I spent the summer wasted. I didn’t drink. I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t hang out or go anywhere. I only fell out longer and longer during quarantine, and yesterday, went out for junk food, came home and turned off, away from the horror and anyway back at the screen, laying on the floor beneath an upside-down American flag and sleeping a strange sleep pocked with ex-Lover and user dreams. I can’t even remember what it was I was watching when I fell asleep. But I woke up and wrote 3 paragraphs in 8 hours. I was at a loss and I’m still at a loss and anyway I don’t want to write off-the-cuff anymore.
It feels hard. It feels impossible and hopeless not knowing what to write about. A whole different pain than when it just flowed and I didn’t have to think about it. I just made deadline and got on with my week. I made word count while on shift and it was good. But now I have to think about it. It matters too much. I can’t just rattle these off anymore. Part I of The End of Summer In America went up on the Throat last week (and Part II) but it should’ve been published here. So I’m giving you Parts III&IV and trying to piece it all together. I may not be able to piece it all together.
Part III: Tornado Watch Weather
There’s nothing strange in America…about right-wing white men of limited good sense parading around with big guns, convinced they are saviors of the American way of life, when in fact they are obvious fools.
—Chicago Sun Times
Tomorrow morning is when tonight’s events become remembered rather than experienced.
—Saint Mike Tallon
This 17-year old just became the movement.
—Maggie Thomas
The only question is whether taking to the streets can break these vicious circles, or whether it is just another step in the decline and fall of a great power.
—Crispin Hull, The Canberra Times
APD has funding for gear, overtime, county, state and federal support and they can’t stop one madman’s car?
—Rebe Row
Summer’s end is the best time to be at the beach. Back home, end of August in a shore town is a cloying beauty, and suddenly desolate—no more kids or laughter, the waves are calm and the water’s warm. September on the east coast with all of summer behind it is a breathless rush of longing and dread. You’ve still got the sun in your skin, the blood comes up and falls out, there’s no cars on the street and the light ticks imperceptibly from gold to scant white. The heat rises up and is gone. The dusks are getting cool and school is starting soon. You should turn in. The warm days on the sand are done. Sunset is heavy, the dark’s getting thick and hazy. Winter’s coming but first the Fall.
2005 was a bad time to be an American but you wouldn’t know it living here. I took out Ironwhore that summer, in May and June of the Year of the Cock, when Nationalism was the norm. American flags and War culture and the New Dumb everywhere. You couldn’t talk about it. Protest against the wars we were getting thick in was unpatriotic, hysterical and fringe. Pulling out was impossible, Osama bin Laden would remain at large and the killing went pointlessly on. W’s 8 years were as bloody as they were misguided and our civil liberties never recovered. I bring up these years at the beginning of the Final Century because it was the last time it was this dark in America. W’s tenure was the 4th time our President was elected without a popular vote. These were my final days in Hostile City and I spent a lot of time in Stone Harbor, and down the Jersey shore, at 83rd&3rd.
There was a time you could get lost in this country. Load up your hash pipe and gas station mug full of ice and rye, burn down the backroads of Cape May County in a black Nissan Sentra with the Hot Snakes blaring. You didn’t want to, you didn’t have to go in for it, the rah rah rah and war drums beating, you kept quiet you could sideline it, get shitty on vakay over barfood and Sam Adams big boys and, barring an uncomfortable afternoon in a shoretown jail, you could lose yourself, never have to cede to sanctioned murder, you could object, if not conscientiously, by stealing American flags up and down Ocean Avenue, shock the squares and blow it out on the weekend and take the bus back to Philly on Sunday. You could make rent as a busboy doing 3 dinners and brunch at a bougie place on the row and split $50 three ways or make $150 for two hours on a Thursday night screaming your head off in a blues band at a bar in U-City. This would be around the age of 30 for me, when the hangovers were getting dark and the most dangerous thing out on the street was me, lucky and apolitical and falling in and out of love at the end of the American Century. Nefarious things were moving, nationally and culturally, grim and inhuman realities lurching behind heavy curtains of hegemony but eventually and like me, maybe—you stopped protesting, and yelling into the void and you got on with your life. Left the party and went your own way, finally, to dry out 40 miles south of the city, get your shit together and leave thee hated East Coast as the Phils won and the first black President got sworn in.
It was too easy to forget all the shit I was so mad about. Besides, it felt like we were winning with him. Healthcare and same sex marriage and legalized marijuana, but despite these cultural signifiers the cool swagger of the 44th President of the United States only ushered in the worst economic disaster since the crash of ’29. He talked cool and he seemed kind but we stayed at war and the truth stayed at large. Men like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange were on the run from Obama’s America. These were the harsh tokes and bad realities of the surveillance state, the ultimate down ticking of the American Century. Dr. West and Noam Chomsky tried to warn us and I did, though meekly, quoting greater men on the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden “This changes nothing.” and it sure as shit didn’t. The worst thing about Obama’s tenure is the confidence it gave the Left but the real shame of this country and every single one of us is the electoral college system.
Trump won with 3 million less votes than Clinton. The last time this happened we had 8 years of War abroad and on our own citizens. The War on Terror and the Patriot Act were costly frauds, missteps that cost our lives and freedoms. We went along with it, what else were we supposed to do, but now—with the needle swung all the way in and pointing red I wonder if we shouldn’t have kept quiet for the sake of our gracious host, should we have stayed rabid, went storming and for their throats, and most harrowing—was that the last time it really mattered, when I cared the most and had the most angst to burn? Did giving in then only get us here, the same jingoism with a ratcheted edge, a war cry with far worse and more horrible repercussions? We were all slack-jawed too, ain’t it, that night—“Can you believe this shit?” PR Girl Maureen Ferguson told me she cried until 4 in the morning. I ordered 150 copies of All in the Wind, silver ink on electric-blue, perfectly bound covers, thinking I could press on through but the truth is everything I feared is coming true. I got sick, watching the protest and murder in Charlottesville, and I stayed sick. It’s playing out now only with more acceleration. It’s impossible to believe. That day is here.
Part IV, The Fall
—Andrew Vaillencourt
‘No, this is just soup for my family.’
—President Donald J. Trump
There was hardly anything else left of the man who at the height of his career had fancied himself the ruler of the world.
—Volker Ullrich
I can feel this tornado watch weather down into my blood.
—Sarah H. Bloom
We need an unexpected event.
—Don Bajema
Perhaps we needed to be thrown from our bully pulpit and off the world’s stage ain’t it. The American Century had to end. These last throes though, are as dumb and base as our rallying always is—all we need to be united is an enemy. Before it was THEM and they were overseas and worshipping another God, War was something to get into a fight over drinks about, but now it’s us, we’re the enemy, each other and on our own streets. The new enemy, come to take away your way of life is me and you too Brother, no shit or kidding about your long automatic, your latin tattoos and Goebbels-esque propaganda. Division fomenting into either hate or fear.
Tomorrow this country could roll back to the 20th Century, we could find ourselves working around the clock to pay exorbitant medical bills or else just fuck off and die. People are enraged and roiling and the New Dumb would rather wage war than show compassion. It’s not news to me, or you or anyone that somewhere someone is always getting fucked and it’s usually by this country. It’s gone unchecked for too long, our selfishness and exceptionalism have gone too far. The beast is eating itself. Then again, if you ask the poor, the black, the disenfranchised, it’s been going on from the beginning. I have no solace for you, good reader, let alone a point of light for us to focus on. All I know is I’m getting depressed again. I can’t stay here and the American Century is taking its final turn. The shit is here, it’s landed and I’ve got to move or I’ll be crushed.
—Going For The Throat, January 19, 2017
That’s from MOVE, written the night before Trump’s inauguration and a far cry maybe, from the 3 months of the terrible summer I spent indoors with a horrible window to the world and watching in horror as we wrenched and bloodied each other and all the while inched ever closer to Dictatorship in the Year of the Metal Ox, 2021.
I took a crash Wiki course in American and International history to write this. It helped me none. The grim and greasy turnings this fuck and his people are perpetuating. The New Dumb on the wire as sudden arbiters of science and objective journalism. It looks they’re getting and staying armed, these weekend warriors of a crashed economy in a plague state. So I make coffee, I write now, everyday. It’s painful but no more than just waiting and watching these moves of the inchoate and indoctrinated. Was a time I told you to MOVE. But then I got sick and the world got sick and now I work full time to pay for healthcare and afford a $1,500 copay for a colonoscopy, see the G.I. and, stare at the draft window I am writing this in and while the NPR blathers all fucking morning long, the coffee grows cold. By the way, I shattered the glass pot on the French Press, so my beans aren’t coarsely ground anymore, but fine now and the truth is I always hated making coffee that way. I miss my stovetop espresso brewer and coffee like I used to make in the heady days when I could live my life unaffected and apathetic in the first years of the Final Century…when you could let the right wingers have it as long as you could get away. Down the shore and smiling more than you did in a decade working the bars in Hostile City. There was music on the radio and you were young and lithe and listless and with enough days on the hot sand to put the sun and salt in your skin. Browned and pliant, freckles blooming, piquant and horny and unafraid.
Before we ask our seniors to pay any more for health care, before we cut our children’s education, before we sacrifice our commitment to the research and innovation that will help create more jobs in the economy, I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well to give up that tax cut that no other business enjoys.
—President Barack Obama, Going For The Throat, June 29, 2011
Tonight, in dusk, everything fading and crumbling around me. I couldn’t finish this column. I couldn’t get my head together. My heart racing, palpitating—I went in to get my things but if I saw my coworkers it would be bad and if the cop on the way there behind me, decided to pull me over it would be, too. Our tension and our unrest, our grief—it’s all in plain view. In fact it’s the only defense, to move like an animal among animals, don’t get caught and don’t get the disease, don’t talk or listen to them, don’t look and stay 6′ away. We’ve been in too long with this terrible window to it all—murder and death and graft and deceit, happening in towns never much heard of before, Kenosha and Minneapolis and Louisville while our great metropoli shrink and shift, board widows and doors and put up signs. Tonight I’ve only the feeling of knowing it will never be this good again, the danger of looking back is this wisdom ain’t it, a spontaneous joy from out of nowhere that is instantly lost in shadowtime. How fucking great would it be to start a band when this is all over? I was thinking and then, I remembered and I felt it, in my gut—dread, the shit coming. Dictatorship in the Year of the Metal Ox, 2021.
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