Category Archives: democracy

Shadow speaks

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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]

Oct 18, 2025

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Here are a few pix from yesterday, Newton Center, where there was a lively and vibrant scene.

A lot of dogs attended, so I can forgive Ken this photo, below (his other hand holds the leash — tightly).

Those are all neighbors from my street, so we were well-represented.

We’d come right from Williamstown where we’d spent the night in a super shabby motel.

I didn’t select it with my usual rigor. At least the room didn’t smell bad?

Tomorrow — some beautiful shots from the Clark Institute (below).

In spite of the eleventh hour critiques of the No Kings Day Rallies, I’m super proud of us — all 7 million of us. If the main point was to demonstrate how incredibly unpopular Trump is, we succeeded. “Who cares?” was his response. Obviously, he does.

The AI video of him flying a jet and releasing streams of shit on protestors ought to be the basis for the 25th Amendment, but we know it won’t be.

Onward.

Could a general strike work in this country? It is the next logical step. I’m at least prepared to SKIP SHOPPING for Christmas if that’s what gets organized.

Who’s gonna feel what when*

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To rise in the dark, is to wonder where the dog is. Illuminated curtains suggest a moon that she’s forgotten about. The mending of sleep these days lies only in its amnesia, its removal from news – like images of troops in American cities or arrests of Congress people (extra points if they’re Black apparently). Reprieve is not the same as rest, nor is it the same as regeneration, but she takes her pauses from horror where she finds them. This time she doesn’t trip over the dog.

She asks the cards over and over — is my mother gone (yes), is my sister gone (no)? Seven o’clock rolls around and the day begins with all its notable absences. There are three cats buried in the backyard. That pin cherry came down years back, but the massive copper beech was only recently chopped up, sections as big as trees hoisted up and over her neighbor’s house to a waiting chipper. Now she can see Michael on his deck. Also, late afternoon sun fills the new room, a benediction to loss.

The black walnuts begin their percussive rain. Watch out! They set off car alarms. They’d really hurt if they pelted arms or head. The squirrels use a big rock near the side gate to open them up, no easy task, she knows. She’s tried. She broke the nutcracker.

Time was, at walnut–artillery–time, she’d be looking forward to snow — not to hastily run through the season of scarlet maples and rusty, rattling oak leaves, but as a knowable return of a certain kind of silence, a sheltering silence.

But now? Seasons seem lost. And when the seasons lose all semblance of regularity, a whole region starts to lose its collective mind.

Meanwhile the ugliest people are in charge. She finds herself listening to an expert** on resistance, who analyzes the use of violence in times like these.

“I’m Irish,” she said last night in a poof of sitting down. “I don’t have a problem with violence.” She felt compelled to clarify though her husband already knew. “For the right ends, of course.”

The expert said, “Don’t shoot the architect of the Final Solution. Shoot the clerks issuing the deportation orders.” He also pointed out that the Third Reich had to break institutions whereas American institutions are collapsing in advance. “What took the Reich four months,” he said, “is happening here in hours.”

Good grief! No wonder she needs pot gummies to sleep!

“Who’s gonna feel what when?” could’ve been the title of the conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates — Klein feeling exempt from all costs of regaining power, Ta-Nehisi Coates not. She admits to her husband that she will not listen. I loathed Ezra Klein before it was cool, she says as if there was a point system. But seriously, if only the morality and intellect of a Ta-Nehisi Coates, if not the man himself, was in charge of the press. You better believe we’d be hearing about the huge multinational flotilla nearing the coast of Gaza.

Half the time? No, now and then, she wonders about an alternate reality – all those newly unearthed Carlos Castaneda books perhaps needing a reread? It isn’t useful to imagine otherwise, but she does.

Most recently: What if we’d arrested Netanyahu yesterday while he was in DC? Or when he touched down in New York? What if this year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Harris or Biden or even, god love her, Jasmine Crockett? Why not? A clear and scathing snub is in order.

He’s stopped seven — or is it ten or is it eight — wars, you know, between countries he can neither pronounce nor locate on a map.

Make that: Greta Thunberg for the Nobel Peace prize.

Meanwhile, she posted a picture of the sour cream coffee cake baked over the weekend — because someone asked. You know those posts – show me something good? And it was good, above average delicious, but where is her moral authority?

The calendar got clobbered. Whoops! A run to Schenectady planned, followed by a day at the Clark Museum. But that Saturday is October 18 – the next No Kings Day rally — so they may be protesting at the Pittsfield Common instead and maybe that’s appropriate since both she and her husband were born there — six months apart. She’s older, if you must know.

Going to the Clark is like going home — not a pilgrimage, but a return to something known and familiar. Hers was a family with coffee table art books. Boxes of pastels. A family with a shared love of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. To see The Woman in White is to notice her own feet connecting to the floor. Hello again! To see that bearded man on a hillside in the Homer exhibit is to feel her chest open. But now?

You can’t go home, she thinks. Remember — your mother is gone! So are decency and honesty as core values. Gone is an interest in governance. Gone is a willingness to follow the god-damned Constitution.

Maybe the Constitution is damned. She thinks no amount of swooning at Sargent’s renderings of cloth will get them out of this mess.

Not one of those 800 generals saw fit to get up and walk out? They sat there silently – some say itself a kind of rebuke – with their stern visages. Don’t they all have stern visages? Making Hegeseth’s cringey advice on how to be more manly all the more laughable.

It would all be funny if the fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t one of their closest historical parallels.

We’ve had a good run, is one way to look at it. Two hundred and fifty year runs are typical, after all, some are saying — but not Louise. Louise sews and thinks about threading needles. A narrow chance, but not impossible. Though if she had to predict, there will be blood and it may come sooner than any of them are ready for.

* uttered by CC in writing workshop on Tuesday

** Tad Stoermer here. It’s an Instagram link.

Fried egg sandwich. Mini-rant.

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Someone very much wants his share of my fried egg sandwich

Writing on the side porch on this cool and clear September morning feeling peace but also disturbance. Isn’t that how it is anymore? Time goes ahead (hear the children play!) and time wallows and sulks (what am I supposed to be doing today?)

A list appears: make ratatouille; read Deb’s pages; organize prompts; delete photos; walk dog; stretch quad.

Meanwhile the destruction issuing from our government seems to know no bounds. We’re executing people in boats now? Yup. We’re using the military to stage flyovers to drown out the voices of rape and trafficking survivors now?

Yes.

But at least Trump is losing and losing and losing — in the polls, in the courthouses, on the national stage. Hubbell today offers a rallying summary.

By the way, I agree with Hubbell’s caution about using the term “soft secession.” Sarah Kendzior cautions against it as well. States forming alliances with each other to counter idiocy from the CDC, for example, is a function of the republic not of secession.

Still, all the memes and laments about blue state tax dollars effectively being used to support fascism really are eye opening. Our protests must remain loud and frequent!

Here’s a minor toxic problem of Trump, one that bugs me no end and that I confront daily — that is, how to label him in any given moment? I called him a “petty cunt” online yesterday for staging those jets to drown out the voices of Epstein survivors. But it wasn’t just small-minded and vicious pettiness, was it? It was a show of retaliatory brute force. It demonstrated a willingness to violate every Constitutional norm to silence his opponents. And it was also one of those lost moments of irony — because threatening the safety of American citizens while they’re saying they’re frightened to speak out just proved the point.

He’s such a cluster-fuck of sin, of weakness, of deficiency, of incompetence and contemptibility, that describing him defies all efficiency of language.

I’m saying that I hate that about him too.

BTW my objection, only objection, to using “they” to describe a singular being is how it fucks up language.

PS if I tried to publish this on Threads, I’d get a pop up asking me to reconsider.

Photos of mine from the Labor Day Rally in Waltham, Mass.

Sparrows and tyranny

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It’s the peace before school clamor. Sparrows galore! Some robins came round to our backyard water feature too. We haven’t seen them in ages.

I’m hating how stubbornly the turtle quilt is refusing to be finished. It isn’t just me, I swear!

I wasn’t really up for a Labor Day rally today but after reading Timothy Snyder this morning how could I not? It’s at four in Waltham.

My sign reads: IS HE DEAD YET?

Which speaks both to how desperately we all want him gone and also to how much a creature of the internet I am.

Timothy Snyder here.

PS the bullshit occupation of South Station is coming. It’s being staged in a city north of here, Beverly. All week I’ve seen locals posting pix of South Station. How clean it is. How safe they feel there, etc.