Mom and Dad shouted at the TV in different languages, both of which I understood after spending over five years listening to the differences. A man in a suit was saying something in a third language that was very difficult to follow, something about the Supreme Court and “tapes” the President thought were his.
“They belong to the fucking country!” Dad yelled. “That asshole! This is the reason I don’t vote in no goddamn elections. Fucking cocksucker!”
Mom only paused to take a quick glance back at me, where I sat at the dining room table trying to do my multiplication. Then she went on: “Where does he think we live? Russia? This is not the way an American behaves. Something’s wrong with him.”
“He’s a disease, Joy. You know what you do to a disease? You get rid of the fucking thing.”
As so often happens, what began as a point of unity quickly turned into a point of conflict. Soon my mother accused my father of wanting to “eradicate” everyone he disagreed with, herself included, to which my father responded with a statement illuminating my mother’s naivete. I believe the phrase “shit for brains” was used, of course only in reference to “those people who don’t know the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground.”
War came swiftly. I knew they’d achieve detente eventually, but not without a complex ritual of negotiation laced with extracted promises and sexual favors. Having a common enemy – the Mormons across the street or something my teacher had said – usually helped them overcome any residual tension.
I made sure to steer clear, just like Europe, speaking Dad when I was on the fucking playground banging shit out and Mom nearly everywhere else.
He knows he has nothing to fear from Court to ballot-box. A woman-Turk-academic? Nothing to no one, meat to howling Christians. Beautiful.
They know – masked ICE agents stalking intelligence, scenting terror: the red-hats want this, want it bad; make it scream, haha.
America knows “YOU’RE FIRED!” as the show goes on because no one cries over spilled milk and breaking eggs is the business of America is WWJD. “WWJD!!!”
Rümeysa means shining star accomplished graceful and noble –
next?
*
“If we lose freedom of speech, it’s never coming back.”
Winter left Los Angeles this week; it’s 80 degrees outside and I’ve run the air conditioner a couple of times “just to make sure it works.” I saw a t-shirt this week that read something like: Los Angeles: Earthquake. Fire. Flood. Democrats. The first three plagues brought a half-sigh from me, as in “Yeah, we’ve been through it, haven’t we.” Especially the fires. Those were scary and I mourn with the people who lost so much. I’ve never known a person whose house burned down. In two days, I knew six.
But…Democrats as a plague? Would that such a plague descend on the whole of the nation! Evidently, my political people have recently decided to experiment with Taoism. “If you don’t resist evil, give it nothing to cling to, it goes away on its own.” WHERE ARE THEY??? Aside from a few quips and a kumbaya gathering outside USAID offices….crickets. MAGA says this is because “the Libs” are exhausted. Maybe. Anybody who feels the connection between recent calls for President Trump to ignore federal courts and Andrew Jackson’s 1830 orchestration of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears, or finds the President’s reference to Napoleon’s rehashed version of “L’État, c’est moi” a bit…repetitive, has got to be exhausted. Again with the fucking Empire???
It’s not that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it; it’s that those who know history are doomed to watch. It’s exhausting. It’s this….again. And again and again…because it’s the nature of the nation. Even drugged-out poverty-stricken I-Ching-ing Philip K. Dick realized something was coming to the Land of George Wallace and Home of Floridian HellQueen Anita Bryant. It’s just not that hard to imagine Nazis and Japanese Imperialists taking over a nation that already thinks it’s sport to scare the living daylights out of displaced Haitians and laughable to not laugh at Puerto Rico’s dignity because “it’s just a joke, man.” We weren’t ripe for the picking; we were already on the conveyor belt.
Which Is Why I’m putting out my first and perhaps last recommendation of What To Watch Next:
No review. No plot spoilers. Just Watch It. It’s like truth serum. Heroism is not automatic and neither is resistance. Both are chosen. And come in different forms.
If you’d like to read my take on HOW TO RESIST (I’ll leave heroism to the likes of Sophocles), see my French-channeled piece “Résistance.” (Click the word before “Click the word”) Centuries of ancestors whispered for weeks in my ear: Always remember, they’re hunting you. It was a sobering realization, one every single non-white-non-straight-non-male non-rich person understands intuitively if not physically. The only question is how we respond to the current pogrom. We might be tempted to sit still rather than face the fact that people who scare others into invisibility or cause nightmares that parents will be taken or stand mealy-mouthed behind exquisite pulpits cannot be our friends. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be reasoned with or hoped for. “Maybe they’ll miss us, maybe they’ll change, maybe they’ll…..”
No.
Resist. Pray for them if you must, but resist.
How you do so depends…on you. As Kala tells ever-beautiful yet tragically familied Wolfgang after he’s exchanged gunfire with his uncle’s organized crime syndicate in the wondrous Wachowski piece Sense8 : “I’m not like Sun. I do not know how to use my fists, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to fight” — right before she uses spices and a few kitchen implements to blow German criminals sky-high (or at least down the hallway).
She’s a chemist. I’m a thinker. You’re a whatever — lawyer, mother, teacher, bus-driver. We all know how to fight in a way that’s true to our nature. My Great-Great Grandpa-priest fought by running off with my Great-great Grandma-Nun and…BOOM! Me. Fight the way you know how. Because, as Kala says after she destroys Wolfgang’s enemies, “I am not ready to say goodbye.” Not even close.
*
For your reading pleasure:
I’m really getting into the whole microfiction genre. If you want a great collection, pick up Robert Scotellaro’s New Micro here. If you’d like to read my latest entries, you can do so here. Of course I like them all, but “Matches” has received some really good feedback (the word “universal” was used). As in all things, have fun reading…which is much easier to do when the story is one-n-done in 300 words.
And just so you know that I know what a podcast is…
I’ve been listening to the Open University on poetic inspiration — as in how to I get inspired?Here’s the link. It’s awesome…and the Irish accents are so, so sexy. If you’ve found yourself where we’ve all found ourselves, time on the hands and nothing to say, listen. It’s about a place to start that DOESN’T involve sacrifices to those horrible Muses.
And for the weirdness factor: there’s a group-cast I listen to all the time called The Whole Rabbit. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics, but principally center on awareness and occult interests. Watch the one on QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS here. Because everybody’s got to have a side-interest.
Until later, thanks for clicking your way to me. Be well. And remember, if people who hate like you, something’s wrong.
Resistance is not wearing a pink hat or marching with a million people or speaking your dreams hoping to tame wild beasts. That’s solidarity, and it won’t work.
Resistance is not trusting love as the enemy nails beams together. It is not honesty before Pilate. It is not true to Self. Truth is for Jesus, aching to die.
Resistance is silence as you speak lies. It is saying yes to Christian neighbors and doing what you can as you work, as you wait. It is letting proud boys believe they've won and their women, that you've found home as you sow faith and community – beautiful vines that slowly grow inch by inch, season by season, year by year.
Then, then…
when need’s grip snaps grieving sons and senseless tears, forgotten daughters; when bereft and lost they reach for friend, family, husband, wife; when only hope shields pain and you stand firmly between the question and its adjured answer: then, then remove your mask, then and only then let it slowly slip from your always-enraged face — show them your ageless hate just once, lonely soldier, so that as they sink their departing view
This is where I met Babar and Gus and
Charlotte who was friends with a pig
and taught us both Life Goes On
even through tears.
I watched my mom carry her weight in books
to the librarian-lady paid to look mean
but she was actually nice as she took pictures
of punchcards and told me I would have
such fun where I was going.
We were poor though I didn’t know it
as I poured over a Big Book of Ships
and I listened to Drums
that I hated hated hated but
I loved the way my grandma read so I
pretended (I think she knew).
Later I'd walk to that funky stoned (literally)
building on my own, corner of Vanowen and Vanalden.
There I solved cases with Encyclopedia Brown
and found a book called The Battle of Midway
that taught me sometimes a war comes down to 28.2072° N, 177.3735° W.
Gray's Anatomy — wow! How did they draw that well,
and is that what I look like inside?
Where the Red Fern Grows because,
you know, dogs — and to make myself feel better
I picked up The Red Pony. Mistake.
Except tears and truth often go together.
Steinbeck became my god before
I met Corrie ten Boom in her hiding place and
Siddhartha Hesse kept asking me questions
until I found out why a caged bird sings
and that wars are going on always,
sometimes in the bedroom,
sometimes far from streets.
Angelou Birdsong led to Beloved Morrison
and Purple Walker, and I saw with new eyes a way:
war is going on always, always,
but to speak is to fight. Never stop fighting.
Never. Stop. Fighting.
Still later I met Monette and found his half-life
beautiful — maybe mine would be, too.
I put Melville back on the shelf 55 times before
I finally breached its first great wave and then thought:
was Hawthorne his Moby Dick?
Poor guy — Hawthorne was a crank
but damn if his letters weren't good.
Woolf my Patron Saint
showed me her room so that I could want mine.
Tan and Yen Mah who made my mom cry
because they knew, they knew — “we carry our stories” —
it wasn’t easy, not easy at all.
She loved those books.
All this and more in a library,
from my little corner one
(when LA had only one area code)
to the Library of Congress, a pilgrimage.
Memories of mom dragging me by the hand until,
later, I was pushing her chair to the books.
All these people, all these ghosts
dancing and sobbing and waiting on shelves,
waiting to be held or thrown, doesn’t matter.
Life buoyed by imagination,
imagination buoyed by life.
Freedom. Adventure. Suffering. America.
So of course:
Arizona
Georgia
Illinois
Louisiana
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
South Dakota
Texas
Wyoming
let's close the libraries.
We wouldn’t want anybody
learnin' nothin' new…
*
“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides.”
— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
I wrote out the questions below on January 7, 2021, having watched the storming of Congress the day before. The insurrection seemed in those early hours both distant and maybe slightly unimportant, like much of the Trump Show; from inside my California shell I sometimes take great comfort in the idea that the entirety of MAGA-Land is an economically-allowed phenomenon that would wither and die without our money. I mean, what would happen if all the Red States had to pull their own weight? Just let them try to pull down the country, I thought, lazy in my Los Angeles-ness, as I began to critique the camera-angles CNN and MSNBC used to make the assembled clan look bigger. Didn’t they seem small, these grotesques, especially when compared with crowds that assembled back in the 70’s to protest the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movers of the 60’s who overwhelmed the Mall? I went down a rabbit-hole made possible by ignorance, querying whether there was violence during earlier protests and gatherings. Weren’t flags burned and people hurt? Is black-and-white really a good look for rational thought?
Such stupidity, because the Day After That Day, the reality that animals had just shit in the Capitol was still with me, obliterating my brain’s attempt to make January 6 “normal.” It wasn’t. The defecation and destruction was part of a program, and I had to see that and accept it. I needed to see that what MAGA accomplished was organized, brutal — yes, a piercing reflection of MAGA-man’s personal impotence and self-serving quite religious rage and yes, probably the work of squirrel-eaters, but also, yes, a terrorist plot enacted by those with nothing to lose against those who simply want to work without being harassed because they can’t wear the hood. January 6’s Infamy was a MAGA terrorist action to remind real men and women who do have something to lose that sham-mans with pick-axes and ancestral graveyards full of excuses will always be out there, waiting.
To pretend otherwise is to make sure those of us working for something better than our past will continue waiting for “things to calm down” while violence and mobbery bludgeon anything we can build a future on. It’s that simple and it’s that stark. Don’t pretend the rattlesnake is a pet.
*
So…here’s a time-capsule of sorts, questions that have not lost their resonance. I’m wondering if they resonate with anyone else.
What if Trump’s army had automatic weapons? They’re really easy to get (especially if you’re only interested in semi-automatic conversions). With automatic or semi-automatic weapons, most of the US line of succession could’ve been killed, leaving Trump to mop up the blood. Was this the real, perhaps eventual goal? Was yesterday a trial run — letting the imbeciles stake out the place before smarter loyalists arrived later? Did Trump want to merely intimidate Congress, or did he hope some of his animals would kill? Will anyone ever know?
Why did it take so long for reinforcements to arrive? It was, after all, well-known that the Joint Session would involve all members of Congress; the date, time, and place were on many right-wing calendars; T-shirts were printed and the potential for violence blasted around the world weeks in advance. Yet it took what must’ve felt like an eternity before Capitol Police were backed up. Why?
Why do 40% of Republicans find no fault with the storming? Some of my friends say it’s because they “understand the frustration.” But, down deep, could it be that they are frustrated the rampage went no further? Are there, in America now, Republicans who are disappointed because there were no dead Democrats? If the mob had murdered Nancy Pelosi, how many Republicans would have cheered? Maybe that’s the difference between the parties: when Trump got COVID, I wanted him to get better — slowly, but still better. When Congress was being terrorized, Republicans got excited.
Why are these anarchists being referred to as Trump supporters, when they should be referred to as treasonous criminals? Is this linguistic softening an indication of tacit support from a supposedly independent media?
Are today’s Republicans enemies of democracy? Do they hate the idea that democracy now seeks to include people those with power never wanted included? Are they afraid of the equality democracy espouses, with no intention, EVER, of sharing power?
Can a country survive when 40% of its people want to kill the other 60%? When Josh Hawley (the real danger here) can fist the air in support of murder and then make money off the picture?
Why have Christian churches been so muted? Do they think the insurrection was just? They HOWL over gay marriage and abortion, but say very, very little when it comes to an attempted coup. Could it be that religious people can’t talk about the coup because they wanted more?
When did America become so weak that nearly half of the country sees in a pathetic boy the picture of strength?
Has America already died? Are we just waiting to pull the plug? What would it take for us to admit that the mind is gone, the principles are gone, the patriotism is gone, and that the only thing left to do is put the body out of its misery?
*:
No answers, just questions that have survived nearly two years.
Most of the time, it’ll be boring. But if we’re lucky, we’ll catch a glimpse of something we’re not meant to see. Pilots leave an apartment window open while waiting for flight attendants to arrive. We see their desperation. A man in a breezeway doesn’t think anyone is upstairs when he tries to get his dealer off his back, all while his little girl plays. The fratboy next door doesn’t know someone can hear everything — and wants him anyway. A whole political party shows its true colors.
These poems are dedicated to who we are when we’re on our own time — to the strange, laughable, heartbreaking, dangerous ways we do ourselves.
They look like sweet town-folk,
salf-of-the-earth, flannel and jeans.
People that watch the sun come up.
Handsome.
Christian.
My God their pies are good.
Killers
who pray your mamby-pamby principles
die with you, slaughtered in the street,
your thoughtful guts lapped up
by well-trained Republican dogs
named Dog.
(Damn. I forgot the warning.
“Warning.”)
But! But!
“How did this happen?” as the
flagpole stakes your throat,
as unprecedented wheezes
through gurgled blood
and your solidarity-warm pink hat
floats down Constitution Avenue,
used and dark and alone.
You didn’t see them multiply.
You wouldn’t see them grow —
in Kansas and Missoura,
Texas and ‘Bama, Ken-Tuck-y,
right beneath your woke-ness
and your museum arrogance and your
holier-than-thou Lululemon mindfulness.
Yeah, see? You’re kinda
responsible.
They knew they were safe.
They knew you wouldn’t think it,
then wouldn’t believe it —
“Love is Love,” right? —
“We’re all in this together,” right? —
as Proud Sons and their Daughters
trained for war right under your
upturned noses,
groomed generals in broad daylight,
bought Armani camo, nice blue suits
(they already had the bullets
and the guns left over from
squirrel practice) —
red necks covered by executive collars,
red ties to hide the splatter.
They left their hayseeds at home this time.
You were ready for zombies, sunken-eyed
okies whose farms were ripped away by BigBanks,
grandpas with four teeth chattering
all the way to the West Coast
(or something like that).
Oh, they had your number!
Talk about stealth!
Their fabric was fine, the
Stanford and Yale and Harvard degrees
genuine — plus “Wow! He lifts weights, he’s so sexy!”
(See my companion lecture on MetroSexual Roles
in the Conservative Cause.)
“Consensus?” you pleaded.
“Let’s talk,” you bleated
because — let’s face it — you’re afraid to fight
with anything other than words;
and refusing to believe evil exists
and is usually HOT and BEAUTIFUL,
you left the Gate to the Sanctuary unguarded,
let WhiteNation and WomansPlace
shit
defile
ravage the Holy of Holies,
our Temple,
us.
Maybe if they had worn
identifying armbands?
I know what you’re thinking
because that’s what you do —
I hear your “protest”:
“Wouldn’t we be just like them
if we used our fists instead of words?”
“If we don’t move beyond labels?”
“Help them heal?”
That’s why they’ll win,
StupidBuford and LazyEyeLorraine,
because they listened to a real Grandma
who said:
“Don’t leave your head so open your brains fall out.”
You thought she was old —
she only had one dress —
you never saw her on Facebook —
Insta? —
and then,
and then:
after Tucker and Rush and Hannity Ltd.
after Laura and Huckabee and Kayleigh visited;
giving guns to teenage saps
doning MAGA hunting caps
(so they’d know who not to cap);
after speeching D+ mobs,
after fisting fascist slobs —
(did you get the little Eliot homage?) —
cops bleeding out on marble
blinded
betrayed —
the hunt was on!
Smoke-out the out-raged enemy
like rabbits or Funny Cousin Earl, who
voted for Carter and was then dead
on his river-raft, thinking he was family;
target those limp-wristed Dem-o-crats
whose Cities call to Our Young
as Jezebel tempted Jesus
(it’s in the Bible);
forget, TexasTed, that
HE CALLED YOUR WIFE UGLY —
AND YOU LET HIM;
we’ve got to corner all codlers, socialists and fags,
show them MTG would win a pig-fight,
make that Puerto Rican loudmouth BITCH
run the Gov’ment Maze to her death,
execute California, hang the un-Hung
Next-in-Line —
am I being dramatic?
Because what they want,
what LittleHornedMan masked
with this “false-flag not-coup” — right? —
is to come:
your ideas, shred like your well-intentioned intestines,
disemboweled from well-toned tummies,
blood sausage for rabid-stupid hungry children —
your ideas, your precious and diverse ideas
that helped BobJoe survive his nail-to-the-head
accident and paid for his black-hating diabetic
momma’s nursing home,
high-falutin' ideas like Medicare and Social Security and
vaccines (CONSPIRACY! CONSPIRACY! ) —
equality —
dead with you.
*
Liberals, people who can think
and probably don’t want to die
(martyrdom being highly overrated),
listen to Grandma, please:
“If it walks like a duck and quacks,
it’s dinner.”
There are no town-folk.
There are no Christians.
There are no rights.
There are armies.
This is America.
And their soldiers will sip sherry
right before carving out
your heart.
(Yes, this will be on the test.)
Greg Beckman 