2025
- If Gulf of Mexico = Gulf of America
- If America = Great Again
- Then Gulf of Mexico = Gulf of Great Again
🏳️⚧️ The U.S. federal government has opened public comments on its dehumanizing passport regulations vis-à-vis trans people. These comments will be public, so weigh carefully how much, if any, personal information you can safely include.
There are three different parts to this, but they’re all about passports. I provided the same comment for each.
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6771
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6772
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6773
'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)
"The Contraband"
"The Recruit"
"The Veteran"
The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1
The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2
From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.
The U.S.–Russia talks in Saudi Arabia have proven once again that Ukraine is ground zero for the war against democracy. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn’t give a rat’s ass about democracy—or ethnic cleansing or genocide. We’ve done evil before, but never so openly, stridently, or proudly.
The pope is ill. Who will Orange Ogre replace him with? Perchance himself? /sarcasm
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
– Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” (1940)*
* Quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2002), 21.
Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.
Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766
Who’s going to be the first cabinet member to go? Rubio because of the impossible negotiating position his boss and colleagues have placed him in? Hegseth because he looks even weaker and dumber than his boss on the international stage? Or will a natural or manmade disaster cost another their head?
📽️ I had fun watching the pre-Code “This is the Night,” dir. Frank Tuttle (Paramount, 1932). Its primary purpose was to be a bit racy and full of laughs. (Thelma Todd’s character loses her dress more than once, catching it in a car door, in a cabinet drawer, and on a fence…) The story begins in Paris, before moving to Venice. It is free of fascism, despite the Italian setting, but the incorruptible protagonist played by Lili Damita is clearly hungry in an early scene, a Depression-related circumstance to which the wealthy men appear oblivious. The comedy takes enough twists and turns that it’s not clear who will end up with who for much of the time.
Advertisement from The Film Daily (January–June 1932).
A barrage of stupid is making it nearly impossible to see or think clearly, let alone argue cogently and persuade. M. Gessen offers a helpful diagnosis in their latest, but how do we, the collective patient, develop a cure?"
“Daisy Bates takes a walk – Activist Daisy Bates picketing with placard: ‘Jailing our youth will not solve the problem in Little Rock. We are only asking for full citizenship rights.'” Ca. 1957.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Demonstrations Collection, image id 1953728.
Anders Puck Nielsen looks at the current U.S. administration’s (non)understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War and offers reasons for why we needn’t panic. Ukraine has more agency than the U.S. administration assumes. https://youtu.be… 🇺🇦
Make America a reviled laughingstock! MAARL isn’t as catchy as MAGA, but it’s more accurate. And it captures something of the vomiting sound so many of us are making.
Felonious Husk underlings fire bird flu, not realizing it is a crucial ally in their effort to destroy the country.
“Two Boys” by Getel Kahn, color print, ca. 1935–43. Note the books the boy in red has slung over his shoulder.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, WPA Art Collection, image id 5179323.
I’ve eliminated a lot of categories that I’d rather keep as tags, if my host Micro.blog had tags. While I wait to see if that ever changes, I need to reduce the number of categories still further. I had let their number grow because of the lack of tags, but it’s time to rein them in a bit.
The plot of “The Manchurian Candidate” relied on a convoluted brainwashing technique to get an American to attack his own country. Who knew that a simple venal carnival barker from Queens and a lunatic South African fan of Apartheid and Nazism could achieve a much more impressive result?
“Murray Hill Hotel, Manhattan” by Berenice Abbott on November 19, 1935, for her “Changing New York” Federal Art Project.
Via The New York Public Library, image id 458449867.
Despite Russia’s unrelenting propaganda, Ukraine is not a U.S. client state, and NATO is not a U.S. client organization, not even when the current U.S. administration talks as if they were.
📽️ Watched “The Deadly Affair,” dir. Sidney Lumet (UK, 1967), a spy thriller based on John le Carré’s 1961 debut novel, Call for the Dead. Quincy Jones did the musical soundtrack. Good stuff.