Tag: historical memory

  • Everywhere, Centralia

    Everywhere, Centralia

    There’s so much to say about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio – all of it utterly enraging – that it is difficult to know where to start. That even before February 3, deadly chemicals were traveling through a residential town on the regular. The lack of basic safety regulations that might have prevented…

  • Fire in the Gap

    Fire in the Gap

    I cannot remember what happened. It is a hole, a blank spot, an infinitesimal chasm in what was my mind. The moments leading up are hazy, as if I saw them through layers of gauze.

  • I Dream a Parade: On Joe Strummer

    I Dream a Parade: On Joe Strummer

    There was a time when all I wanted to write about was the Clash. This, among people of my age group, is not exactly unique. I was twenty when Joe Strummer died, and, having already been raised on the legends of what the Clash meant – for punk, for music, for radical culture, for the…

  • The Least Incompetent Empire

    The Least Incompetent Empire

    What does Vladimir Putin want? The question is the obsession of just about every reporter, pundit and politician in the west right now. Virtually none of their answers should be considered reliable. They are spun from the same stuff as the worst Cold War paranoia. And make no mistake, the invasion of Ukraine is the…

  • The Alchemy of Militant Memory

    The Alchemy of Militant Memory

    Seventy-eight thousand. That’s roughly the number of names that cover the inside walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in the Josefov section of Prague. Each name is perhaps an inch tall, its calligraphy unadorned and neat, grouped first by town or region, then alphabetically. These are, it is stated upon entering, the names of all Bohemian…

  • Nothing Sane

    Nothing Sane

    Ill-fated power plant workers confirm that the reactor has indeed exploded by staring down into a deep, burning pit. Flames rise up with an unnatural ferocity. It looks less like an industrial accident. More like an Old God awaking from under the Earth’s crust. 

  • Twenty-Five Things You Can Call a Concentration Camp Other Than “Concentration Camp”

    Twenty-Five Things You Can Call a Concentration Camp Other Than “Concentration Camp”

    Pity the middling white ego. Noticing nothing but oppression as far as the eye can see. Having its drive back from the Hamptons interrupted by marching Black people, hearing people speak Spanish at the grocery store, encountering homeless people in broad daylight who refuse to decrease the surplus population. Oppression is positively everywhere for this poor, disgruntled…

  • Of Unfinished Revolutions

    Of Unfinished Revolutions

    Here’s a series of questions for my “fellow” Americans. Answer honestly. Do you really need to know what Prince Harry and Meghan Markle named their son? Should you even give a blue shit? Is the fact that you have twelve years to stop your city from sinking underwater in any way impacted by the naming…

  • Here In the Empire

    Here In the Empire

    Poway, California. The final day of Passover.  According to one eight-year-old child in attendance, the shooter aimed for the kids first.  The rabbi was shot through the hand, losing his index finger, and reports say that at first he attempted to continue speaking from the front. A member of the congregation, sixty-year-old Lori Gilbert Kaye,…

  • Ode to an Ancient Shark

    Ode to an Ancient Shark

    The world’s longest-living vertebrate. Older than Shakespeare they said. (Initially…) Can we say she has a memory? What lives inside her instincts? What imprints and echoes? “The Arctic as we know it” is over. Soon it will be ice free. The permafrost becomes impermanent. Waters warm. Gasses trapped inside glaciers escape into the atmosphere and the process…