A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Biden’s Victory Speech
Now is the Summer of our discontent
Made glorious Winter by this dearth of Trump
If all goes as well for the Democrats on November 3rd as reality is likely to permit, there may be a few minutes, a few hours, even a few days of self-congratulatory euphoria granted to the Ancien Régime of the DNC and its legions of fellow travelers. At the end of it, though, the butcher‘s bill will be presented to someone else, preferably someone to the left of them, and their descent into irrelevance will pick up again exactly where it left off on November 2nd.
Brown Is the New Blue
The New York Police Benevolent Association’s bid to turn urban police departments into America’s Sturmabteilungen.
Now that Patrick Lynch, President of the New York Police Benevolent Association, has dreamt up a left-wing war on cops, and enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, there’s no longer any reason to pretend that metropolitan police forces in the United States aspire to anything beyond remaining the largest and best-funded gangs in their respective cities.
Translated into plain English, the message from Lynch is clear enough:
If we feel like sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broomstick, or pumping 19 bullets into an unarmed Amadou Diallo, or choking out Eric Garner, we’re just gonna do it, and if you know what’s good for you, you civilians are gonna keep your mouths shut about it. None of this shit about black lives matter, or defunding the police, you got it? Otherwise you can just call a fucking Democrat instead of 911 the next time you need protection. Finally, do we REALLY need to remind you that there’s 50,000 of us, and we’ve got body armor, tanks, helicopters, and automatic weapons? If you think Bill de Blasio runs this fucking city, think again. The Donald understands us, so we’re down with him. We’re gonna make sure he gets four more years, and after that, you can go fuck yourselves, all of you.
This is interest group politics transformed into something far more toxic to civil society, far more likely to qualify as fascism with American characteristics than anything we’ve seen so far in national politics. The question is, what happens now that Lynch and his boys have so openly crossed the Rubicon? Regardless of the outcome of the elections in November, the political class is unlikely to return unchallenged to the kind of neoliberal centrism touted by the DNC or Atlantic magazine. It seems far more likely that an ever-capricious Donald Trump will offer urban cops, white supremacist biker gangs, rural sheriff’s departments, Oath Keeper and Proud Boy militias, Christian Dominionists, and the rest of his proud deplorables whatever cover they need to attack people living happily in circumstances that their peculiar subcultures find unendurable.
Why would he not? There’s surely nothing more perfectly suited to Trump’s ego-driven triumphalism than starting a civil war, especially one that his very stable genius can’t imagine losing. The only thing stopping him, the only thing keeping his malignant meddling from turning a disorganized rabble of volunteer culture warriors into a full-blown fascist movement, is his own lack of character.
Whatever actually motivates him, Trump is clearly a narcissist, not an ideologue, a Perón rather than a Hitler. His followers are good at resenting anything they can’t understand, and threatening people who can’t defend themselves, but they’re not much good at anything else apart from bootlicking and delusional aphorisms. This might not matter if they had a halfway committed leader, but Trump himself is far too lazy and far too incompetent to take personal charge of forging their resentments into a set of principles robust enough to govern a country of 330 million people.
For those of us sane enough to want out of this whole demeaning Todestanz, the absence of anyone in Trumps’s entourage actually competent to seize state power might offer us exactly what we need, namely a little more time to get our affairs in order before the real apocalypse — climate change, famines, mass migrations, collapsing global economic interdependencies and real wars, with real armies — is upon us in earnest. We can only hope.
The People, Yes….
Given a lemon, the real American makes lemonade
On Lying Down With Dogs
Attention Kayleigh McEnany:
This is the most famous picture of Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, Axis Sally, in U.S. military custody in 1946, on her way to be tried and convicted of treason against the United States. Is this really who you want to be when the sadistic lunatic whose lies you’re so diligently passing on to us finally gets his comeuppance?
21st Century Human Interface Design
Modularity, not convergence, is the future. There’s not going to be any other foreseeable way, short of magic, to approach the ideal state of computing hardware design, in which the use case alone determines the form factor. If you have the money to acquire its full arsenal of devices, Apple currently comes closer to this ideal than anyone else, Microsoft included.
In this future, it’s not going to matter where data is stored. So long as every device granted access to a unit of data is seeing the same instance of it, with both security and synchronization routinely embedded in every transaction, and therefore rendered trivial to the user, it won’t matter at any given moment where it is stored. Again, Apple gets this better than anyone else, even when its execution has been less than ideal. That’s why its somewhat premature effort to do away with files and file systems on the iPad will ultimately prove to be the right way to go. Files as a concept are obsolete. Computing devices understand this. Human beings do not. Handicapped by our reliance on the conceptual commonplaces of the past, we haven’t yet figured out what the ideal relationship should be between the tangible and the virtual, but we will. We’ll have to.
Ambidexterity is the new black. Trackpad, touchscreen, or mouse? Keyboard, stylus, or voice? Why not all at once? An embarrassment of riches ought to be the goal here. On our most treasured devices, there’ll always be at least three or four ways of doing anything, no matter where our hands are, or our eyes. We should be thinking musical instruments, not typewriters; collages, not spreadsheets, and we should try to keep in mind that whatever advances are made in the underlying technologies, imagination is still the most formidable aspect of the human side of the human/computer interface. Steve Jobs understood this, which is undoubtedly why Apple still understands it today, and why I think they’re very likely to remain the most reliable overall steward of human interface design and development as the 21st Century progresses.
Eppur Si Muove
It’s probably a good thing that no one in the Republican Party dares contradict the vicious imbeciles of the Trump administration. Better for the rest of us if they’re all still looking in the wrong direction when Nemesis finally comes for them.
American Landscapes — II
Facing westward
I stand in the seawind.
Black water moving on the sand
matches my breathing.
I turn my back to ruins
and I walk
making my speeches over water.
Forced metals
yield insoluble salts
leaves fill their complicated needs
whenever it rains.
I leave my footprints at the waterline
and the waves come.
The sun clears the sea.
Interstate 40
For Charles Bukowski
You already have your plans
your image of the women coming to you
blond
and used to the water
you smell salt in the air
and money
when you close your eyes
and you decide to come
You pack your toothbrush
you try it on your friends
you stop for cigarettes in a gas station
And it takes you coming out again
the wind
the way the trucks pass
I think how you stand there
feeling for your wallet or your breathing
striking a light then
inhaling
as you step down off the curb
They do it the same way in the movies
first with the wind
and then
a Greyhound sign
a kid with a botched haircut
and a dufflebag maybe
two girls seen only once
laughing and turning away
outside the terminal
Inside
a drunk and his paper suitcase
get tagged and separated
one ticket apiece
someone puts his last nickel
in the pinball machine
They get it right
the producer
the director
thin as it is and sad as it is
they get it right
And we sit there
watching the places we start from
the places we wind up in
sooner or later
pass over us
and no one blinks
no one wakes up afterwards
Everyone but everyone
a moviegoer
Even the drunk great once
at following the hero and the waving grass
at stepping over the derelict
lightly
with the rest of us
Before the bottle took him
and the fog inside him rose
and left him a six-part
ticket to the coast
and forty maybe fifty cents
The westbound express
is now boarding passengers
at gate five
Places everyone
It was
just like in the movies
the way I remember it
There was hardly anything
left of him then
except for the eyes
except for the way he sat there
with the light on him
looking out
and me across the aisle the whole time
thinking
“It all comes easy to him
the storefronts and railroad crossings here
the lumber yards
car bodies
bars
it all comes easy”
But for me
this is how it is in the towns
The children run
and you pass them
At the crossroads
faces
women’s faces most of them
turning away from you
inside the glass
outside the glass
the same
I have never found it easy
I find it the way it is
the land like a flatiron there to here
the towns small
and broken at the hinges
and wind
and too much light
all of it out of our reach now anyway
no matter what my friends tell me
who rub their hands together
and the dust escapes them
who walk through looking at scenery
No
I have no respect for the land I think
I think of you
shielding your eyes when you travel
the sun at noon
standing on the broken ridgelines
“Half chalk” you think
“half fire
standing like that…”
But you go on following electric wires
letting your eyes glaze
your weight
shift a little
and when the weather changes
you watch the Indian beside you
the one with the crewcut and bow tie
fold his hands
He’s made the trip before
this Indian
or his uncle has
or his sister
Forgetting the hawk
the shadow where their horses go to water
forgetting the slap of the wind
and the broken rock standing like that
they pack overnight
and make their way here with you
Here
they all come here to California
where everything
stays close to the heart
everything works
so they think
and they come
I know the way they come to it finally
leaving the smell of sweat and alcohol behind
the uneasy breathing
They roll their magazines
and step down blinking
in their new sunglasses
they get picked up
or walk toward town against the wind
in pairs
alone
And when I look again
cypresses and redwoods cover them
girls with copper earrings
lemon groves
earthquakes
fire in the hills
money
(if they’re lucky)
money
I know
I have been here ten years now
doing what they all do when they need to eat
or stop for a smoke
or be remembered
I check the mail
put the water on for coffee
find my way downtown
I come home at night
and open up my curtains over
California palm trees
California-loving-the-water
“And when it’s like this”
I think
“I could come to it still
the way they do
the way you do
all heart and teeth”
But after ten years
the suntan oil and chlorine and success
run in me like a river
cheap thrills cheap thrills on signs
burning under the offramps
acres of carpeted hallways
doors with numbers on them
and regret
something like regret always part of it
come morning
It weighs too much with me
the traffic and the leaden air
love
the way my neighbors work at it upstairs
with the lights on and the TV going
all this time
and it never changes
There’s a swimming pool in Burbank
like they say
a yacht
a white sand beach in Venice
lettuce in the desert
And in Hollywood a man I admire
stumbles in his bedroom
Drunk
undoubtedly drunk again
and I think
“Night
and his arms around it
night
and the wind in it
making something for his middle age and mine”
while people pull up in their cars outside
and park
and walk away
while I sit up half the night
with a light on still
and curtains blowing
listening to the palms outside my window
bend and rattle
and it weighs with me
It weighs with me
exactly
the way you’d imagine
Point Lobos, 1969
And if you had
What you thought you had
When the trees
Turned with you
And the times
Out of all time
Came
And you could see what they said
What they all of them said
Was true
No measuring here
No defense necessary
Sing with me now
No iron intrude between us
Break your vow here
And no fire burns
The way we burn already
The living and the dead
Together
Cold fire
Even when
the lot of us
are ash
I will tell you
Did you think that I’d
Forbear to tell you
How we are?
How
Broken by the knowledge
Broken
All the pieces find
Their voices here
Speak here
Thigh-deep in lupine
Dead-white
Cypress arms and fingers
Over us
And our eyes on the gull