I sometimes find it useful to write the unspeakable. Grain of salt time, folks.
Yesterday’s workshop writing prompt was a quote taken from the recent HBO series, Task: “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing, there is a river.” I posted the screen shot from the series as well (above). Central to the story is the idea that we sometimes do terrible things for good reasons. Villain as hero stuff.
Also of note: the workshop took place two days after 8MM Americans showed up in the streets to protest autocracy.
🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋
He was shabby and short and wanted to burn it all down. Sound familiar? John the Painter. Red hair, fiery temperament, a Scotland-born American enthusiast in England at a divisive time. “No Kings” the ultimate distillation of revolutionary thought then as now. Early in December – what year, don’t ask, I don’t know yet — he set fire to buildings near the wharves in Portsmouth.
I can’t focus. He didn’t burn ships as intended. It was ruled an accident. Does that mean James Aitken a.k.a. John the Painter failed? He was dubbed both a saboteur and a “frightened little man” and ultimately was executed.
I have a massive cloud in my forehead or I might be able to supply more details. If the “frightened little man” escaped, how was he put on trial? Ah — now I see he lacked coolness and guile and confessed.
Shabby little saboteur with red freckles and a fondness for arson, holder of big revolutionary ideals, lacking guile and coolness.
I keep going back to Luigi being captured in Pennsylvania while having breakfast at a Burger King. I think that’s what was but it could have been lunch at McDonald’s. Luigi also showed a lack of guile and you couldn’t help but wonder if he wanted to get caught.
Then there’s Jason Fairbanks, infamous murderer of Dedham, Massachusetts, who in 1801 after breaking out of prison stopped for a bite to eat at the ferry depot near Lake Champlain (or wherever) – long enough to be captured. He was executed. John the Painter was executed. Someone somewhere is calling for Mangione’s execution. Anybody and everybody who resists the post-capitalist order or the GOP is a domestic terrorist now, apparently.
Did it bother the little revolutionary, John the Painter, that the fires he set were deemed “accidental?” Meaning the only way to claim credit for his pro-American stance (was that even a stance then?) (make that: his “anti-Kings stance”) was to confess.
A man being little and being referred to ever and on as little, does things to a man’s psyche, none of them good. Refer here to Stormy Daniels’s comment about a certain pro-King’s appendage.
I’ve said two things so often that I’m sick of myself and they’re not incontrovertible, but here they are. One, if Trump had a big dick, we wouldn’t be in this mess, and two, if Hitler had been a talented painter, met with acclaim and reward, Poland’s genetic pool would be vastly more interesting today.
Say what you will, but we are at a “Sons of Liberty” kind of moment and I wonder just how long the peace will hold. Images in my mind – Liberty Poles (Fairbanks’ kin got in trouble for erecting one), the Liberty Tree near Boston Common where the Sons of Liberty would meet, now a mere plaque because the British understood its significance and axed it down. It was a time of ragtag collections of men, barely armed, of treatises proclaiming this freedom and that freedom, taxation without representation being called BS.
Does it always come down to money? Well, penis size and money and by the way to look at Jeff Bezos’s clobbering walk with his new bride is to perhaps see an overlap.
If only we wonder, we tired-at-times-hopeless-modern-day-liberty-lovers — if only we had atoned for the great sin of slavery. If spiritual and financial reparations had been made — where would we be now? Certainly not in the maw of backlash to an elegant, moral Black president who loves his wife and brought a dog into the White House, which is being shredded, even as I write.
The Liar-in-Chief promised he wouldn’t touch the structure, but promises be damned and by “promises be damned” I mean we the American people be damned. The aptest, most stomach-churning metaphor around — a power-crazed, mentally unwell man with a little penis is tearing down walls of the White House and in true autocratic fashion demanding that the press not show pictures of the demolition. They’re upsetting, those pictures.
But back to coin and cock. The issuance of tariffs has long had swinging dick energy to it. Why is this not commented on more? (You can’t swing a mushroom, but the point holds). 40%!! 60%!! You’re an ally and there’s no trade imbalance? 120%!! He’s hoarding the cash, circumventing Congress’s power of the purse in yet another outrageous fashion. Lest I sound too New York Timesey here, let me be clear: he is violating the Constitution, he is breaking the law, he is committing impeachable offenses. Daily, mind. Every god-damned day.
Back in the day, patriots were busy, doing things like founding Plattsburgh and casting a massive Liberty Bell in bronze and stitching up the first flag. Did they have less to lose, I wonder, or was it easier to take up arms against an occupying force when you’ve been slaughtering Native Americans for 15 years or more? Bloodshed normalized, and anyway if a stray bullet didn’t get you, the pox or yellow fever likely would.
General strike? Cancel Christmas? It’s hard for us Americans to imagine an uprising being effective without money at its center and it’s also hard for us to be inconvenienced.
Who is suspect? Whose lies get the biggest megaphone? Whose disgusting and sacrilegious AI tomfoolery gets put out to millions without consequence?
Armed revolt, I say. Armed revolt. Or poison, poison would be good. I’d start with Johnson, Trump, and Miller. Arsenic — a little at a time.
“Relax!” you say. “Relax.” You go relax. Go relax somewhere else, anywhere else, but not near me and now I’m out of time and maybe we are too.
[I was scanning pages from this book while writing]
Cock and coin: you have a stronger stomach than I for I cannot even begin to visualize the first but coin, oh hell! “he is pressing for his Justice Department to pay roughly $230 million as a settlement for investigations he faced during the Biden administration and his first term in office”…saying that he was the injured party, blah, blah, blan…
Yesterday was the lunch with my MAGA relatives. I will admit that I was nervous as the time came closer. At 11am, they arrived promptly and I steeled myself, telling myself that I would stay calm…As they came up the walkway, they could not help but see my sign by our front door, Hands Off Democracy. No one mentioned it whatsoever so I can only think they had discussions in the car on the way to our home.
Our visit was loving, poignant, hilarious at times, with lists of aches and pains recited, stories of our fabulous grandchildren and great grandchildren, photos displayed on phones and I brought our family photo albums, family stories told and retold, possibly embellished a tad. There was a moment when I stilled myself and wondered why we could not talk about the “elephant” in the room (no pun intended, in the civil way that we we were interacting around the table…?
When I had commented on this coming event and my concern, Dee you had said, knowing how much I like to dance, well I could always dance…AND I did. One of my nephews knowing my love of Motown, in particular the fabulous Temptations played My Girl on his phone and he and I danced in our living room. My husband’s’ brother laughed and said that nothing changes with me, to which my sister in law said that is how I stay young!
This morning, it feels surreal, as if we had stepped back in time, into a twilight zone of looking the other way and I wonder, when it hits their pocket books, touches their coin, what then?????
Well it doesn’t get much better than “loving, poignant, and hilarious at times.” In a way, the avoidance of the topic of politics during a visit mirrors the weird split in how we are living. Going about our days in a sheen of normalcy while knowing at the same time all the destruction being wrought.
The $230 MM is such a powerful display of greed and makes clear what happens when you dont say no to bullies.
I’ve just learned that federal agents will be sent to San Francisco, where one of my daughters and her partner live. In response to this action, the venerable establishment City Lights Bookstore and Publisher, owned by the late great beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, hung protest banners across the building with words from Ferlinghetti’s poem, “Pity the Nation.”, written in 2007.. The banners read in full:
“Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, Whose sages are silenced and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.”
“Pity the nation that praises conquerors and acclaims the bully as hero.”
“Pity the people who allow their freedoms to erode and their rights to be washed away.”
” My country tears of thee. Sweet land of liberty!”
You are spot on. I want to see this in The New Yorker, in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone – how about Good Housekeeping? I’m not trying to be cute. Are you posting this elsewhere? Are we allowed to share it? Because its everything I want to hear said, way better than anyone else us saying it.
And this is why I blog! Thanks Maggie.
And yes to sharing
We are on the eve of destruction, but Trump seems to be doing most of the destroying to date, doing to the White House what the 9/11 hijackers were unable to pull off. The battle between MAGA and the resistance seems destined to burn everything down, metaphorically at least. No turning back the clock; best hope is for something new and better, phoenix-like rising from the ashes.
BTW, Patience Wright resided here in Bordentown NJ, just a few blocks from us.
That is a best hope. To rise new and better. So many are clueless to what is happening. That’s one thing. The other thing is the speed with which our institutions (and buildings as it turns out) are being torn down.
I did know that Patience Wright hailed from Bordentown but didn’t know how close to you! I’m enjoying learning about her. Quite a figure.
OK, this is how my brain does *not* work: I walk by a giant cast iron blue sign, almost everyday and for last 10 years, that describes the essential things about who Patience Wright was, and I think, “oh she sounds VERY interesting”. And, when I read her name in your blog, I thought,”Now, why is that name so familiar to me?”. my god…
She was an artist and a spy and you might really enjoy learning more about her. I first came across her in Jill Lepore’s book about it Jane Franklin.
There’s a tablesoon of Salt!
Just now read that the cost of the East Wing desecration is at 300 million and nobody seems to be concerned about asbestos mitigation. Some talk of a new bunker under the box of air posing as a ballroom. Rats can be gassed underground quite neatly.
Image: Kash’ eyeballs leaping out. Kegbreath weeping unde a table, trying to hold his breath. Miller with a Luger in his mouth. Trump putting ketchup on gold coins with his face on them. Choking them down.
As for Task, I’ve not been quite successful in avoiding spoilers. Tom Pelphrey was a standout on Ozark. His arcs seems to dive all the way down. It’s not lost on me how this biker culture is so completely self deluded. Did you see (suffer through) any of Peacock’s (!) The Bikeriders? And my brother’s name is Robbie.
Leave it to you Deb to come up with that imagining! And BTW not just asbestos but security clearances for the construction crews and security considerations for the rebuild. So much is amiss. Plus, he says he’ll pay for it (or the people bribing him) and then demands $230 million from the DOJ, which if he gets, mean we, the tax paying public, are paying for it. Also the price for the ballroom keeps going up. I imagine it’ll be $450 MM soon.
Tom Pelphrey deserves all the praise. As does Ruffalo. Hope you get to watch sometime soon. Such a well done series.
And, we’ve never had Peacock I’m afraid.
Very cool, and I want ti read Jill Lepore anywwy.. Thanks!!