacts” for the cryosphere — Earth’s ice in all its forms.

Melting of glaciers and sea ice, the thawing of permafrost and the accelerating rise in sea levels, will have widespread repercussions, from flooding to water shortages.

Some of the effects of the rise in temperature are already visible, such as the 20-percent loss in glacial mass in Switzerland.

— Delphine Paysant / “UN reports warn of large-scale damage to Earth’s ice from climate change” / AFP News

“I’m calling this the Trump hangover election,” David said. “It’s as if voters woke up, it’s the morning after. They made a bad decision the night before, and now they’re correcting that. This is buyer’s remorse.”

— Mother Jones Editorial / “America to Trump: You’re a Loser” / Mother Jones

There was an incredible sense of optimism then about what the European Union could become. Now it’s falling apart for the reasons you mention, plus a third. Europeans at the time often thought that the end of the Cold War meant the end of traditional geopolitics and an inexhaustible peace dividend. They didn’t really reckon with the possibilities that Russia would again become a military threat, China an economic threat, Africa and the Middle East sources of unchecked migration, and the United States an isolationist, fickle, even belligerent power.

In other words, the continent really thought it had reached the End of History, capital E and H. A fatal miscalculation. I’m not sure there’s the political wherewithal in Europe to get its economic and strategic houses in order before these problems get much worse.

— Frank Bruni & Bret Stephens in Conversation / “The Only Thing We Can All Agree On Is That the World Is on Fire” / The New York Times

The days of the House of Representatives functioning like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump administration are over.

— Hakim Jeffries / “Democrats vow to use their power to check Trump” / The New York Times 

What I’m Listening To:

She’s my black market baby
She’s my black market baby
She’s a diamond who wants to stay coal
Wants to stay coal

— Tom Waits / “Black Market Baby”

The Dictator Says

The dictator says: St. Ignatius used a cilice; hold your breath and expand, let go… and I do. He places live wires on my testicles and says: Go!

She’s gesticulating wildly and walking waterboard eyes toward me. She has violent intent, the dictator says.

I unclench my jaw, drop the bite stick, and drift away from my honeymoon croon.

I’m the balloon man over Captiva — a reductive William S. Burroughs doppelgänger. (S. for Seward, did ya’ know?)

Did you consult Burroughs’s spirit? Did you step inside the dream machine? What you sought was not forthcoming in the haze of your hallucinations. What you thought was worthy — a trip with Benway down the Amazonas, rusty metal shank in hand and a stream of clear snot running onto your lips — was instead, a dead end. A cul de sac like a new channel carved out by the overflowing river that deposited you in a billabong in the middle of the vast jungle: lost and still obscured. So now move on. Reach for that fraying vine overhead and pull yourself out before you’re sucked in by the quick mud. Dusk is approaching and something is stirring in the bush.

I am the oily fellow who travels by foot and occasionally bicycle. I have rhinestones for eyes and spangles for hair. Would you please walk along this road with me. I’ve left the barrens and seek conviviality; and you seem full of congeniality and a merry schpilkas. Won’t you be my peripatetic neighbor? Let’s just keep going — so unctuous.

Go here, then go there. Just go go go and keep going. Grit through the pain.

Just keep going.

What I’m Reading:

That is no reason to breathe easy. What we know is that, if he thinks he might lose, the president is opposed to free and fair elections. He is opposed to the idea of electoral accountability. He rejects the fundamental republican principles of self-government and popular sovereignty. If he could act unimpeded, he would make the United States a Potemkin democracy.

This election cycle may be over, but as a threat to our freedom to govern ourselves, Trump still looms.

— Jamelle Bouie / “Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.” / The New Tork Times

Intractable (Downgrade Don)

You dream
Your tongue is loosed
Upon that intractable wafer
Glued to the roof
Of your perfidious
Mouth

What I’m Reading:

For much of my life, I was your garden-variety MSNBC Democrat, but I’ve moved left and weaned myself off corporate news in recent years. After voting for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, I’ve found that it’s Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialist platform that has stood the test of time. And as my political consciousness has grown, so has my anger.

I am outraged by the Democratic Party’s failures—failures that ushered in today’s fascist hellscape. I’d even argue that Democrats are just as culpable as the far right when it comes to delivering fascism through a series of missed opportunities, by backing down for no reason and calling it “integrity,” abandoning the working class in favor of corporations, and remaining so obsessed with their own moral goodness that they forgot to do the job they were elected for.

— Jennifer Welch / “How Joe Biden and the National Democratic Party Paved the Way For American Fascism” / lithub.com

Today, The Past, and Some Night to Come

He lives with ephemeral creatures beneath his feet and stanchions around his bed.

A case study in diverting his elbow’s loose skin and the stubbing of his tender footing.

In the darkness outside sycamores make wide arm imprecations and water themselves with wines of every variety.

His ambition is drained in a scruff of the neck twist—a meager remembrance of his days spent in a robe.

His teeth are chattering. Tomorrow he starts his apprenticeship as a bellows fellow at the smithy.

“Fou!” says the Past, inserting its finger in god knows what—¿El lapiz de Extremadura?

He slogs, knee deep, in hummingbird angles, all-stiff and blur-fast. Before him shine the bones of the pitiable Condors of Lima.

Is he comforted by this knowledge—that the afflatus was hard won—speaking in tongues while wearing the cloaks of invincibility? Or did he don the cloaks of imbecility?

In any case, his body is taught with a dab of holy pedantry.

***

She, on the other hand, hears a clacking coming from the road. She feels the steering wheel shudder to the sound of the clacking. Is there a compromised tire up front? What is making that sound? She feels the steering lock and she drifts to the shoulder.

The car’s thermometer reads 115 degrees. The empty road heat shimmers in the distance—an ocean opens in the desert.

This is not something she can afford to do—leave the safety of the car and expose herself to the environment or to potential marauders in wait.

She intuits Inuit umiaks on a Fata Morgana in the heat shimmer ocean before her—all this in invisible increments of …

***

And you say: “Stanchions? Cloaks? Condors of Lima … lapiz … Wha?! Are you insane?”

What I’m Reading:

My father made sure my sisters and I
cried before we left to dance or sing.
I’d like to believe he would have hated this
man who means to rule America again, but
who knows how the dead vote.

— Jennifer Martelli / “The Witches All Were Singing”

snouter

i am a parasitic acarologist
hosting a tick and a bacterium
an entomophage pullulating amongst legions of others
looking for a parasitoid wasp
im a beaky toothed sort of snouter
out and about for a ladybug finger or two
the dog never knew what hit it
and neither will you
(microbes are where the action is)

What I’m Reading:

The Republicans could set the world on fire on their march toward authoritarianism and it might not matter. Because when it comes to fighting fascism, Democrats are showing up with a cardboard knife to a gun fight. 

— Jennifer Welch / “How Joe Biden and the National Democratic Party Paved the Way For American Fascism” / lithub.com

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The Supreme Court’s decision decimating the Voting Rights Act threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land, and Congress contained no Black members from the South. 

“This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years.”

— Ari Berman & Pema Levy / “Whites Only: The disaster the justices have unleashed has its roots in one of the darkest periods of our history.” / Mother Jones

There’s too much human
in being human, & not enough
being. All I want. I’m that guy
who thinks the Serenity Prayer’s too long.

— Ace Boggess / “Are You Worried About a Breakdown?”

Much of the hope for the nation’s election integrity this cycle rests on local officials, including Republicans, who have stood up to immense pressure from Trump, and even faced death threats from strangers . . . the lieutenant governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who is tasked with running the state’s elections, and has fought a lonely, and boldly public, battle for the rule of law. “It sure looks like they’re trying to take over control of elections to make sure only people they want to vote are voting,” Henderson tells Gellman, about the Administration’s actions. “To me, as an American and a Republican, it’s offensive.”

— David Remnick / “[“Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to assert federal control over elections.”] / The New Yorker Daily

I had refused to see the darkening clouds,
but now that the rain was here, it soaked everything.

— Okwudili Nebeolisa / “Eventually”

More than 50,000 people are estimated to have died across Europe’s cities during the brutal heat waves that roiled the continent this summer — making this year’s heat the region’s deadliest on record, according to a new analysis.

About two-thirds of the deaths, more than 32,600, are directly attributed to climate change, driven by fossil fuel pollution, according to the findings, published in two peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature Health.

— Laura Paddison / “‘Worst on record’: Brutal summer heat wave killed more than 50,000 in Europe’s cities” / CNN.com

The river is disappearing.
The edges of the bank washed out.
What use is a mouth if not bent to protest?

— Gray Davidson Carroll / “Trans-substantiation”

The 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States is the kind of milestone that forces the nation to look back and ahead—to consider yesterday and tomorrow. In the current environment where America is trying to make itself great again, there is the obvious question: Great for whom? Sadly, this anniversary pits discernment, critique, and learning past lessons against the frothing full-throated mantra of America First—the idea that the nation has only ever been great, regardless of the generations of people that have suffered enslavement, slaughter, and subjugation in its construction. Given that I am of the first free-born generation of Black people, from my point of view, there has never been a time when America was fully great. We’ve only ever been on the steady march to achieve a more perfect union.

— Kamau Bobb / “How AI Changes the Fundamental Structure of the Classroom—Especially the Segregated Ones” / Literary Hub

What I’m Listening To:

Trouble and me we’re old buddies you see
I’ve stuck by him and he’s a stickin’ by me
Well, goodbye honey, be thankful you’re free
And that you’re not stuck with ol’ trouble and me

— Buck Owens & His Buckaroos / “Trouble and Me”

State I Was In

I took umbrage at the penumbra—
The darkling darkening of my mood—
Was it the reddening super harvest moon?
(Its waxing moony-moony face: jejune)
Or was it a flaring sunspot’s craquelure of quietude?
Or was it the plague?
Or the fascist wave?
Or the tactless foot?
Of the biomass soot?
Or the king tide poot?
Or was it the phallic gun-shaped state
I was in?

What I’m Reading:

A new report suggests that it might be possible to launch a swarm of satellites that reflect sunlight away from the planet to cool the global temperatures in as few as 20-40 years. The timeline of such a ‘planetary sunshade’ would depend on the rate at which heavy-lift rockets that could carry the materials into deep space are developed, the report says. A lot of people think this idea is “just fantasy”, says space-systems engineer Chantal Cappelletti. But the falling cost of space launches has made the prospect of space-based solar geoengineering seem more realistic.

— Jacob Smith / “A plan to shade the Earth from space” / Nature Briefing