Orson Wells at the recording studio for the Mercury Playhouse October 30, 1938 production of live radio play “The War of the Worlds,” done as news broadcasts.

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying “Boo!” Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian, it’s Halloween.”

Orson Welles, one of the writers, actors, and announcers of the radio play based on H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, stepping out of character as Professor Pierson in the play as the broadcast ended, having heard about mass panic seizing the U.S. during the radio play. President Roosevelt had previously gone on air in Washington D.C. that night to confirm that the radio play was not real, and that a Martian spaceship had not actually landed in the United States to take it over.

Illustrations for H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds by British artist Warwick Goble, for the 1897 publication of the work in Pearson’s Magazine.

“And before we judge them too harshly [the Martian invaders, that is] we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.”― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, novel first published as a book in 1898.

Wells wrote to a friend about the delights of killing ordinary English people by Martian means in his novella: “I’m doing the dearest little serial, in which I kill my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways — then proceed to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.” Ultimately the Martians are felled, not by any actions on the part of their human prey, but simply by catching human germs.

H.G. Wells was a British writer, novelist, historian, and a modern political theorist, who also invented modern modern science fiction in such riveting books as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Orson Welles’ inspired use of the book as a template for a radio play was modeled on an actual broadcast of a pitiless Martian invasion, at a moment in 1938 when the world was on the brink of global war, and Hitler’s pitiless imperial Reich,begun, starting with the invasion and takeover of Poland.

Note in the quote above that Wells is not himself declaring the Tasmanians to be an “inferior race’; he puts this statement in the mouth of a character who is offering the standard white Western European quasi-scientific justification for their own colonial racism. All colonialism, its subjugation, its violence in genocide and ethnic cleansing, its occupations and its mass displacement, is predicated upon racism and the dehumanization of others.

The upsurge in thoroughly debunked eugenics and “racial science,” or racists non-science as it should be known, was critical to sustaining colonialism and imperialism into the twentieth century, as the “religious” argument that “heathens” were being colonized for their own good to save them as Christians was losing its punch. In fact, of course, there are no ‘inferior races,’ nor in fact do races as such exist in science.

Goble’s fabulous depiction (among the first ever) of creatures from outer space;the “actual” Martian is squid-like, tentacular, possessing enormous eyes without a corresponding face.

His novel is about the shock to the self-satisfied colonial overlords of the late nineteenth century of the appearance of Martians on earth, whose very arrival in space ships shows them to be, by colonial logic, a “superior” race to that of humanity. It’s an astonishing feat of literary imagination that is also a blunt parable about treating other humans as “ inferiors” and subhumans, and expendable ones, and is meant to shed light on the horrors of colonialism and imperialism no less than the exploitation and domination of the earth and its inhabitants.

I’m starting this post on our present war, the illegal, immoral, and catastrophic war against Iran started by the United States and Israel working in tandem, by taking a quick look at two works of art, the first a novel by H.G. Wells, not only a visionary novelist, but also a social theorist and left wing writer who foresaw the creation of the United Nations. The second is the famous radio play by legendary actor and film director Orson Welles, also a passionate social commentator and man of the left.

Wells’ novel, among other works of his such as The Shape of Things to Come, The Time Machine, and a host of essays, took on modern fascism and investigated it throughout his fiction and non-fiction; Orson Welles was part of the New Deal cultural and artistic projects and conceived of his radio play modeled on Wells’ The War of the Worlds “coming true” forty years later, and made overwhelming vivid by the techniques of supposedly live commentary breaking into another performance in progress, creation of firsthand mock interviews with “experts,”and other media filters that created incredible urgency, verisimilitude, and panic.

In Wells’ 1898 novel the only thing that can stop the Martian invasion is their susceptibility to earth’s pathogens, which kill them despite their superior technology. In Welles’ radio play, Martians do begin to die, but the outcome is left open and on an emergency basis. It ends with Welles himself voicing the quote at the beginning of this essay.

Initially, H.G. Wells was somewhat upset when told about the radio play and its effects on the U.S. public, with people streaming out of New Jersey where the landing supposedly had begun, some families racing to the Canadian border, others volunteering for military service, many barricading their homes or making panicked raids on supermarkets. He thought it might have been overkill, the use of his work as a hoax that then showed the American public in a truly naive light. One might say, their true light: naive but not at all innocent. He soon changed his tune, and on a visit to the U.S. in 1940 appeared for a joint interview with Orson Welles, whom he recognizes as a fellow artist and a left wing fellow traveler, someone he praises for his prescience, his artistic vision, and for getting Hitler mad.

Among the things they discuss in their 7 minute interview is the fact that Hitler did, in truth, bring up the radio play The War of the Worlds and its panic effect in his horrifying Munich speech, saying that this pathetic public reaction underscored the decadence and weakness of the United States. In 1940, the time of their interview, WWII had already begun in Europe and it was a war-torn Wells–atrocious bombings by the Nazis had already begun in major cities and towns– who greeted his American counterpart, Welles, both of them comprehending firsthand the unbelievably dire stakes of the second global war.

Wells, whose lifework was analyzing the grounds for peace and alliances, encounters his much younger artistic and activist counterpart Welles, who was similarly trying to ring the bells against facism and Nazism. Both were global citizens, comprehending the unspeakable effects of world war launched by Hitler. This is around the same time, i.e. February 20th, 1939, that DJT’s father Fred ne Drumpf was attending the famous pro-Nazi gathering of the German American Bund in New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

The link here is that Orson Welles’ ostensible Halloween “prank” was actually a warning call, a three alarm artistic bell based on H.G. Wells’ earlier warning about the damages of colonialism and imperialism, extraction and domination as primary social forces stripping the earth bare, and the way these would inexorably lead to total war. What happened was war between and among the colonial powers themselves, in WWI, which would destroy the world economically, and in fact bring fascism into being, and then WW II, when war of all against all , predicated on “superior races” and subhuman groups, would proceed from the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Japan under what had become its fascist nationalist regime.

You might think that ordinary freedom-loving people in the streets would react to World War II’s prospect with fury, with pushback, with rage. Some did, but it was primarily those who were singled out as dissidents, labeled unfit, dehumanized for their ethnic, cultural, religious or sexual status. It was left wing thinkers, socialists and communists, labor unions, artists, writers, scholars, journalists, nurses and doctors, good scientists, enlightened clergy and lay people, people of difference such as gay computer pioneer Alan Turing, imprisoned by Britain for his homosexuality, who saved the UK’s bacon with decoding, just as did the Navajo code-talkers, and the anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists around the world, who stood up initially, and after WW II took their efforts towards mass decolonization and social freedom.

Wells first and later Welles were warning the world of what it would take to defeat this appalling war and fascism altogether. The beautiful thing is that their commitments could converge and strengthen one another, since H.G. Wells was already thinking about the UN Declaration of Human Rights that would mark the end of WWII, and Welles was near the beginning of a coruscating artistic career of unmasking the US global ruling class–what else, after all, is Citizen Kane–the fictionalized portrait of a real fascist billionaire who seized U.S. media.

If you have 7 minutes to spare, you might find the audio recording of the first and last meeting of Wells and Welles in 1940 really diverting–the passing on of a baton of speaking truth to power.

Conversation between Orson Welles & H.G. Wells, 1940. YouTube Public Domain Archive

Antonio Gramsci, writing of his period of interregnum, which is now ours.

Photo by J. Wicke

“None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.” George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, Man Booker Prize winner, 2017.

Robert Thurman is a foremost world scholar, interpreter, and translator of Buddhism. (And father of Uma). Among many other achievements in his field, and as an exponent of and practicing Buddhist, he offered a new translation of the Bardo Thodol, better known in the Western world as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In his preface he explains that there is no book with that title, and that “bardo” refers to a “between-state.” Bardo Thodol is much better translated as “The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between.” In a recent YouTube commentary on the bardo, Thurman calls it “a critical, luminous opportunity for enlightenment, where the mind is freed from physical constraints and karmic habits are temporarily suspended.” He emphasizes it is a “womb and tomb of existence”, offering a “golden opportunity” for rapid spiritual progress if one is prepared to recognize the light of awareness.

Obviously such preparation is a complex and dynamic aspect of Buddhist thought. That’s not where we are headed here. Instead, it’s to consider “the bardo” as a liminal space where liberation from everyday habits of thought and unquestioned life practices is not only possible, but crucial.

Thurman, too, sees the many aspects of bardo as a between-state as occurring before death, as well as after, with the Tibetan understanding of six bardo states, which include the liminal space of dreaming and the directed consciousness of meditation. For Thurman even sneezing or experiencing orgasm can be flashes of the bardo in-between, when focusing on using these transitional moments for liberation.

Bardo, then, is not merely about dying, nor the elaborate journey taken within the state of bardo which might await those who die. It is a “between” state that occurs whenever our old world falls apart, offering an opportunity to find new ground, break habits, and transform consciousness. I’m using bardo metaphorically, or some might say “metonymically”--since a metonym uses adjacent spaces of meaning to make its own. Space and movement are crucial to the bardo as both a feeling state, or an embodied predicament, and to the very notion of change, and the liberation which can follow.

Almost every treatment of Bardo has to do with an individual–whether, as in George Saunders’ brilliant novel Lincoln in the Bardo, it’s Abraham Lincoln in his bardo journey after death, which we readers are privy to, where he confronts his ongoing anguish about the death of his son Teddy, rather than, as one might have expected, his ruminations on the Civil War he led and won, or the effects of his own death by assasination on the body politic.

My own thoughts about bardo were sparked by the recent scattering of ashes for a beloved friend, the integral part for me of a human/canine family we constituted. She was not a Buddhist per se, but exceptionally knowledgeable about its traditions, its meanings, its importance as a mode of being in the world. Another friend closer to being a practitioner, and living very close to the Buddhist center presided over by the extraordinary abbot Joan Halifax, was marking her days of bardo and suggested the 49th, the transitional one in some versions of Tibetan Buddhism, as the day to do the scattering on his ancient farm nestled under Mount Atalaya. We gathered shortly before dawn, and just as the sun rose as it does each morning over Atalaya, scattered her sacred dust over the pinon trees and boulders lying in the field, a spray of white roses spread on the frosty ground, on the coldest morning of the new year.

I’d anguished privately over this ceremony, low key and comprising only four living people, with the literalism that overtakes us even in, or maybe especially in, moments of extremis and grief. I felt that this creature of the world, a global citizen without a fixed home, not a U.S. citizen but a permanent resident still with her British passport, having been sold as a child from an orphanage in South Korea at a time when this was a government policy (although hidden) under its then Park dictatorship, living in Bali, Japan, Mexico City, Colombia, New York City, under Mount Tamalpais, in Spain, Italy, and Paris, as a dancer, a transcultural adoption therapist and activist, and a painter, would be rejected by the the United States in its present state; I imagined her being stopped by ICE, were it more virulent in New Mexico, coming out of a cafe en route to chemotherapy, or even worse.

Instead it was the gentlest possible consigning of someone to the earth, a place so private and still (on that day), with a visible history of human communities there going back thousands of years as a crossroads for cultures and peoples criss-crossing from sea and land across continents. So in that sense appropriate, a place for sojourners as well as those rooted there for so long, even if it felt at that literal moment woefully lonely for her.

Share

And this place is also, as much as it soars above the quotidian United States to summon up eons in mountain and rock and the ongoing growing of corn there for centuries at the least, of course partakes of what is become the savage, monstrous American nation, dealer of death and destruction worldwide.

When the scattering of ashes itself occurred though, each of us four scooped ashes in a paper cup to follow our own trail along pathways alongside cottonwoods, oaks, and pinons, dawn breaking around us and the lucent wave of light, pink-tinged at first,

illuminating the hillocks and dips of the land. Anxious literality faded away to the real, the visible and the invisible. If her personal in-between, her bardo period, had ended, in Tibetan theory at least, it is clear that this liminal space of liberation is as much for those left in her wake to walk through and summon as the grounds for a self-remaking, in and through her spirit. Being everywhere in the world at once, she is not alone there, but in deathly open-air solidarity with the ancestors, no less than the rain, the trees, the field mice, the coyotes.

Bardo is a luminous concept or way of being, which points to the thresholds we’re always encountering, often with eyes wide shut and ears covered. In discussions about it, which range from religious doctrines and spiritual questioning, it is usually the individual as the unit of contemplation. In the many artistic recreations of bardo states, however, the collective often rears its head. George Romero’s classic film Night of the Living Dead, literalizes the realm between the living and the dead, which though ostensibly about zombies, creates a bardo in racist suburban New Jersey, with a chance at liberation from the onslaught–one that’s not taken, as the way out is offered by a Black man. Those hiding in the basement had the chance to liberate their thinking, a bardo they collectively refuse.

I want to suggest that America is experiencing collective bardo now. The American population is a traumatized one, collectively and over centuries of grotesque forms of state violence and oppression, and now to add delirious economic inequality and the ravages of AI. A new vocabulary, or reinvigoration of older vocabularies, needs to be marshalled–ones that speak of hope.

Try to entertain this conceit of Bardo as a between-space for a collective “soul,” because a literary conceit is what it’s most like. Literary conceits aren’t trivial or relegated to “mere” literature–conceits such as “utopia” and even “dystopia” are among the things that get us through the dark night of the soul, or at least through the weekend when an illegal and entirely unnecessary war is announced and we stand transfixed in horror. To imagine a bardo-like realm is to paradoxically reintroduce agency, movement, the potential for liberation, which can only happen collectively.

Think of ourselves–the whole group or mass of us, citizens and non-citizens who reside and live and work here, as undergoing bardo together, a liminal space of much violence and terror, of surreality, and yes, different from before in that the national “experience” has been unleashed as the language of our polity, the lies mostly stripped away, or dressed in such outrageous and campy monster costumes that the lies stand revealed in their ugliness, and their consequences are visible.

Of course I don’t mean that everyone is united–bardo isn’t magic. I’m urging it as a version of a thought-experiment, because in bardo the stakes are very high, whether one is addressing its meaning spiritually or religiously, ethically or politically, which is a subset of ethics. Bardo, as a between-state, aligns with the United States right now as it experiences, in Gramsci’s words, an interregnum of monstrosity. Yet we need to think of it as a collective Bardo experience; to do so restores our understanding that everyone can be part of the process of “liberation” afforded by bardo’s liminality, in Thurman’s translation of the meaning of the bardo.

The power is in understanding that all life is a whirlwind, but seeing our chance now to make a bardo of it gives us something to hold on to–one another, yes, but ideas and stances, alignments and concerns that spring from our interconnectedness. Bardo is not about “talking to people on the other side,” that half-baked civility discourse that is really about inertia and cowardice. It’s instead taking care, shielding people and the world we’re part of. The only price of admission to the bardo conceit I’m extending is the acknowledgment that this monstrousness cannot continue without articulating a replacement for its horrors. The sky has to be the limit for such imagination.

Bardo is the in-between space where one shares the concerns and crushing burdens and travails of the others in our bardo bullet train–shades of Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer, about the train of survivors on an endless loop around a devastated world, where class warfare breaks out. It may seem impossible to generate solidarity in such a state of misery, but in fact the creativity and wisdom to do so appears nonetheless as the lumpen passengers experience their awakening.

The urgency in bardo is to learn and to understand during the bardo period when ordinary ways of thought and action are suspended, or are shown to be either useless or actively malignant. As monstrous as it is, this is a time when new alliances can be made, when new possibilities can be imagined and entertained, when those dispossessed of power or voice or agency can speak to one another as the vast majority they are. As painful and terrifying as it can be to walk through bardo, one can prepare for it with solidarity at your back.

The crucial thing about bardo is that it is never the status quo that you, or we, can fall back on. The hunger is there for clarity, the “luminous” clarity bardo viewed as a brief moment or 49 days after death or this in-between of the political uncanny provides. The common good and what it means is also the watchword, written in words and actions of care, rescue, replenishment and the value of every human and other-than-human being among us. Our American bardo has to keep active the notion of a future for all of us, for a “we ourselves” interpreted as broadly as possible.

We can see clearly now, alas, and that alone brings us to stand together, in pieces if needs be, with a backward look to where we’ve come from, and the sunrise ahead.

photo by j. Wicke

Spectators and supporters celebrate Mayor Mamdani’s Inauguration, January 1, 2026

Part 2: Inaugurating the We

The city of New York, its far-flung boroughs, its history back through the indigenous peoples who first lived on and near the site, its multiple European explorations and conquests, such as by the Dutch, its locus as a place of slave markets and of free Black resistance including participation in the revolutionary war itself, its myriad waves of immigration over centuries that constitute the heart of the city and its neighborhoods and communities, merging over and over again until that Many constituted the One capital city of the United States, in a sense. The campaign itself continually drew upon specific communities, groups, and long-time vocal political presences within New York City, including those that hadn’t been tapped before, or been acknowledged as a vital community strand–such as the South Asian community captained by its “Aunties” in stumping so successfully for Mamdani in Queens and elsewhere.

The campaign made visible as a force some of the Many who hadn’t found themselves wielding political clout on this scale before; it also resonated with groups whose clout had been local and profound, but not enlisted in a specifically anti-austerity crusade for a mayoralty in service to the Many as the starting point of the One. Fiorello Laguardia’s socialist approach to governance served as an older and massively successful model of a city whose greatness is predicated not on its Wall Street or largely white billionaire class, but rather on the multiplicity of the Many who have made it work as the city of millions it continues to be, always a place that remade itself in and through the immigrant populations who have then added to the immensity of the One that it offers to the world.

What one loves about New York City is its Many, the Many it encompasses and embraces. Zohran Mamdani starts there, with his loyalties to the Many, including those going unheard, unseen, or unconsidered as the very force behind the greatness of New York City as a place and an idea.

Trump and Mamdani standing in front of FDR portrait

Trump’s squadron of cabinet billionaires and his billionaire media moguls like Larry Ellison will try to batter NYC to the ground, because Zohran Mamdani is wearing FDR’s mantle as mayor. NYC and its strong combatant against tech bro oligarchy in Lina Kahn, and actually establishing, to the horror of the Bezos Washington Post’s editorial board, for Julie Su, who has a rich background in union politics, a Deputy Mayor’s position for Economic Justice. To which they ask: “what is that, pray tell?” Well, it’s the very reason why Zohran won.

“Affordability” is not some throwaway term for pretending to care about people being able to afford their lives. Zohran Mamdani presented exactly the same challenge to Democrats as he did to MAGA Republicans, particularly to Donald Trump, his billionaires, and their monopoly autocracy. When you start with “affordability” you start with the Many, not on the basis of “entitlements” or any of that nonsense. You start by saying we will no longer allow Austerity as the premise of our political and social economy. Everybody matters, and when they do, billionaires are not allowed to run the country, or its once capital City, with their theft of what belongs to the Many.

Billionaires, including Democratic ones, have been put on blast by NYC. Bernie Sanders’ truism that they “should not exist” needs to be adopted as the watchword.

Bernie Sanders delivers oath of office to Mayor Mamdani; both heirs of FDR and sons of NYC

Economic Austerity (there’s really no other kind) became a while back the watery grave of social hope, so clear and yet so cloudy it’s impossible to pinpoint any signs of life. This connection is why there is something else at the core of Zohran Mamdani’s win. That is the uncompromising stand toward the genocide in Gaza taken by his campaign and now his impending mayoralty. This flows directly from the credo of recognizing the Many as the starting point for democratic politics, and also speaks to the derivation of E pluribus unum from Cicero’s commentary on social bonds being similar to those of love, family, and friendship, and predicated on collective empathy for one another.

Zohran Mamdani, his campaign, his victory, and his new administration center humanity and solidarity. The genocide in Gaza, which continues apace despite a false “ceasefire,” and threatens to become ever more hideous in Trump’s horrendous planned “takeover” of Gaza and repudiation of the Palestinian people, has been paid for by American taxpayers, with 21 billion in arms and weaponry in the last year alone. This is a moral atrocity that has swept away the international human rights order, and any justification whatsoever for “Western ideals.” And that is fine with Trump’s autocracy, yet it is also fine with a majority of Democratic legislators.

However, by a very large margin the American people are against this genocide. And it also has to be understood that the absolute destruction of Gaza’s people, its children, its future, is the goal. The reason behind this is racism, is apartheid, is fascism, –all of which are core beliefs and policies we are experiencing in the United States now, in our own resurgence of colonialism, segregation, subjugation.

Zohran Mamdani won because he made it clear: here is another way they are not listening to us. Genocide to them is a profit-making opportunity, just as ICE raids and surveillance are, in the concentration camp American future. We will not stand for it.

In short, we need the moral, loving, caring and equality-embracing side, the anti-austerity side, to give voice as is finally happening now, no matter how much mass media/mainstream media ignores or misrepresents this, no matter how much Democratic standard bearers deplore this.

The power of speech that is not hot air or mere rhetoric trusts people to recognize actual history lessons of all kinds, including that we are burdened by Austerity. These voices are heard, this discourse of empathy is heard, not with partisan hatred or veiled violence, but instead is understood as love of the political kind, even when, as it must, it deals in hard and tragic truths. Real history lessons are stories, they are narratives shaped around real actors, real suffering, real defeats and real rising up. They are a form of factual fiction, history as literature because it draws from the wealth of truth, passionately and reverently told.

Zohran Mamdani, the next mayor of NYC, has told his story, this story, told this open-ended truth, and the Many have shared it with him. This will reverberate across the nation. If you can make it happen in NYC, it perhaps can happen for the benefit of all–not anywhere, to be sure, nor everywhere, sadly, but told and retold as a tale of two cities, one the unaffordable Before, and the other, beginning to bring together the formidable powers of the Many as One.

I watched the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani alone on January 1st, yet I felt, and knew, that Saschia was there too. There were endless moments in the inauguration that sparked the intimacy of solidarity, the sense of acknowledgment and shared joy that is not predicated on hate, but rather on love. There was one such moment when my composure, such as it was, broke open into the grief I felt and feel, and yes, I cried and cried.

For my dear, brilliant, glorious and beautiful friend, of course. But also what she had contributed to this moment, to this ongoing struggle, and to the fight for humanization and rehumanization, which is all that will save our lives on the planet we are part of and must protect. When Mandy Patinkin sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with the children’s choir of P.S. 22 in Staten Island, it was supernal. For me, it could bridge death with the power of its summoning, its yearning, and its possibility. Love, empathy, compassion, solidarity, including joy: these are resistance.

YouTube Short Clip Mandy Patinkin singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with PS 22 Youth Choir, Staten Island at Zohran Mamdani inaugural 1/1/2026

@cbsnewyork

CBS News New York on Instagram: "Actor and singer Mandy Patinki…

The final line, “why oh why can’t I?”, from the original song sung by Judy Garland in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz,” is given the most perfect switch, from the “I” of personal mourning to the prophetic hopeful “We” of solidarity.

Photo by Ashia Mikumari. This too can be a Blazing World of Hope.

Photo by Ashia Mikumari, Saschia’s Sunrise Blessing

This post marks this newsletter’s return after a hiatus that started at the beginning of December. In its reappearance with all its political passion and bite intact, I’m adding to This Blazing World the open expression of the personal passions, personal and social history that animates my feeling, my thinking, and the drive for solidarity I argue for in everything I write. I’ll resituate what I’m writing about in the humanity that gives rise to it–not just my own specific “humanity,” comprised of many things and histories, as if I had lots of secrets to spill, but rather from within the human relations that underlie what we call “the right side of history.” That’s the human side. And of course “human relations” far exceed only those beings and entities called “human,” since ultimately we are interrelated in nature and as nature in huge webs across time and space.

But the human part matters terribly now, as it always has, yet the urgency of reclaiming humanity has never been as critical. It is in fact our very humanity that is under attack now, everywhere we look if we have eyes to see, or ears to hear.

All of us, everywhere, with the exception of a cadre of billionaires, the super-rich oligarchy that supports and empowers them, and the fascists at the helm, have been put on notice: we are expendable. Huge swaths of humanity are being dehumanized as inferior, illegal, Others, terrorists, monsters, in a theater of cruelty designed to demonstrate the power to define “humanity,” and to take it away.

So delusional is the version of fascism being set up that AI is supposed to be able to replace human labor, in most instances, and so piteous is the hold that tech billionaires now have over the world’s economy, they have been able despite the insane AI bubble to begin to colonize the globe in earnest in service of this. Dehumanization is critical and crucial to billionaire rule, both in rendering humans “redundant,” and in securing the power to define and control literally everything.

Sacha Song, Her Nom de l’art

The hiatus in publishing my Substack happened because a beloved friend, who had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer a year and a half ago, and for whom I had been caregiving, began to die in December after her medical treatments had failed her. She didn’t make it to 2026, but made her transition on December 30th late at night. This British Korean woman was a global citizen; she had had to become one. Essentially sold to her British parents during what are now known to be government assisted paid adoptions through the 1970s, when she was born, she was sent to boarding school in England at age 7, the better to keep the abuse to which she was subjected hidden, the only non-white child there. She left her second boarding school as a teenager to make her own way in London; became a fashion model in Japan at 17; became a talented sommelier to support herself as a dancer in a renowned modern troupe; lived in Bali, Spain, Colombia, Paris, Lagos, Mexico City, and then for a long and vibrant stint in New York City, joining the young international talents there. After another stay in San Francisco as dancer, body movement specialist, and teacher, she went to Santa Fe, another global kind of place, indigenously, and found herself as the painter she was meant to be. She died at age 53, using MAID, which the state of New Mexico humanely permits.

She’s the human relational core for me in Zohran Mamdani’s seemingly outlier campaign, starting in the summer of 2025, as we watched and read transfixed. As a longtime New Yorker myself, and a longtime democratic socialist, I would have been following this on my own, passionately. But here was Saschia, in some ways the epitome of the Trump regime’s dehumanization rhetoric, and with terminal cancer “to boot,” as she sometimes said. We’d partly begun our friendship because we’d seen each other wearing keffiyehs in town; this was long before October 7th and in response to what has been called the slow genocide in Palestine starting before 1948. IYKYK. We knew.

What I literally mean is that this campaign, grueling as it was, was magical. It was joyful. Every aspect of it allowed for the return of full-throated humanity, of the ethical acknowledgement of people of all kinds, of the indisputable importance of immigrants to a global city as well as a national city and a nation itself, the notion of the city as a public commons, the idea that a government fosters the futures and the lives of all who live within its scope, and that this is its reason for being. When he won the primary, we were ecstatic; when he won in November, there was joy abounding. It was not only “good news” in a sea of nightmares. What it showed was that there was this as a future for New York City, despite all the horrific pushback we know will happen, it’s a victory for the Many, who made it happen, and can be a future for the same resistance at local to global levels. It is literally hope. We watched and read and danced in the park and toasted sparkling water to Zohran, to the City, to all those who voted and worked for him and continue to do so.

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City started with a “Yes, There is More” answer to Oliver Twist’s plea against the austerity, the New Poor Law, starving him to death: ‘Please, Sir, We Want More.’ It was a “we,” not an “I,” because Oliver acted on behalf of everyone experiencing the new plight, the new prison of the workhouse. Under Mayor Mamdani it becomes a nationwide model for the return of genuine democracy, or of economic justice, which can only begin when articulated for the Many; E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One. The Many will and must include immigrants, whose contributions are in fact constitutive of “e pluribus.” The term “abundance” is not a nice word for corporate profits, it’s the flip side of scarcity and the coin has to be called for the many, not the few.

As Mayor Mamdani himself said in his inaugural address, abundance refers to making things abundant for those who live and work and grow up and grow old in the City itself. Austerity capitalism is inevitably a scarcity economy for everyone who is not in the upper reaches of the elite, at most the upper 10%, but in actuality the .01% the economy gives everything up to.

Great Seal of 1782, E Pluribus Unum (in folder Part 2 Austerity Zohran Mamdani))

The Great Seal of the United States from 1782 contains what was to become the de facto motto of the United States, and is still imagined by many of us to be so. Actually, in 1956 the non-descript motto “In God We Trust” replaced it, by vote of Congress. Much was lost in that great replacement, if you can pardon my language. The latter is a ‘meh’ motto of theocratic bravado, and asks nothing of nor explains anything about the principles upon which this new form of republic was once going to be constituted.

I start off with the Great Seal motto because Mamdani won the New York City mayoralty for the return to “affordability” he promised as the crux of governance. That isn’t simply taking into account what can be afforded, and by whom: it returns to the original political basis of the American republic, in other words, that it is founded upon and for the Many, from which basis arises its unity, its union, its One-ness, and, by the way, the legitimacy for governance.

One, out of many: E pluribus unum makes a certain kind of promise to live up to, a unity comprising a many that is diverse, different, arrived at by immigration, and by the embrace of an idea. Of course from its inception the reality behind the aspirational motto was riddled with grotesque flaws, given that several of the original designers of the Seal were vastly wealthy slaveowners who saw no contradiction in excluding their enslaved laborers from the Many, although not for counting as 3/5ths of a white person in establishing votes. Just as bad, the indigenous peoples of the land in question were considered antithetical to its purpose, enemies of the Many, and subject to extermination and removal. These are resounding and foundational contradictions whose pit we have fallen into continually, and now reside within.

We can see ever more keenly that Mamdani and his advisors and staff are resurrecting E pluribus unum as the unspoken rallying cry for a city that is expressing itself for the first time in a long while publicly out of its multiplicity, its diversity, its majority of working class and middle class inhabitants, its proudly immigrant roots and routes.

The Latin phrase ‘E pluribus unum,’ was not an everyday one, even back in the days when Latin was not a dead language, but the tip of the Roman imperial spear. To resurrect it for use in the Great Seal required some almost mystical coincidences among the many disparate kinds of people joining in on the revolutionary plan. Its origin seems to trace back to a passage from Cicero, the Roman consul, philosopher, orator, and politician, whose remarkable public life from his birth into a political family in 106 BCE, to his execution in 43 BCE, covered the turbulent last decades of the Roman Republic, during its transition to becoming the Roman Empire.

As a thinker and writer Cicero created a lasting political vocabulary–with notions such as humanitas– that melded his education in Rome and also in Greece, where he mastered its philosophical tradition. His political and humanity-related vocabulary re-emerged more than thousand years later, first in Europe during the beginnings of Renaissance humanism, spearheaded by the rediscovery of lost Greek and Roman manuscripts, thanks to their preservation by Arabic societies, which were still in dialog with these Greek and Latin texts, and thanks to Irish monks who traveled to those places and then preserved many of these texts in Celtic monasteries, ready for their revival. There was also a huge second coming of this Ancient Greek and Roman body of political, literary, philosophical and humanities-related knowledge during the 18th century Enlightenment period, inspiring Locke, Paine, Hume, Jefferson, and many others. Obviously this spilled over into the very notion of what a revolution was for–what kind of government would replace the ancien regime of kings and their tyranny?

So what did “e pluribus unum” mean to Cicero when he coined the phrase? He certainly didn’t envision a far future modern revolution, but he was tremendously concerned about what the transfer of Roman politics from its form as a republic, where its senate held the reins, to an Empire led by dynastic Emperors would mean. E pluribus unum was a coinage of Cicero’s that he built upon the thought of an Ancient Greek social philosopher, Pythagorus. We’re getting into the ancient weeds here, but only for a remarkable pay-off in understanding just how unusual ‘e pluribus unum’ was as the much later rationale for the creation of a democratic republic out of a revolutionary movement in the 18th century, a world away from Rome.

Cicero wrote in his De Offiicus, as part of his argument that basic family and social bonds are the origin of societies and states: “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (unum fiat ex pluribus), as Pythagoras wishes things to be in friendship.” The social bond, then, is a form of friendship or love that might almost be the definition of solidarity, empathy for a Many the individual can never know in full or even in part, an individual who also is a part of this whole, the One, a social and political bond that subsumes the power brokers, the Billionaires both domestic and foreign, and the elite absentee landlords who have declared the City to be “theirs.” And fought to buy the election, to no avail, to the tune of $8 billion dollars, to which Mamdani riposted: “I wasn’t even going to tax you that much.”

Strange as it might seem, Cicero’s original creation of the phrase e pluribus unum, was then used by a group of American revolutionaries to provide the core concept of the Great Seal. It required those adopting this notion of a Great Seal, a pledge behind the idea of an alternative modern social mode, to also adopt the notion of a radically new kind of empathy, or love, in a sense, that saw the One of the Republic, the state, comprising the bonds between and among the Many. That placement of the Many as foundational to the One defies what Austerity systems tell us about who is worthy of inclusion in this One, worthy of empathy, or help, or encouragement, or equality and opportunity, and why.

As we saw in Oliver Twist, a key goal of the new economic theorists in creating austerity to keep those considered unworthy from organizing together to revolt was to destroy empathy and family and community bonds themselves. And that is what is happening now in our close-to-fascist country, ruled overtly by fascists, some parts of it already deep-dyed in fascist hatred for the Others who are blamed for having taken Oliver Twist’s pittance away from him. The bonds of empathy, community, and solidarity are being attacked and violated in every way, in an attempt to eviscerate E pluribus unum as an idea, a goal, a foundation, and ethos for the nation. However imperfectly.

This very solidarity, the basis in social bonds and even in love that lies behind E Pluribus Unum is so feared by the powerful billionaires and the oligarchy that controls us now, given the widest possible berth of operations from the “president,” in exchange for his free range over all the spoils and private deals he can make worldwide, is the force that won Zohran Mamdani the mayoralty of New York City.

Old-fashioned prelude deliberately modeled on Charles Dickens’s Chapter Headings.

Santa Fe street corner by austere full moonlight, photo J. Wicke

Austerity always marks a far right turn, one that invariably slows the economy and all indices of well-being, including survival itself, for the “rest of us,” the Many, the 99%

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

“When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man

“There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all, we accomplish all, even Peace.” W. E. B. DuBois

“The poor white man pays the public and psychological wage of white supremacy. . . The theory of the new South was to make white labor rich and happy by the degradation of the black laborer. . .This divided the working class, and made poor whites even poorer.” Black Reconstruction, 1935

W. E. B. DuBois; Portrait taken by fiend, writer, and photographer Carl Van Vechten.

I’ll be using Charles Dickens and his explosive novel Oliver Twist in this essay as a way to both explain austerity and to offer its critique, in a short and dirty way. I do this because Dickens wrote this novel in explicit protest of the takeover of the British political economy by so-called “liberal economics,” which bears no resemblance to the word liberal, or the epithet “libtard,” as it is used or understood today. There is no “bleeding heart” at the core of liberalism. The very opposite. Liberal economics is cold-hearted in the extreme, and proposes itself as a pseudo-science to justify its damage, as if this damaging inequality were inherent in the “economy,” or “the market,” itself. But austerity is the key to understanding the valances of a political economy set up, or rigged, in precisely this way.

Attacking austerity head-on, and formulating a starting point for municipal government that doesn’t acquiesce to Austerity, to lack and want and poverty for the many, is the true secret of Zohran Mamdani’s glorious victory against the billionaire mob who oppose(d) him desperately. “Affordability” is anti-Austerity from its get-go, because affordability is defined as starting with those who cannot presently afford to live even meager lives in the city they define and support by their labor. Making it affordable for the working class and the middle class means erasing the Austerity premises both Republican/MAGA and centrist and conservative Democratic rule is based upon. “Abundance” centrism is abundance for the same folks who already have it, the slim percentage of the mostly white wealthy and outright billionaire class, who think they own New York City, and everywhere else, and the government itself, and do. Austerity is only and ever the scarcity economy doled out to the public. And “society,” as Margaret Thatcher famously said, under right-wing perceptions “does not exist.”

Photo by J. Wicke of a china plate depicting Oliver Twist’s dramatic asking for more gruel, the plate purchased by me at The Old Curiosity Shop store in London in the 1980s, now a fixture on my desk. It copies for mass reproduction George Cruikshank’s famous original illustration.

This post is not about literary criticism or Dickens studies, or anything expressly literary, except the truths literature tells. Dickens is like Shakespeare in the English literary canon–both major literary innovators, “great” writers, whose literature was not written or performed only for elites, but arose out of mass popularity, their “literary” language a blend of idioms from the poorest to the elites and in between, the English of people from the so-called lowest classes to the “highest,” the latter perhaps in their own estimation. Dickens is as much mass culture, and proudly so, as great literature. The blending that happens in Dickens, just as it does in Shakespeare, can help us see the very things that are still covered up, made taboo, in our modern cultures, and beyond that, to feel as well as know about these. That coming together has something to teach us now, because Austerity is becoming more and more apparent, more and more clear, to those who suffer from it, and now those that do are the great, the overwhelming majority. A beginning-to-be clear-eyed majority.

Oliver Twist has one extremely memorable line, a cry from the heart that has transcended the novel to be recirculated in endless cultural forms, a line that almost everyone knows, even if not where it’s from, because it speaks for all who have found themselves disenfranchised, dehumanized, brutalized, abandoned, and ignored. “Please, Sir, I want more!” Oliver doesn’t mean “I want more candy,” with “wanting” in that sense. He means, with a bit of Britishism, that his meager helping of sawdust-inflected gruel, a starvation rations, leaves all the boys in want, in need. “Please, Sir, I want–I have to have–more!” It comes from the lips of a 9 year old male character, Oliver Twist, a workhouse orphan when the “workhouse” and its basis in a general economy of austerity had, in real life, just been formulated.

Austerity isn’t “natural,” just a by-product of the way things are. It’s an invention of capitalism and its spokespersons across several centuries now, and it emerges from the cruelest zero-sum game: “we” can’t stay rich, or super-rich, unless you are poor, or poorly-off, or wanting for the very social and public goods that make life worth living, or just possible to survive.

Oliver appears in Charles Dickens’s second and entirely revolutionary novel, Oliver Twist, Or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. Oliver Twist’s premise helps dramatize the cruelties of austerity through both its literary clout as a narrative, and its mass cultural popularity as a genuine product of a working-class man (Dickens) and his outlook. Above all, our reaction to Oliver’s plight can break through the normalization of austerity that has prevailed for two centuries, especially in the United States, and its weaponization to the degree that an explicitly fascist agenda could prevail in the recent election, receive the whole-hearted approbation of all the billionaire class, the Big Tech oligarchy, and all of mainstream media caving with barely a whimper. “Please, Sir, I want more” is exactly the demand that our suffering, debased country is voicing, except in its new guise: we demand more.

The 23 year-old Dickens lobbed the dynamite of his second novel as a “ripped from the headlines” account of the British New Poor Law of 1834, established in Britain by a duo of dark philosophers and administrators of nation and empire, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, whose watchwords were “efficiency” and “austerity” for thee, though not for me and my ilk, the elite. The public narrative of Austerity gets started in earnest at the precise moment of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and the latter is the narrative repudiation of Austerity that gets things started with a bang.

What got Dickens so fired up that he tackled this monumental shift in modern government under capitalism? Part of the reason is that Dickens had suffered his own austerity crisis, so much so he became a writer and wrote revolutionary novels about the tragedy while never revealing it, except to one friend. The son of a lower middle class family often in arrears and overwhelming debt, Charles became the family breadwinner at age 11, working and living alone miles away from his family, “housed” with fellow child workers in London in a desolate blacking factory warehouse, printing out by hand and pasting labels onto bottles of shoe polish.

Charles Dickens, below, depicted at Warren’s Blacking factory, age 12, making and pasting the labels on its shoe polish, and living in its rat-infested warehouse alone except for fellow workers, scrounging or begging his own food.

Illustration of Charles Dickens anguishing over his pile of Warren’s Blacking labels; illustration by Fred Bernard, from the ironically titled The Leisure Hour, 1904

The New Poor Law of 1834, was meant to replace the previous Poor Law, itself awful, but actually predicated on the idea that society exists. There will be lots of poor people to whom terrible things will happen–they go hungry or starve, they die in epidemics, they have children who need to be fed, they grow old and are alone and helpless. By no means a remedy, the Old Poor Law at least acknowledged the humanity of the poor, and the moral duty of a society not to look away from “the least of these.” There was still a sense that the desperately poor had a “right” not to starve, or freeze to death in the streets, or be driven to begging in their old age. The “parish” system offered a meager kind of charity, that was meant to slightly curtail the effects of masses of people driven off their land, gathering in towns and cities without work available, or if there in factories, without any guidelines or permanence for their life-threatening employment..

The New Poor Law served the interests of the burgeoning capitalist class by dehumanizing the poor, suppressing wages, and converting public assistance into a mechanism of social control and labor discipline. Instead of a right, as Tom Paine declared it, poverty relief became a punitive, workhouse-based capitalist hellscape driven by profit, utterly amoral, a system designed to force desperate individuals into the exploitative capitalist labor market at any wage at all, even zero, effectively making them responsible for their own suffering. We are experiencing this today, when almost everyone is massively poorer or less secure than they once were, the deliberate de-humanization of anyone in trouble, anyone born poor, anyone orphaned, anyone addicted or ill, anyone hit by hurricanes or flooded away or broiled to death in the heat of their trailer or on the roof of their job in torrid Phoenix, anyone who has lost the ability to pay dearly for being allowed to live. And the re-racialization of austerity, too.

As a super fast way to define Austerity, in brief, anti-Empathy as a religion, in this essay and for American society, I’ll turn to a device I’d otherwise avoid like the plague: AI. I pledge that I will never use AI in my own writing. Here, though, it is hilariously instructive to trot out AI definitions of austerity in two completely adversarial, contradictory forms, which AI, not being human and not being intelligent, let alone en route to sentience, will never realize.

Here’s how AI defines it, when asked: “what is economic austerity?”

1. “Austerity measures are government policies implemented to reduce a budget deficit, typically through cutting public spending, raising taxes, or both. These policies are usually enacted during times of economic crisis to promote fiscal stability but can lead to reduced public services, higher unemployment, and social unrest. Examples of measures include cutting social programs, lowering public sector wages, and increasing taxes on citizens.”

I want to make it as apparent as I can that the “ordinary” definition of austerity exemplified by the first AI definition is mostly pure ideology, blaming the victims of austerity policies for those very policies as if “budget deficits,” which are not really real, were caused by excessive “public spending,” when they are not. You don’t have to be a small m-marxist, dear reader, or a democratic socialist, or a garden-variety progressive to see that this definition is problematic–not because it’s AI slop, it’s problematic because it echoes in AI fashion every plain vanilla economist, who simply doesn’t get it. Garbage in, garbage out.

The definition considers austerity an anomaly, something that crops up only when a deficit quandary emerges. But needs must, “we” in response have to tighten the food, water, heat, electricity, educational resources, and health care screws, and in most cases, do so permanently, in order to help resolve those pesky budget deficits. And budget deficits are just shit that happens accidentally, whoops! Suddenly, it becomes clear to some that there’s a gravy train out there, with old people having the gall to think their prescriptions should be covered, or parents expecting that the birth of a child shouldn’t cost them in excess of their entire yearly income. Such audacity must be corrected by Austerity. It’s the capitalist doom loop.

Here’s another version of the definition of austerity that AI gives you, but only if one types in the prompt I used: “Karl Marx quotes on austerity and capitalism”:

2.“While Marx didn’t use the specific term “austerity capitalism,” his theories describe how capitalism naturally leads to policies that suppress wages, cut public services, and increase precarity for the working class to boost profits, especially during crises of overproduction, ultimately undermining the system’s stability and exacerbating inequality. Austerity, from a Marxist perspective, is not a neutral economic choice but a class strategy to empower capital by reducing labor costs and demand, forcing workers to accept lower pay and less security.” (boldface by me, not by AI’s invisible hands)

First off, of course Marx didn’t use the phrase “austerity capitalism,” because austerity and capitalism are one and the same. Austerity is for everybody else–non-elite, or non-white, etc. This post is about explaining and giving life to the longstanding regime of Austerity in America, regardless of which party was in power, understanding its terrible effects, especially on the American working class and its poor or neglected, and arguing why the failure to address austerity or to mitigate its evils is paradoxically responsible for the election of Donald Trump to his first term and also his second, the now explicitly fascist term in “progress.”

I’ll offer only one quote from Oliver Twist besides the famous few words spoken aloud on behalf of all his fellow workhouse boy inmates, “Please, sir, I want some more!” Let me just give you a taste of Dickens’ bitter, whip sharp sarcasm as he sets the stage to tell how the Parish poorhouse was systematized by austerity economics into a ghastly trap to both monetize the poor, and to kill them off, literally. The orphan Oliver is removed from his humble parish house, where he had a few kind people surrounding him, to be set to work and “live” in the new workhouse set up for the above purposes.

“Poor Oliver! He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy unconsciousness . . . that the Board had that very day arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence over all his future fortunes. But they had. And this was it:

The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered—the poor people liked it! “Oho!” said the board, looking very knowing; “we are the fellows to set this to rights; we’ll stop it all, in no time.” So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed (to the workhouse), the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, [for] the increase in the undertaker’s bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two’s gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies.”

This is calling a spade a spade, and the novel was rapturously embraced by all classes in London. The very large class of non-readers were able to hear the book read aloud on streetcorners, chapter by chapter, for free, and the working poor who could read were served by libraries where the book was made available for reading, or where it was performed as drama. Dickens himself went on tour to perform the most galvanizing scenes on stage, playing all the parts from memory, and often for free.

Needless to say, when Oliver does verge on starvation he runs away to London, where he is immediately surrounded by predators. Those vile people are, no matter their criminality, not a patch on the predatory system that caused him to run for his very life.

The ecstasies of the “board” are the same ecstasies of Elon Musk cutting billions of so-called waste while receiving many more billions in kind; these are the ecstasies of Russell Vought of the OMB declaring that no one has rights to any kinds of public service, whether disaster relief or children being able to eat. These are the ecstasies the billionaires of New York couldn’t bear to lose to “affordability,” for fuck’s sake, when austerity was making them so much richer than even Bloomberg or Ackman had ever dreamed.

At the time Dickens was writing (the 1830s-1860s) creepy philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who invented utilitarianism, was one of the minds behind the New Poor Law. Cut to the chase: it wedded the Law to Austerity at the same time as it turned relief for the poor into a utilitarian calculation of profit and loss, and with the poor, Bentham opined, it was always loss. They should never be happy, because then they would not work. Since there was no work to be had, the workhouse should forcibly separate and break up families, friends, all human necessities, and let them die on three bowls of thin gruel a day. Bentham did believe in animal rights, although not most human rights; he had his own body mummified after death and intended it to be on permanent display forever at his university. Bentham is the person from whose dubious philosophy the specious philanthropy “efficient altruism” emerged, as well as the notion that altruism, or empathy, is solely an individual, and never a social, task.

The auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham, containing the philosopher’s skeleton in his clothes with a wax head, at University College London (photo by Allison Meier, author of essay, for Hyperallergic online journal.

He called such a permanent display of a famous person after death becoming an “auto-icon.” This icon is still displayed at University College London, although its head is made of wax after the horrible decomposition of the actual head, and its body below is his skeleton, padded out to look like a body. The clothes are original. Oddly, few have followed his example.

I find this auto-icon telling of the grandiosity of someone who was happy to dehumanize others to turn them into receptacles of capital or dead vessels of it, living to labor or dying in order to contribute their bones to make fertilizer, never to be memorialized even by a gravestone, Bentham decreed, let alone a name carved upon it. And thought his reputation could defeat death.

“Liberal economics,” or classic liberal economics, centers Austerity, or the denial or reduction of public services, with any luck, entirely, in favor of bolstering profits for and creating a massively powerful elite, to prevent any real revolt or change. Austerity is as relevant to our predicament right now as is the attempt to destroy or drastically reduce below starvation levels the SNAP “allowance” which keeps 42 million children, elders, women and men of various and non-binary genders, from literal starvation, or grotesque famine conditions. “Please, sir, I want more” rings out now with a horrible echo in Trump’s own voice–he loves to say, “then they ask me, please, sir . . .”

Never an Oliver asking for just a bit of humanity, only a Donald telling others how great he is. The utter folly of the “golden ballroom” atrocity is in a sense Trump’s developer’s version of an Auto-Icon, a present-moment version of gilded Auto-Iconicity meant to rebrand the White House as the billionaires’ playground it is.

People wait in line to pick up food at a pop-up food distribution in Oakland, California, on Thursday. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

The need to impose this crushing austerity at any time is a complete fiction. There is always “more.”

The takeover of austerity “logic” in the United States happens after the assasination of Abraham Lincoln, the first working class president ever to be elected at that time, and one of the very few ever to serve. The similarly killed James Garfield was the second, falling to a would-be assassin’s bullet and gross medical malpractice after only 200 days in office. Thus the first arrival of the Gilded Age, which Trump is busy replicating in fool’s gold in every particular, from the embrace of Austerity to white supremacy to being anti-labor, which means hating the working class he supposedly rescues.

Here’s Karl Marx, writing to his occasional pen-pal Abraham Lincoln, this time as the head of the International Workingmen’s Society of Europe, to congratulate Lincoln on winning his second presidential election, and thus, Marx was sure, ending the Civil War in a defeat for the slave South. (1865)

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. . . The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. The epoch to come . . . fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, the Central Council:etc.

(By the way, Lincoln’s private secretary sent Marx a reply thanking him for the sentiments.)

The meaning of austerity in the United States is refracted and enforced through our systemic and endemic racism. When Reconstruction was repealed, after less than a decade of its highly successful anti-austerity and anti-racist measures deployed nationally, Austerity roared back into the driver’s seat. This meant harsh and vindictive practices against the majority white population at that time (neither Social Security nor health care for the elderly existed), and added to it, utterly ferocious racially-weaponized discrimination that led to openly genocidal austerity measures within already harsh austerity policies. What force fought austerity during these years? Vibrant and militant and diverse labor unions, who met with violent resistance, and nonetheless gave us such gifts as social security (not a gift, but already paid for by the worker), labor rights for the 8 hour day, and “the weekend.”

The Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) of Downton Abbey asks her immortal question around the dinner table. Who needs “a weekend”? Only the little people who labor.

You may feel our SNAP withholding disaster and the vast reservoir of hunger it reveals is to be laid at the feet of Trump alone. Or the shutdown–but 8 Democrats broke that. And the explosion of healthcare insurance fees that threatens to destabilize the entire economy in a few weeks’ time. While he deserves every execration that can be thrown at him, the Austerity politics that give us 42 million on the edge at any given time, and the failure to ever correct healthcare past the ACA which Obama created and will be repealed for most, have persisted throughout Democratic administrations after FDR’s, and not just those that have faced Republican hardball in Congress. Virtually every centrist Democrat (“centrism” in short means a follower of neoliberal economics, and a believer that Austerity reigns supreme) has little to say or do right now, except give lip service to a No Kings rally. About their actual masters, the Wall Street elites, the supposedly “nice” billionaires like Bill Gates who aren’t, or the corporations which bankroll them, they must be silent. Let’s coin a name for “centrists” or “center-right” and even most center-left self-descriptors: a centrist is an Austerian, someone who considers austerity a “fact of life” for poor, precarious, or otherwise “unproductive” people.

But in fact, Austerity is made to happen, to give corporations and capitalist finance the breathing room to siphon off more profit, or to use unemployment, very profitable for capitalism, to plow back profits and raise their own stock’s value. A Deficit is nothing but a good excuse for intensifying the hell of Austerity. Austerity comes first–suppressing wages, cutting public services, poor and working class incomes become too diminished or non-existent to buy the stuff the corporations are producing or the billionaires are betting on. Stocks themselves are bets, “hedged,” then grown into hedge funds. Now is the time for those such as Zohran Mamdani to spell it out, and when he did, people saw it clearly, and voted for it.

People listen because what is said aloud speaks to their truth, their experience, in ways others have sought to deny, to hide, to obfuscate. And what arises in the listening is not hate, not viciousness, not “tribalism,” but rather the solidarity of empathy, cheers for other people and for standing together. And the human-ness of this is a prerequisite. It’s the human voice in all its human glory, its strength and its frailty, its wisdom and its folly, its ability to touch and draw in the better angels of our nature, and to write these on the body politic. We have to return to that, and we can see Zohran Mamdani’s victory as in part the victory of a human voice speaking directly, clearly, with integrity and empathy to all who heard him. See Part 2!

What Austerity does in the flesh and to the bodies of the otherwise invisible, is answered by elevating empathy as the ultimate moral sentiment.

Radical empathy–it starts publicly in one site with Dickens, it stays on with all the revolutionary narratives and revolutions or resistance itself that have followed it.

Literature, political theory, much philosophy, many kinds of religious practice, some strands of science, especially climate science, and other cultural and social sources from visual art to film to television to clubs and open enclaves offer empathy for others plural, which is given agency in solidarity with those others, however problematic or inconvenient they may seem to be. Austerity has to be grasped with the kind of empathy Dickens gives it in his revolutionary Oliver Twist. It does something else that is equally needed, opening a wedge that brings to vivid life the Many who are then become the subjects of this new understanding, not its pitied objects.

What did Karl Marx think of Dickens, and such works as Oliver Twist? A very great deal. In a letter commenting on British novelists of his time whom he greatly admired, such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thackeray and George Eliot, with Dickens foremost, he writes, novelists “have issued to the world more political and social truths than all the professional philosophers, politicians, publicists, and moralists put together”. This is the highest praise from a profoundly literary man whose first book was a volume of poetry, his second a children’s tale, and finally his thesis, claiming, as will his The Communist Manifesto, “the point is not just to understand the world, but to change it!”

By the way, the first translator of The Communist Manifesto into English, was Helen MacFarlane, the Scottish activist, journalist, writer, thinker, wife and mother, who ultimately died at 41, with 11 step-children, one dead child, and two born shortly before her untimely death. Living in London she was a friend and writerly colleague of both Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. The former supported her against misogynist attacks in the world of radical journalism, the latter found her politics a little too spicy for his style, but still saw her as a massive talent writing for a magazine rival of his Household Words, and an estimable Christian radical. . . She called Jesus “the Galilean proletarian.” Let a thousand flowers of resistance bloom.

And let’s give Helen MacFarlane the next to last word:

“What we want is justice, not charity–a right, not an ‘incalculable benefit from above’. As children of the same Father, we demand that we share in the advantages of civilization of which we have been scandalously robbed; we demand our birthright as human beings–as rational, moral agents. That which we hold directly from God, in virtue of our humanity, we will not degrade ourselves by receiving as a favour, a ‘charity’, at the hands of any human being, still less at those of rascally aristocrats, whether landed or financial.”

Our rascally billionaires are both landed and financial, our Austerity neither charity nor the rights of humankind. The worst of both worlds in each case. We demand our collective birthright as human beings. “No “please”, no “sir” this time, we demand what we deserve as the people and the stewards of this nation of the Many.

Image of Golden Ballroom from Folder as last picture, with caption in folder

Artist’s Image of the Golden Ballroom. Published in Newsweek. Here’s where the rich eat everyone who is not rich, as they already do, except literally.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci

A British commentator at the UN speech offered a post-speech diagnosis with a nice Britishism: “He’s barking mad. Do the American people realize this?” The answer is, yes we do, but that is the wrong question. The question is who is this entertainer, a fame whore of long standing, serving? To ask the question is to become the Enemy.

Ever since 2016 his “madness,” his colossal deficits of coherence, much less knowledge, integrity, empathy in any degree, rank bigotry and incompetence have been spotted. And then endlessly commented upon. In Dr. Mary Trump, his niece, we’ve had a superb source of guidance to his fathomless superficiality, the surface charm that hides endless malice and vengefulness, his narcissistic wounds, which are what his entire personality consists of, and now his evident cognitive decline, mirroring in some respects that of his father Fred. (She’s achieved far more than this valuable decoding, writing several truly incisive and eloquent books about the US history that led to her uncle’s rise, and also practices selfless activism in her resistance movement within the Democratic party.) I don’t at all mean she should stop giving us her important commentary as a Trump whistleblower by birth. His roots are in many ways about revenge against enemies, from Dad on up, and also down.

I mean that we have to be far more clear than, say, the majority of the Democratic party and especially its sclerotic “leadership” is capable of being, than mainstream media or its traditional measured pundits will ever be, to truly see the big picture that the atrocity of Trump as a person shields us from. The first deviation from the Constitution that Trump had going for him in his first presidency was a stark violation of the emoluments clause. He set up a huge gravy train where money flowed to his family and above all himself from his hotels and businesses nationally and internationally, where he even charged for putting up the Secret Service agents who protected them. He made deals of every kind, investments he knew would then prosper, and by blocking any measures to block Big Tech made himself the darling of the coterie of billionaire bros who now run the economy outright, from within the cabinet and outside it. This isn’t his financial genius, as he ran everything prior to his presidencies into the ground, into bankruptcy, or into fraudulence. He had to lie about being in the billionaires’ club before his presidencies made that a reality, and especially now, having succeeded in gutting regulations to their order, he has proven to the billionaires and to the US (we the people) that billionaires and democracy, as the former always knew and thus bitterly fought to defeat democracy in even shadowy form, are incompatible.

In “Indian Drawing Lesson (After Leonardo)” (1993), Ms. Smith depicted a stately buffalo with multiple legs that suggest motion, like the arms of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Credit...Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Many of Quick-to-See Smith’s drawings and paintings involve opening up cartography, or mapping, to its experiential or phenomenological roots; here an enormous buffalo in motion collocates present, past, and future in motion together in a map with literal legs. The spirit of place, the spirit of a place in time.

Share

It’s a perfect storm of intersectionality– excuse that triggering word, since seeing how things connect systemically is anathema to miseducated or non-educated Americans, even when they “went to Harvard”– that is responsible for this dictatorship, which Trump will happily then perform. His latest hope is to pirouette himself into a Nobel Peace Prize with one of the most hideous “peace plans”imaginable. Again, even a scrap of peace is essential if it will stop one more person from being starved or bombed or orphaned or tortured or killed while in hospital or emerging from the womb. But this genocide has been and continues to be massively profitable to Trump’s actual “base,”companies including MicroSoft, Amazon cloud computing, Meta, Google and Alphabet, Palantir and on and on. Almost, but not exclusively, immigrant based.

We can now add the government shutdown to the intersectional matrix. The Christian nationalist retinue have been working overtime for fifty years, and before that all through Jim Crow, to install white supremacy and Christianity as the sole religion, where church and state are merged. Russell Vought, although he looks like a nebbishy banker from Muncie or some such place, is a supreme zealot who is getting his way on behalf of Christian nationalism and white supremacy as head of the OMB, the Budget. Trump needed this wing to pacify his voting base as they experience the shocking reality that the rug has been completely pulled out from under them. Vought’s philosophy is that each patriarchal heterosexual white male-led family is entitled to precisely nothing, even at the local level, even within their communities. No fire departments, no water safety inspections, no ambulances or emergency services, no FEMA or even its state and local equivalents. It’s a terrifying vision we see being carried out already. Much of it is sold, including to new citizens, by the fiction that copious healthcare money is going to immigrants.

The wager or the bargain made with the billionaire class is as follows: Trump will use the government as his private department of emoluments. He and his family have made $5 billion dollars since January 2025 in their cryptocurrency venture and in huge global property development sales. It matters not a whit that he’s a demented vulgarian–that is a plus. And his squadron of billionaires, especially those such as Larry Ellison, among whose best friends is Benjamin Netanyahu, are now framing media, and educational and cultural institutions too, so that there are few options for dissent. To gauge the depths of the US’s plight we may need to borrow a piece of military slang that seems right for the moment. We are FUBAR. F**ked up beyond all recognition/repair. E’ffed are US.

He has declared himself dictator in his swoony, low-key voice, musing that “people like a dictator, maybe.” That has overwhelming consequences that are systemic and structural, not an outgrowth only of his psychopathy/sociopathy, nor the grandiosity of potential dementia. He’s succeeding in a weird way entirely on his performative terms, as the front man for a dictatorship that has been long waiting in the wings, built on structural foundations that have now broken through the supposed guardrails, which were always gossamer. The dissemination of information and the dissemination of data are now consolidated in monopoly hands, and this, not some “return to manufacturing” which will never happen, nor should it in that way–centrist Dems, we see you and we raise you–is the source of US economic hegemony, for the moment.

Hannah Arendt mentions that lies are critical to dictatorships, and that is eminently true. We’re seeing the morphing into dictatorship of a dictator-figure who has taken the route of both acting and then lying as a non-actor, which is different, and a unique prospect American society has offered. As Herman Melville showed us in all his novels, especially the one titled “The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade,” America is confidence game-adjacent, always. American confidence is always about the performance of lies. Sometimes it’s about swindling lies, rigging lies, tragic lies, lies of extermination. And sometimes it’s about fiction, about a special kind of narrative, the kind of lie that tells the truth.

A dictator cannot lie, in a sense, because the Dictator is the truth itself. Once that happens, and it sort of has, in the semi-demi way we live now where you can be a “little bit pregnant” and lose your life by fiat of the state, the counting up of his manifold lies in every speech or post is a colossal waste of time, and I’d argue, a deliberate one. Where oh where are the lies of yesteryear, dutifully compiled by Glenn Kessler and other journalists? Recently the BBC, put together a four-hour recited litany of his lies to accompany Trump’s state visit to the UK. Who could watch that or even read that, unaccompanied with a statement or a narrative about how even one of the lies became a lie. What was its true-r shadow companion? And why? Lies compiled are inert, dead lies like flies in amber. Then, for parity, these are usually accompanied by “lies” told by the other guys, as if these were remotely comparable. Like snowflakes, lies told have and always will evaporate, instantaneously, because it’s what’s underneath the lies that is never or rarely reported or remarked upon. Majestic liars like Trump count on this–their life is made of lies, and as confidence men they sell their lies as themself. This has worked well.

Truth has a shelf life when it lies buried by lies. Truth is not a correction to an error of fact alone, it’s a narrative, an opposing narrative, that needs to be told when the lies are thick on the ground. Lies–as bald-faced and bare as Trump makes them, just plain audacious lies–are the currency of dictatorship. It’s impossible to combat them without a narrative that acts as a whisk broom to sweep up a stinking pile of lies in one full swoop. You can’t annotate lies, anatomize them, or bury them once said. But you can address them with a narrative about things that are not lies, but either questions or positive possibilities.

Adam Cvijanovic’s mural in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

Adam Cvijanovic is the son of a Serbian immigrant architect, who worked with immigrant German architect Walter Gropius. Among many aesthetic resources he cites for the mural series that now occupies (I use the term advisedly) the Cathedral on 5^th Avenue, include homage to John Ford’s classic film landscapes, the X-Men, mural staging by Diego Rivera, whose tiny portrait appears, John Singer Sargent portraits, WPA murals for post offices and public schools with their resistant New Deal narratives, and Byzantine icons. The gatherings, too, seem to take place perhaps as a recasting of the Sermon on the Mount, with congregants and any visitors occupying Jesus’s perspective looking out at those who constituted his followers. Which would then become anyone looking on this message in a place of worship.

Cjivanovic says that this public art in the Church is meant to convey that “We are all in this together.” It is a deeply aware work very much meant for its moment, whose sentiments are eagerly blessed by the Cathedral’s Cardinal Dolan and its congregation. Resistant art on a huge scale at this precise moment. And at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, no less, where the “president” has sometimes “worshipped.”

And yes, its collective title is taken from the Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello song, “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?” The question of our times.

What the various strategic forces which have crystallized around Trump now make possible for him is to play dictator on TV, as in the old advertising line where a white-coated doctor–always a white male– winningly confesses “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” letting an audience in on the joke that also makes the sale. The fake doctor can still win our trust with his medical advice about the product being advertised.

Along these lines, Trump not only plays a dictator on our screens, and has since day one, but in doing so, has become the Dictator. He is the perfect hieroglyph of advertising, or if you prefer, its Moebius strip. As the cult leader even of those who in private deride him, he advertises himself, and that suffices in our upside-down world as the authority to dictate who or what is an enemy, and what is not need not be specified.

When the truth about the near and the distant past is made clear through a galvanizing narrative, then the truly traumatic deprivation and refusal of American governments, both Democratic and Republican, and now the red oyster cult of MAGA, to offer much of anything to the polity beyond the pabulum of individual bootstraps needing pulling up, becomes clear.

It doesn’t need to involve bashing anyone, it simply needs to be stated positively and truly, and in a way to reach people. To actually consider that there is a common good and what that might look like, is not hard to do, because it’s a passionate conviction for justice, for equality, for humanity. It has to be part of a narrative. Now, by and large, the execration of Trump as a liar, as a dementia patient, as an idiot, chiefly serves as an excuse not to offer new narratives that reach into the future, and by doing so, help to summon it.

If everything would be “okay” if he had never descended that “golden” escalator in 2015, or if it would be all right again if he were a person who could accept his failure to ascend the stalled escalator in the United Nations building with some humility– this actually builds him up. The general excoriation of Trump as suffering evident “cognitive decline”--when was he cognitively whole? Or perhaps literally insane, and therefore, as I heard one pundit declare, “it’s so frightening to know he holds the nuclear codes.” Yes, but he does now, he did from 2017-2021.

How do these cogent individual diagnoses, apt and satisfyingly terrifying as they are, begin to address which forces made the dictator’s sandbox so luxurious, and shunted him back into it. Those are systemic forces, and have to be countered with political narratives, economic narratives, historical narratives (as Heather Cox Richardson and numerous others do so well). Since we can’t ameliorate any of his manifold issues and shortcomings by listing them or deploring them, how do we move on to what matters, that is, unboxing the rest of us from this, um, situation. It isn’t dementia or narcissistic personality disorder, that caused it, it’s fascism’s long, slow playbook. And that requires many players, many institutions of global as well as US formation, many hallowed ideals that turn out to be shams. It wasn’t a “mistake,” that gave us Trump. It wasn’t a misjudgment of his “character.” Remember the days of “now, he has become presidential”? That’s the baloney of America’s individualist fetish talking. So is placing blame on those who elected Trump, as if their “stupidity” somehow caused it to happen.

No: an already oligarchic US found ways to foster, systemically, politically, performatively, someone who took his life lessons from McCarthy’s pal and lawyer Roy Cohn. It takes a big village–of hypercapitalists, of megachurches dedicated to political overthrow, of big tech “mystics,” of zealots and bigots and supremacists of many stripes who are organized, who run stuff, who have been ready in the wings to take over. And those who “fell for it” got played, but not just by a person, rather, by a system that advertised for him.

A showdown film for the ages has a bit of hard advice for us. In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Baby Jane, played by Bette Davis, a once successful child star who has long since lost her fame and fortune, waits upon her once much more successful adult film star sister, played by Joan Crawford as Blanche, as all around dogsbody and caretaker. The two are reduced to living in a house supposedly paid for by Blanche when a star, although Baby Jane remembers the house as purchased by her child star earnings, which her father controlled. When Blanche tries to break free and sell “her” house, Baby Jane mounts her revenge on her sister by leaving her helpless, having to crawl on the floor and beg for food and water. Blanche cries out at one point about the injustice of her plight, “If I wasn’t in this wheelchair, you couldn’t do this to me.” And the gloriously brutal Bette Davis, making her vengeance clear, responds: “But ya are, Blanche, ya are.” Video: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane

Let’s take a hint, too, from these amazing divas and the culture of narrative revenge that has made them legendary. We don’t want to be Bette or Joan in this feud–Blanche and Baby Jane end up lying on a Santa Monica (?) beach together at the end, penniless and vulnerable and probably near death, but sisters again in truth. We want to be Bette and Joan in this “feud” for knowledge, for truth, for justice. The truth in the film is that both of them were royally stiffed as women: by misogyny, by patriarchy, the studio system, aging out of the studio system, by beauty standards, by hard-nosed capitalism, even by Los Angeles rents and the general social failure to help the elderly, and lack of Medicare for all. When we attack Trump in isolation–and don’t get me wrong, we need to do so, or we’ll go mad–that is entirely insufficient: otherwise it’s all a version of Baby Jane’s tough talking: “but he IS bad, but we ARE helpless.”

Ask the actual questions, offer a narrative for the future, tell the actual truth. And do so in small and large ways, and preferably, with humor, wit, style and panache.

The burning of the Library at Alexandria, unknown artist

Photo of young Harriet Tubman. Photo: Swann Galleries

Part I: On Lies, Truth, and Confidence Men

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies... have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please”. Hannah Arendt

“You are an abolitionist, ain’t you?”

“As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean a zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody’s interest, and therefore, rousing nobody’s enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say.”

“Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.”

“From all this,” said the herb-doctor, still forgivingly, “I infer that you, a Missourian, though living in a slave-state, are without slave sentiments.”

“Aye, but are you? Is not that air of yours, so spiritlessly enduring and yielding, the very air of a slave? Who is your master, pray; or are you owned by a company?”

Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade, 1857

We start with Hannah Arendt’s incredible diagnosis of what the dictator, the autocrat, the fascist, must do to render the public, or much of it, helpless: strew the world with so many lies that belief in anything becomes impossible, until belief itself is reduced to believing in the Dictator, and thinking things through is a process unavailable to most people. It’s not that they are “stupid” to begin with, it’s that thought itself is in jeopardy. Thinking is the danger.

I’ve paired it with a quote from Herman Melville’s acidic last novel, set on board a ship bound for New Orleans, where a whole set of “confidence men,” such as ministers, herbal medicine swindlers, those selling investment opportunities and everyday business men and hustlers, converse in a wild ship of fools environment, where having “confidence in” another human being or in an idea or a belief is strategically stripped away and replaced by the masquerades of these confidence men. Trump is a confidence-man par excellence, selling himself as the only thing in which anyone can “have confidence,” because he melds all the confidence-man tricks: as if he believes in virtue and the Bibles he sells, as if he offers protection and safety against the untrustworthy world of villains, as if he offers freedom. The slice of dialogue above features an anti-slavery person who is not a “moderate” abolitionist, eager to ensure that no one loses any money. The herb doctor thinks he’s halfway to getting this Missourian to buy into his masquerade, and invest in some herbal treatments, when the tables are turned and the Herb doctor is accused of being a slave himself–a company man, par excellence. The “moderates,” for whom we could substitute the entire Democratic party establishment, are “invaluable understrappers for the wicked man.”

Back to our reigning Confidence-Man recently, advancing his agenda of “confidence” on the cusp of declaring martial law. Speaking to a silent audience of the highest military officers, generals and admirals in the U.S. military, summoned from their command posts across the globe for a command performance by a flexing dictator, the nascent Emperor remarked on the absence of applause, and jovially encouraged alternative responses. The assembled were told that they could even walk out if they didn’t like his speech, although then they would be “out of a job” and even a “future.”

I’m seriously saying that we are in the end zone for dictatorship. If you think proclaiming himself King or Emperor is far-fetched, tell me what this golden ballroom seating 900 people that’s larger than the White House itself and whose frantic building proceeds apace even during a government shutdown is for, other than his Installation. And it would be just large enough to seat most of his billionaires, close to their total number in the United States. It’s their ballroom, they paid for it, and the installation will also be their coming out party. But we the people who don’t and won’t accept this, and are legion, have to face that this is happening, not merely imminent.

Two recent speeches have sealed the deal. In each speech, and its following flurry and frenzy of commands and declarations, the guidelines were set for anyone, except for the fewer than 50% who voted for him, or were eligible to vote, to become an Enemy of the State. If you are or were ever an immigrant, especially if an immigrant of color, you are part of an “invasion” of Enemies. If you are a resident, or even a citizen, now an extremely variable category and no guarantee of anything as meager as due process or habeas corpus, and you dissent in any way, including by being a person of color, being LGBTQIA+ or an ally of all those letters and the queer plus sign too, an anti-racist, a non-Christian Nationalist, even if a white Christian, or an antiracist, antisexist, anti-monarchist or -dictatorship, anti-climate and habitat degradation, anti-fossil fuels, anti-misogynist, anti-Zionist, anti-oligarchy, you are an Enemy no matter whether your ancestors disembarked from the Mayflower, or if their presence preceded the Declaration of Independence for up to ten thousand years. Even more chilling, if you are pro-tolerance, pro-equality, pro-freedom of speech, thought, and even lawful action respecting others, pro-”environment” or in favor of addressing climate crisis, pro-peace, pro-Palestinian (which does not mean being anti- anything else), pro-innocent before proven guilty, pro-human flourishing: it’s curtains for you. You are absolutely an Enemy, as the generals now know. The Enemy within.

What’s So Funny about Peace, Love and Understanding at St Patrick’s Cathedral Photograph: Diane Bondareff/AP Content Services for the Archdiocese of New York

A suite of enormous murals by the artist Adam Cjivanovic now permanently graces St. Patrick’s Cathedral and transform its interior into a paean to immigration of all kinds and in all times, including the present, which is to be seen in the above left panel, those waiting now, interpolated by previous immigrants who watch over their arrival. To the left, the mural’s spirit shines upon illustrious and less-often remembered immigrants, including the 17^th century Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the first canonized Indigenous saint, and on the far right, the 19^th century benefactor to the Cathedral, Pierre Toussaint, a formerly enslaved Haitian man who became a society hairdresser and was deeply engaged with the Church and its diverse communities of worshippers. And Dorothy Day is there!

That speech to generals and admirals, awkward as it was, and although as addled and rambling as every speech, every press “conference,” every blast from his Truth Social is, definitively marked and crossed a rubicon. The Constitution is dead for our present government, in their eyes, and so now the American military and its key officers serve Trump personally, essentially becoming a private military force whose overriding charge is to locate and put down “the enemy within.”

The Enemy is fuzzy yet vast, including, it seems, every mild-mannered, even centrist Democrats as a “radical leftists,” all people of color except those who have pledged to MAGA, all non-white supremacist nationalist Christians, including one presumes Pope Leo, all immigrants or persons on visas, however documented they may be, or if undocumented, doing the work of the nation, innocent of any crimes other than providing crucial labor and services. The terror on the streets, and it is real terror that is being meted out in Chicago, Los Angeles, in the detention camps and elsewhere, now has the justificatory rhetorical link the administration has wanted to place any and all dissenters under the charge of “terrorism.” The draconian hellscape applied to the non-existent “immigrant invasion” readily spreads to those not only protesting and assisting those criminalized by ICE, but by extension to “the other half” of the voting public.

That enemy is Us. That is, to deploy the pun that only works its diabolical magic in the United States, we have been told the enemy, and He found that it is U.S.

Adam Cvijanovic in front of his mural. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

As Cvijanovic explains, all the murals celebrate the ongoing social contributions of immigrants past and present. He also states that the representational style was a deliberate aesthetic choice, since the U.S. doesn’t have a long history of cathedral and church art. “This would be retrograde in Europe.” It’s meant to prompt the next wave of U.S. church art. The mural depicts various first responders in the left panel, and a multigenerational bevy of Irish immigrants, whose original church of welcome in New York City was St. Patrick’s. Above float some of the angelic and holy figures seen as apparitions in the Irish town of Knock in 1879, who accordingly bless the emigrants beneath them.

We are a nation of immigrants; we have always been a nation of immigrants even before there was a nation. The Pilgrims etc. disavowed their immigration by claiming they had found the promised land, but that’s a political story. And it entailed demonizing the inhabitants of that stolen land, something that is again fashionable and locks us in with Israel’s preposterous cover story of exterminating “Amalek,” as the Bible foretold. We have now been put on notice, the enemy is the US. We enemies, “terrorists,” citizens of no or full birthright whatever, are to turn around and face the barrel of a gun because we don’t accept a past that never existed, won’t give up as a nation any notion of a future containing either liberty or equality, and certainly may not expect the free pursuit of happiness. Unless we are libertarian billionaires willing to toss a few ballroom bribes into the cauldron.

A detail of “Gifts for Trading Land With White People.” Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times;

This a small section of a 14-foot wide mixed media painting of 1992 by lauded Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, garlanded above its painted collage section by the detritus of dangling candies, football team merch, and other mass-marketed “Indian” flotsam. It hangs in her installation in the Whitney Museum of American Art. She died in February, 2025.

The above might risk seeming as if things are worse because now it’s U.S. citizens caught in the ICE nets too; I mean no such comparison. Rather, it’s crucial to see that the immense terror going on is all of a piece, a theater of cruelty ratcheted up to obviate some of the pesky demands for “evidence” or “due process” that nonetheless the autocrat ignores.

To bracket that breathtaking line in the sand, in other words, the announcement that henceforth the loyalty of the military itself is not to the Constitution and country as such, but rather to the absolute power and demands of its supreme leader, we also have the United Nations speech that preceded it.

There too, despite the demented asides, the petty furies about the travertine floors he would never have installed had he been given the remodeling contract way back when he was building shitty casinos, the malfunctioning of his teleprompter (who could ever tell, in any context, what constitutes a “malfunction”), the enforced walk up the escalator on entry–caused, it later emerged, not by a UN plot to embarrass him, but by his own crew filming his glorious ascent, his wretched awfulness isn’t purely responsible. No one could ever want to take him off the hook, it’s just that in many ways it is helpful to the administration to have the debates remain focused on whether he is “well” or not. Immaterial! This causes people to ignore what has already been ironed into place, what is already being pursued on a daily basis, and systemically.

Every note of his fathomless narcissism and cruelty was sounded at the UN, and nonetheless, the line in the global sand was drawn. Irrefutably. The United States has no future commitments to any global projects, and in fact, will honor no global laws or treaties except those of its own leader’s wishes. And that means none. (But he does “love the UN.”) By telling the assembled UN delegates that their “countries are going to hell,” our budding dictator declared that the race to the bottom in terms of climate catastrophe is a chimera, a figment of the imagination, and won’t be tolerated. The punishment will come in tariffs or outright overthrow or extrajudicial killings.

International waters? Don’t make me laugh. Venezuela who? And no, while this latest “cease fire” brokered “agreement” is, if it cuts off genocide by just one hour, devoutly to be wished, for Trump the Palestinians will always be expendable as a people, to be driven off even their open-air prison land of Gaza (it was a British Tory who rightly called it that), out of their refugee camps, and uprooted from the West Bank, their land taken for increased Israeli settlements such as those funded by the Kushner clan.

Ms. Smith in 2023 at the opening of “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. At left is Kaywin Feldman, the gallery’s director; at right is Deb Haaland, the secretary of the interior at the time. Credit...Shannon Finney/Getty Images

The Trump administration seeks to use National Guardsmen from volunteering states (Texas anyone?) in support of ICE raids and under the supposed provocation of “insurrection” when such raids and arrests are met with protests. The narrative of Indigenous land and its ongoing inhabitants is neither acknowledged nor respected.

It’s one of Donald Trump’s favorite words, in what is a very shrunken lexicon: “beautiful” is his highest accolade, from the “Big Beautiful Bill” to “beautiful” breasts to his showing off of the “beautiful” gilt-spattered walls of the Oval Office re-do.

This note is not about criticizing his non-existent taste, nor excoriating him for his literal crimes in designing and now perhaps building at lightning speed the “Grand Ballroom” of his Versailles wet dreams, dwarfing the White House itself. Nor for his fashion crimes against self-tanning products, men’s ties, and the color red. These are the very least of his crimes and offenses and terrors. He’s a fascist, a dictator in waiting for the next Supreme Court “ruling” that he can, in fact, “lock us up” at will—squandering entirely what might be meant by “America the Beautiful.” No matter how aspirational that song title and slogan may be, in it dwell past and future hopes that mean the opposite of his cramped and sordid “beautiful.”

“Beauty,” in the broadest, widest sense, matters. And beauty is a form of justice.

Banksy posted this picture of his new artwork on the wall of the Royal Courts of Justice. It was covered up soon after. Photograph: Banksy/PA Wire

Obviously the work makes itself a ghost after it is taken down, a sublime after-image in the eyes of the world. The protestors being tried had supposedly committed acts of “terrorism” by peacefully holding up simple placards objecting to genocide in Gaza, supporting Palestine Action. Many of those charged were elderly, and employed as clergy and educators.

I’m taking “beauty” here seriously in a political, philosophical, and abundantly creative sense. I’m asking what role a revival of civic or collective beauty does or must play in countering and confronting and posing cultural alternatives to a sadistic regime of grotesque, violent, cruel “beauty.”

Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher who initiated the movement in thought later called “the Enlightenment,” broke new ground for beauty, for “aesthetics,”or the study of beauty, by reclaiming the grounding of beauty in a universalist critical faculty of mind. Not mere “taste,” whether good or bad, but instead a mode of apprehending reality, of apprehending the world, that was held in common by humankind, however different their apprehensions.

The Enlightenment, over the centuries, absolutely betrayed its initial basis, as Kant exemplified it, in these revolutionary goals of freedom and equality. We can’t paint Kant’s breakthrough with that tainted brush, which largely became a cover for colonialism and imperialism, its polar opposite. What Kant did do was provide the basis for seeing the making of beauty , or art, and the resulting perceptions of beauty, as critical achievements across cultures, time, and geographic space. This makes it an essential human endeavor, and for Kant, a liberatory one. Beauty links to justice, then, to giving the justice of recognition to something made or apprehended as beautiful, and thus essential, necessary, as a human faculty. And we now know that this extends beyond human animals to other-than-human animals, as the vast artistry and creativity of myriad species finally comes to light, and humans embrace fellow art-makers in species from fellow simians to bower birds, arachnidae to bees.

A really important part of Kant’s argument has implications for the present dark moment—he splits beauty, lodged in or enveloped by a containable form, a form that has beauty because of its limits, off from what he calls the “sublime,” something that exceeds limits. Rather than evoking pleasure, which beauty does in apprehending its form, the sublime often begins in feelings of terror, the fear caused by not being able to perceive the limits or even any coherent form. “The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and it consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence evokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality. . . the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”. I think we can relate to Kant here.

The sublime could be evoked, in Kant’s time, by a landscape scene of chaotic Alpine mountains where a beholder’s vision couldn’t get a foothold. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a novel that blasts open the division between the beautiful and the sublime, setting many of the most intense conversations between the Creature and his maker, Victor Frankenstein, on Mont Blanc, one of the favorite mountains for sublime paintings.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog Caspar David Friedrich German ca. 1817

The Creature is practically born as a sublime artwork exceeding human limits, with parts and pieces assembled from multiple genders no less than multiple ethnic sources, hanged prisoners, and non-human parts as well. The Creature accuses their maker of having abandoned his progeny, down to the very crime of never naming hum, with full justice on their side.

When Victor Frankenstein first gazes on his supposed creation, he finds the sleeping Creature very beautiful, in an overtly erotic way, praising its lustrous long black hair, among other things. It’s only when, like Sleeping Beauty, the Creature wakes up and opens its eyes, gazing directly into those of its Maker, its Father, its Suitor, that Victor is seized with “horror and disgust,” two major emotions the sublime can bring forward. Victor looks into the face he has created and is stricken by terror when it looks back at him with love. The Creature exceeds limits, yes, but it’s only when his sublimity asks for the justice of recognition of who and what he is—and finds it utterly lacking—that they find themself alone in the world.

In Victor Erice’s 1973 film Spirit of the Beehive, a scene from filmmaker James Whale’s 1939 Frankenstein is projected in the cinema of the small Spanish town, locked up under Franco.

The end of the novel creates another sublime artwork, visible to no merely human eyes. The Creature has finally caught up with Victor, on a doomed voyage into the Arctic, only to find him dead on board. The Creature decides to go by sled over the ice, presumably to the North Pole, where they announce to the ship’s captain that they’ll commit suicide and light their own funeral pyre. Whether or not that’s literally possible, it’s a plan for a great unseen art work, making a flare and dark smudge across the frozen wastes very much like a sublime signature against the white polar background. The signature of a fellow creature denied justice for its very existence.

Later in the film, a man the little girl in Erice’s film believes to be the Frankenstein “monster” is discovered by her, actually a partisan against fascism hiding on the family farm. In both films, the “monster” becomes both friend and ally, a sublime pairing of two vulnerable and oppressed beings.

There’s another reaction to the sublime by a conservative philosopher, Edmund Burke, writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution. He isolates the sublime emotion of terror, and attributes sublimity to the French revolution itself, as a horrifying if horrifyingly necessary repudiation of unfreedom and inequality, followed by what was called the literal Terror, as guillotines beheaded the aristocracy and then fellow revolutionaries alike. This, too, was the sublime in art come to life, where beauty’s call for justice erupted into a limitless terror.

We’re in a time where there’s a war on museums, on universities, on other institutions where art and beauty get adjudicated, discussed, displayed. That is terrifying to the dictator, and is very much not sublime. Many displays of beauty and sublimity are threatened and being criminalized—Drag Queen reading time at public libraries, for example. Or art that is blended and combined with justice for the natural world, or art that acknowledges that we are part of nature and not over and above it as dominators. It’s clarifying as a chance to take art/beauty/sublimity back in all its forms and limitless forms from a hellaciously commodifying art world and an often brutalizing art “discourse” meant to spark prices, rather than emotion, thought, sharing, justice.

Let’s think of beauty, of art and creativity, of the sublime as giving us its limitless powers of expression and transformation, even in an everyday sense. We need as many collective scenes or expressions of beauty (which can be ugly) and sublimity (which can have terrifying elements) as we can generate, when traditional displays of art are censored or cut back or erased.

Get beauty and sublimity as twin swords for justice in through both back doors and front doors, whether disguised as music festivals, parties, mass movie-going, gatherings, performances, readings, dances or raves, comedy shows and stand-ups and videos, ghost art memorials for what is lost, ofrendas in honor of the disappeared, park treks, lip-synching, star watching, facetious golden statues left in public parks in Washington, public readings of, say, the Gettysburg address, global match-ups of protests, contests and races against fascism, church choirs offering dedicated concerts, fashion shows around justice, power quilting, posters and emblems and sublime memes: that’s a new job or loving gesture or personal or collective act that truly sparks beauty as justice wherever it appears. Solidarity around art, beauty in the widest sense, is sublime because it terrifies the right people, who are absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, simply in that solidarity exists and is limitless. Make it beautiful again.

Anselm Kiefer, Fallen Angel

Keith Haring, Angel Icon

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).”

― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

Illustration of Palestinian woman grasping her olive tree about to be cut down and her land seized

Jump ahead of the time frame of 1899’s Heart of Darkness, to the formation of the U.N. charter in 1948. A key part of international human rights law, part of the post World War II Declaration of Human Rights that followed, the charter was created to encode the values that were meant by the Western nations to prevent a world war ever again, and to do so by making it clear and apparent that Nazism and fascism were absolutely against Western values and aims. On the legal side, this entailed setting up the parameters of universal human rights, which all those who belonged to the United Nations would then embrace. This also involved spelling out the legal terms by which a violation of human rights laws could be charged, at the Hague or within the United Nations itself, and its courts. One of the most telling words is “intention.” The intention to commit a violation of human rights must be found, on the part of individuals or institutions within that nation or government accused. That’s usually the slippery part, because intentions can almost always be fudged.

In the aftermath of WWII colonialism was explicitly rejected. That’s what the post-WWII Western alliance was about, in fact. Drawing up the International Human Rights laws, expressly forbidding colonial subjugation. That’s what the United Nations and its Charter stands on. Yes, I know, irony. But also, and increasingly, horror. Because all the elements of Colonialism are back, as justifications for the sundering of the global “order” under Trump.

The most important world event of the 20th century was beginning to take place or had already begun in many places by 1948. That is, decolonization–which was sometimes a slow process of diplomatic wrangling, and other times required revolution and armed revolt. No new colonies as such could be founded or claimed. The particular factors involved in the creation of the state of Israel were at variance with these tenets of international law, since these extended an already problematic situation. Colonial occupation itself is a violation of international human rights law, and a colonizing country cannot by law put down the resistance to its rule. But now “stateless” people who are essentially refugees on their own land, in their land, are at an impossible disadvantage. Notice that Trump’s ferocious deportations are about creating stateless people, sending them to countries in which they have no status whatsoever. His setting up of concentration camps across the U.S. also portends this for “enemies of the state” who become stateless within their own nation, purely by his fiat, in his State of Exception.

The United Nations, declared on September 16th, 2025 through its Committee on Inquiries that Israel is unequivocally, and intentionally, carrying out a genocide in Gaza. (Of course this has been known and agreed upon by many other bodies of inquiry since 2023, but that the UN has finally weighed in is crucial.) This means, of course, with the full backing and complete military and financial support of the United States, and equally, with some profound exceptions, the backing of the UK and of most European Union countries. In the case of the United States, just as it was under Biden’s presidency, the armamentarium is supplied in full and without any questions.

The US, in particular, is making a huge profit from the genocide by way of its leading tech oligarchs and their companies–Microsoft, Palantir, StarLink, Jeff Bezos’s cloud computing arm, etc. At a minimum, this has led to horrendous distortions in our body politic and to the single worst humanitarian, political, and ecological catastrophe of 21st century times.

Side by side with this is the terrible predicament of how to mount a significant opposition to what is happening under Trump–ordinary people are doing the best they can with protests, marches, local and other races that are still being held, and with what is still a majority overall rejection of what is happening in Gaza. And many, many worthy commentators and new sources of news and of narrative now exist. But the vocabulary, the narrative, is still expressed and repeated by mainstream media, deeply compromised as they are themselves, in terms that essentially accept the White House as just another presidential administration.

One aspect of this paralysis is that a moral and ethical vocabulary has to be linked to broader stories. Many of those resisting are doing it–the Fighting Oligarchy rallies under Bernie Sanders and AOC are an example, the mayoral candidacy win by Zohran Mamdani is another, the highly important news outlet Zeteo under Mehdi Hasan does it, as does stalwart Democracy Now–because none of these people or groups or organizations erase the mention of Palestine and the fate of its perhaps as many as 200-500,000 civilians killed and being killed and dying of starvation and injuries right now. The “return of democracy” scenario alone is a relatively weak narrative and ethical pivot for remedying the ills that afflict us, especially because the last person to try and fail to articulate this was Joe Biden. Genocide in real time is incompatible with “democracy,” or even with an attempt at its renewal. A horror this vast cannot go unheard, unseen. And it should be apparent horror sparks horror when done with impunity,

In Gaza, much of the world in the Global South and large percentages of citizens in the U.S., UK, and Europe have recognized the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people for almost two years. We don’t need a Kurtz to admit what is happening. Israeli officials are only too eager and proud to do so. The horror, the horror is subsidized by U.S. tax payers down to the last bomb. Palestinian society, its vast numbers of journalists (many exterminated in targeted killings that exceed any wars since WWII in total deaths) scholars, poets, film-makers, peace-makers, diplomats, so-called “ordinary people” who are renowned for their resilience, their eloquence, including that of the beautiful children of Gaza who dance, sing, and record their witness of these horrific truths, has been and continues to witness, to explain the truth, to analyse the horror, the horror in real time, before real cameras, with full voice. Masses of people know the truth, and act upon it: this horror is intentional, and its intentions are being condoned by the West.

We now have a United States where the fig leaf of Western values, human rights, or moral value does not even receive lip service, and colonialism is essentially touted as a good idea. Witness Greenland. Witness Gaza as a US “resort territory.” What this does mean is that protesting what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is a protest for what is happening here. No Kings doesn’t quite cover it–unless the kind of King one has in mind is long dead King Leopold II. If so, let the marches continue, and let the target be more than a supposed buffoon with an “orange” face, cankles, and bruised hands. Those are relatively impotent complaints, as if what was “wrong” with him is his “incompetence” and his age. No: he has declared in a fulsome voice his version of an essential plan: Exterminate all the brutes! Take him at his measure, at his actual word, as Charlie Marlow would.

Los Angeles Protest march, September 2025, Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus inscription

Italy’s largest cities (below, Milan) combined a Worker’s General Strike with protests demanding the end to genocide in Gaza.

The demonstrators blocked an intersection near the United Nations building in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday. NYC on Eve of Trump’s UN Speech today, 9/23/2025Credit...Carlos Barria/Reuters

― Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine

“If I had fled to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in a tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live?” James Baldwin, 1972

Illustration of Palestinian Girl at Art Exhibition in her refugee camp, Gaza

Part I

The journey up river to find Kurtz becomes a voyage into horror, as it becomes clear that Kurtz has “gone native,” in the racist terminology for departing from the norms of colonial power, setting himself up as the ultimate “chieftain,” another notion also premised in racism. Kurtz is not following the customs of the place, he’s cosplaying the colonial version of a savage African who would be king. His place deep in the jungle is surrounded by heads on poles, a fence of the beheaded who serve as warning of his power. He’s kept all the ivory for himself. Charlie finds Kurtz weak and dying, yet still keeping up the pretense of his majesty, and Charlie enters into conversation with him. Of course he does. But Kurtz has abandoned the imperial project, which is to keep the colonial machine running, even unto death. However, and this we can see today–every colonialist or neocolonist regime or project will generate a Kurtz, someone who has ostensibly “gone over” to the “other side,” but whose apparent defiance and adoption of renegade behavior only serves to underline the hollowness of the colonial enterprise itself.

Charlie sees the famous Report among Kurtz’s belongings in his royal hut, and reads this tissue of impassioned lies about what wonderful “civilizing” is going on, and how noble and good it all is. On its last page, in the margin of the report, and written with horrible intensity, is Kurtz’s final postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” This truth, the actual underlying basis of colonialism when all is said and done, blazes handwritten off the final page of his entirely bogus Report.

It’s a horrific truth, morally indefensible, a violation of everything that is supposed to make the West and their colonial nations superior, “civilized,” the very height of human goodness and intelligence and achievement. The latter is the only rationale for colonialism that will wash, except it can’t–because it is a lie. It all boils down to the actual ruthless endgame of colonialism. King Leopold II was given a green light, ultimately. He killed at least 6 million Africans in his colonial grab. The present DCR still pays the price in blood, poverty, and incessant warfare for his “Belgian Congo.”

Kurtz dies, and Charlie Marlow has to scramble back to his ship, to save his own life and those of the white people accompanying him. He grants Kurtz a tiny measure of praise after his ignominious death. In that blazing footnote, Kurtz told the truth. His report was a lie, his own behavior an outrageous descent into evil, but his last words in the footnote, accepted that all the high-flown pieties of colonialism’s civilizing mission were a lie, and in truth, were bent from the beginning on destruction, erasure, theft, profit, and ultimately displacement and outright extermination. Marlow bends toward him to hear his last words, and there is Kurtz’s agonized voice, declaring the verdict: “the horror, the horror,” his judgment on himself and the whole Colonial enterprise.

Charlie gets back to Europe, never to be the same. He’s a shattered being. But he did make a pledge to Kurtz, to go see Kurtz’s fiancee in the city, and tell her some kind of lie about his death. His fiancee is what western culture at the time demanded from its middle class white women, that is, that they remain the repository of values, religious and otherwise, that the society did not actually run on. They are left in the dark, speaking as the “conscience” for a West whose power enacts the exact opposite of its claimed values. These women live unknowingly on lies. She’s exactly like Kurtz’s painting.

The fiancee is never named, unlike Kurtz and Marlow. Her moniker in the book is “the Intended,” placeholder for the woman– the man’s intention in law makes the marriage, not her pledge to him. At the end of the book, the Intended begs Marlow to say more about Kurtz, and especially wants to know his last words. All she has to comfort her is what a “hero” he was. Charles Marlowe hates lies, and he will not tell one. How does he get around this, in a book revolving around Truth? Charlie says to her: “His last words were your name.” Charlie slips through a loop of language but does manage to tell the truth.

Kurtz’s last written words were his stated intention to stop all this lofty rhetoric and get down to what we really came for, i.e. to exterminate all these “brutes,” these inferior beings who got in our way when we took their land, when we took them away, when we destroyed their existence. “The horror, the horror,” his last spoken words, were what became of the tacit intention to exterminate everyone, if need be. His last words were her “name” in Western law. What lies beneath the beautiful words is the horrific intention–we’ll take all this as ours by right, even if it requires killing all you brutes, you human animals.

"Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labour with a black skin is branded." Karl Marx. part of his friendly correspondence with Abraham Lincoln

Nsala of Wala looks at the severed hand and foot of his five-year old daughter (1904). From photograh taken at Baringa, Congo state, May 15, 1904 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Part III

Charlie himself is depicted as ghostly, and sometimes “looks like” an ivory idol in the act of telling his story. It’s the colonial cultures that have denied their true idolatry, which is for unlimited money and power, and not at all the virtues the West claimed to hold dear: truth, goodness, even democracy, universal humanity, “all men are created equal.” Charlie proposes a challenge to his listeners and to Conrad’s readers at the time, in his embrace of the universality and equality of all humankind. This bedrock premise is precisely what has been recently stripped from libraries, museums, universities, public education, and public history.

All the whites he meets involved in the colonial project have sung Kurtz’s praises–he’s based on several real-life figures. An orator and a journalist back in Europe, he’s viewed as a man of incredible charisma, a great writer, a true genius of sorts. He’s been sent to the Congo to write a Report on the colonial venture there, with ringing praises of its benevolence, its goals as a “civilizing mission” to these savage peoples, bringing science and religion to a lost and howling “wilderness,” in order to raise up these non-humans as much as possible, out of the goodness of the colonizers’ hearts. King Leopold II commissioned many such Reports, although they didn’t convince anyone. And on the other hand, they also didn’t stop him or any other colonial power from their brazen, hellish subjugations.

Kurtz Painting of a Version of Lady Justice

An example of the prevalence of the iconic woman with torch, even for a film studio

Searching for Kurtz after rumors begin about his illicit behavior, Charlie finds a painting Kurtz had made in another trader’s hut. It’s a very strange allegorical painting, which features a blindfolded woman carrying a torch in her hand. Charlie sees right away what’s wrong with the allegory–while the Goddess of Justice is often pictured as blindfolded, carrying the scales of justice, she’s depicted as blinded to ensure her fairness. A blindfolded woman carrying a lighted torch she cannot see ruins the allegory, or inverts it. If she’s blinded, she can’t be carrying the light where it needs to go. The very idea of a goddess dispensing justice or truth to a culture is shown to be an illusion–the female figure can’t know where she needs to carry the light, and also can’t be sure herself that the torch is even lighted. There’s both nihilism and misogyny in Kurtz’s little artwork; it’s Charlie’s premonition that Kurtz has abandoned his imperialist tasks in favor of becoming a “king” himself, because he sees the lies in his former glorification of imperialism as Truth and Light.

We already know that the Statue of Liberty is Trump and MAGA world’s most hated monument. If they could blow up this iconic monument, I think they would. It’s not only the figuration of America as a welcoming female goddess, but also stands in for precisely the role, the attitude, of a welcome to immigrants, who will then comprise America itself. We dimly remember the poem affixed to its base, which has a complex history. Written by Emma Lazarus, an American poet who was involved, among other activism, in helping Jewish refugees fleeing from pogroms in Eastern Europe find refuge in the United States. She wrote a sonnet about the gift of the French-made statue to help raise funds for building its base. Only after her death in 1887 was the poem, “The New Colossus,” chosen as the inscription for the statue’s base, and its final lines highlighted and often memorized by American schoolchildren as they would never now be allowed to be.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, written 1883

“Mild eyes,” “Mother of Exiles,” “world-wide welcome,” “Keep your storied pomp! “wretched refuse.” Anathema! Heresy! Radical left speech. Instead: Bring on the ersatz pomp to the Oval Office, drench yourself in crypto and gold, and use the ferocious, hateful eyes and virulent scowl of your mug shot as an official portrait. Keep out–and get out!

Illustration from French Building for US 4th of July, tied in to immigration issues

“Trans Forming Liberty,” by Amy Sherald. Credit...Kelvin Bulluck, New York Times

The artist Amy Sherald was told this painting could not be included in her forthcoming Smithsonian exhibition, as “too sensitive”; rather than exclude it, she has cancelled the exhibit entirely.

Part II

What has changed dramatically since Conrad’s novel coined these touchstones for the modern condition, is the attempt to make colonialism or imperialism invisible, to omit or even to lie about the colonial pasts of virtually every modern European country, and above all the United States. The latter has kept an invisible empire going since before WWI, and then throughout the twentieth and up to our time in the twenty-first. The American Empire flies under the radar for most Americans, who are taught to honor the U.S. as the exceptional country, the country using its exceptionalism to promote the great values of democracy and so forth around the world. The Empire, by contrast, used its primacy to destroy democracies wherever they might crop up, since these threaten American economic or political hegemony. The public is largely only armed with a storybook or pledge of allegiance version of this, where the United States is a place of “liberty and justice for all,” and seeks to spread these goals worldwide. To this, much of the world, especially the Global South, has mostly agreed with Gandhi, who when asked by a Western journalist “what do you think of Western civilization, Mr. Gandhi,” replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

We’re now seeing, though, the return to the promotion of colonialist “values,” in the United States in particular, as a positive good. Colonialism was embraced by fascism and by Nazism, particularly as the junk science of eugenics and its absolutely false ranking of a hierarchy of “races” with “whiteness” at its pinnacle eclipsed the purely religious rationalization for its earlier forms. The spreading of Christianity to those benighted, inferior peoples who somehow hadn’t heard of it until guns were pushed in their faces was turbo-charged by Jim Crow’s “racial scientists” discovering, oh what are the odds, that all non-white so-called “races,” an invented category into which to pour this fatal nonsense, are inferior in “intelligence”--another bogus category–to White Male intelligence. (Note–white women need not apply, as all women have inferior intelligence to white men as a group.)

Heart of Darkness has a fascinating passage that shows how deeply connected now debunked “racial science” was with colonialism. As Charlie Marlow is interviewing for his job in Brussels, a doctor comes in and asks to measure his skull. One assumes this might be to compare Charlie’s Caucasian skull if he dies with those of supposedly “smaller” African brain pans. The doctor also coyly warns him about the likelihood he’ll come back insane, which apparently happens a lot to other employees of this colonial venture, and advises him in French to remain as “calm” as possible.

If you think this racial science is horrifically stupid, you’d be right, but it’s the actual basis for the cultural dismantling and erasure under Trump of achievements and contributions that don’t fall to white people, which are legion. And in case you think it’s only “MAGA” types who buy into this, such self-styled “geniuses” as Stephen Pinker of Harvard and JD Vance of the Vice President’s office believe that the pinnacle of “intelligence” is White and Male. “Transhumanism” as a goal, along with such “ethical” movements as efficient altruism, have their roots in the racist and eugenicist return, and these foul roots cling to AI in many guises. So the horror is not far behind. It’s intimately related to what we’re experiencing now.

Every facet of Colonialism has a new gleam on it, invoked casually as a justification for unspeakable, and internationally illegal, acts. What used to be covered over with the rhetoric of Western civilizational superiority, and then after decolonization (not entirely complete yet), in such acts as the founding of the United Nations and of its Charter, became the consensus that Western values were the antithesis of colonialist agendas, is no more. What was seen, if not fully admitted, as predicated on colonialism’s grotesque racism, its materialist grabs that now literally threaten planetary survival as ecocide thrives, and its contagious ultra violence and state terror, has evaporated. That’s no longer seen as a horror, it’s an opportunity.

I’m giving an account of Heart of Darkness to capture its echoes and to show how “real” the horror bearing down now is, in its actuality and in its consequences. This isn’t about a crash course in literature, it’s about how narratives both constructive and destructive can circulate in and through the world, and offer us ways out, as well as ways to see through stories to avoid at all costs.

Western societies have revolved around binaries–whiteness/blackness/, men/women, culture/nature, superior/inferior, the West/the Rest. In every binary one of the pair is definitively superior. Heart of Darkness is told the way it is, with its amazing modernist style, because it refuses white/black binaries. Everything is a misty gray, a shadowy composite, a foggy journey. Conrad’s novel reverses and refuses binarism, so that whiteness is never a sign of superiority, virtue, or civilization, with blackness standing in for evil, ignorance, or desolation. The neat and tidy divisions of the Western world into rationales for “why we’re on top” fall apart, as the novel refuses a black/white world. Those binaries are readily adapted to a world of colonial hierarchy. Instead, as Charlie tells it, black segues into white, an overall grey blots out binaries, and the Truth is revealed in darkness, not in light.

Charles Marlow, Conrad’s main character, is an outsider of sorts: he’s pretty down and out, rather than rich and self-satisfied, and anybody reading the work can spot his untreated–untreatable– trauma from way off. His trauma comes not from what he has suffered as a victim of colonialism, but rather from what Colonialism is, and how he both witnessed and participated in it.

Little do his companions know, Charlie will seize on this sailing opportunity (he doesn’t have his own yacht) to talk and talk, and in so doing, to show them all, and his haunted self, the depths of their complicity. A complicity that is then shared by the readers of the book, not because we the readers are evil, or are literally involved, but because we too live in a fatally compromised modernity whose true colors we must examine for the dark truth. Marlow shares with his elite fellow sailors how he found out this horrifying truth–he lived it–which he now carries. Once he recognizes it, he quits his commercial sailing life, and devotes himself to spreading the word: not in my name, not by my hand at the tiller.

Charlie is willing to see what is actually happening, even though it’s misty and unclear and complicated, and to call it out, even at the expense of no longer being what those aboard the Nellie at first call him, “a jolly good fellow.” By the end, he’s a messenger from hell itself, and a prophet from the future. “The horror, the horror,” is what people will call what has been done in all their names. If they ever hear the story.

Charlie’s motto, after all, is “I hate a lie.” What happens when the lies uncovered are those inconvenient truths that lie behind the ostensible values and the goals of society one lives in? What is left for the man who “hates a lie?” Only to tell the tale, not exempting himself from participation, although he didn’t realize what taking his Belgian job would mean. And unlike Charlie, the men on the yacht Nellie are funding and driving the enterprise of colonialism, as a leading banker, a financier, and a “gentleman.” Charlie is trying to talk to prototypes of Musk, Wall Street and hedge fund billionaires, the oligarchs and power brokers of their day. It’s a desperate, one-way conversation we the reader are asked to overhear. So mesmerizing, so appalling, so suspenseful: we wonder, what did Kurtz actually do? And how is it possible to forget the actual millions killed outright, through starvation, and punished for simply living with the amputation of hands and feet, by King Leopold II’s decree? Charlie’s message: No one gets out of hearing this scot free , untouched, “innocent.” And “we,” in his case, the British Empire, are doing the same things.

What Joseph Conrad, whose real name was Konrad Korzeniowski, was writing in this first modern(ist) masterpiece in English, was that modernity was pinned to the map of colonialism, so to speak, a global heart of darkness of genocide, subjugation, mass exploitation and worldwide violence. And that this horror was not admitted, not recognized, but instead covered up and rationalized by all the Western colonial powers. Konrad, before he became Conrad, was born in occupied Poland to revolutionary parents who sought Polish freedom from Russia. After they were imprisoned, exiled, and finally died, his uncle Theo living in Paris as an exile took him in, but Konrad by the age of 16, although bright and well-educated at home by his uncle, wanted to see this blighted world for himself, and became part of the merchant marines as a sailor.

Konrad wasn’t part of a wealthy elite, wasn’t a British gentleman or a “gentleman” at all. He was at first a talented freelance sailor, whose employment took him all over the then 85% percent of the world that had been colonized by the Western powers by 1900: places like colonial India, Indonesia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, and Africa. And when he saw that in some sense he had been a colonialist gun for hire, although never wielding a gun, and that colonialism was the greatest lie on the planet, he was forged in his identity as among the greatest modern writers world-wide. Konrad couldn’t be a “revolutionary” himself, unless one wants to count him as one in his writing, as I do, because he was a stateless person, a refugee in France, and unable to go back to Poland because it was occupied by Russia. Years later he became a British citizen, and did a careful dance illuminating the rapacious British Empire in his writing, but an absolutely clearcut, outspoken one. (He never became wealthy or even financially secure, never won any great prizes.)

Neither Konrad taking a sailing job to Africa nor later his character the British sailor Charlie knew it at first, but they had inadvertently joined up with the most rogue version of colonial power among all the varieties of colonial horror going on. King Leopold II of Belgium had established his own private colonizing mission in the as yet “unclaimed” Congo region, whose enormous profits–in rubber, ivory, precious metals, and unpaid vast slave labor all flowed to him personally. It became a literal holocaust.

Leopold’s private Empire killed millions of Africans in an unrelenting barrage of devastation, slavery, displacement and imprisonment, and over a short period of time. Later, as a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, along with Mark Twain, William James, and other writers such as Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad tried to fight back politically too. King Leopold was called up to explain the horrors of his domain to a Council comprising the European colonial powers. It was hard to stop him, since his self-justifying excuse for his personal corruption rested on the same justification that the other national imperialists used for their nation-state Empires. They were all joined in arguing that colonialism was a benevolent or beneficial attempt to civilize savages, to spread enlightenment to inferior and benighted people who were wasting resources and profits, and as non-Christians, were mired in “utter darkness.” They were Other, sub-human at best, already cast into outer darkness.

In Conrad’s novel, just as in the “real-life” Belgian Congo, its inhabitants, as they lie dying on the ground, having been worked and starved to death, are identified only as “enemies” and “criminals.” Not by Conrad or his novel, but by the actual colonizers. As Leopold then argued, the natives were indeed the enemies of a vastly superior civilization, a white European one, inherent criminals of inferior race, and barely to be counted as human. It’s a short jump to the present characterization of immigrants or even citizens as “bloodthirsty criminals,” and of the so-called “radical left,” which can and does mean anything, including anti-racism, as “enemies of the state.” The colonial logic of subjugation and extermination by fiat is drawn from an archaic Colonialism that now operates digitally.

The statue was set on fire last week in Antwerp. Credit...Jonas Roosens/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; after thousands signed petitions to remove all King Leopold II monuments, it was removed in 2020. BLM protests in the US spread to Europe and urged a confrontation with its Colonial past

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Walter Benjamin

Part I

The words “the horror, the horror” have to be heard together, for the classic double tap of repetition, a doubling that seems to cry out to us directly, as if from a horrified voice. The voice emanates from literature in its truth-telling mode, a call-out to the world. Joseph Conrad’s elusive and often misread thunderclap of modernity, the novella Heart of Darkness, was shaped around a sailor’s tale, to offer the power of the spoken word put to use in a modern world of print and technologized words. The whispery dying words of a man called Kurtz are repeated much later in narrative time by a sailor, talking to a few British elite men as they take an evening sail on the Thames. That seaman, Charles Marlow, actually overheard those words at the deathbed of Kurtz in the Congo; we the readers of Heart of Darkness, just like the men onboard the small ship, hear the words said in Charlie’s voice as he ventriloquizes Kurtz’s actual whisper. In today’s terms, it’s as if the novel appeared on a screen and we could “press play” to hear an actual human voice saying “the horror, the horror” in our own ears. It’s the human voice delivering this haunting verdict, to other humans listening, about the world the West has made..

What the dying Kurtz was saying, what Charlie Marlow was repeating to his small audience of important men, and then what was transferred in printed words to the English-speaking readers of Heart of Darkness in 1899, later to reverberate in the world of literature as a cultural touchstone, was a Judgment. “The horror, the horror” is not a dry legal judgement you’d read in a document, not a thunder and brimstone religious judgment coming from some pulpit, but rather a social self-judgement on the entire enterprise of Colonialism. Conrad’s novel opened up the abyss of what white Western societies, the colonial powers, were actually doing in their colonial takeovers all over the world. “The horror, the horror” is spoken to an ultimate judge, not to God, but to the realm of Truth. Because the truth of things was, simply, a horror. The horror. Twice over. When a voice says something, instead of its being merely “written” on the page, we have to try to hear it as we read. The “horror” is a breath of shared spirit, and the word enters the reader as a listener and a witness, not as a passive bystander.

Colonialism/imperialism were beginning to be studied closely even then (in the later 19th century) as the economic and political juggernaut of the West, arising hand in hand with capitalism. Colonialism had been called the great “civilizing mission” to the world, demonstrating Western superiority as a civilization of incomparable goodness, benevolence, blessedness, and intelligence, and inculcating white supremacy as an inevitability, as other “races” were first invented as categories and then declared to be “inferior” to whiteness. To tell the moral and ethical and actual truth about Colonialism as the primary Western project was to break a huge taboo, to violate a cocoon of silence. This is the role of narrative, of literature, of storytelling. Heart of Darkness broke the taboo, it tore away what had been the silent agreement to pretend that Colonialism expressed Western values at their height, and was motivated by the highest values.

Illustration: Colonial Map of Africa circa 1900, colored by Colonial owner

I’m drawing on one of the central literary narratives of modernity as a way to show the continuity of “the horror, the horror,” as it meets our present horror. Some of the major horrifying cultural narratives we are currently immersed in are deeply related to one another. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness shows us that Colonialism begins and ends in genocide. This same throughline connects our urgent contemporary horrors. It’s important to note that genocide extends as well to diminishing the culture, history, and life opportunities of a group or a people. The more things seem to have changed, the more adamantly they stay the same, especially when there is no reckoning, or that reckoning is retracted. Above all, “the horror, the horror” represents a shared feeling, an acknowledgment of inestimable wrongness.

Conrad’s “the horror, the horror” is about the violence, both actual and symbolic, convulsing modern society as the West went all in on colonialism. Conrad understood that war would become endemic to a capitalized, weaponized colonial world. He also knew what colonialism meant where it was practiced, in the “colony,” with its utter, intolerable, oppression of body and mind and soul. We can understand this extends too to an ultimately “postcolonial” world, when it includes the creation of a deliberately forbidden type of national state predicated on settler colonialism.

Heart of Darkness creates a narrative that is the opposite of the “hero’s journey,” using many key hero’s journey motifs and reversing them. The hero Odysseus visits Hades in The Odyssey, and comes back to tell the tale. Dante, the character in his Divine Comedy, travels through the levels of his invented Hell, passes through it to Purgatory and ultimately to Paradise. And even Jesus, seen as a hero, surmounts his crucifixion and returns from the dead. The deeper Charlie travels into his sailing job once he reaches the African coast and heads into the Belgian Congo, the deeper into Hell he is. Not because Africa is hell, or a “dark continent.” Because the genocide and ravaging destruction Charlie sees everywhere around him is a hell of Western colonialist making. And Charlie will not come through it, not get to “the other side,” because this hell is what has been made of the world by his culture, by the West, in short, and everything it has said about why is, also in short, a lie.

Some of us have heard the voice speaking truth unforgettably in cinematic form, as actor Marlon Brando, playing an American soldier named Colonel Kurtz, whispers “the horror, the horror,” in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. A faithful mapping of Conrad’s novel onto the realities of the Vietnam War and its absolute horrors, it elucidated the insanity of an imperial war costing at least a Vietnamese million lives, let alone the 52,000 Americans lost. The Heart of Darkness-based film allowed for a powerful counter-narrative (among many others) that exposed the war’s true beating heart of darkness. That defeat too gave the lie to the notion of Western and American superior values, just as Kurtz’s original whisper had done to the myth of colonialism as a "civilizing mission” bringing enlightenment to “savages.” The revival of the film in a meme by Trump’s staff, posted on Truth Social, indicates a reversal of its tropes, as Trump plays the role of Lt. Kilgore, a monstrous figure in the film, and twists the phrase “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” into an exultantly sadistic embrace of the “sweet smell” of deportations at the hands of his Ice police force.

Donald Trump's Sept. 6 Truth Social post with an AI image inspired by the 'Apocalypse Now' film

Right now there’s an uncanny dovetailing in horrifying ways, with all these elements of colonialism. We can start with the rise of fascism in the US, being consolidated this very minute, and its emphasis on deportations and the creation of concentration camps across the US. Next, to the killing of Charlie Kirk, certainly a horrible act of violence to be regretted by all, one that has been deplored and denounced by both political parties and the vast majority of the populace. In its aftermath, his tragic and unacceptable murder has led to his martyrdom by a wave of censorship of free speech, weaponizing his death to act against a so-called “radical Left,” and neutralizing the white supremacist, Great Replacement Theory, and Christian Nationalist views he held and promulgated in life, all rooted in colonialism. And the ongoing genocide in Gaza converges entirely with the colonialism and racism it proceeds from, still supported by the US, and equally a factor in the threatening and actual erasure of free speech.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”―Antonio Gramsci

Part IV

As bad as things are, This Blazing World is at least as much dedicated to finding the wonders of all kinds that abound. Many of them inhere in other people, in non-human animals and plants and processes, in wild wit and style along with endurance, resistance, building stuff and taking it apart. That’s how we build, how we gain stamina, how we rejoice. Always with a mind toward the informed “pessimism” we need to accept, which itself liberates an optimism of the will– meaning the agency of those joined together. The three pillars of solidarity.

The “forces of Life converge” right now in a Greta Thunberg way, our version of Joan of Arc, perhaps, in her green bucket hat and keffiyeh scarf. She has recently demonstrated, yet again, that climate action, climate crisis and climate restoration values are inseparable from taking steps to end the Palestinian genocide and what it entails: billionaire hateful men, fossil fuels to the max, extinction of land and extinction of humanity. On the Madleen, the first of the Freedom Flotilla of ships in a brigade meant to bring food, medicine, and sanitary supplies to the besieged people of Gaza, an entirely non-violent operation, she and the rest of the estimable “crew” were arrested by Israel and promptly deported. These fights are the exact same fight for a life in solidarity.

Note that among our billionaire overlords is Peter Thiel, of PayPal and now the insidious Palantir, which provides the surveillance capabilities that have made the Israeli genocide of Palestinians so horrifically surgical and targeted. Thiel is now offering Bible Studies classes to his credulous Silicon Valley ubermenschen, where he has declared to his students that Greta Thunberg is the literal “Antichrist.” I would have said the reverse, if I thought that was a meaningful category. However, his claim makes abundantly clear where Big Tech falls in this binary world view, where Hate and Domination are key, women of all kinds are inferior and the enemies of male self-love. Follow that radiant Thunberg image of the combination of the supposedly “separate,” individual “causes” that are in fact inextricably connected.

We’re now living in the Great Purge stage: considering oneself to be a global citizen is now dangerous, much less pursuing the ethical values of equality, trust, empathy, love, freedom, inquiry and curiosity. And non-violent protest of all kinds, in “democracies” that used to praise freedom of speech. These words are now anathema. Care for the world, the planet, and its interconnected creatures, habitats, species, environments, and their very survival, is stigmatized, criminalized, and done away with the ultimate violence of erasure. It’s a blazing world, all right. As such, This Blazing World has to tilt to the global rather than only focusing on the U.S. itself.

Lastly, there’s another “secret” reason for the title, This Blazing World, and it goes back to the Cassandra role of witnessing, and of pointing ways out and through the fire. Trailblazing British author Margaret Cavendish, a literary writer, scientist, political theorist, and feminist thinker before that was a thing, wrote The Blazing World in 1666 as a Utopia, the first of this genre from a female pen, and also simultaneously the first work of science fiction. Her utopian realm is led by a female Empress, who welcomes the Duchess of Cavendish herself–very meta-, to show her the Blazing World. Utopia is always a political genre; the Empress describes herself as a student and a teacher at once, delineates the job of an Empress as “to listen,” conceives the world as embracing horizontality, and repudiates hierarchy. Her Empress is no pie in the sky figure, but closely resembles someone like Mexico’s first woman president, democratic socialist Claudia Scheinbaum Pardo. That is, someone whose values are those of horizonality, multiplicity, modernity in education, thought, and science (climate science is her area, as it was for the Empress), freedom and autonomy for groups.

The Blazing World is a world blazing with the light of illumination and knowledge. The Duchess witnesses the Empress in wide-ranging conversation with her subjects, who are not there under any duress. Instead, she seeks to open up dialogue amongst the divergent species of the Blazing World: there are lice-men, worm-men, fish-men, and mammal-men, to name a few. Her role as Empress is as a facilitator of dialogue among -men to bridge their differences. The Empress offers a striking vision of horizontality rather than hierarchy, with a woman leader at the helm of an interconnected, utterly earthbound society. And one where more is more.

Contemporary illustration by Helen de Cruz of the original text of The Blazing World, 1666, Margaret Cavendish; the Empress’s “StarStone Chappel,” is depicted, with its blazing windows, where she preaches a gospel of love. The starstones give off a blaze without heat. From the Cavendish text, the Empress’s credo: “Fear, though it makes people obey, yet does it not last so long, nor is it so sure a means to keep them to their duties, as Love.”

This Blazing World pays homage to models of society that are seen as interconnected ecologies. Horizontality means that lots of different and divergent people can coexist in a loose affiliation that is strong because of its many strands. That is what can stand against systems of hierarchy. The utopian thrust of the book comes out of a focus on mutual storytelling, an act which becomes one of solidarity. Solidarity starts with acknowledging our equality within all this complexity and perplexity, as well as the differences in people’s pain, or historical heritage, or their solutions that have up until now been ignored or deliberately buried. In the blazing crisis pervading our world and all its beings and creatures, we take our solidarity from that mutual position. Solidarity takes place on the horizontal, across a boundary, heading out of bounds. Even the Empress is at one point in the book swept away by a river, having to swim to shore. Everyone is in the same boat, or lack of a boat altogether.

In one sense, Cavendish’s 1666 utopia The Blazing World, came true: women have managed in some contexts to be seen or to fight to be seen as equal, powerful, intellectually creative beings; interconnected ecologies as Cavendish describes the life world of the Blazing World are now seen as underlying every aspect of our world, from the microbiome in all things to the social systems and cultural models that best describe it; humans and non-human creatures are not machines, not mechanical, not devoid of consciousness, learning, intelligence of all sorts, and cultures of care; beauty in the highest sense is also a form of justice; politics need neither involve inevitable sagas of war, nor be stultified by hierarchy. The multiplicity and diversity of a population contributes the most value.

I’m not proposing any utopia as the answer for our plight, which is also the world’s. But the method of horizonality as a shift from hierarchy allows us to ask: who is being left out in this discussion? What blatant truth is being ignored? And, the key question now dominating our lives, Cui bono? Who gets the money, at levels beyond comprehension? Who has the power, at levels beyond comprehension, and why?

Wilde’s quote makes it clear that no single utopian notion is a stopping point. The goal in This Blazing World–in a spirit of empathy, outrageous love and creative generosity–is to make some maps. Maps that tell us where, and even what, we are made up of, taking place on common ground, with a future held in common. Map-making entails agency and action too, and joy and creativity, style and passion. We rescue common ground by embracing uncompromising and compelling mutual values until those are brought back to breathing, pulsing Life. And then, we do it again.

Double rainbow over the Sangre de Cristos; photo: Jennifer Wicke

Part III

The most important element of the truth that now stands clear as day before us is a non-negotiable feature of the approach This Blazing World will take on things. The genocide of the Palestinians taking place before the eyes of the whole world is due in large part to the United States, which is completely complicit in this appalling act. (And has been since either 1967, as some say, or even further back in backing the Nakba, the catastrophic expulsion of at minimum 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland, in 1948.) No oppositional group that does not acknowledge the absolute horror of this colonial, apartheid, and thoroughly racist state as it violates every dimension of “democracy” and international humanitarian law, unto the very extermination of an occupied people, can lead to the renewal of the rule of law and any hopes one might have for “democracy” in the United States. The failure to grasp this will doom any Democratic party that attempts to fight back fascism without seeing this atrocity for what it is, predicated entirely on colonial racism and total subjugation, and profoundly grasping the shared humanity that makes this an intolerable reality on our watch, with our money, with our own racism added to the burning pile.

Why? Because this genocide is about fascist values waved in plain sight, ignored by Western countries (but not all of them) in defiance of every rule of international human rights law, or the so-called “Western values” that for some in our Christian nationalist camp give free ride to their ghastly . I’m sorry to say that many of those who became media stalwarts by arguing that the U.S. risked fascism or might succumb to fascism–not all, but most–had Ukraine as their only example of a foreign situation that would demonstrate the grip of fascism under Trump. Ukraine’s plight is indeed horrendous, Putin’s invasion was unequivocally wrong and cannot be supported, even if NATO is a problematic organization. But to cite that as the sole litmus test, rather than to recognize a wholly-owned United States ethnic cleansing occurring on the world stage now, in the apartheid state of Israel, the worst genocide since World War II taking place in real time and with global eyes focused upon it–that is to fail our future before it has even gotten underway, and it is to ruthlessly align the U.S., no matter who is in “power,” with global criminality. All the breakthrough Democratic or Democratically aligned new candidates, with Zohran Mamdani as putative mayor of NYC a case in point, see this clearly, and speak to its truth.

The official definition of genocide is not only the killing of a people outright, in cold blood. It covers all the aspects of extirpation, from cultural genocide, to the expropriation of land and of the means of making a living, staying alive; it covers the denigration of a people’s history, its stories, its genuine ancestry (as in “the Palestinians do not exist”); it covers the deliberate destruction of their knowledge base–as in academocide, as in the destruction of the radiant universities of Gaza, its museums, its artists and poets, its libraries, its archives, its schools, its curricula, its worship sites, its rituals, its sacred sites and ability to worship; it destroys all its links to its natural history, down to its recipes and the foodstuffs necessary to make them; it debases above all its humanity in targeting children from birth, in torturing and imprisoning in, in destroying childhood itself, and the scared continuity on which all families and peoples rely.

Hind Rajab, 6 years old, graduating; found dead in a shelled car February 2024, with family members and two paramedics who had come to rescue her. “Will you come get me?” she asked rescue workers trying to locate her over the course of six hours. She gave her name to the rechristened Columbia Hall during protests; she gives her name to the Hind Rajab Foundation.

Notice the degree to which the fascism in place in the U.S. has already in many states and on federal websites, in museums and universities, public schools and libraries, archives and national monuments cultural genocide is well progressed. I write this in no way to compare U.S. conditions to what the Palestinians are suffering now and for 76 years. But the roots of this rise from the same soil: ethnic cleansing, erasure of women, hatred and exclusion of Others in any category, a relentless assault on thought, on art, on knowledge, on freedom. Our libraries are ripe for burning, our universities are decimated as citadels of knowledge, public schools that embrace and love all their students are already on notice: this will not be tolerated. The U.S. has been complicit every step of the way as Israel rained this down on Palestinians; now we begin to institutionalize it in America.

I envision This Blazing World as a collaboration, between myself and my reader(s), creating a community of exchange with every word. Equally crucial, though, is that it becomes a place to track the feelings of grief, disorientation, and literal trauma we share. Whether a reader is new to the shock of belonging to a global pariah nation, or has a long history of being spurned by an America now re-establishing those exclusions in “law” with violent impunity, This Blazing World aspires to share it. The world is pinning its dismay and anger, as it should be, on the trauma and genocide in Gaza, and what that means for the whole world. We should too.

This newsletter is modeled on free and even free-wheeling inquiry,with a passionate sense that people have grappled with different versions of this same oppression and suppression for a long time, and done so with courage, brilliance, artistry, love and care, invention and creativity. It’s more a matter of seeking out and finding common ground with those legacies, heritages, and existing communities, finding space for feelings as well as thoughts, for new things along with very old things that are new and required again. Culture matters as much as politics, as every act re-balances the ledger.

Part II

Sounding the alarm bell of fascism and autocracy as already present involves making it clear that the United States has already been a fascist nation. It’s not so much a question of “can it happen here?” but in what ways will it manifest again? The fascist grooves are worn deep in American soil, and in certain respects, the U.S. was a veritable pioneer in its homegrown fascism, able to offer tutelage in fascism’s best practices to the very regimes or leaders we tend to think of as having invented fascism off their own bat–to Mussolini, Hitler, Afrikaner apartheid leaders in South Africa, and one can go on and on.

The fatal American innocence that would make the above paragraph shocking or perplexing doesn’t extend to those many millions of Americans fighting for their citizenship, their vote, and their very existence, against fascist forces in the guise of the U.S. post-Civil War cavalry and its extermination project against the Indigenous in the West. Labor Day is an appropriate time to note that the fierce animus against union organizers, members, strikers and often massacred martyrs trace a bloody line across the 19th and 20th century U.S. as literally fascist capitalist owners struck back, with private armies, private spy squads, and with the assistance of federal troops. The fascism against unions, for that is what it is, returns in the billionaire guise we see around us now. Among the chief reasons for the “Doge” fascist fantasy of “reducing waste in government” was the outright crippling of the unionized federal workforce of the U.S. through mass firings and outrageous calumny against all federal workers–for the paramount reason of being unionized.

The recent occupation of Washington, DC is many things, but certainly is a prelude to martial law. Apparently headed next to Chicago and no doubt to NYC and other urban capitals, such military occupations likely will be invoked as deterrents to the “midterm elections,” that now quaint expectation of normalcy, as they come due. Such occupations borrow from past U.S. practices in the South, but not only there. Making extravagantly hyperbolic declarations of the crime and violence in such places will unleash the military and ICE forces at polling places and on the streets. The Washington, DC occupation is a palate cleanser for this type of overt fascism, and here, too, it happened before. Woodrow Wilson, once president of Princeton University and a heinous racist from Staunton, Virginia, as president of the U.S. ruthlessly purged the middle and working class black workforce from the city they had forged in the aftermath of Frederick Douglass, and resegregated the city.

Wilson’s street level fascism was absolute in his treatment of Black Americans there and across the nation, lodging Jim Crow in the heart of the capital city. That’s not all Wilson did on his fascist escapades; Wilson militantly and violently struck back at women’s suffrage, imposing prison sentences even for marching in its favor. He tied the U.S. entry into WWI to fascist police squads searching out those who had not “contributed” to war bonds, and to women who refused to volunteer for U.S.O type “entertainments” for servicemen.

It’s important to remember that Woodrow Wilson screened D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, as the first film ever shown in the White House, shortly after its premiere, in February of 1915. Based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1903 novel The Clansman, the film celebrates the emergence of the KKK to right the wrongs caused first, by the victory of Union forces in the Civil War, and second by the loss of national “honor” during Reconstruction, figured in the film by a rape committed in the nation’s capital by a Black male politician against an American sweetheart, the white actress Lillian Gish. The film had aroused national condemnation upon its release, by the NAACP and in many states where it was banned on grounds of its racism. It proposes a narrative of the recovery of American “honor” that is indistinguishable from current white Christian nationalist sentiments, and from Project 2025’s racist underpinnings. Adding to the complexity of this, Griffith’s silent film was immediately acknowledged worldwide as an extraordinary advance in cinema itself, despite its horrific narrative. The ways that Griffith’s told this benighted story, rather than the story itself, opened up film to an array of techniques that remain central to it even now: cross-cutting, closeups, parallel editing, large-scale scenes, such as battle scenes. This exemplifies a contradiction, or paradox, that is being carried into our new fascist era, one of using the supposedly most sophisticated technologies available to underpin the most hideous and backward of social and political narratives.

The legal codes that made Jim Crow a tighter and tighter web of bondage were outrightly fascist; the racial codes were seen as breathtakingly effective by Hitler, for example, a veritable manual for how to vilify and constrain the Jews and others–socialists, women, labor organizers, Indigenous and nomadic populations, and so on, as opposed to “national socialist fascists.” Cultural control of universities, the culture of the press, of literature, film, and opinion, was at the heart of Jim Crow fascism and is returning with a fascist vengeance.

What is equally remarkable is how clear everything becomes from these depths. The United States is in the uncanny position of having had a hybrid “democracy” for more years than it didn’t have one; we’ve always been a volatile mix of stone age authoritarianism, glitzy ‘new fascism,’ serious attempts at having a democracy worthy of that label, and all of this shaken, not stirred. In other words: for a huge swathe of the U.S. population, citizens and documented and undocumented immigrants alike, for five centuries or 10,000 years (minimum), all of this is simply their history. And nothing radically “new.”

The Democratic Party as it presently exists is hugely responsible for this state of affairs, and will not save us from it in its present formation. It has had no message but neo-liberalism for a very long time. Of course there are now and have been visionary, astonishing public servants within the Democratic Party, but they are not in power, and are often not just unsupported, but primaried. The Democratic party as is, has to be remade, scrapped, even named anew. At local and state levels, a lot can still happen with insurgent candidates running on the Democratic line, but again, we can’t count on elections, not even for the proverbial dog-catcher. Simple anti-Trumpism or Never Trumpism will never reverse this grotesque “new republic.” Nor will supposed “moderates,” “centrists,” or their “Abundance” ilk. What remains optimistic here is that it's the people themselves who are far ahead of the establishment Party, and they are already listening to and demanding the new narratives.

Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Santa Fe, New Mexico, Sunset; photo by Jennifer Wicke

Part 1:

This Blazing World is an alarm. It’s an alarm that wants to tell the time with urgency, to provide a wake-up bell. It’s also a call to arms, not in the violent or military sense, but an alert to action that blazes up with our collective creativity and solidarity.

I’m starting this newsletter at the precise moment when oligarchy rampant has blazed into visible autocracy and fascism, just as these partners rear their hideous heads (again and anew), and “democracy”--if it exists– struggles to keep a mere foothold in holding back the flames. The blaze is both literal and metaphorical, made literal in vast wildfires, megafires of uncontrollable scale, intensity, and destruction across states and nations and continents. These apocalypses have become a stand-in for the blazing planet we’re all sharing, currently the hottest it’s been in 16 million years, with no hope under foreseeable conditions of lowering that global heat. And with that, the regime of flood, tsunami, glacier melt and unmitigable ocean rise accompanies the blazes, which often prefigure the worst damage water can do. This vista of the blazing world isn’t separate from the metaphorical plane, because things are now set up like interlocking Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls, in a kind of infinite regress, if those were scary dolls resembling the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Let me state a few premises of This Blazing World, and why it’s not simply a catalog of disasters. There’s an uncanny clarity in the air, along with the metaphorical smoke and mirrors of our time. You can actually smell its spirit. To put it as the remarkable Vandana Shiva, earth scientist, feminist, and leader of the global movement “Seeding Freedom,” did, in an ebullient short video, “the youth are rising, the women are rising, the Earth is rising.” There’s an opportunity to grab the truth and bear witness to it. This offers surprising reasons for optimism in what is, for shorthand, a global billionaire’s capitalist bonfire of the vanities. Their horrendous fire-dream, while not in danger of stopping anytime soon, is nonetheless sowing ashes forged in fire, little embers of possibility that can more readily spread and seed the truth to others. To us.

Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian philosopher and political theorist, who died in one of Mussolini’s prisons, his great books mostly assembled posthumously from notes and scraps smuggled out of his cell, gives us a major motto for the newsletter: “Pessimism of the mind; optimism of the will.” Optimism may seem to be delulu, positively crazy, but Gramsci’s kind of optimism is the only kind we can afford right now. This is an optimism of action (and articulation and representation are actions too) based on taking the full measure of the pessimistic truth about things, the often unbearable truth of what we’re up against, underneath which we can find the optimism to act, to bear up and to refashion the truths and the stories we tell, because anything less is wasted optimism. And wasted pessimism, too. We really have nothing to lose.

Original Cover, Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing-World, 1666

It’s much later on the fascist meter, the social collapse into dictatorship, than most people think, sadly. That’s neither “doomster talk” nor is it fatalistic nihilism to say so. Have you noticed what I might call a liberal “jinx model,” where if a commentator or critic or artist or activist draws a stark line in the sand, it’s as if doing so has set off bad vibes, caused people to lose their “hope,” as if hope were individual Vitamin D. Some of the very admirable spokespeople who have started channels or columns or newsletters to call attention to our plight, and then to suggest actions to take, have had this problem built in. They are either placing all their hopes in the Democratic party as it currently exists, just in its being a little more “forceful,” or in protests that, as commendable and heartening as these may be, are very soon to be proscribed by the martial law that has already arisen in Washington, DC. These protests will be criminalized soon, just as were the BLM, Breonna Taylor and George Ford protests, and have been the university and college protests of 2024, along with too many others to name here. We have to be able to see that coming, pessimistically, and yet take the gauntlet up again in the most passionate, widespread, and collective ways we can. And protecting people, insofar as possible, as part of advance planning.

There are literally no institutions left that can be relied upon to muster a fight against this, absent many admirable people in the court system, who no longer have a Supreme Court worthy of the name to shield them, rather one supercharged to do the bidding of the billionaires and corporations. They can beat back fires in singular court cases, but have no way to link these discrete judgments into the towering inferno of legal disapprobation we need now. The oligarchy is entrenched everywhere, the billionaire class (.01 of the oligarchic elites at 1.0%) is totally ascendant and the one class group that is growing, albeit measured in single digits. We await the announcement of the first trillionaire slouching toward the fires of hell to be born.

The universities in the main have caved, and the losses in academia and to public schooling are incalculable. America is nothing if it is not diverse, equitable, and ever increasingly inclusive. The cultural model for white supremacy and the fascist suppression of knowledge, because knowledge is dissent, proceeds at frantic pace in the evisceration of “DEI,”of museum exhibits, the teaching of history, the destruction of public monuments that recognize those other than white supremacists and remember that the Confederacy lost the Civil war; there can be no knowledge at all, in any field or in any private or public endeavor, when critical thinking is criminalized. All knowledge emerges from a theory of knowledge, from a criticality–what it means to question– that the smallest children possess in their rapturous curiosity.

We are most certainly squarely seated within fascism, although it is buttressed by a platform under construction for far longer than this Trump term alone, or its predecessor. And we are going to have to walk into this fire, the fire this time. Here, too, for This Blazing World, all of these forces and factors are connected.