Open to the public

    The nation is accepting

    responsibility for the

    care of Matthew Shepard

    today. This gesture to

    his surviving family is

    not to be disparaged. I

    know of no one who will

    regard this courtesy as

    equal to the obligation

    of every person living

    under the nation's law.

  

Has anyone ever known such bliss?

What heaven it is when reverberations
from Twain and Liebling echo down our
aural canal, with tirades against dem-
ocracy such as emerged from the post-
sovereign State of Georgia this week.

How wrong, how unjust, how beneath a
demagogue's dignity it would be, for
any of us to deny what hilarity must
be credited to Republican efforts to
suppress the vote with mechanisms so
indebted to torches and little hoods
as to make us gasp with raptest awe.

Pricelessly, yet exuberantly stuffed
with tomfoolery of halcyon days, the
torrent of fraud now pours from that
Party's gubernatorial candidate, who
labors at his day job to supervise a
fair election. Oh, children! All who
mourned, they missed the theft of an
election in Florida in the same mode
in 2000, must rise from their torpor
to applaud the most perfect thievery
of the ballot since Scalia rescued a
Bush to bring us the surveillance of
our patriotism. And to think, a wom-
an of slave ancestry is his nemesis!

But now, so shrewd is this luminary,
not to deride her gender or her race
for pitching the State into a pit of
universal enfranchisement, but rath-
er to blame the Real Malefactors, an
axis of San Francisco socialists and
New York billionaires. What, off the
top of your head, sounds more Jewish
than that, but the President's warn-
ing of malevolent international fin-
anciers when he gained his election?

Aren't they clever, our kindly ones?

ii  Eudora Welty, photography
    Home Before Dark
    Blacks expelled before sundown,
    every day of their lives, Jackson, MS
    1935


Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones
Harper Collins, 2006, 2009©


Victor Klemperer
I Will Bear Witness
  A diary of the Nazi years
  1933 - 1941
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998©

All the world knows who set the Reichstag fire

       The party that demanded

       a silencing of dissent,

       to reinforce its minor-

       ity rule in a republic.

Origins of Wednesday lxxxiii: Time to reboot

   With many soothsayers declaring now

   how Darius has bewitched all of At-

   tica, it's good to recall the power

   of playing fair, by summoning it. A

   contest can still be won or lost by

   an old practice: vote, November 6th

   

Home, home on the range

Has anyone else been noticing the
recurring burbling in the classic
cassoulet of nativist paranoia,
on the evils of pedestrian migra-
tion to this sacred melting pot?

It was not ever thus, of course.
Pedestrian migrations were cel-
ebrated, before the emancipation
of slaves, in regular compulsory
expulsions of undesired Americans,
to various deserts not yet covet-
ed by the boaters and their des-
cendants, for their oil and gas
or railhead potential. Through
it all, however, transit on foot
has marked a populace with disfa-
vor, stigmatizing the stroll as
an act of such outcaste indecency,
as to ostracize the practitioner.

Not since Andrew Jackson have

Americans enjoyed the Presid-

ency of so avenging an angel of

this cassoulet, as the incumbent

hero of its every white bean.

Famed for his devotion to ham
hocks, his adoration for the
white bean is reciprocated even
more ebulliently by the longest
to swelter in his marmite. His
great project, like that of the 
beans, is to sustain the horiz-
ontal layering of the cassoulet
against the vertical inevitabil-
ity of its burbling evolution.
This lends his passions a truly
fatal air, widely apprehended
by his cherished, sodden beans.

One senses, through the turmoil

this upstart Jackson brings to

the protectorate of white beans,

that there must be some obscure

complication in their resistance

to the laws of physics - beneath,

that is, their corruption of na-

tionhood and faith to conceal it.

Various gurus murmur along think-

tank lines, of North-South versus

East-West forces of upheaval or

renewal, depending on the bean.

But insofar as they cannot bring

themselves to migrate to a waste

land of their own, cannellinis

think only to hoist the marmite

from its flame, or by closing it,

enjoy the thrill of its explosion.

Simple operation of steam, really. 

Suppose it were Friday clxv: What is its frame?

Almost any movement, captured,

is from some perspective, a race

against time. I think the race is

a reluctance to part with the image

in itself, not any struggle with time.

Pedantry, generally considered

to reflect an undue concentration

on details of interest to no one else,

might from that perspective only represent

an anchorage in values beyond irrelevant time.

Is the permanent collection

of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

especially challenging to the untrained

eye, or are its concentric ramps a launch,

of a struggle for rapport with what one sees?

ii  Nino Migliori
    View from a train
      untitled color gelatin print

Fingers first, memory last

              

A friend wrote in the other day,

reminding one that politics play

only a part. At the end of it, I

agree, though they do take their

time, up front. These are photo-

graphs by the 20th Century Bolog-

nese master Nino Migliori, which

compose themselves as a sequence

in the direst crime of politics,

against which naïveté holds fast.

"The hands speak," was the title

of one of his exhibitions in New

York. Let it be known, they live.

Nino Migliori

Il Complanto di

  Niccolò dell' Arca,

  La Matière des Rêves,

  Cuprum, 

  Gente dell'Emilia

A singspiel for our times

Now that our fabulist President

has dispatched his Secretary of

State to concoct a libretto for

an abduction from an Ottoman ser-

aglio gone awry, all confidently

anticipate an enormous enhance-

ment of his original premise, a

band of rogue murderers infil-

trating one autocrat's embassy

in another's secured city, only

to chop the captive for lunch.

Much prettier music, much mer-

rier ribaldry; with a score al-

ready in the public domain, by

no less than Mozart. Ah, so much

to dazzle: who could rue the in-

cidental disappearance of the

corpus delicti? Take that, O.J.