Let’s see if the fragments written on scraps paper fit together
Like empires gone before, so shall we
I haven’t been sleeping well
This morning I woke up early from dreams that left me in a cold sweat. I don’t remember them very well, but I remember the other night, a dream of trying to find a professor with a cure amongst a rubble-ruined city. Rough looking, worn-out men lolled in front of homes that used to be very nice.
I wake up feeling like a cage has come down around my insides and is squeezing… squeezing…
A scrap of paper with nothing but names
It says George Floyd, it says Breonna Taylor, it says Ahmaud Arbery, it says Robert Fuller, it says—
Somehow the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is worse than the LAPD
Robert Fuller was found hanging from a tree. The LASD determined it a suicide.
You don’t hang yourself from a tree.
Deputies shot Andres Guardado five times in the back as he was running away. The officers then destroyed the security camera footage from his workplace.
The coroner released a statement against the wishes of the Sheriff’s office, confirming via autopsy the cause of death.
Every appearance by Villanueva is full of paranoia and threats.
There are endless allegations against his deputies and the Sheriff’s department’s response is to close ranks, engage in obstruction and secrecy, and justify their brutality.
Portland is all there is
For a week, I haven’t been able to look away from Portland, Oregon.
The feeling of a cage around my insides started when I saw the video of a protester with a boombox getting shot in the face with an impact round by the feds, who, at the time, was an unidentified agency. We now know that they’re Customs and Border Patrol officers.
The protestor’s name is Donavan LaBella.
We’re the same age.
His skull had to be reconstructed.
He was across the street with a boombox.
I’m watching consent being manufactured in real time
A week has gone by with Border Patrol terrorizing Portland protestors, using the shock and awe tactics of a military.
Protestors are grabbed and hauled into unmarked vans.
They come out with bruises and felony charges.
The New York Times ran an article posing the question of the legality of border control doing this. They came down on the answer of “yes.” I am watching consent being manufactured in real time and I feel a cage squeezing my insides.
The Rumor Mill
Word on the street is that Portland is a testing ground for further Federal occupation of cities controlled by Democrats.
Isn’t there still a pandemic?
Yes.
Fuck Garcetti
For reasons unbeknownst to the public but pretty easily guessed (it’s Business Lobbyists), Eric Garcetti threw the doors open to restaurants and bars much earlier than originally planned.
And then he has the temerity to shame people who decide to go to these establishments.
Eric, you can talk about being cautious all you want, but the mere act of opening the bars and restaurants back up is an assertion that things are close to normal.
Hospitals aren’t at capacity, but it’s been trending in that direction.
I get groceries every three weeks, sometimes four if I stretch them out good
I see my boss, I see Jinny and that’s it. I have spoken with other people via only computer or phone for so long.
Is this going to be going on for years? Am I going to have to be doing this for years because this country has failed so catastrophically in containing the virus?
A poverty holocaust
But who has to go to work during a pandemic anyway? It’s the “essential” service workers, and they’re not being protected. Hey, remember all of the hubbub about Amazon warehouses being death traps?
We could have nipped this in the bud by rigorous quarantining and financially supporting people.
Rent isn’t being canceled, people are out of work. The evictions are piling up, piling up, piling up.
Meanwhile, government money has been spent in a deluge to companies, not people. Get back to work at companies supported by government money because we don’t want to support you with government money.
It makes sense to me.
COVID is more than a 3% death-rate
For each death, there are countless cases of permanent damage. And the law of big numbers means that if it spreads through the whole of the US population, the dead and permanently injured will be in the millions.
The Rand Institute took a PPP Loan
You know, if someone passed me a satirical screenplay to look over, and it had events like that, like Disneyworld opening up, like the protection of Confederate monuments, the forcing open of schools, the rabid endorsement of Goya beans because the CEO likes the President, Trump’s speech about radical leftists in front of Mount Rushmore… I’d be marking it up with a red pen for being much too on the nose.
Having a globally interconnected economy is nice but…
The trickle-down of Reagan’s post-industrialization never came. Instead, the impoverishment of the inner cities and rural communities was all but guaranteed by the movement of manufacturing jobs overseas with more lax labor laws.
But it’s not just the already poor who have lost stability and advancement. Those who were born middle class find themselves at a much lower wage-earning capacity than their parents.
But there is so much wealth. There is just a distribution problem.
We could make sure everyone is taken care of, but instead, poverty is a character defect and worthy of a coronavirus holocaust.
Call your representatives
I feel like it’s so little, but I have been emailing and calling my representatives. I’m forcing myself to take a more active role as a citizen in Los Angeles because this is all I can do.
I can’t go onto the streets
Nor can I set a torch to the nation. We deserve to be nuked. We deserve for the San Andreas to open itself wide like a hell mouth and swallow California whole.
Black Lives Matter Boulevard
Symbolic gestures seem to be anyone in power is willing to do in the face of massive popular protests.
The “concessions” here in Los Angeles to the demands of defunding the police would be laughable were it not so fucking condescending. $125 million taken out of an LAPD budget of $3 BILLION. Not only that, it’s not really being taken out of the budget—it’s some shenanigans with discretionary funds, and it was approved by the LA police union which is highly suspect.
Vote, they say
I want to shake Pelosi and Schumer until their thousand-dollar suits rip to shreds.
Is this the best the Democrats can do? Tell us to go out and vote?
Nancy Pelosi recently made comments longing for any other Republican president and I wanted to vomit.
I love how our duly elected Democratic representatives harbor little more ambition than to be Republicans who don’t want to electrocute the gays.
Endless idleness
Why am I writing? Why the fuck am I writing plays in the middle of a pandemic?
Why am I not doing something actually useful? Why am I not harvesting food, or tending to the sick, or learning immigration law, or delivering food for a food bank, something actually useful?
Why does it seem like the best I’m capable of is putzing around on a keyboard every now and then for a play that can’t even be performed? What is wrong with me?
Sins for which were never atoned
This country is so fucking squeamish about atoning for past wrongs. We’re so good at either mythologizing them away to be never wrong at all or justifying that doing anything to atone would be impractical.
Reparations are owed and I will not be shaken of this conviction. The twin original sins of indigenous genocide and chattel slavery must be atoned for.
QAnon is the dumbest shit
And yet, it may be the most ludicrous conspiracy to ever gain traction (I’m not going to repeat it here, but here’s the Wikipedia breakdown), but it has proven to be a highly dangerous cult. There have been multiple murders by believers of QAnon, Trump has retweeted prominent QAnon accounts and the New York Police Union boss gave an interview… with a QAnon mug in the background.
November is the month when it all ends
I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories. But literal federal agents disappearing people on the streets of Portland like the Gestapo has suddenly made much more plausible outcomes that seem horrendously outlandish.
It’s been a horrendously outlandish year.
Suppose that Biden wins. Suppose that the rampant voter suppression isn’t enough for Trump to hold office.
Does Trump go gentle into that good night?
What happens when he declares the election to be illegitimate?
My mind only gets as far as that step: when Trump declares the election illegitimate, what happens?
And there my meager powers of foresight come crashing to a halt.
Does due process actually do its damn job for once and the ambitions of a dictator are a mere blip on our historical fabric?
Or does he seize control by any means necessary? Are there Kristallnacht purges?
My meager powers of foresight fail me beyond that. I have little faith that November will be a quiet passing of the torch.
American Dictator
A not insubstantial amount of the Trump base is in favor of this.
Anger paralysis
I can hardly think straight. I just get a circular firing of synapses, and that’s about the best that can be managed.
I’m more livid than I ever thought possible and I can’t seem to channel it anywhere. I am barely able to channel it into this blog post, let alone anything else.
Let it end
The American Experiment is over.
There are too many stresses. As COVID continues to squeeze the poor and the Feds grow ever more brutal and as Trump does whatever the hell he’s going to in November, the only conclusion I can draw is that something is going to collapse.
To that, I say: “good riddance.”
And as I first wrote those words, I felt the cage around my insides loosen.
The only words I can use to describe my current emotion is: “euphoric fatalism.”
The Great Change is coming in one way or another. Maybe it ends with my corpse stuffed in a pile of dead liberals, maybe it ends with a truly egalitarian society free of callous kleptocracy.
I am accepting of my place. These may be the last Decent Days for me. Whatever comes, I cannot be the agent of change. I am one of the billions who is swept along by history.
I’m burning the notes
I know the ashes will provide nourishment to the soil, somewhere, somehow.
Everything has to end sometime. Only then can new things begin.