Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Who’s that on his bike
Tears on cold cheeks . . .
. . . Most odd to be crying
And pedalling hard

— Seamus Heaney / “The Race”

You can feel the onset of authoritarianism in your central nervous system: shock, disbelief, fear, paralysis. Familiar norms and rules disintegrate every day, but the ultimate consequences remain unclear, and Americans don’t know how to assess the danger. We haven’t lived under authoritarianism. We haven’t experienced this level of sustained polarization and vitriol since the run-up to the Civil War. During the McCarthy era, careers and lives were ruined, but the White House didn’t lead the pursuing hounds.

— George Packer / “America’s Zombie Democracy” / The Atlantic

Fall fell wind-wise today—
trembles of dried lilac stalks, dead
hydrangea that couldn’t reach
water, all the finches and wrens
boldly on the move. Fall fell, my friend.

— David Roderick / “Message for Jim in Syria [Fall fell wind-wise]”

. . . Las Casas issued a famous declaration: Todo linaje de los hombres es uno—All humanity is one.

At the same time, the New World’s conquerors mocked the idea of humanity’s oneness, laying the foundation for race supremacy. Spanish settlers and colonists legitimated cruel killing on an unprecedented scale, forcing the New World’s inhabitants to labor in mines, fields, and waters, to extract the riches of America—gold, silver, pearls, dyes, and soon sugar and tobacco—that Europe would use to gild its empires, muster its armies, fund its wars, build its cathedrals, and pay for more voyages of conquest and enslavement. Never mind what priests like Las Casas were saying. Theologians were known to say one thing and its opposite. Indians were little better than apes put on earth to serve man. To dominate them was just. To work them to death no more a sin than to butcher a hog.

— Greg Grandin / America, América

in my home town, when I was a child
in elementary school, faithful in my recitation
to the flag, the L.A.P.D. pounded into a man’s body
on the side of the freeway, caught on tape,
the camera candid, the verdict not guilty,
my neighborhood ablaze, the smoke visible
from the kitchen window and on TV.

— Donika Kelly / “What I Might Sing”

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

What I’m Listening To:

They swerved around the planets
A thousand times a minute,
Singing songs, I sang along
But my heart wasn’t in it.

— Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo / “Texas Man Abducted by Aliens for Outer Space Joy Ride”