The Sane Unbenumbed Person Tongue-Tied, Sane with Gratitude and Terror

Old self-portrait, 2020, before the plague, from a time when canvases were tablets, reminded of it when struggling yesterday to keep my mouth shut and facial expression blank when a colleague at work expressed outrage at a video Trump released of Gaza as the Riviera of the Levant complete with a shirtless Trump and Bibi drinking cocktails with little paper umbrellas on beach chairs, Biden would never do this! he/she/they, outraged, barked, neglecting to cite who was responsible for the destruction depicted at the beginning of the video, and it occurred to me that without these grids my keeping my mouth shut and face straight an impossibility

The empire at its most honest
"Lawmakers in Alabama are expanding police immunity so that it's harder to sue cops for excessive force. The mask is off. Politicians want state-sanctioned violence to go unpunished. Everyone should be outraged about this. America is a fascist police state"
"Barack Obama signed $8.3 billion in cuts to SNAP. Dems didn't say a word. Joe Biden ended pandemic emergency measures resulting in 15 million Americans being thrown off Medicaid. Democrats silent. Again. The proposed cuts to SNAP and Medicaid by Republicans are draconian and inhumane. But if you're only speaking out when the GOP does it, and either ignore it or make excuses when Democrats do it, it's probably not Medicaid and SNAP you really care about"
Capital as Power in the 21st Century
"I Believe The World Is Ending - Does That Make Me Crazy?"
The Path to American Authoritarianism
"President of the United States posts video of him taking over Gaza with his statue for worship, dollars raining, Trump Gaza as centrepiece as he & Netanyahu chill at the beach. Ethnic cleansing rebranded as a real estate deal. Colonialist White Supremacist Zionism. Pure Evil"
⇧	"If you're old and slow like me, then that Trump Gaza video goes too quick to absorb its full insanity. So I took a few screenshots for you to digest at leisure. This is something genuinely posted by *the President of The United States Of America*.						⇧
The worldwide assault on working people
"Disgusting. I mean, the way a pile of pig offal or a bucket of chum or an overfull latrine is disgusting. The stench is permanent"
America First Deepens World Stagnation
⬇	"The Washington Post and LA Times editorial pages have gone full MAGA, MSNBC has purged all of its anti-Trump anchors, and Twitter is owned by a literal Nazi. Here's why liberal media bias is still a problem"						⬇
Bezos announces the Washington Post editorial page will exist solely to justify Bezos' shitlordly magnificence
⇧	"You might think Bezos is contradicting himself by declaring that all his minions must conform and support "personal liberties" on threat of expulsion. But for the US ruling classes, "liberty" has always meant "property", not "ideological freedom""						⇧
⇧	"Declaring that "personal liberties" are your north star in the same email where you're announcing that you're banning all views but your own from the newspaper is a helluva thing"						⇧
⇧	"Jeff, hi — now that the Washington Post oped page will become purely devoted to free markets, you should hire me to write about how Amazon's thousands of patents are a dangerous violation of free market principles"						⇧
"One reason (of many) that the very rich are "anti-government" is that they're not reliant on any govt services because they're rich. Courier services, private attorneys, private schools, cars and taxis, private playgrounds. In their minds "no one" uses public services, because no one they know does"
"Praise Jesus, we successfully voted to take food and healthcare from poor people to benefit the rich. Amen.”
"To Increase Government Efficiency, Every Federal Employee Must Write an Email No One Will Read"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
"This is not a political party right now. It is a country club for careerists who are happy to ride out the inferno in their luxury bunker"
Motherfucking Democrats hate you more than they hate magacrackers and it ain't even close
"We wanted to know how to make the Democratic party relevant again. So we talked to James Carville, Bill Maher, and Matt Yglesias"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
For shitlibs, it's not the genocide itself - who was the president that supplied the weapons and OKed the destruction depicted? Undersold, understated, denied genocide OK, tacky celebrated genocide icky. Shitlibs are shitty
(a) call them mercenaries and (b) the pigstool knows America has always employed mercenaries to do off-the-books wetwork so what he is calling for is on-the-books wetwork with all than implies both on-the-book and off in the future
"A major factor for why we are where we are is because for the last three decades, we’ve slopped up tons of movies and TV shows instilling the idea there are actually really cool billionaires and few if any about really cool forest rangers and VA staff"					Ubiquitous Evil
YES	Brief history of Israel’s theft and trafficking of Palestinian organs
"the irony of receiving rape threats from zionists over an essay i wrote about zionists sexually assaulting people really does just speak for itself"
The World After Gaza (w/ Pankaj Mishra)
The Supreme Court just gave scammers and robocallers the legal right to endlessly spam your phone and harass you
The decoupling of urban and rural America
"If we do not hate the internet, what we detest is its capture, enclosure and transformation by Big Tech’s nexus of billionaire oligarchs and finance capitalists."
Maggie's		Today in Rhetorical Questions!
The Reliquary Translations (37, 38, 40, 43)
Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?
Things Brad Learned in the Fire: On the Destruction (and Rebirth) of a Bookstore
Elizabeth Bishop's grandparents					{ feuilleton }
There's a word for that			Percival Everett interview
Krasznahorkai interview					#1467 The long journey
Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate
Mark Ford on a new Anthony Hecht biography
NEW JENNY HVAL ALBUM IN MAY, NEW SONG NOW!
Autechre Announce North America and UK Tour					☞	They are playing Detroit the same week in October I'll be in Chelsea visiting my daughter and son-in-law, hmmm
NEW SWANS!					☞	Album out in May, no US tour dates as yet, new song	⬇

THE FACE

Franz Wright

Is there a single thing in nature

that can approach in mystery

the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   

its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   

by sights that ought to strike the sane   

unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   

with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   

at any given time: and if

you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   

they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you

with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile

the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   

preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   

one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   

or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,

to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.