2025
- If Gulf of Mexico = Gulf of America
- If America = Great Again
- Then Gulf of Mexico = Gulf of Great Again
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For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎
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.
“Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?” by Samantha Hancox-Li, Contingent Magazine, October 1, 2019, contingentmagazine.org… 🏳️⚧️
Diplomacy 101: Orange Oaf’s threats are going to lose their value as fast as Putin’s nuclear saber rattling has. It sure would be nice if Orangina deigned to surround himself with people in possession of expertise and experience.
Sounds like artillery fire. Guess I’m close to Aberdeen Proving Ground. That, or things in DC are escalating.
“When this is all over, Adams Morgan, Washington, DC” by Tracy Meehleib, April 8, 2020. Via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2020632316/. License: CC BY-NC-ND.
Orange Oaf is setting up a mediocre cadre of leaders who will only tell him YES. And why not? This approach has been working out real well for the bare-chested judoist of the Kremlin, who’s losing hundreds of thousands in Ukraine.
📽️ Watched an antifascist drama set in the time before the United States was at war with Germany, “Watch on the Rhine,” dir. Herman Shumlin (USA, 1943). Despite the title, it takes place around the U.S. capitol, except for an initial border crossing from Mexico and a train to Washington.
It’s hard to look at the coming constitutional crisis and not think of Prussia’s constitutional crisis of 1858–64. But instead of Bismarck, we’ve got Boris and Natasha role-playing leaders.
I don’t understand how tariffs are supposed to foster American industry. How is investing in a country led by a criminal lunatic a sound plan?
I don’t know how the Republican party comes back from their fascism, however long the affair lasts, without some thorough housecleaning and a major rebrand.
📽️ Rewatching “Mrs. Miniver,” dir. William Wyler (UK, 1942) for the first time in maybe 20 years. In its day it was an effective propaganda film in the early months of the U.S. entry into the war. Now, for me, it’s an escape from a world in which the Nazis are in Washington, DC, itself.
Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944
Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.
Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/
The one who deals the blow forgets.
The one who carries the scar remembers.
– Haitian proverb*
* Quoted in Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism (St: Martin’s, 2022), front matter.