A haunted child
At his lemonade stand
Under a tree that was
Here before us
Will be here after us
Because it’s not in Palestine
There is no justice, child
Only the haunting,
the terrible beauty we can see
Because we’re not in Palestine
Unbidden Bits—June 20, 2025
Overheard at an imaginary reception:
I’m a chatbot censor—victim of the Musk purge. At Alphabet now. You?
Deus ex machina engineer.
Uh…?
I write science fiction.
Ah…guess we have a lot in common, then.
No Kings March, Cottonwood, AZ
Unbidden Bits—June 12, 2025
Checking my web links this morning, I find that J.D. Vance has also been demanding that Governor Newsom do his job. Unfortunately he thinks that a governor’s job is to lick President Trump’s boots, express contrition for not doing it earlier, and to look the other way while the President conducts a Nazi-style armed invasion of his state, sends the most vulnerable of his people to concentration camps outside the country, and gets his propaganda minister to brag about it on Fox News.
No, J.D., that’s not Governor Newsom’s job, that’s not any state governor’s job. As Trump’s Vice-President, that’s your job. You’re the Toady-In-Chief. My advice to you is to stick to your knitting, and let Governor Newsom get on with the job of defending his people against the sociopath you work for.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
This is more like it, Governor Newsom. Keep it up. If responsible government officials do their part, we citizens will do ours. Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor—we all know the drill.
Governor Newsom, the Time Is Now
Defend your people. Do your fucking job. If you don’t know how, ask Володимир Зеленський.
Is It Genocide?
Yes.
To call it anything else is to deny the painfully, devastatingly obvious.
Have I, as a citizen of the United States, been complicit in this genocide?
Yes.
To deny it is to pretend that the obligations of citizenship do not apply to me.
Were there provocations? Were they inhumane?
Yes. As true in October, 2023 as in May, 1948.
Do we need to talk about European colonialism, Muslim atavism and xenophobia?
If we’re being honest, yes.
How can a child of the Enlightenment, a citizen of the United States, countenance even the idea of an ethnic state?
Intellectually, not at all. Diplomatically, the wisdom of the principle of live and let live is unavoidable. We should accommodate any religion or ideology which doesn’t demand that we bend the knee to its claims of supremacy. (This absolutely includes Christianity, which has a long history of lethal meddling in other people’s legitimate affairs.)
Can we understand why, 80 years after the Shoah, Israelis feel embattled, feel justified in committing any atrocity which they believe will keep their enemies at bay?
Yes, absolutely.
Can we understand why, 77 years after the Nakba, Palestinians feel abandoned by the rest of the world—as alone as the Jew who once wrote on a Matthausen concentration camp wall, “Wenn es einen Gott gibt, dann soll er mich um Verzeihung bitten!” (“If there is a God, then he ought to beg me for forgiveness!”)?
Yes, absolutely.
Is there any hope of forbearance, of reconciliation here?
None that I can see.
Is this because I’ve become morally and spiritually numb?
Probably. Does this speak well of me?
No.
Can I, will I do better?
Time will tell….
In Defense Of Indifference
We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)
Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.
Opus Dei, Opus Diaboli
Can you tell the difference? Neither can I—and that’s not because I don’t know what I’m looking at….
The Hillbilly Pygmalion
George Packer seems to think J. D. Vance may still have a future.* I’m not so sure about that. J. D. made his bid early on, trading his shuck for Donald Trump’s jive, but he may not find it so easy to reverse the process when he needs to, and given the current state of US politics, at some point he’s definitely going to need to.
Not so many years from now, when Peter Thiel is safely tucked away in his New Zealand bunker, Musk is on his imperial pilgrimage to Mars, and the Donald is dead, the Sons of Trump will surely have no further use for J. D. He’s smarter than they are, to be sure, and he seems to have convinced the MAGAsphere that he’s as big an asshole as they are, but in the end he lacks the Trump boys’ financial resources.
Besides, even Fox News seems to have noticed that a Julio-Claudian-style War of Assassins may already be more in vogue in Washington than the fascist frenzy of Trump’s first hundred days. J. D.’s currency is still good at the Times, the Post, and—Packer’s stylish hit piece aside—The Atlantic, but there’s still many a banana peel left between him and the White House, every one of them with a Trump logo stamped on it right next to the Chiquita sticker.
*The Talented Mr. Vance, in the July, 2025 issue of The Atlantic