Zeitgeist 10/13/26

It’s too soon to ask me my opinion on the death of a nation that isn’t dead yet.

I looked into it, because I’m so horrified at the state of things down there in Foggy Bottom, but I can’t apply for refugee status in Canada. Canada still considers this a safe country.

I’m thinking about that. Is the US of Assholes still a safe country? And what does it mean that Canada thinks so?

We’re three weeks out from the 2026 midterm election, and Trump is making all kinds of noise about how the Democrats are going to steal the election, while at the same time, he’s trying to gain control of each state’s election process, stationing ICE near polling places, having practice ballot-seizings… and everybody remembers January 6th of 2021, when he tried to coup Congress to stop them certifying Joe Biden as president and in the middle of things maybe eliminate a couple of enemies, like Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and AOC.

But we’re 6 years futher into Stinky Don’s slide into dementia, into a presidency whose approval ratings have gone about as sour as any president’s in recent memory have gone (which is saying something, isn’t it, W?) and whose base is crumbling like stale, stale cookies. Can this crippled old bagadoo muster the wherewithall to actually steal the whole country from us? And here’s the real question: are we all pathetic enough to let it happen?

And is Canada right about us? The answer to those questions and many others might come as soon as three weeks from today.

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Over the weekend, I found my self in an extended go-’round with an English guy who at the beginning of things had seemed somewhat reasonable and worth talking to about various topics where I knew we disagreed. I held out hope for a lot longer than I probably should have. By the end of our “debate” this morning, I was 100% convinced that there was no there there. If you bring up stuff he doesn’t like he starts repeatedly screaming about “the left” and how “the left” is fundamentally delusional and always wrong about everything because “the left.”

It was truly disheartening. The longer it went on, the more vehement he became and the more obviously he strove to find some path to “victory(?).” His one article of faith (and it was faith) is that everything any leftist says is some received false notion and can’t possibly be true. In the end, he resorted to abandoning our”conversation” and started one elsewhere that was meant as character assassination and miscast what I said while still crowing about “the left” and how I’m “a racist.”

So in the end we come to this. Yes, I am on the left, and proudly so, and as to whether I’m a racist… probably? But this dude is definitely a delusional RWNJ. The more we got into it, the more it became clear that the supposed reasonability and willingness to explore ideas was a veneer overlaying a whole lot of postmodern ideology.

I’m still looking for a right-winger I can talk to and consider views I have that might be wrong. Didn’t find that here, and by golly, it seems more and more unlikely that I ever will. The best I’ve found for this so far are Saagar Enjeti and Emily Jashinsky over on Breaking Points, but I’m nobody so I don’t talk to them, I just listen to Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim talk to them.

And yeah, I learn stuff, and sometimes I call shenanigans. But at least they show it’s possible for there to be some kind of continuing discussion.

–

We’re a couple of days into the aftermath of the Ukrainian bombing of 3 Russian data centers and the cascading effect of that destruction on the discourse on the internet. Bot activity on the web from Russian servers has gone down to 0.4% of usage prior to the attacks. There’s no clear data on the full effects, but with at least a couple of major Yandex data centers offline, there’s widespread reporting of a marked drop in right wing troll activity online.

I can only see this as a good thing, just a few weeks out from an election.

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Ilhan Omar’s being targeted by HSI (Homeland Security Investigations), who raided her Washington DC residence, looking for any evidence they can find of irregularities in her immigrant status, so that they can revoke her citizenship and deport her ahead of the midterm elections.

My sense is that this is backfiring. One has only to look at Elon Musk, who is the subject of reports that he came to this country with undocumented status and then bought his way in. The same can be said for FLOTUS, who is the subject of similar reports and who, for some reason, got a “genius” visa in the midst of her immigration process. Is Melania Trump really a genius? Perhaps in that crowd she is…

My guess is that they will find no irregularities in Omar’s legal path to naturalized citizenship, but that this will not dissuade Trump from targeting her and trying to remove her from office and from the country.

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I Waited 48 Years to See John Lydon Work a Room From The Stage Like Nobody’s Business.

And I Didn’t Buy the T-Shirt

John and his best mates. Photo by me.

The only reason I didn’t buy the tour T-shirt was that they were unremarkable, if not ugly. I wish they had been as good as this show was.

My brother and I have made a point of going to see concerts since he’s been here in Western Mass. We’ve seen some good shows, and not a single stinker among them. We’ve been to mostly prog rock, since that’s my current interest – as stated before, it’s music I feel no urge to pick up an instrument and try to play but it still excites me about the aspect of music that has always motivated me most, which is… how do I put this… ensembleness? Is that the best term? I dunno, but it will do for now – and Michael is cool with it, but this year we’ve tried some non-prog options. We saw Gang of Four on their “goodbye” tour, Beth Orton in September, and on Saturday night we saw PiL, and finally learned that it actually is pronounced “pill.”

This was one of the rare occasions of late where there was an opening band, in this case a high-energy quartet operating under the name “Plague Vendors” who were mixed horribly but managed to thrive on their own determination. Lead singer guy did a creditable job: charismatic, athletic, channelling the band’s megawatt energy like a kyber crystal. The music was uptempo, loud and raucous, and muddily mixed. Couldn’t really pick out the bass sound at all from the muddy morass that included it, the kick pedal, and the general low-frequency moan the room has naturally. What’s with all of these terrible, terrible venues of late? People think you can just put up a stage inside of a cavernous garage and a good sound man will be able to sort it all out. Not really true, unfortunately. After the show I went online to hear some of what their music really sounds like, and I’d class them somewhere between the MC5 and the Brian James era of The Damned with a faint frisson of psychobilly mixed in. All in all a good set despite the disadvantages.

As we were driving home from Boston after seeing this show, we listened to Can’s Tago Mago, with the understanding that it’s one of Lydon’s favorite records. In the aftermath of the previous night’s set, one can easily identify it as a major influence on PiL. While the two musical experiences are quite different, a focus on groove and trance ties the two together. My brother commented during the PiL show about “march after march” referring to the rock-steadiness of the beat from song to song, and I clearly hear a kind of hup-two-three-four-ness in Jaki Leibezeit’s drumming (accents on the two and four, of course!)

One of the main aspects of hearing PiL live that I looked forward to getting was the overall feeling of them as a working unit. So much of the band’s recorded output seems disparate, with different lineups and seemingly entirely different compositional approaches that I wondered how they were going to build a cohesive sound out of all of the seeming chaos. They managed it quite well. Recent material sat quite comfortably alongside a two-song sequence from Metal Box, “Rise” from Album merging seamlessly into an extended improv bit that touched on other of their songs and bits from outside their own ouvre. All told, it was a deeply layered soundscape built into a dub and post-punk framework that was both contextually related to the music that existed through the band’s formative years and an explorational quilt of impulses and unexpected influences.

And over and above everything else, there was John Lydon. My comment to Michael at the time was “Shatner vibes,” which I came to because there’s a huge amount of commitment and confidence there, driving through the limitations and the quirks to make a whole personna that is both iconic and… him. There was a related feeling between the two stylistically, and some important differences, too. At the same time you could see them both working within the Shakespearian hero framework, Shatner has more of a “man in the grey flannel suit” mainstreamness, where Lydon is reaching for something shamanic.

In discussing the show afterwards, I stated that Lydon is the best-ever lead singer who can’t carry a tune, and I think that’s right. He works in the groove, he reaches for moments of connection, and he gestures into the infinite. He was absolutely the focus of the entire experience and he took us someplace magical. He doesn’t sing so much as he chants and encants.

In sum, this was a fabulous evening, and a singular experience. At the end, standing on stage in a line with the rest of the band, John said something I never would have expected to hear from him. He called the other members of the band “his best mates.” That felt true and I found it touching, coming from a guy who has spent so much of his life at war with the world. It made me happy for him.

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An Annotated List of Some Sources of My American Malaise

These are symptoms of a corrupt society.

  • Democratic Neoliberals –
    • Jimmy Carter – Ineffectual leader, Famously criticized Americans for their lack of will while failing to address the hostage crisis in Iran, the double-whammy of unemployment and concurrent inflation, or much else, really.
    • Bill Clinton – tried to combat the Reagan wave in politics by becoming more Reagan-like.
    • Hillary Clinton – Not politically talented, managed to continue the Democratic tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of vicotry.
    • Obama – Big talker on the campaign trail, didn’t do much of what he promised, continued the party’s practice of pointing at the Republicans while lying in a self-drawn chalk outline of themselves.
    • Zombie Joe – propped up by a party apparatus more motivated to hold on to power than to help people, as they had been since Bill Clinton. Failed to manage even that.
  • Fascists
    • Reagan – Laid the groundwork for every evil thing the Republican Party has done since. Didn’t introduce Milton Friedmann’s to the American economy (that would be Jimmy Carter) but he advanced the neoliberal cause into the inescapable plague it is to this day.
    • Bush – Bush 41 was the intellectual giant of the last 4 Republican presidents, but that didn’t help. Lasted 1 term. Remember Operation Desert Storm? Whoopee! Also, his opposition to “Voodoo Economics” disappeared the moment he got the job helping Reagan administer those very policies.
      • Bush 43 eroded the power of the constitution even farther, committed horrible atrocities across the globe, is nothing in comparison to the next Republican president in terms of destructive, greed-fueled idiocy.
    • Trump – Here is the air you’re breathing now. At this point the constitution is a meaningless piece of paper, human life is only as valuable as its bank account, and because of his actions on the international stage, everyone in the world rightfully hates us.
  • Imperialist Wars of Aggression
    • Genocide – An American tradition going back as far as 1619. Today our tax dollars are continuing that tradition in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon.
    • Iraq War – An illegal, unprovoked war of agression that has led, by some counts, to the deaths of over 600,000 innocent Iraqis and destabilized the entire region.
    • Afghani War – An intentional failure and boondoggle that went on for 20 years too long. It’s trillions of dollars that were just thrown away, and that was the actual purpose of the adventure.
    • Iran War – continuing the American tradition of unprovoked and illegal wars of aggression against countries that didn’t attack us. We’re losing this one decisively.
    • Rat Bastardry™ in countries to our south – How different is Nicolás Meduro from Manuel Noriega, in the final analysis? Mainly the difference is in the even worse behavior of the American state. It must be remembered that the US has worked its evil on the countries south of us since we’ve had the ability and interest to do so. The Mexican-American War of 1848 is of a piece with the kidnapping of Meduro and the theft of Venezuela’s oil and gold.
    • Vietnam War – An obvious precedent for much that has happened since. No one remembers Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., but they should.
      • Gulf of Tonkin – the trumped up fake attack that set the precedent for many lies that followed.
  • Internal scandals
    • Watergate – A context in which an American President claimed, “If the President does it, then it’s legal.”
    • Corruption – This country has been set up to benefit the merchant class from the time said rich imperialist first set foot on these shores in the 17th century. At this point, all other impulses – Democracy, individual liberty, equality (hah) – have been subsumed into the weathiest among us’s greed.
    • Racism – Endemic and written into the script. Apart from simple prejudice, there’s endless history of legislation (Virginia’s Black Laws dating back to 1680 as an example,) suppression, and all manner inhumane treatment. The thing to remember about racism is that it’s a tool of the rich and powerful. It’s divide and conquer.
    • Sexism – Let’s just say “virulent patriarchy” and move on here.
    • Homophobia – A tool of patriarchal hegemony with the added pizzazz of being a fear of the self in many cases, and in virtually all of the most virulent cases.
      • Transphobia should probably get its own own bullet here, although in my perception, it’s got most if not all of the features of homophobia, with the addition of trans folk being seen as an even more direct affront to the sensibilities of the patriarchy.
    • White Supremacy – If we look at this as distinct from racism – which it isn’t, really – we have to point to the strange matter of how many white people think they’re being oppressed if they’re treated the same as everybody else. It’s truly weird, and that misreading of the map of the world in the social dimension is a huge source of the malaise we all endure.
  • The disappointing left
    • Bernie – Bernie gets huge credit from me for the things he’s accomplished. He’s the best spokesman for the anti-neoliberal movenent that’s burgeoning in this world that the US has, but he has also failed us all at a couple of crucial moments. He’s twice gotten to a crucial moment in his campaigns for president and just thrown in the towel without winning enough concessions from his opponents to make a difference.
    • The Squad – Four women in Congress, generally fighting the good fight, but they sometimes self-sabotage and therefore sabotage a country struggling to find some moral and ethical footing in this post-neoliberal era. The best of them is Ilhan Omar, in my opinion, although AOC is more charismatic. We shouldn’t expect them to change the world, but sometimes I wish they would fight harder, and sometimes it’s frustrating that they fold when they shouldn’t.
    • Current Liberal Leadership – When the supposed opposition acts like quislings and collaborators, and simultaneously shout down anyone who acts as true opposition. They pretend to be on our side while abjectly serving their Epstein-class masters.

A New England Economy

Consider these posts a brainstorming exercise.

New England used to be an agricultural region. There are so many small farms around our communities that it gives me the impression that if we made it a priority and funded/encouraged it, we could be an agricultural region again. It’s possible that we could grow enough to sustain ourselves, though I don’t know for sure what it would mean to try to feed all of the people here from New England’s arable land alone.

This will bear some investigation.

Crumbling mill buildings in Turners Falls. The one nearest me is still in partial use. Photo by me.

We also used to be an industrial region, at the same time as it was an agricultural region. There are abandoned mill buildings all over the area. Turners Falls, the next town over from me, has a decommissioned water turbine. That’s sustainable power. I wonder if that turbine could be brought back on line, and how much of our current power needs it could meet?

To be clear, I’m not saying “start up all the old mills again,” In most cases, that’s not possible. On the other hand, though, if there are old mill buildings and other facilities that are refurbishable, it would be better to do so than to reinvent the wheel in all cases.

It’s also true that those old mills were rife with problems. They were often terrible, dangerous work environments. They exploited workers. They were massive polluters. We could do so much better with modern humanistic labor and safety standards, and with environmental protection regulations in place and enforced. We would have to work to make sure that corruption was monitored, controlled, and eliminated.

It’s worth noting that New England’s best and most important industry is education. We would do well to open our universities to students from all around the world, as we once did. I work in this industry, and I’m proud of what the University I work for does, and glad to be able to contribute.

And I think that’s what I most like about the idea of an independent New England. We could all be part of something we’re proud of again.

Small disclaimer — I am likely being very naive. I have no real notion of what the starting of a new nation in this period in human history involves. I have some education and some mid reasoning ability and imagination. Read along with me as I investigate what such a massive change would mean. It’s an interesting subject.

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Cover Reveal

You may be aware that I have a book coming.

Or, far more likely, you don’t.

But I do, in fact, have a prose chapbook coming. The central idea of the book is straddling the line between fantasy and nonfiction. It occurs to me that this is a very postmodern concept… But the fantasy genre is, at its best, incredibly postmodern.

The book is 60 pages of my writing (well, probably more like 50-some pages! I used negative space in formatting this book for the grace I could get out of it) all of which stands somewhere on or very near the line between nonfiction and fantasy. There’s tall tales, lyric essay, memoir, auto-fictional storytelling, shadormas (a shadorma is a Spanish haiku-like poetic form,) and even a recipe.

Oh, and did I mention (no, I did not!) that it has a GORGEOUS cover designed by Heather Balchunas?

And really, that’s what I most want to show you right now. Here’s the cover of my new book…

Gorgeous cover art by Heather.

The release date is October 24th, and the book will be available from me or through this website exclusively. Further details are forthcoming. Watch this space.