THE WESTERN LAND, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunderstorm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes.

The causes lie deep and simple—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Today, Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Fani Willis could stay on the case against Trump in Georgia, provided Nathan Wade leaves the prosecution team. It’s a judgement that proves the adage about Solomon splitting the baby is routinely misapplied. In Solomon’s case, he made a shockingly clean but injudicious decision to avoid a revoltingly messy outcome. Here, Judge McAfee made an unnecessarily messy decision because he was trying to look judicious - but whatever. No one really thought this guy was Solomon anyway, and in the end, Fani Willis gets to stay on the hunt.

Good.

Personally, were I the judge, I would have tossed aside the charges against Willis months ago and told the adversaries to stay focused on their roles in the case against Trump and his associates. I’d have made the judgement that - as a white guy in Georgia - there was zero chance that ANY good would come out of publicly examining the private, sexual, and financial lives of prominent Black professionals in an already highly polarized and racialized historical and legal milieu. Even admitting that I shared a hint of suspicion that, for some reason, an attorney and political leader as accomplished as Fani Willis would stoop to using a combination of sexual persuasion and political clout to extort and manipulate a colleague - who is also a man of substance, means, and power - for paid vacations is just offensive on its surface. It plays WAY too hard into the Jezebel / Wild Buck stereotypes of Black sexuality, and even considering it - I’d have surmised from the offing - would only turn my courtroom into a pathetic sideshow of shadow-play racism for weeks on end. But I’m not Judge McAfee - so here we are, two months after this unnecessary stupidity began, with the trial again moving forward.

Ugh, what a silly distraction.

I’ve stopped reading the New York Times, as it has turned to clickbait garbage, but I still crack the Washington Post every day to scan the news and gauge the state of the “liberal-biased media.” While far better than the Grey Old Lady, it can be nearly as frustrating a process. Check out the headlines and framing for four of the five above-the-fold stories today in America’s last half-decent broadsheet.

1. Biden faces pressure to deliver a strong message to DISSATISFIED VOTERS.

2. Bernie Sanders made private WARNING to Biden about 2024 campaign.

3. Biden has canceled $138 billion in student loans. Some say it’s NOT ENOUGH.

4. Of Biden’s proposals in his address last year, here’s what FLOPPED and what succeeded.

These choices represent a lot of editorial intention, but they sure as hell aren’t guided by a “liberal bias.”

Yesterday, while puttering around in the kitchen, I thought about what a great exercise it would be to aggregate all economic stories in the major media over the past year to compare the framings. By the numbers, it’s been an extraordinarily great year by nearly every metric of growth. Inflation is down, employment is up, GDP growth is strong, manufacturing jobs are soaring, unions had a great year, and so did the stock market. Building projects are engaged across the country through the Inflation Reduction Act, the crush of debt from student loans for young earners is being addressed through forgiveness and remediation, and pharmaceutical companies are being forced to rationalize the prices of at least some lifesaving medicine. All that is empirically true, but what I’d like to know is the percentage breakdown between stories that SIMPLY REPORTED THOSE NUMBERS vs. stories that reported the numbers inside articles leading with the message “economy strong, BUT NO ONE BELIEVES IT.”

Like many of you, I watched the Tracy Chapman / Luke Combs duet of Fast Car from the Grammys last night and was powerfully and unexpectedly moved. Also, like many of you, I remember vividly how that song — and that artist — stood out in the spring of 1988, when the radio was blasting INXS, George Michael, and Terence Trent D’arby in a never-ending, power-pop loop.

She was just so different. So human and real.

Tracy Chapman’s voice and talent felt — then, and again last night — like a marble-smooth boulder somehow preexisting the river itself. There was all this stuff — all these gated drum tracks, borderline erotic videos, pyrotechnics — and then, suddenly . . . a lady with a voice and an acoustic guitar. She shut us all up for a minute, sort of a collectively stunned silence of truly listening before, inevitably, we were back into the radio roll of Rick Astley, Poison, and Bobby Brown.

For all her understated, graceful humility, she left a deeper mark than those acts. One that made hearing her sing again last night more than a bit of nostalgia. It felt, instead, like an escape from temporality itself — a sudden relocation to a space of truth, beauty, and light.

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Soon, the Supreme Court will take up the Colorado case to determine if, after trying to overthrow a legitimate election to maintain power, Donald Trump is eligible to hold the office of the Presidency of the United States.

They will almost certainly make an embarrassing hash of that ruling.

I’ve not been posting much political content for the past months for a few reasons. First, the issue most central to the global debate is uniquely ill-suited to social media. In October, the day after Hamas murdered over 1000 Israelis, I hazarded this excerpt from the poem September 1, 1939, by W.H. Auden:

“I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

Like Auden’s complete poem, written just hours after Hitler invaded Poland, setting the stage for World War II, I offered that stanza as a lament for the hell that would flow from that newly minted and atrocious history of violent action.

It was not taken as such.

For about ten years, from my teens into my twenties, I spent the night of December 21st at a cabin in the woods with John and Doc Colella, a son and a father, and two of the best friends I'll ever know. They’re both dead now, but I still think of them nearly every day, though as we pass through the solstice each year, they utterly fill my heart, my memory, my soul, and my interior sky.

Maybe John knew what we were doing the first years we went up, but I sure as hell didn’t. I just liked being invited. John was so brusque and cool, while his dad, Doc, was entirely different than anyone I’d ever met. To my mind, and in my experiences back then, compared to him, most people were like cookie-cutter patterns. Or perhaps, better, it was that he’d started with one shape, but it didn’t suit him, so he punched holes through walls and scraped chunks out of the level parts of himself until he was a wholly unique form.

CJR - the Columbia Journalism Review - posted an important story this morning, linked below in the first comment. It's about a 5-minute read that breaks down the failures of the New York Times and the Washington Post regarding political reporting. Consumers of both broadsheets will note that CJR correctly tars the Times as significantly worse at their job, though both papers of record are shitting the bed when it comes to maintaining a properly informed public.

For all the talk about the polarization of news, the siloing of information, or even the bizarre and mindless assertion of a liberal-biased media, the real problem is capitalism - though CJR doesn't come right out and say that, so I'm saying it here.

Before anything noble or enlightened about informing the public and the virtues of independent journalism, newspapers want to keep their readers' attention. So, when it comes to politics, the absolute imperative is to sell the horserace. If, by the very nature of the horses involved, that race is a thoroughbred vs. an old nag, then the media needs to boost the slowpoke, hobble the speedster, or both.

Knowing a little history, I don’t carry illusions about the 1970s being an idyllic time. Even back then, while I didn’t know the context or the interconnections, I knew about the Vietnam War, Watergate, ICBMs, the Cold War, and the murders of JFK, RFK, and Dr. King. I knew about Bobby Sands and the IRA, Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Patty Hearst and the SLO, Charlie Manson and Helter Skelter. I was aware that “out there” things were scary. Still, around my neighborhood, it was mostly manhunt games, Pinewood Derbies, kickball, bicycle jumps, Big-Buddy Bubble Gum, and an Evil Knievel motorcycle toy that, if you really spun it up, could jump damn near all the way across Orton Ave.

Is it weird that, while I know life back then wasn’t idyllic, while I know there were so many problems in the world, it still seems like it was so . . . good?

That’s weird, right?

When I think about the goodness of being a kid in the 1970s – a kid in a blue-collar/middle-class mixed neighborhood that wasn’t very economically diverse and not racially diverse at all – I think about a few things. I think about my grandmother first. Her name was Peggy Parker, and she just radiated fairness, kindness, and love. Whenever I felt hurt, the first person I thought about was Grandma and how I knew – above all other things, that she loved me without reserve, and if that remained true, everything would be okay in the end.

Back when I was a little boy, our family took in another child named Manny for a summer, and while I'd like to think that at a tender 7 or 8 years old, I understood the importance of heroic hospitality, I did not. Manny was a jerk to me, and I did not like him. He lied about stuff and got me in trouble - or so I remember it, anyway. Then, one Sunday morning, we were at mass at St. Thomas Aquinas on the West Side of Binghamton. All six of us were there. Mom, Dad, me, my older brother Jay, and younger brother Ed - who was probably under three years old at the time, and Manny.

I never liked church. It was boring and stupid, and if not for the little wooden dowels you could pop out of the missalette rack with a carefully prizing fingernail, I would have lost my boyish mind altogether. But the ONE THING during mass that didn't suck was when the deacons and altar boys came around for the offertory collection.

It's not that I understood what was really happening, but at least we could move around a little bit. Also, because we took religious education classes on Wednesday afternoons, my brother Jay and I had these tiny envelopes into which we would seal two quarters and then dutifully drop them into the basket when it came around.

I’ve been in the wilderness for a while, trying to find peace, perspective, and a path forward. I think I share that sense of dislocation with most of you. These are some deeply dark days.

That sense has led to a strong impulse toward flight. So, for the past month, I've fled - as far away from the present darkness as I could find, away from the political, religious, ethnic, sectarian, tribal, and even technological blinders of the present day. When I began to flee, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or where I'd go, but I knew it was not here in the present moment of loss, agony, and pain.

I’ve lived much of my life this way. When confronted by a great fear or a situation I do not understand, I see which way the crowd is running, and I bolt the other way. That goes a long way to explaining why I live down here in Guatemala rather than near my family and friends back north.

Emmett Till would, and should, be celebrating his eighty-second birthday today - just a little older than my mom and dad, whom I'll be traveling to see very soon.

Till, visiting family from his home in Chicago, was murdered in the small town of Money, Mississippi, by folks who "take care of their own."

The purpose of the murder was vengeance against Till for having the temerity to exist and to breathe the same air as the very white, very upstanding, very small-town people of Money. It was also a warning to anyone else who looked like Till that they'd better not try that in a small town where people "take care of their own" and define "their own" in the most appalling of ways.

The Jason Aldean shit got stuck in my craw again today, and I was going to write something long and critical about how he DIDN’T grow up in a small town. He grew up in a majority Black city, Macon, Georgia, but CHOSE to attend a Christian school where the student body is STILL over 90% white in 2023. I was gonna write about how the town where he filmed his video, Columbia, Tennessee, is no longer a small town, but it WAS one in 1927 when Henry Choate was tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of that small town before being hanged right where Aldean CHOSE to stage his video.

I was gonna write about how the whole point of Sundown Towns across America was never having to SAY the words, “Get out by dark, N*****,” because that shit is IMPLIED by the militancy of statements like, “We protect our own round here,” when “our own,” are all fish-belly white and hair-trigger angry about them “outsiders from the city coming 'round here to do no good."

Just ask Ahmaud Arbery's people about that.

Country music wankstain Jason Aldean recently aired a video for his song "Try That in a Small Town" and outed himself as yet another in a seemingly endless line of pathetic, talentless, terrified racist white dudes with stylists and record contracts out of Nashville.

The song is a paean to violence against the upstart wokes, it's a hymn about the sacred, insular, hateful "ethic" of sundown towns in rural America where "outsiders" should fear for their lives if they don't like the way we do things around here.

Aside from the artist being a garbage-soul, "Try That in a Small Town" is also just an awful song of bad writing, canned phrasing, gaudy production, and ham-fisted tropes. It's a godawful mess, and I do not suggest you bother with it for one minute more.

The butt of the scuttle suggests that Trump is looking at charges on three counts in the Jan 6 case:

- 18 U.S.C. § 371 - Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. - When two or more people conspire either to commit any offense against the United States or to defraud the United States or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.

- 18 U.S. Code § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law - makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.

- 18 U.S. Code § 1512 - Tampering with a witness - prohibits tampering with witnesses, victims, or informants in a legal case, with the intent to obstruct justice. It makes it a crime to engage in actions such as intimidation, retaliation, or bribery to hinder the communication of information or cooperation with law enforcement or the judicial system.

On May 19, I wrote this about Ron DeSantis when much of the punditocracy was still hyping him as the next big thing. “What a fucking idiot. What a cruel, cowardly, bullying idiot. If you’re getting into the DeSantis market, short the fuck out of your position. He’s a political tragedy just beginning to implode.”

As has become painfully obvious, that assessment was on the money, and tonight, I’d like to do two things: First, I’d like to take a bit of a victory lap at spotting this also-ran for what he was before the herd caught up. Second, I’d like to draft the first (of thousands) of autopsies concerning the DeSantis campaign that will be written when he officially drops from the race after Iowa. The fact that he’s still technically alive, politically, makes it that much more fun.

Call it a premortem.

Last night at Annie and Gus's weekly fam-dinner, we had a killer meal and watched the Season 2, Episode 6 of The Bear - and a few things struck me hard.

First: It's the best damn thing on television since Ted Lasso, and; second, it's the best companion show for Ted Lasso one could possibly imagine.

I know, I know, I know. At first blush, the shows couldn't be more different, but in some ways, they're the exact same narrative, just blown inside out. Both shows are about how trauma profoundly warps "normal" people all the time. Both shows have as their backdrop the pre-action suicide of someone who, by all visible measures - to their family and friends, anyway - had the world by the balls. In Ted Lasso, it was his dad, who we never meet. In The Bear, it's the older brother, Michael, who we just really met in the FUCKED-UP Christmas special we just watched last night.

I love the rainy season, but I miss the night sky.

Like many of you, I've been a stargazer most of my life. I think it's just in us. We're a narrative species. We draw meaning and sustenance from the world around us - the grand metaphors of being, and with the possible exception of the ocean, there has never been a more expansive template for contemplation than the night sky.

The daytime sky presents its answers forthrightly. The big yellow bastard up there gives us heat and light. It makes the flowers and the berries grow. It provides us with life. But the night sky is inherently more sublime. What's the point of it but to sleep, perchance, to dream?

Last night, I met a new friend for dinner, and as with nearly all met-a-new-friend-for-dinner-nights, it was a charming, lovely few hours with no real spark.

Most of my friends have soured on this sort of dating. I think it’s maybe a generational thing. At 56, I’m not opposed to a hook-up, but need more than an opportunity to move toward intimacy. I think that’s fairly common with age—or maybe I’m just old. Either way, the upshot is that I don’t go on dates looking to take someone home or be swept off my feet, and doing so with the expectation of some great reward of sex or love is, for me, something like randomly grabbing two jigsaw puzzle pieces and assuming they’ll fit. 

When that DOES happen, that’s great, but expecting two incredibly complex, sentient beings to click perfectly into one another over dinner seems a bit of a skylark.