Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

This terrorizing and demonizing pretends to be in service of recreating a white America that never existed. The US when white supremacists like Trump were young was whiter, but this was never a white country. In 1776, the 13 colonies that became the United States included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous people (some southern states were a third or more Black). When the US annexed Texas in 1844 and then in 1848 took Mexico’s whole northern half, a Spanish-speaking population was already settled across parts of what’s now the south-west and California. The first African Muslim in what is now the United States came in a Spanish expedition almost a century before the Mayflower brought its fanatical Puritans to the shores of Massachusetts in 1620.

— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian

it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.

— Mary Oliver / “Invitation”

Whew.

Damn. This America.

This raucous, malfunctioning, precocious, thuggish, absurdly tender, enviable, poisonous, utterly mercurial snitch of a nation. This bumptious, blustering, broken experiment. This circle of arms, haven for guns and greed, this cult of celebrity, this shelter and sanctuary, this bait for demons and demagogues. This place we call-home.

Like it or not, we’re surrounded by our country. It hasn’t been easy to watch its many wounds rise to the surface for anyone to see.

— Patricia Smith / “Series Editor’s Preface” / True Mistakes

A hot pocket in every Chernobyl, a pig
in every inbox. I’m announcing early that I’m running
for the top spot. I’m building a beautiful mall.

— Harryette Mullen / “Spam for President”

Every industrial, high-GDP country in the last decades of the last century took steps to restructure their economies in response to inflation, unemployment, rising energy prices, and global competition. Yet no other wealthy nation did so as gleefully as did the United States. It’s leaders facilicated deindustrialization and the outsourcing of decent-paying jobs; deregulated finance and other industries; pushed for the elimination of small farms and the massive upscaling of agribusiness; gave up their ability to discipline and tax corporations; and revised laws to allow first Walmart’s and then Amazon’s destruction of Main Street. No other comparable nation, not even Thatcher’s, presided over such an enormous redistribution of wealth upward, creating a superclass of billionaires immune to democratic control. None so happily let its political class and institutions fall captive to money, while at the same time gutting the institutions—welfare, unions, housing, farm communities, hospitals, mental health care, the media—that might have softened the blow. 

— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World

Climate change is making plastic pollution worse, says a new study: heat and extreme weather accelerate the breakdown of plastic into tiny particles, while storms and floods stir up old garbage from landfills and melting releases microplastics from ice. As the resulting material mixes with our air, water and soil, toxic hitchhikers such as pesticides are carried with it. Meanwhile, the ceaseless production of new plastic generates billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions — creating a vicious cycle. The solution: make less new plastic, get a grip on waste and clean up what’s already out there. “The biggest achievement and greatest hope for success would be to establish an international, legally binding global plastics treaty…”

— Flora Graham / “Climate change and plastic is a vicious cycle” / Nature Briefing

The persecution of huge numbers of brown people and even the mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy. Los Angeles, for example is an almost 50% Latino city, and despite the ICE and border patrol outrages, arrests, imprisonments and deportations, it remains so. The city’s very name is Spanish, a reminder of who was here first. All the hatred, all the persecution, seems like the panic of racists pretending they can stop the future of this country no longer being majority white through sheer cruelty.

— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian

What I’m Listening To:

Why does the past hurt me so?
(Why does the past hurt me so?)
The world is laughing at me
I am such a disaster
(Every day, I’m a shell)
A shell fallen down and dead
Curled, like a heavy downy baby goose

— Dry Cleaning / “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”