Category: writing

Sharing from DIVEDAPPER // D.A. Powell

…

Instead of looking at thirty or forty poems, you’re looking at two hundred poems and saying, “Here are the forty best ones, now make a book.”

Yeah. So I’m in that mode of resisting the convention of materiality and productivity.   I feel like in a capitalist society we put so much emphasis on end product. Writers do it to each other. It’s a kind of unconscious shaming that writers will sort of say to one another, “So, are you writing? Are you working on anything?” Like, “Are you an actual writer?”

Oh, yeah. As if to say no is to admit some sort of deficiency.

In every other aspect of our lives, we have periods of rest where we don’t worry about the fact that we’re not in our office. We take time off from practically everything in life, except, for some reason, in the arts we feel like we always have to be working. I think that we’ve made a kind of enslavement of our own creativity. Like it’s a genie whose lamp we rub and summon, and we have to do it numerous times otherwise we’re not legitimate. So I’m enjoying being illegitimate.

Read the whole piece here: DIVEDAPPER // D.A. Powell

Hegel on Knowledge, Impatience, the Peril of Fixed Opinions, and the True Task of the Human Mind – Sharing from Maria Popova @ Brain Pickings

“Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there.”

I frequently lament a particularly prevalent pathology of our time — our extreme impatience with the dynamic process of attaining knowledge and transmuting it into wisdom. We want to have the knowledge, as if it were a static object, but we don’t want to do the work of claiming it — and so we reach for simulacra that compress complex ideas into listicles and two-minute animated explainers.

Two centuries before our era of informational impatience, the great German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770–November 14, 1831), who influenced such fertile minds as Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir, addressed the elements of this pathology in a section of his masterwork The Phenomenology of Mind (public library).

Read the rest of this at: Hegel on Knowledge, Impatience, the Peril of Fixed Opinions, and the True Task of the Human Mind – Brain Pickings

Notes from the Resistance: A Column on Language and Power | Literary Hub

It is a bright cold day in December, and the clocks are striking thirteen. To the past or to the future, to an age when thought is free, from the age of Trump, from the age of Wikileaks, from a dead woman, greetings.

This is to be a column about language, but before I get to that, and why, we’ll need to get a few things straight.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the first act of rebellion undertaken by Winston, the protagonist, is to acquire a blank book and begin to write down his thoughts and memories. He does so despite the glare of a Big Brother poster, and under the watchful eye and keen ear of the two-way telescreen.

I write to you now from my laptop with its two-way listening and seeing devices. I have a smartphone in my bag that does the same thing. I use these instruments to watch and listen and in return people can watch and listen to me. I operate under the impression that it is I who chooses which people can and can’t do this, but we all know it is already legal for that not to be the case.

Read the rest of this great piece here:: Notes from the Resistance: A Column on Language and Power | Literary Hub

White people aren’t just privileged. They’re also spoiled.

 

upside-down tattered American flag
Things only look upside-down, if you expect them to stay right-side up

For the record, I am pretty sick and tired of SWEEPs — Straight White Educated Entitled Privileged folks — lamenting about how their kids won’t do as well as they have — or as well as their parents did. The tone of the conversation often sounds passive, as though America will naturally march in the direction that favors them, just ’cause they’re here.

There’s so much presumption that goes along with that. So much presumption behind the expectation that an education alone will guarantee you a job. That the world will necessarily work a certain way, because your straight outlook tells you that’s correct. That having to actually compete for a job, rather than proving your worth to your employer on a regular basis, is somehow beneath them.

Like, once you’re here, and once you’ve set up shop, you’re entitled to keep that status indefinitely, because, well, you’re here.

It all sounds like socio-economic ideological equivalent of squatter’s rights.

And it’s tiresome.

I’m also sick and tired of the belly-aching about the election results, when it’s clear we’ve been lied to, we’re being lied to, daily assaults on common decency are taking place… and white folks sit around wringing their hands, not wanting to make a fuss that might offend their white peers (who may or may not agree with them). Worse yet, is how people flock to secret Facebook groups to commiserate, but they won’t actually stand up and say in public This is Wrong, and if You Don’t Think So and Try To Normalize This, You’re Aiding and Abetting the Dismantling of the United States. You’re an Enemy of the State.

Nobody’s guaranteed anything, here. We all have to work for it. We all have to defend the rights and freedoms we feel entitled to. We all have to put our shoulders to the wheel, or the things we take for granted are just gonna go away.

If the past month isn’t plain evidence of that, I don’t know what is.

Yah, we’re not just privileged. Or entitled. Or any of those other consciousness-raising terms.

White people — any people — who take everything for granted and don’t think they’ll have to work for what matters most to them, are more than that. They’re spoiled.

Sharing: A ‘Safe Space’ For White People, Otherwise Known As ‘The Two-State Solution,’ or ‘Disunion As Solution’ | The Huffington Post

It’s time, America. It’s either a two-state divorce, or “Heil, Trump” will be coming to your neighborhood as it has already come to mine.

We are in a civil war. Not very hot — yet — but in which tension is building daily. Neo-Nazis party in my neighborhood of Chevy Chase, unnoticed by the Leader, while he attacks the cast of Hamilton instead. Clinton keeps racking up votes, now with a 2,000,000+ vote lead, while no one is yet auditing the states that swung the Electoral College (itself a vestige of slavery). Liberals are turning in on themselves, while conservatives stand stunned, buried at the foot of the wreckage of the Republican party while the kakistocracy takes shape.

All this because a few hundred thousand Rust Belt citizens, repeatedly fed misinformation and disinformation in our era of Big Data, decided to first destroy the Republican Party, which had betrayed then for forty years (fool me once…), and then take down the entire country in a fit of pique for an encore. Now they will learn what pain really feels like, as they’ve given unlimited power to a demagogue (“Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”) while emasculating themselves. Their new Karl Rove fancies himself as Darth Vader, Dick Cheney and Satan, though on a good day he elevates his narcissistic neo-Nazi self-image into Thomas Cromwell (who ended up executed by the Crown, but no matter).

Read the rest here: A ‘Safe Space’ For White People, Otherwise Known As ‘The Two-State Solution,’ or ‘Disunion As Solution’ | The Huffington Post

What if we’re all not as bad… as that?

tattered american flagAn interesting thing happened to my perspective, over the past couple of weeks. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, wreathing myself in the virtual equivalent of sackcloth (Facebook posts) and ashes (Tweets), I’ve slowed down and started paying attention to recurrent themes after the election.

One theme, in particular, stood out — The Russian influence over the election.

Okay, people, here’s the weird thing: We’ve known that the Russians were “meddling” in our election politics for many months. President Obama warned about a Cold War-style ‘cyber arms race’ with Russia back in September – and even before that, there were ongoing concerns about Russian influence in the election (including hacks on the DNC in June). Nobody paid much mind, really, even when Donald Trump publicly asked Russia to produce emails of his opponent. Yeah, we’ve known about it. But for some reason, nobody paid much mind.

Now, we come to find out that there’s been a veritable firehose of disinformation / fake news – okay, let’s call it what it is: propaganda consistent with Russian patterns that’s flooded the social media scene and effectively eclipsed actual, real-world news. To quote the Washington Post:

On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

Okay, so what? you may ask. Big deal. But consider:

The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.

That means Russian-backed propaganda has been seen — in just one instance — over 266 times for every one view of the real article.

Here’s a link to the list of “fake news” — ahem — propaganda sites from PropOrNot.com. You will probably recognize at least some of them, as a one-time “trusted source” for yourself. I actually do. And that’s disconcerting, to say the least.

Which means that our brains have been hacked.

Our minds, our hearts, our election, our country have been compromised by a hostile entity that within my lifetime was seen as a mortal foe.

And they may have been up to no good during the primaries, as well. Which made the GOP into one of the biggest b*tches patsies of the Kremlin, of all time. I mean, seriously. If that’s true (and I don’t doubt it could be), they really got taken for a ride.

And meanwhile, the “discussions” we’ve been having with each other in ever camp — intra-party, inter-party, and across the full political spectrum, have been a relentless shit-show. Many, many conversations have not been productive, tons of them have been anything but civil, and countless exchanges have been downright abusive… and everything in between. We’ve come apart at the seams as a formerly civil society, in no small part because people who are a whole lot smarter than a lot of us, and who know our weaknesses even better than we know our strengths, made a hell of a lot more effort to trick and mislead fuck with us, than we made the effort to stay responsibly informed.

“So, what part of this is good?” you may be asking…

Well, consider this: The only way that Trump and his illk (double “L” is intentional”) could get into their position, is by cheating — by teaming up with a bunch of crafty Russians with the firepower to pull this off. He couldn’t do it himself. And he couldn’t do it honestly. He couldn’t possibly win by playing by the rules, so he broke them. No, he didn’t even break them. He moved the whole dynamic into a parallel universe where the rules supposedly didn’t even exist. And we fell for it. Many of us, anyway.

Now, lest you get your libbral knickers all self-righteously a-twist and start feeling smug about how Trump’s camp never would have prevailed on a level playing field, don’t forget that plenty of prior elections have been fraught with questionable results, themselves. I can’t recall there ever being an election, where allegations of fraud weren’t leveled.  And the results in 2008, when it seemed to so many of us that Hillary was commanded by the DNC to step down, so Obama could take the lead, just made her presumptimve “in the bag” victory that much more satisfying in 2016.

Not having that happen… well, that stings. Again.

This time around, it’s different, though. Because an outside nation has gotten involved, from all the evidence. A slew of bogus websites have strewn clickbait “news” across Facebook (a company which couldn’t even see fit to block the ones which were known to be fake — not a difficult thing for them to do, by the way). And an All-American army of naive millions have gleefully  passed along the propaganda, an eager extension of Putin’s reach into the hearts and minds of conspiracy-theory-loving “information consumers” who couldn’t be bothered to fact-check. On Twitter, Russian trolls (who are easy to spot because their foul-mouthed accounts are full of nothing but Trump promotions), unleashed campaigns for and against, whipping unsuspecting tweeps into a frenzy.  All the while, the different sides have escalated their vitriol against one another.

And I can’t help but wonder how much Russia had to do with the Hillary hatred that boiled in the depths of the hearts — and on the tips of the tongues — of all those Bernie supporters.

So, again, how is this good? Because — contrary to the common belief that Hillary is a total loser and couldn’t win, if she tried — it shows that she’s actually such a formidable opponent (and a shoe-in for the job of CEO of America), that Trump was helpless to do it alone. And the only way he could do it, was with a little lying-cheating-stealing help from his friends over yonder.

That puts things in a whole new light.

I, myself, have thought, if Hillary can’t beat a self-proclaimed serial sexual assaulter who’s said he’s more attracted to his daughter than his wife (the paper removed that quote, btw, maybe ’cause it wasn’t nice), who brags about not paying any taxes, incites racial violence at his rallies, is a poster-child for ISIS recruitment, promotes nuclear proliferation, talked about “walking” (out) on our NATO allies, whose idea of good policy is imprisoning his opponent (whom he stalks on-stage during a debate)

trump-stalks-clinton

and deporting the very people he employs to the other side of a wall he thinks he’s going to build, and was endorsed by a North Korean dictator who shoots, poisons, and burns alive his foes as punishment, who the hell CAN she beat?

But maybe the answer is, in fact, “Trump.”

Maybe the answer would have been “Anybody and everybody”. Absent the influence of a highly sophisticated program of hacking and psychological meddling, maybe, just maybe she could have beaten anybody else who stepped up to challenge her. We’ll never know, because the playing field, this time around, was about as even as the golf course in the movie “Caddy Shack” after Bill Murray’s character went after the gopher with all the explosives.

So, for all those who are #StillWithHer, that’s actually something. And it should give the whole country pause. Likewise, it should give us pause, that Trump was so distrusting of the American people, that he HAD to make sure we were lied to, deceived, misled, misdirected, and whipped into a frenzy of fight-flight haze that pumped us full of cortisol, which suppresses the immune system and damages (and kills) the brain cells responsible for remembering what just happened. The only way he could prevail over the American people, was to literally make us sick… waging a clandestine campaign of psychological and physiological warfare on us, lie to us, cheat us of the truth, and bully us into his brand of submission.

Whether it actually works or not, is anybody’s guess. I’m sure we’ll find out.

We’ll find out a lot of things. Yes, MI, WI, and PA all seemed destined for Trump, but people are actually doing something about following up to make sure. Forget about Florida in 2000 (if you can). We’re actually getting a recount in Wisconsin, thanks at least in part to Jill Stein, a third-party candidate who may or may not being doing this for the noble cause of election legitimacy. And we might just get recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well. People have contributed over $5 million (of the requested $7 million) to make it happen, and the number keeps rising.

So, there is hope.

Most of all, the hope I take away from this — no matter what happens — is that even though we’re a fickle bunch who will oh-so-eagerly turn against each other in times of distress and disappointment… even though we turn into a rude and vicious mob at the drop of a hat, “liking” lies and passing them along with chortling glee… even though the candidate who could have requested recounts in WI, MI, and PA at no additional charge to us (but left us, her constituents, to foot the multi-million dollar bill and push the initiative forward)… even though we apparently can’t tell truth from lies, anymore, and prize our democracy so little that we run around calling for capitulation unity before the Electoral College has even voted, never once realizing that when we surrender to this sort of evil, we’re complicit in it… this hardly would have happened, if a world-class psychological warfare program weren’t unleashed upon us over the course of months, maybe even years.

And the people who did this know that the only way they can actually beat us is by cutting out our hearts and turning our prodigious energy and influence against each other.

When we’re united against a common foe, we Americans have a habit of winning (for better or for worse). But when we turn against ourselves… God help us. And heaven help the rest of the world.

If only we knew that as well as the KGB.

Why so quick to sink the ship of “identity politics”?

Pirates approaching a sinking ship
It’s pretty clear, what’s happening

This stream of thought occurred to me this morning, after I read a few pieces heralding the imminent demise of “identity politics” — you know, the political orientation that acknowledges the diversity of our society and addresses the individual needs of disparate portions of the population?

I tweeted a series of thoughts about it. And I’ll elaborate on that more below. Original tweets are bold. My thoughts here are not

Maybe I’m not paying attention enough, but it seems to me everyone calling for an end to “identity politics” is straight, white, and male. Granted, I haven’t dived deep into all the pieces coming out about it now. I’ve been sick with a nasty sinus infection & flu-like symptoms, so my capabilities are somewhat limited. But from what I gather, it’s time to “get beyond identity politics” and start gathering the Democratic party around our shared values, etc.

I dunno… abandoning the recognition of our inherent diversity seems… fraught to me. In my experience, whenever we’re pushed towards “unity”, the conversations and priorities very quickly center on the priorities of straight, white, abled, privileged (you know you are, let’s face it) males, who feel entitled to push their agendas. That’s for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is that the guys who start calling the shots have the time, energy, and resources to push their agendas over the rest of us — who have been at a disadvantage for a long time, due to the lack of recognition of our individual situations and needs which exist in parallel universe to the guys who say our concerns are “irrelevant” or “distracting”.

To this queer, intermittently disabled gal, it seems like getting rid of “identity politics” is another form of erasure. I mean, seriously, it’s just pathetic, to hear a straight, white guy whose wife has been making it possible for him to do his thing for all these years (Bernie Sanders, in the case I’m thinking of), and whose roster of accomplishments just pales compared to his onetime political opponent, it’s the ultimate kick in the face. The thing that actually drew me to HRC over Bernie, was that  she got the deal with disability, and she’d actually done something about it — rather than suggest yoga and deep breathing for chronic pain, as Bernie had done. Never once, was I convinced that anyone other than Hillary even a glimmer of recognition about the true nature of disability, let alone had plans for how to address our issues. I’ve been in and out of chronic pain for 30 years, and it’s no fucking fun. Likewise, to be constantly told that being queer is “no big deal” and that I can be every bit as mainstream as the next person, is a slap in the face, all too often handed out by well-meaning straight folks who prize uniformity as the greatest accomplishment of all. To have individual situations like mine – and worse – glossed over during the campaign by every single candidate as Hillary… and then have those who failed to acknowledge the importance of our differences summarily dismiss them as “irrelevant”, is a double-whammy of indictment against this idea of pitching identity politics out the window. Maybe, just maybe, the reason that Hillary got so many more votes than Trump was exactly because she embraced “identity politics”.

PLUS, if there’s Any discussion of HRC’s campaign “weaknesses” can only be taken seriously in light of a 100% trustworthy result, free of voter suppression hacking influence, voter intimidation, absence of threats of violence, etc. We all know there were issues. Hell, Trump himself encouraged the creation of those issues – veiled references to armed intimidation, veiled threats against his opponent. And members of his campaign actually came out and announced proudly that they had three different types of voter suppression in play. And when the NSA says the Russians had an influence over the election, and talk of hacking had been making the rounds for months prior. So, no, nobody who’s been paying attention would say any of the above was possible.

And all the facts indicate those were NOT the conditions we had. You don’t have to say it out loud, but you do have to acknowledge the facts.

So, no – it’s NOT accurate good form to loot the shipwreck of the HRC campaign b/c they steered their ship onto the shoals. Everyone is carrying on now as though it was the HRC campaign that screwed up. They did this wrong… they did that wrong… the DNC was a love-fest of American Exceptionalism that ignored the plight of suffering Americans, a sign of things to come. Hillary’s message didn’t resonate. She didn’t do well enough. She was totally off-base about everything. So, hey, let’s all climb onto the foundering frigate and start dismantling the ship for its hardware and booty. We can take the pieces we need… like, all her disappointed followers looking for a plausible ideological reason she “failed” so miserably. And we can kick her even more when she’s down, because if you can’t win against a raving, bigoted, Nazi-quoting, misogynistic, serial sexual assaulter who can’t even let his wife vote without looking over her shoulder, what good are you? Maybe all her internal Democractic opponents, the ones who recognized her relevancy and power, who wanted a piece of the action, but could never fully commit to her for whatever purist rationale,  think it’s good form to board the foundering ship and start dismantling it, but guess what – you’re killing the goose that laid the golden egg. And you don’t even care.

They were torpedoed. They were. And worse yet, WE were. People don’t seem to get it. Team-sport politics has blinded us to the realities that the hacks, as well as the voter intimidation and suppression were an attack on us ALL, a direct hit to the heart and soul of this nation. Regardless of your political leanings, if you do NOT demand an audit of the vote and an investigation into fraud and outside influences, you are contributing to the problem. And you’re attacking your own country at its most fundamental level.

And anyone who gorges themselves on the “lessons of history” (tsk-tsk-tsk) about how to NOT run a campaign & steers political discussion in a direction away from the HRC focus on acknowledgement of ALL and inclusion of those not white, not straight, not male, not 100% abled is taking advantage of a situation created by outside influences – anti-American influences – and that makes them complicit in it as well. Ultimately, do any of the Ones Who Think They Should Run Things really give a damn about principle, as long as the principles don’t favor them? I’m quite tired, actually, of people getting all high ‘n’ mighty about principles when they’re losing… and then suddenly think they’re irrelevant when they’re winning. For some reason, those who feel they’re entitled to tell everyone else what to do, are ever so quick to disenfranchise those of us who were actually served by the discourse of identity politics, falsely drawing conclusions about its “failure”, when what really failed was our democractic process, as well as our vaunted Office of Homeland Security. Where the fuck where they, anyway, when all the hacking evidence was rolling in? It wasn’t like they didn’t know. For months ahead of the election.

Which is NO cause for celebration. There’s a taint  of Schadenfreude to this whole sordid aftermath, something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, where the losers along the way are taking advantage of this for their own needs. That’s why Bernie Sanders will never, ever have my full support. And I’m cooling to Elizabeth Warren. Where have they been, in defense of our most fundamental right? Where have they been, in defense of the Constitution?  Everybody’s “girding for the good fight”, and never once lifting a finger to prevent that unwarranted, illegitimate fight, to begin with.

Sign of the times: sell out your very own democratic process for a “win”. Because a Trump victory gives you the chance to showcase your own brand of Democratic progressivism, and it will stand in sharp contrast to your own platform. And now you’ll have four years to perfect your message and build your base, build your mailing list, build your political connections. It’s all about strategy, now. Screw the American people.

Note: You’re *not* winning. And at least some of us will remember this, in the years to come.

Sharing: Vengeance Is Mine | from Jacobin

Fantastic writing…

Watching the results on Election Night was like what I’d imagine living in an eighties teen horror movie would be like — the summer camp air curdling into one of vague suspicion, as a strange dawning sensation of doom takes hold. Slaughter: Ohio, Florida, Michigan — all bloody and prone. Who will be picked off next? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? Minnesota? Your state? The vote is coming from inside the house.

Trump didn’t think he was going to win — not him, not his cracked, wincing campaign manager, not the sozzled Nazi werewolf chairing his presidential bid, not the jackal pack advising him, not the rival camp, not the media. Trump, that demented circus peanut, knew that he had lost every debate, that he had failed to appeal to the mystical moderate voters who determine elections, that he had trailed in most every poll.

And yet when the ballot boxes were locked and the results came filtering back, Clinton was in trouble. A few hours later, she was dead meat. DOA.

There was no grand strategy here. Trump was obviously petrified and unsure of himself, woozily winding his way onto the Hilton dais to claim victory at 3:00 in the morning. This plainly wasn’t supposed to happen. Trump, pea-brained gurnard that he is, only swims downstream; he’s never supposed to reach the spawning ground.

Read the rest here: Vengeance Is Mine | Jacobin

Strange Bedfellows – Chapter 2 – Maria’s Walk

Abstract drawing of a meandering line, ending in a scribble of panic
Maria’s Walk

Chapter 2

But one day, things changed. Their maid, Maria, arrived in the morning at her regular time to clean their condo. After waxing the black-and-white tile dining room floor, dusting the glass shelves and tabletops, rearranging cushions on the couch, love seat, and side chairs, vacuuming their brilliant white pile carpets, polishing their heavy, ornate silverware, and washing windows, she headed into the bedroom. She collected stray piles of dirty clothes to launder or dry-clean, rearranged scattered items on the dressers, and turned to the bed to straighten it.

But when she pulled down the covers, between the black satin sheets, she found the rotting corpse of an old, shriveled woman. Skin stretched tight across bones, cheeks sharp, teeth bared, pelvis and ribs angular beneath copper-colored, paper-thin hide, the body’s sparse silvery hair fell from the scalp, and the stink of decay filled the room.

Maria stumbled back in shock. With a shriek, she turned and fled the apartment, barely able to close the door behind her.

When Paul and Christina arrived home later that night, they noticed nothing unusual. Engrossed in the last twelve hours of their own experiences―politics at Paul’s work, and the new show Christina was opening in less than a week―they mixed their customary drinks and compared notes on their demanding workdays.

Looking up from her glass, Christina noticed the vacuum cleaner was still out, leaning in a corner of the living room. With a sniff and a resolution to give Maria a good talking-to, she replaced it in the utility closet, and went back to her husband. As she passed through the dining area, she saw the silverware had been polished, but not put away; forks, knives, and spoons lay scattered across the glass dining room table, gleaming dully under the dimmed chandelier. Christina replaced the tableware in its case, her lips pursed, adding this infraction to her mental list of reprimands for Maria. This maid had been with them for years, but lately she’d lost some of her attention to detail. Leaving lights on when she left the apartment, forgetting to unload clean clothes from the dryer, leaving the television volume turned up when she shut it off… This laxness was starting to wear on Christina’s patience.

Returning to the living room, she took the second drink her husband held out to her, and sipped. As the martini burned in her throat, she scented something―rank, bitter, sickly sweet, almost unnoticeable, but not entirely.

“This is the last straw,” Christina said indignantly, swallowing hard and shaking her head as Paul noticed the smell, too. “We simply have to find some more reliable domestic help.”

Cocktails in hand, husband and wife sniffed their way through their home, checking under cupboards and behind furniture for the source of the smell. Both agreed that Maria had probably brought some dead animal with her from her run-down neighborhood… perhaps she’d left it for them out of spite. They hadn’t raised her hourly wage in some time, and lately she’d been more sullen than usual. It was only out of charity, they’d kept her this long. She needed them more than they needed her. But still, her attitude had deteriorated in the past months. With mounting indignation, they made their way slowly around the apartment, until they stood in front of their bedroom.

With measured pace, Paul walked the perimeter of the room, checking under the chest of drawers and behind the dressing screen for the source of the smell. He set his drink on Christina’s vanity table and poked his head underneath; perhaps some food had fallen behind there and had taken weeks, even months, to go bad.

Hands on hips, Christina surveyed the room, nostrils flared. Everything appeared to be in place―except the laundry, which lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. The smell couldn’t be coming from there, she thought. Their dirty clothes usually smelled better than Maria’s clean ones. She could see nothing. But this room was the obvious source of the odor. Scanning the room, sipping her martini, her gaze eventually rested on the bed―a tangled mess of sheets and blankets. Incensed, she strode towards it and pulled hard at the covers.

Christina screamed. In his haste to get up, Paul smashed his head against the underside of the vanity, and stumbled woozily to his wife’s side. She stood ashen and shaking beside the bed, her quivering hand clutching the edge of the sheet. When he reached her side, Paul recoiled, his stomach churning.

It was a horrible sight―the corpse of an old, old woman, hair white and sparse, falling from a bony skull, skin pulled tight back from a skeletal face, grey teeth grimacing between shriveled lips in the light from the city outside. Flat remnants of breasts lay on a sharply bony ribcage, and the abdomen was sunken between pelvic bones stabbing upwards through the parchment-like flesh. An unholy stench rose from the body, leathery and emaciated, rotting and covered with a fine, grey dust.

“Oh, God―” Paul choked back a wave of nausea. Christina stood motionless, frozen with terror. “When we get hold of that maid―” he muttered, prying the covers from his wife’s hand, gingerly pulling the blankets over the body.

Beside him, his wife swooned, her hand clamped over her mouth. She reached for his arm and steadied herself, then staggered to the bathroom. She barely made it to the toilet in time. The martinis and late lunch she’d gobbled in a rush that afternoon spewed into the toilet bowl, as she heaved and heaved till there was nothing left in her stomach.

What horrible thing had they done to Maria? Christina wondered, her gut churning and her head pounding. What could they possibly have done to deserve this?
Paul’s stomach heaved suddenly, and he staggered to the kitchen where he vomited violently into the sink.

If this was Maria’s idea of a joke, he thought angrily, she could find work elsewhere. Was this some kind of snake-handler’s vendetta? A voodoo trick, maybe? He thought back over the past months. What had possessed Maria to do this to them? Was it the pay? Had one of his competitors at work paid her to do this? He knew he had enemies―they both did―but what monster could have put her up to such a thing?

“Honestly,” Christina snorted. She threw open the door, stalked through the dressing area, and burst into the master suite. Paul followed, muttering about the “unwashed masses.”

 

When the irrefutable evidence gets splattered all over your favorite shoes

mud splashing onto the shoes and legs of two people
It gets messy

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my initial reaction after the election — the morning after that too-late Tuesday night, when I’d gone to bed exhausted, my nerves worn to a thin fray. I woke up thinking, “Oh, even if it didn’t go her way last night, Hillary has the good sense to not concede until all the votes are in…”

And then I heard that she’d conceded.

… the wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media …

… the wailing and gnashing of teeth in my own home …

Everywhere. Shock. Dismay. Distress. Despair. I live in a cornflower-blue state, now, and the vast majority of folks I heard from (most of whom I’ve worked with or hung around with in the general New England area), were pretty churned up about that mess.

And what sprang to mind for me, who grew up in blazing “red” surroundings… who came of age during the Reagan years… and who has friends who were preyed upon by the FBI, “Ratso Rizzo’s” Philadelphia regime, as well as undercover government goons who killed their friend and carved “n****r-lover” on the dumped body?

I thought, “Fine. Now it’s back to business as usual, after this extended liberal interruption.”

It’s not so much that I downplayed the risks. I’ve known he was trouble for quite some time, and I’ve been following the writings of people who have issued dire warnings about what a Trump presidency could mean for this country. I’ve known what a horrible, wretched person he is, since I lived in northern New Jersey in the late 1980s and saw his dealings splashed across the tabloids. I used to watch “The Apprentice”, which left a bad taste in my mouth with all the posturing and facade barely concealed its seedy underbelly.  The racism, bigotry, white supremacy, misogyny, ridicule of disabled people, and steady stream of vitriol put me on alert, months and months ago. It’s not like I had no idea his fascist coup could get as odious as it has, in just the past few days.

I already knew. And frankly, I was already ready.

‘Cause folks, this is not my first rodeo with people like this. You may say, “Oh, you can’t possibly be accustomed to this!” But here’s the thing — I grew up under very different circumstances than the majority of people I know. And in almost unrecognizably different circumstances than the new generation of Millennials coming up on the public scene. I started elementary school during the first years of busing, and rocks were thrown at my school bus when we went through certain neighborhoods. One rock cracked a window not far from my seat.

I attended a high school where a Jewish English teacher had swastikas drawn on her car, along with other slurs I won’t write, and where German language students (for fun) sang the German national anthem and did a Nazi impression/”comedy routine” on the PA system one morning, to work up enthusiasm for their soccer team when they played against the Spanish language class.

In the world where I grew up, you never said the word “gay”. You didn’t even hint at it. Even if you were gay, you never said it out loud — you referred to yourself as “that way”, or “one of the tribe”, or “a friend of Dorothy”.   A women’s bookstore (which of course carried some lesbian feminist titles) was firebombed in a small city 10 miles from my home — twice — so it went out of business.  And if you had the audacity to visit the one known gay bar and park your car within two blocks of the place, there was always the chance you’d get your tires slashed.

The KKK was active in two small cities within a 50 mile radius of my home. It still is.

So, when I see all this drama around Trump’s people, his circle, his followers (including an unlikely Vietnamese-American) saluting “Seig Heil!” (sic. – yeah, she really spelled it that way), it just brings up a whole bunch of old shit with me that feels so, so familiar.

two white men and an Asian woman doing a Sieg Heil salute
Stranger than fiction: A Vietnamese-American saluting to white supremacy. Woo hoo…? What she didn’t get the “Mein Kampf” memo?

And it feels cold. Bitter. Stupid. For all the wrong reasons.

There are no right reasons, but the fact that nobody saw this coming feels like the wrongest reason of all. The fact that nobody thought it would get this bad, this quickly — with people so blatantly eager to rape and pillage and just send everyone around them straight to living hell, while next-to-nobody in positions of power steps up to stop them, or even question them… the news media treating this like it’s just another story, talking about the fashion choices of the new Nazified leaders — how spiffy they look in that coordinated ensemble — as if that’s The Thing Worth Reporting.

It feels completely convoluted, on top of it all, because here we are with a tender generation of Millennials who are perhaps the most sheltered and entitled creatures ever to issue from the loins of their parents, fond of their safe spaces and easily whipped into a frenzy about “microaggressions”, a larger generation than the Baby Boomers, who have even less political acuity and familiarity with the horrible world beyond their schools than those wild-ass Hippies… and they are no match – I repeat – No Match At All – for the machinery they are about to charge against. They haven’t a clue.

And meanwhile, people still say they voted for Trump for economic reasons.

Cue the dissidence.

I haven’t got time for despair.

See, I know what it’s like to live on the cultural margins in shitty times like these. I know what it’s like to be illegal — when my choice of intimate / life partners was punishable by law. I know what it’s like to live like you’re constantly on the lam, never drawing attention to yourself, never speaking up, learning how to keep yourself from becoming a target, because No One would ever come your assistance. I grew up queer in a world where queer got you killed. I grew up female in a world where women were good for one thing only — breeding. Oh, and obedience. Let’s not forget that. I’ve lived for quite some time in a world where there really is no equality, no justice, and there’s no point in getting my hopes up for it. Because no sooner does it show up, than it gets slapped away by someone with an agenda who claims they’re just protecting themselves from the “threat” of my existence.

Everybody seems to have forgotten just how awful it was to be anything other than straight, white, and right-wing in many parts of this country, for so, so many years. Everybody’s forgotten how oppressive it was, how soul-crushingly oppressive. They just think that all magically dissolved away when Bill Clinton was in office… and then they sealed the deal with Obama. But while people’s backs were turned, the elements that truly, genuinely want to crush and kill people who are Not Like Them, have been busy stoking their fires of resentment and vengeance.

They don’t go away. Not really. We just conveniently forget the ugly truth of them. We congratulate ourselves on how open and accepting and loving we’ve become… how much we’ve evolved. We forget about everything except our own little fanciful echo chamber, full of peeps just like us. Sharing photos and memes and our favorite songs.

And then Those Other People come back.

And we’re shocked.

Stop being shocked. You pretended not to see that puddle of mud in front of you, and you ran towards it in your favorite shoes, anyway.