“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Eyes and Eggs, 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat :: Medium: pencil,paper,cotton
* * * *
"Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?"
Happy 250, America! (Koni Nordmann - Workman Tony Soraci Kissing Miss Liberty During Her Restoration, NYC, 1984.)
* * * *
“You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment,because at least that means you had expectations”
― Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior
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“The election of the first anti-American president was caused neither by electoral whim nor by the good fortune of a charismatic madman. His rise was made possible by a coterie of criminals who do not want to be punished but delight in being caught. Flaunting their criminal impunity is part of the thrill. Their belief that they would never be held accountable is logical since they had never faced serious consequences despite spending decades committing illegal acts. In fact, they had reaped ample rewards. Now, finally, they had the greatest reward of all: the power to rewrite law itself.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
“But there is a difference between expecting an American autocracy and accepting it, and I refuse to accept it. Every loss we endure is a reminder of the gifts we still hold, and of our obligation to fight for a better future for the next generation”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
It is scary how quickly we stop seeing people. Labels become so loud that they drown out the ordinary, sacred details of a human life. A wife making her husband's lunch after thirty years of marriage. A father leaving before dawn to go to work. Three sons who learned perseverance because they watched it every day at their own kitchen table.
How is it that we've become comfortable talking about entire groups of people without ever wondering who they tuck into bed, who they're grieving, or what dreams carried them here in the first place? That should shame us. It should make us stop and ask what we've allowed to happen to our own hearts.
This essay was written by conservative, Bill Kristol. (He and I disagree about many things but his post reaches beneath politics and reminds me what decency sounds like.) :
"Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed by agents of our government while driving to work early Tuesday morning in Houston, was fond of telling his three sons, “Que siempre le echemos ganas en esta vida.” The Washington Post offers this rough translation: Give it your all, and never give up.
This is a Mexican proverb. But who hasn’t heard similar sentiments expressed by other immigrants from other places at other times and in other languages? We native-born Americans often have it relatively easy. We can be quick to grumble when the going gets tough. It’s often our immigrants who remind us that the better response to life’s challenges is unstinting effort and determined perseverance.
And so it’s often immigrants who remind us about the importance of work.
Ronaldo Salgado, Lorenzo’s eldest son, emphasized yesterday that his father was “a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work.”
It’s often immigrants who remind us about family.
Araujo’s son said yesterday that his late father was “a family man” and that yesterday was “the first day without him for all of us, and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work—the first time in their 30+ year marriage.” Araujo worked hard throughout his three decades in the United States so that he could support his family and raise their three sons. “He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said.
And it’s often from immigrants that we learn about generosity.
According to the Post, Araujo was known as someone whose door you could knock on if you were looking for work, and he would help you. “He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, father and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American Dream,” Ronaldo Salgado said.
And it’s from immigrants that we often are reminded about the importance of education.
Araujo and his wife had little formal education, but were determined that their three sons would go to college. Ronaldo told The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo that his father would remind him and his brothers “that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.” As Adrian reported, “Ronaldo, 29, graduated from the University of Houston; Lorenzo Jr., 27, from Tufts University; and their youngest brother is in college now.”
It is these young men who are calling for a full and honest investigation into why a peaceful and law-abiding man was killed while driving to work by agents of our government. It is they who are seeking the truth about what happened and asking the public to come forward with any new video or images that might shed light on their father’s death. It is they who are trying to hold our government to American standards of responsiveness and accountability and decency.
And it is our government that is stonewalling and covering up, refusing so far to provide any information at all about what happened Tuesday morning in Houston. It is our government that appears to be blocking independent investigations by the Justice Department or by local authorities. But not to worry: The Department of Homeland Security inspector general, we are assured, will add this case to the more than 600 complaints of misconduct by DHS employees that his office is now investigating.
We should be grateful that Ronaldo Salgado Araujo came to live here in the United States, to build houses for Americans, and to raise three American sons. Araujo was not yet an American citizen, though he had in the last eighteen months filled out paperwork and provided documentation, references, and fingerprints in an effort to regularize his immigration status. But he had lived as an American, de facto if not de jure, for the last thirty-five years. As his son said, he had sought to live the American Dream and to help others to do so.
His son also remarked, “My father was always a strong man and never wanted us to know if he was in pain. He never complained.”
Our current government, by contrast, is led by weak men who constantly complain, and who benefit from exploiting other Americans’ weaknesses and anxieties. Our current leaders talk endlessly about American exceptionalism, while turning us into an unexceptional country presided over by thuggish apparatchiks.
I dare say Ronald Salgado Araujo was a better American than they are."
Events on Thursday illustrate why each day of the 2026 midterm campaign will be filled with peril for Republicans who have tied their fortunes to a rapidly declining megalomaniac. We should never hope for bad news for the president because such news invariably means suffering or injury for the American people. But we must also recognize that every outrageous act by Trump and his sycophants causes more Americans to walk away from Trump and all that he represents.
Trump cobbled together a paper-thin winning coalition in 2024 by convincing Americans that he would quickly deport the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants in the US; instead, his armed thugs are literally assassinating and kidnapping law-abiding, productive, long-term residents of the US striving to comply with complex immigration rules. And his promise to keep America out of “forever wars” has turned into a “forever war” of his own making that has emboldened a terrorist state and inflicted financial hardship on the American people.
But there is more. As he inflicts pain on the American people, he is on a narcissistic binge of naming existing landmarks and monuments after himself while he hints that he will construct new monuments to himself by defacing the historical and cultural landscapes that belong to all Americans.
Some people are attracted to preening bullies like Trump, but most have an instinctual dislike for blowhards who make everything about themselves and their insatiable egos.
We can’t rely on Trump to defeat Republicans during the midterms. That task is ours. But we should recognize that Trump provides new fodder for attacking Republicans and presenting Democratic values and ideas in a positive light. As campaign consultants and party insiders snipe at one another over Graham Platner, we must remember that those family disputes pale in comparison to the stories generated by Trump and his thugs every day of the week.
The first story in today’s news is a tragic one that will unfold over the coming weeks as ICE struggles in vain to conceal the truth about another killing of an innocent American resident.
ICE agents kill a motorist in an apparent case of mistaken identity.
ICE agents in Houston shot and killed the driver of a van with three people inside. The agents were allegedly laboring under the mistaken belief that the person they were searching for was in the van. He was not. See The Guardian, Man killed by ICE agents not intended target of immigration arrest, DHS says.
Like other unprovoked ICE and Border Patrol shootings, the officers claim that the victim “weaponized their vehicle” by trying to run into or over the ICE agents. Per the Guardian,
It is a defense the agency has used in other high-profile incidents, including when Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis and in the shooting of two Venezuelan men in Oregon earlier this year. Video evidence contradicted both of these descriptions.
Although the facts are still developing, video obtained by Houston television stations appears to show an unmarked ICE vehicle pursuing the victim’s van, driving into the oncoming lane through a construction zone, and cutting off the van. See New video angles emerge of ICE pursuit through Houston neighborhood before shooting | kvue.com. (“Another video from a nearby medical clinic shows the ICE SUV, which had no visible emergency lights, appearing to cut off the van.”)
Although DHS says it is investigating the matter, similar claims in Minneapolis were used to shut down state investigations into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. DHS has already disclosed that the agents were not wearing body cameras, and ICE is detaining the only witnesses to the killing. These troubling developments suggest that DHS and ICE are attempting to suppress bad news or get ahead of it. Either way, Trump has unleashed a lawless, untrained, deadly force that is killing Americans and residents who are productive, law-abiding members of society.
Late update: The Washington Post received written statements from passengers in the victim’s van that dispute ICE’s version of events. See WaPo, Migrants who saw man killed by ICE in Houston say he did not ram officers. (Gift article, accessible to all.)
Per WaPo,
The three men who were arrested during an immigration operation that resulted in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction.
The migrants are disputing key elements of the Department of Homeland Security’s account of what transpired during a chaotic traffic stop in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood in Houston on Tuesday. They spoke from immigration detention with attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who shared their written and oral accounts with The Washington Post.
DHS released a statement hours after the deadly shooting saying that Salgado Araujo had rammed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle and “weaponized” his white work van “in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”
“That is a lie,” wrote Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over … there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”
As in Minneapolis, ICE and Border Patrol officers sparked national outrage that forced Trump to back down and fire key members of his cabinet and other senior officials. It appears that we may be headed for another showdown with the administration. As in Minnesota, we will defeat the Trump administration, and the battle itself will give Democrats additional reason to vote like our democracy depends on the outcome of the midterms. Because it does.
War resumes in Iran.
The second pillar of Trump’s campaign was that he would refrain from engaging in “forever wars,” which is exactly what his war on Iran is beginning to look like. Over the last five days, the hostilities between the US and Iran have been indistinguishable from a hot war. See NYTimes, As U.S. Steps Up Attacks on Iran, Prospect of All-Out War Rises. (Gift article, accessible to all.)
Per the Times,
The U.S. military says it sharply increased its attacks on Iran this week, as both countries extended a cycle of hostilities that has all but shattered a truce intended to pave the way to a long-term peace deal.
American military officials say they hit about 170 targets in Iran during strikes on Tuesday and Wednesday, 15 times the number struck during a previous round of attacks in late June.
Trump has no plan for exiting the war against Iran. The US bombed Iran for nearly a month and failed to beat the nation’s leaders into submission. The notion that additional sporadic bombing will accomplish what a months-long air campaign could not achieve is ridiculous.
Trump’s canary-in-the-coal mine, Joe Rogan, said on Thursday,
We might’ve f---ed it up by going to Iran. . . . This war is not something anybody that’s conservative wanted. Most people don’t want it, except supporters of Israel. They’re the only people that seem to be thinking it’s a good idea in this country. Most people are horrified by the idea, because Trump was elected [and] one of the pillars that he stood for, apparently, was that he doesn’t want any more wars.
See The Hill, Joe Rogan criticizes Donald Trump’s Iran war stance: ‘Might’ve f‑‑‑ed it up’.
When Joe Rogan turns on Trump, millions of young white men take notice. Trump’s net favorability ratings are already at historic lows. The resumption of fighting and the increase in gasoline prices that will inevitably follow will make it more difficult for Republicans in the midterms—because they have enabled and protected Trump’s highly umpopular war of choice against Iran.
Concluding Thoughts
I have included a new astrophotography image in today’s newsletter, the first in many months. See Daily Dose of Perspective. I did so for two reasons: I gave a talk at the Westwood Village Rotary Club on Thursday about my astrophotography (at the invitation of a reader, Bob S.) My talk reminded me of all the reasons that contemplating our place in the universe is a healthy and helpful practice.
More importantly, I am beginning to receive emails from readers who are once again turning away from the news. For some, it is the cumulative disillusionment of the treatment of Epstein, and the campaigns of Graham Platner, and Eric Swallwell. For others, it is the Supreme Court. One reader today said that the conspiracy to hide Mitch McConnell’s health status (or even his life or death status) was too much. She said she would continue to support the newsletter with a paid subscription but would stop listening to the daily audio and instead listen to books on tape because she just couldn’t take any more “fiction being paraded as news.”
I began publishing the astronomy photos during the very difficult and emotional debate over whether Joe Biden should step out of the 2024 presidential race. I published a handful of photos to help me remain calm during that period, and readers encouraged me to continue the practice. I published astronomy photos until I began publishing photos of daily protests from across the country, which I believe the mainstream media is ignoring. Candidly, I didn’t have the time to do the astrophotography and curate and publish the protest photos. The latter displaced the former.
But I hear the same angst and pain now that I heard in 2024. I believe that perspective is one of the most critical components to maintaining a healthy, positive attitude during difficult times. So, I will return to my practice of publishing daily photos of my astronomy. But the time crunch remains, so I will recycle photos from the last 18 months, interspersed with new photos taken on a current basis—as is the case with the photo of the galaxy known as Messier 101, included below.
I raise this point not to discuss my photos or time constraints. I raise this issue to say that if you feel the last two months have been particularly hard emotionally, you are not alone. It is also important to say that if you need a break, take it! It is far more important for you to be part of the long-term renewal of America than for you to exhaust yourself with continued resistance today.
There are literally tens of millions of Americans who are engaged in this battle. No single person carries the fate of our nation on their shoulders, so do not make yourself feel guilty over how much effort you can contribute at any given moment. To paraphrase Joe Biden’s speech at Union Station in November 2022, “We need just enough of us acting for all of us to preserve democracy.”
We are going to make it through the challenging period. Do what you can, help when you can, and trust that someone will step in to fill the breach when you need a breather. And try to keep things in perspective. Tonight, in my backyard in Los Angeles, my telescope collected photons that began their journey from M101 more than 21 million years ago—long before humans (or even apes) existed. That’s the light you see when you look up at the night sky. So, yes, the next two years will be rough, but we will ultimately prevail. If it takes two years—or three or four or six, that’s okay.
Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused to accept this caricature of freedom. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
The Fourteenth Amendment overturned that idea, recognizing the federal government’s power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.
“I don’t want my children to chase American illusions marketed as American dreams, but I want them to understand why things went wrong, to appreciate everyday miracles and not think them small, to have reverence for the good that endures and work to protect it, a republic if you can keep it, a family that would remain American whether or not America remains. We would love America out of defiance, and defy America out of love.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir
"What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it."
[From the Atlantic article 2016 "Opiod of the Masses" :: by J.D.Vance of course]
To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh.
Image: Alchemy - Mercury and sulfur personified / Unknown artist / Wikimedia Commons (from Wellcome Collection) / Public domain.
* * * *
The Great Work
“There is no absolute distinction between the alchemist and nature, between the inner and outer worlds. All are part of one creative, evolutionary process. Because of this alchemy has always possessed a spiritual dimension, since it is not possible to participate in the Great Work of Nature without experiencing a self-transformation. In order for the work to be successful, total participation is required. Alchemy is a comprehensive science of the cosmos in which both humanity and the larger universe are implicated.”
~ David Fideler, Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence.
All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man.
As posted on Facebook by Jim Cate of St. Petersburg, who owns an extraordinary archive of photos.
* * * *
Any Common Desolation
Ellen Bass
can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.
""Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, the Russian rooftopping couple from the 2024 Netflix documentary “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” scaled the top of the Empire State Building this morning, dressed in black with helmets and masks. Angela wore cat ears. They unfurled a black banner reading “when the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace,” a line commonly attributed to Jimi Hendrix."
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Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
By William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Finally a Federal Judge has publicly stated for the record that Trump and Vance, the elected leaders of the United States are bigots.
A federal judge in Ohio ruled against the Trump administration Monday, citing bigoted comments President Trump and Vice President JD Vance made about immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the White House to unfreeze immigrants' benefit applications, citing Trump and Vance's "outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election." These applications include filings for work authorization and green cards from people in the U.S. from countries including Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, and Venezuela.
"Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia," Marbley, nominated to the federal bench by President Clinton in 1997, wrote.
The judge quoted many of Trump's comments against immigrants of color, including the time he railed against people coming to the U.S. from "shithole countries" or when he claimed Haitians are "poisoning the blood" of our country. In his second term as president, Trump attacked Somali Americans and accused them of adding "nothing" to the country, and oversaw violent immigration crackdowns across the country, particularly in Minnesota.
Marbley also highlighted Trump and Vance's made-up accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's pet cats and dogs.
"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do," Vance said in 2024, which Marbley quoted directly.
"This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people," Marbley added.
The ordeal of dying must be memory, so much seeing and losing forms.
Friends whacking at invisible ankles and you.
The action is done in a dream. Who did what?
The closed book, the feet
asleep.
Proof that you lived is that you kept notebooks.
Are you collecting material for dreams, she asked the audience.
None of them remembered collecting or dreaming.
Nothing specific, that is.
For a book, no.
They lay down that night not looking for a real thing but for a way back.
A dream broke time apart.
You’re allowed to fear the coming hallucinations, she added.
You met me at the subway
where tracks led east to
North Station and on
up to Cape Ann.
We were almost romantic
Not knotted but erect
side by side passively waiting
for an apocalyptic collision to rupture
the grave tension between wholly conscious
ontological thinking
and the steel pebbling motion of tracks
sparked into action by a fiery touch.
We smiled our way forward perfectly even.
To be described as a note that separates from a song and blows away.
When you are down to nothing more to call onOR you can say I walked Manhattan from sundown to dawn.
So I have traveled the world.
I walked by foot all over dungeons to see a film starring friends—Americans.
The ceiling collapsed from heavy rain and artificial colors condensed
along the sidewalk.
One puddle looked just like the world-marble.
Time had thinned for gravity and a speeding apple
Since time was lightweight and invisible.
Manifest, unbelievable.
A faraway land
And a hotel I never visited
In a ghost-book half-erased
You could tell I was in love with a non-entity.
This was the hardest part assigned to me.
During my brief tenure I loved loving best
One who didn’t exist.
In the early days, it was the opposite.
Nature (all of it)
Did exist and loved itself.
Clouds doted on the sea, amorousness
Was in the air returning every wave and sigh.
The squirrels told the oak
To shake its acorns down
For the poor dirt to eat.
