Category: politics

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Dear Dems,

As a lifetime democrat whose dad would turn over in his grave if he could read this  — I’m done with you. Citizens of Minnesota,Oregon, New York, Maine, Washington and Vermont are risking their lives on the street against the fed’s personal goon squad, while all you beltway-brained dems can come up with is reform and retrain instead of abolish. 

Quoting the New Republic “These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches.They abduct people, children.They use children to abduct other people.They shot a woman in the face, murdered a 34 year old nurse, tear-gassed a car of children, dragged an elderly man in his underwear from his house in the freezing cold, detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all  away. ICE is not working alongside local enforcement which has at least ostensibly accepted fair policing as a standard. 

You can’t retrain them. Or reform them: they already believe they are good citizens by fulfilling quotas from federal powers determined to stop white men from getting kicked off the throne by brown/black people, democrats and women. 

Don’t congratulate yourselves for funding a terrible budget just because you gave ICE 2 weeks to agree to no masks, body cams, identification, and warrants to yank old men out of toilets. Oh, and wear a uniform.

None of this will work. ICE is not a responsible agency working along with local enforcement. It is a palace guard enforcing the will of want-to-be king laughing in your placid faces.

There’s only one solution: defund them. Period. Ally with the mayors and governors desperate to kick the goons out of their states and cities. The law cannot constrain them. Use the funds for a health system that isn’t killing us, for infrastructure, transportation ad nauseam. 

And until you wake up, stop texting me for donations.

Riki Moss, South Burlington Vt


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Democrats you’ve lost me.

When I read headlines like “Congress clinches $1.2T funding deal for DHS, Pentagon, domestic agencies” and “Democrats support bill that would give ICE $10 billion” and “Jeffries won’t whip vote against ICE funding.” just weeks after Jonathan Ross, a longtime ICE firearms instructor, literally filmed himself shooting Renee Good in the face, I’m sorry, the party has lost me. Unless leadership turns over – Mamdani! AOC! Bernie! Eliabeth! – or unless a new party figures out a blueprint for regime change, I’m left in the dark, lost in the shadows, fantasizing the end of the world as I know it. As a Jew with ancestors plucked off the streets by an armed, masked gestapo, I’m sensitive to history repeating here, in my country, and shortly in my state (as goes Maine, so will go Vermont. What will Scott do? I can guess. ) Jack Smith laid it out, our former president was a felon. So? We elected him again. Of course, not me, but “we” in the sense of “us” not criminalizing him after January 6th. I wonder how my party let Smith be gagged and himself open to conviction. I have no solutions, I’m not a politician. It’s not my game. I did my marching in the ’60’s and am too old now to chase armed goons in the street waving my broom against a rifle as if one could sweep away the yellow filth blasted in the eyes of a helpless citizen. It’s a dilemma: on the one hand I’m filled with awe of my beautiful spinning planet, on the other hand I’m terrified as one species, mine, seems determined to wipe it all out. Yes, I have with me the artists, the poets, the caretakers, GenZ and maybe five of the governors, but our voices are marginalized by the uncanny reluctance of those we elected to protect us. All I have is one voice, however thin, to add to the millions raging against the machine. But for us to be heard, we need our party. We elected you. Fear isn’t an option.

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water and fire

News of the day, one run on sentence

When the American president assassinates an Iranian General, Iran lobs missiles at a US army base. No one gets hurt, except for what is dismissed as headaches, as in ‘we can assassinate your hero but you can only cause us a headache.’  But later we learn that 50 troops are treated for brain damage. Moments later, a civilian aircraft on its way to Ukraine crashes just after take off, killing 176, mostly Ukrainians and Iranian Canadians. Iran blames failed mechanics, the airline, Boeing and the US. Thousands of Iranians gather to mourn their General and hate us. Too many, because there is a stampede where people are trampled to death. Meanwhile, a video is released. Here is the plane, here is the missile, here is the impact. Iran says whoops, our bad, egregious error. Now the protesters turn on their own government.

Trump issues statements: we will destroy your culture and the American people love you and want you to flourish. I wonder: what kind of love is it that destroys your culture? But then, videos begin downloading and I am distracted. Australia is burning. Firefighters in shorts cradle Koala Bears wearing hand knit booties over their burned paws. They are wrapped in blankets called Johnny Pouches knit by prisoners. They knit and knit until Australia is overwhelmed. There are billions of animal deaths. My brain crackles. This is a local extinction. And while I sit there, stunned, Puerto Rico is wracked by earthquakes and then a volcano erupts in the Philippines, and somewhere else, people holding babies and blankets make their way through water up to their waists while dogs swim around in circles.

Burning forests, flooding banks. The ground beneath splits like a melon.

Here it is clouds, freezing rain. The landscape waits silently under layers of ice. I sit in front of a fire at a table cubing the meat of an animal who has spent its short, bucolic life in a field eating grass until it is murdered just for me. Under the table, two elderly dogs lie romp-to-romp. I’ve never been to Australia, Ukraine, Iran. but I can imagine. Under the burning brush, new life, although it is difficult to celebrate because, at the same time, we are the burning bush.

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Until AOC grows up….

She’s amazing, beautiful, effective, fearless and from the Bronx, right?

We’re heading East on pot-holed roads to raid a friend’s perennial garden. A quietly lovely afternoon, all the trees are green, the lake is high and rippling, the mountains drop backwards in perfect pespective, old orchards bloom white, as if covered in moths. Vermont is at its most perfect. We’re hurrying through the poorest county in our little state, one of the prettiest, wanting to get back before the evening’s predicted rain and wind, and we’re talking about the future, or rather that grim possibility of the world without us. Actually, I don’t know if it’s grim. Our species is doing a terrible job.

So I ask; At this particular moment, this exact instance in which we believe humans have gone over the tipping point to the downside where ruin is inevitable, who exactly would you pick for the Democratic candidate? And when he looks at me sideways, like who cares, it doesn’t matter, I said, I’m disgusted with Biden, that he’s Hillary Redo and yes, maybe she won the popular vote but lost the electoral collage, and Biden will do the same, Trump will win, and I hope…Yes, he said, putting a hand on my knee. We will be dead and you know what, that’s OK with me.

I still am hooked on Bernie, I say, squeezing his thumb. I love the guy, although we’re the same age, he reminds me of my leftist, moralistic, intransigent, dad. So right now at this ridiculous moment I would pick Bernie, with Elizabeth Warren as his Vice because she needs to be President. She will yell and taunt billionaire white men, biding time for AOC to grow up. AOC will win by a landslide with Mayor Pete as her Vice. By then, one half of humans will have murdered the other half plus viruses and who knows, plagues, fascists, Trump Jr., elephant extinctions, Fox news, anti-vaxers, twitter wars, Cabinet members who believe in the Rapture, black holes, Match.com, and if the planet can still sustain us, who knows…my voice trails because I will be long dead so really, who cares who I vote for. My future is now while the Millenial futures unspool in scenarios yet unknown..

We were turning into the first St. Albans exit now and heading towards Fairfax. Past McDonalds and the Hannaford Mall, the Dollar store, TJ Max, Guys Farm and Yard, The Veterinary Service. On the left is a huge and well maintained, possibly new and very red barn, with a clump of cows waiting patiently at the door dreaming perhaps of a nice quiet stall, certainly not of slaughter.


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We are all Bozos on the Bus

Wavy Gravy said that, but someone else probably said it first. I’ll go for Wavy, though, because his embodiment of the state of our humanity is precious. He is (still, at 80) the man for whom compassion is a drug. The love child, someone said, of Groucho and Mother Theresa. He had his own bus named Further, which was, back in the day, the Merry Pranksters’ vehicle of choice transporting around all dimensions a cadre of real bozos who wished us all well. But that was then and this is now. Instead of the magic carpet throbbing with good cheer, there waits at the corner, motor humming and windows blackened, a driverless Escalade.

My friend had a belly ache, the cause unclear, so his doctor ordered two Cat scans, one abdomenal, the other pelvic to be done together for a full picture. Because, as the docter knew, we are not divided by the belly button into scanable parts. The insurance company approved the top half but not the bottom and the hospital scheduled one scan, the one at the top, for a month away. The doctor then went to bat for my friend. He nudged the agency until the pelvic scan was approved to be done at the same time as the abdominal. But then the hospital refused to do the scans together and wouldn’t schedule them separately until a whole new set of requests were received. Which would delay the tests even further. Meanwhile, my friend, urged by his doctor to go to the emergency room to get the tests he needs, refused to do so. Instead, he yells at the hospital scheduler, the clinic’s receptionist, the insurance representative, drinks bone broth, swallows Tylendol and Ambian, and finally, like any good American patient, gives in because we are all bozos on the bus and noone has any idea what to do about anything.

Another friend went up on her dentist’s website where, to her horror, she saw a positive review written by me, with my picture, and a statement that I had five children, three of whom she took to this dentist. Now, I do go to this family dentist, but I never have written a review, nor do I have five children, nor would I ever give my dentist permission to post my toothy image on their website. My friend suggested that I call a lawyer and at least get free dental care for the rest of my life. My lawyer, however, never called back. So I went over to the practice and said hey, you have no right to steal my identity to boost your revenue, to grab my photo and by the way I don’t have five children. Oh, said the dentist, the web people get all that stuff from Google.

I suppose, although it’s hard to face, that maybe it’s true that we get what we deserve. We get Google and Google gets us, and this brings me to Donald Trump. The world is running on some kind of algorithm that fakes humanity the way it fakes the news and it’s out of control. Wavey and his pals were then and Donald Trump is now, two bozos on opposite poles. Yesterday I was cheering AEO and, yes, Omar, weighing my love of Bernie with my lust for Beto, but today I think the reality show guy could win the 2020 election because the bus keeps breaking down.

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NOLA zoetrope

The last time I was in NOLA – way before Katrina – I dismissed the city as a theme park. This time, I’m not here as a tourist. I’m in a real neighborhood at a residency established by the people responsible for the first Free Tibet concerts back in 1995, in a little house behind their own.

This is the Bywater, formerly the Upper Ninth Ward. It runs along the river bordered by the French Quarter and Treme. I stand in front of the levee looking up – I am beneath the river! Enormous freighters with names written in foreign alphabets crawl back and forth along the Mississippi. I climb the the steep rusty bridge over the freight train tracks and the levee and come back down to a pretty green walking trail called Crescent Park. The day is gowing hot. People wearing spandex ride fast bikes toward the French Quarter while others, heads down texting, are walking their dogs. Dogs are everywhere and they are lucky dogs because New Orleans has hundreds of dog parks made out of empty lots when the river broke the levees, buildings collapsed and eventually the rubble was taken away.

I ran into one dog today, in a voodoo supply store, a fat hairy dog riveted by something on a top shelf.

NOLA is a bowl in a swamp, where it seems the apocalypse has already happened. The survivors are in various stages of getting over it, standing up and falling down, like a Laurie Anderson song. It is a port – freight trains run along the commuter lines. it is commerce and joy, voodoo and nunneries, community and desolation. People on the street smile, they nod, they say,”how’s your day goin'” and sometimes they stop to tell you how their day is going. The clothes! Prints on stripes, dresses over shorts – this is a city that loves its skin. Po-boys are delicious, gumbo not so much, hipster cafes painted shades of orange behind shutters next to drink dives and one-stops, BMW’s with Jersey plates drive behind construction trucks and Havana Chevys and then there’s the Bark Market that sells pet supplies on one side and art supplies on the other. And the Death, Pharmacy and Chicken museums. An Improv theater in the Healing Center along with the food co-op and trance making supplies.

On my (white) side of St. Claude, soft bellied bearded men sit in cafes eating cake and reading novels, while on the other side an emaciated Haitian rides a stolen bike around in circles. The Quarter is a 20 minute walk away, as is Treme, as is downtown. It is a city of writers. Walter Percy lives on, his old writer’s group still meeting every Friday at a certain bar.

One wonders, where do the people who get pushed out go?  Houston?  Katrina didn’t do them in, they say, it was the government building substandard  levees and infrastructure, the broken pumps; it was America that almost killed them. NOLA, they explain, nodding wisely, is a blue dot in a red state.   

The cats, however stayed and multiplied.  You see them everywhere, in the stores, on stages, grooming their tails in art galleries, hunkered down on stoops, sneaking out of alleys. Always single, They patrol grocery stores, pose on cafe counters and have serious expressions. On every other porch there is a plate of half eaten food. They don’t need water because, as I said, NOLA is a bowl in a swamp.

My computer pings. It’s a weather alert but not for me: a blizzard is sweeping West to East across Northern Vermont.

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Clueless Murakami

Before starting Murakami’s huge (970 pages, good lord) new novel Killing Comentadore, I read Men Without Women, a slight book of short stories told to the narrator Murakami by men, some of whom are friends, others acquaintances, all of whom are currently living without women.  Some of them care, some of them don’t, and some are suicidal or dead, but what they have in common is that they are more or less clueless about the women who have vanished from their lives. The Murakami girl is either a superhero (1Q84) or she disappears never to be seen again.

Taeko Kono is one of them. And she’s nasty:

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A nasty little Trump clone planted in “our” Supreme Court

You noticed the twitch, right? Left upper lip triangulating towards the nose, eyebrows arched and rapid eye blinks? Looks like a snarl, but of course, it’s not, because our nominee is just a regular beer drinking basketball playing judge who went to YALE.

Susan Orleans once said she was sick of old dead white men. Too bad, because new ones keep getting born.

 

The new face of a Supreme Court judge, the Brett.

The twitch bothers you, right? You wonder about the odd facial tics, the tongue in his cheek, the tears squeezing out when he’s talking about football camp. Like how old is he? The pursed lips, staring eyes. He looks like Mr. Potato Head on crack, a raving teenager someone should send to his room.  Something really weird in the mouth. He wants to talk over everyone, shout, make his sniveling points and go home for a beer.  You think this guy is having some trouble with the truth. The judge is a liar and a smooth one, the kind that deflects questions,  knows the value of a righteous rant and above all deserves the job because, well, he is Brett.  He was born for this job of a Supreme Court Judge! Mamma was a lawyer, Daddy kept up his calendars. Didn’t his very own daughter ask to pray for the woman? That woman who is destroying his life by her accusations which no way should be investigated? Somebody screwed that lady up but wasn’t me. A guy without blemish, gosh, everyone has told him so, even women have remarked on his fairness, and all he wants is a FAIR PROCESS that will get him the career plum he absolutely deserves. If it doesn’t, it’s because of the conspiracy: “Thanks to what you on this side of the aisle have unleashed” ….. I may never be able to coach again. Jesus. Never mind that we don’t want this guy as our coach,

Is he not showing us what a despicable judge he will be? Consumed with paranoid, partisan rage. The ranting Lear. Weren’t you the were the pornographer on the Starr team who asked Bill Clinton if he’d stuck a cigar between Monica Lewinsky’s legs? The guy denying a refugee the abortion she begs for? Your body isn’t yours, woman, it’s mine.

Yes, Brett. You blew it for me, but you’ll likely be nominated because you’ve spent the last four days being briefed at the white house by Donald Trump. Be my Donald clone on the Supreme Court. The judiciary is MINE. the house is Mine. the FBI is Mine. Congress is to do MY bidding, We are not going to vet your character because character is, as we know, overrated; what is important is stopping the other side from usurping our power. The entire Republican party just wants to stay in charge by lurching behind the flapping feet of a contemptible, stupid, illiterate, blasphemous, raging pitbull even though at any moment, in a bad mood, he will kick open the doors to the zoo and blow you away by lions, even though he’s a disaster and you, by impliction…..

When I first began to comprehend how Empire that rises inevitably falls,  I thought, OK, that’s not so bad. Let America back off already, it’s time. I thought we were making progress, spreading horizontally towards decency. That our goodwill, incredible resources, diversity, and astonishing landmass would let us settle into becoming a generous place to live and flourish. We had only to let go of our exceptionalism, learn how to spread the wealth, give up the myth of The Greatest Military Power On Earth because really, it is ugly.  I thought we would shake off the oligarchy.  That the Empire would fall gracefully as a landing seabird when its time came. 

What fools we are, spooning around the soft spines of this dream, hoping to keep warm and dry while out in the real world, our elected raging, paranoiac spews seeds through our laws, courts, safety nets, decencies, hope, and here’s one more fungus ready to fatten himself off of me.

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UBU ROI, our nightmare

We’ve considered him stupid, moronic, evil, incompetent, mad, racist, misogynistic, a pedophile, self-aggrandizing, lying, stupefying,  narcissistic, character flawed, disgusting We’ve mocked his hair, his ties, his mouth, his little fingers, his wife, his children , his bone spurs, his deal-making, education, university, his gold leaf, his diet, the elevator, his advisors, cabinet and his lack of a dog. We call him a clown and we make Ubu Roi his avatar, Pere Ubu, Alfred Jarry’s surrealistic joke of a dictator who wants to be the king of Poland. That play so horrified its audience, it closed the night of its premier, but this performance has lasted over 500 days to become a national – no, a global – nightmare.  

At this moment, his most despicable action is holding hostage immigrant children to get his way – he wants his wall, and Congress is figuring out how to give it to him.

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Rusdie and the “Rubble of Truth”

I start this new day indoors with a warming fire, dog in the vicinity of my feet. Outside it rains hard. I look at my planet from the safety of my window and marvel. How the brown earth is a skin with the color green bursting from every pore with haze sweating off the surface of the pond, how tears flood the gulley, how the lilacs have been and are now gone without protest, how the swallows investigate the eves of my house as further nests, and how I wish they would accept my invitation to stay.

This is from Rusdie in the New Yorker. I’ve always disliked him, but this version of “why we write” reminds us of possibillities beyond ego and mood.

“In Germany, after the Second World War, the authors of what was called Trümmerliteratur, or “rubble literature,” felt the need to rebuild their language, poisoned by Nazism, as well as their country, which lay in ruins. They understood that reality, truth, needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, with new language, just as the bombed cities needed to be rebuilt. I think we can learn from their example. We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of the truth. And it is for us—writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers—to undertake the task of rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality, their faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.”