Considering a Nameless Way of Living

A Hillaryite Colleague stomped up to me yesterday and said, in genuine anger, I hope you're happy. Because I, you see, would rather a Trumpiam descent into my Hillaryite Colleague's worse nightmares of fascism rather than give Clinton her earned turn. Fuck you very much, I said in my head.

I made a conscious choice to stop screaming at people - like this Hillaryite Colleague, yes, but Loved Ones and friends more - about the motherfucking Democratic Party and especially the motherfucking Clintons three months before the election. About how they could lose, yes, but more how she would rule (even I didn't think they could, in the end, fuck this up). I failed often, but I did try. People can vouch.

My Hillaryite Colleague said, I hope the DNC makes Howard Dean chairman, not that black Muslim. It's time to rebuild the party from scratch. Fuck you very much, I said, out loud this time.




 

• Partridge 63 yesterday.
• Autocracy: Rules for Survival.
• Consider how happy police are today, at the prospect of a Giuliani Justice Dept.
• How we all got it wrong.
• Post-mortem: a Moral Morass.
• Revenge of the forgotten class.
• Technocrats, populists, citizens.
• Adorno for 2016.
• Zukunft.
• The nightmare begins.
• Watching whiteness work.
• The Home Front.
• BTW, Schumer supporting Ellison over Dean is only Schumer out to knife Dean for whatever cynical reasons a fuck like Schumer lives by.
• Area Liberal no longer recognizes fanciful, wildly inaccurate mental picture of country he lives in.
• Americans (who've been here 15K years).
• Martin O'Malley wants to be DNC chair. Fart.
• Nineteen hours of Leonard Cohen's music.

POEM

Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.