Monday, November 3, 2024

Several weeks ago, I predicted a Trump “buzzer beater” victory in the national election, and nothing has happened in the meantime to make me change my mind. If anything, a poll mentioned in an article in the Washington Post convinces me that he will be the one inaugurated as the next President in January, 2025.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/01/presidential-election-results-scenarios-trump-harris/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert

QUOTE: A Washington Post-Schar School poll last week showed 51 percent of voters across the seven swing states approved of his presidency. UNQUOTE

Now please notice that this is a poll of seven swing states. That poll did not measure what percentage of voters in the entire United States approved of his term in the White House from 2017 to 2020. My guess is that it’s around 45 to 47 percent. After all, Trump’s first term as President was particularly unpopular in several states with large populations. So while I don’t have an official poll to cite, it’s extremely unlikely that Trump could break the 50 percent barrier of first term approval on a national level. Why does he remain so unpopular? For one thing, he’s an incoherent prevaricator. Narcissism is the fountain of youth for compulsive liars, and Trump guzzles from it as if it were a diet cola.

I predict that Trump will win the popular vote in a majority of the seven swing states. In doing so, I repeat my original prediction: he will lost the national popular vote for the third election in a row. More people in the United States detest, loathe, and despise him than admire him. Unfortunately, the election rules are set up so that if he wins for instance, the popular vote in Michigan or Pennsylvania by less than 15,000 votes, he wins all of that state’s electoral college votes. A win is a win in any given state, and such an outcome could give him an Electoral College victory for the second time in the past three national elections.

I am terrified that so many of my fellow citizens want a tyrannical bully for a leader. Trump will proclaim, of course, that losing the popular vote for the third election in a row gives him a mandate to generate radical chaos in the federal government’s policies. There are a number of outcomes that are not going to be popular with those who voted for him, and during the next four years I will remind them of their responsibility for making those disappointments possible.

I can only hope that California does not experience its long-expected calamity of an overwhelming earthquake, since Trump will be even more contemptuous and disdainful of this state’s needs than Bush was of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or Trump himself was of those in Puerto Rico after their natural disaster in his first term. As for myself, I have only a smidgen of hope that I will be spared the attention of his assiduous, boot-licking lackeys. I hear their giddy algorithms of retribution already at work, singing of a vitriolic fascism.

*****

If Biden had announced, halfway through his term, that he was indeed only a one-term president, things might have turned out differently. VP Harris has done as good a job in running a three-month campaign as anyone could ask for, but Biden’s performance in the first debate ultimatey weakened the case for voters to choose a Democrat in the 2024 election. The blame for Trump’s return to the White House primarily rests on Biden’s shoulders and history will judge him very harshly.

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Exene Cervenka and John Doe performing at the Beyond Baroque Gala

Los Angeles is still feeling the afterglow of the corporate success of its baseball team. News reports claimed that one hundred thousand people, more or less, converged on the streets of downtown Los Angeles for a raucous parade of baseball players and team officials. I was happy for the exuberant joyfulness of everyone who was there. In truth, it wouldn’t make much difference to New York City if the Yankees had won the World Series. After all, that team has won over two dozen World Series. Unlike the Dodgers, the Yankees didn’t lose a World Series to a team that cheated in order; nor did the Yankees have to forego a World Series victory parade four years ago because of the pandemic. This World Series triumph allowed a city to release long forestalled energy.

Of course, for some people it takes an event on the scale of the World Series to distract them from the oncoming debacle of the national election. For those who are more easily calmed, there are two events this weekend that you should know about: the 2024 LitLit gathering, and the Beyond Baroque gala. The former is free; the latter costs $200 a ticket.

beyondbaroque.org

https://givebutter.com/c/beyondgala

Below are links to the vendors of print culture that will be in residence at LitLit, which is sponsored by the Los Angeles Review of Books. If you can’t make it to THE PIT, then browse these cultural outlets for some fascinating and intriguing books!

https://9vtbackslash5.com

https://www.826la.org

https://www.altaonline.com

https://www.lapl.org/angelcitypress\

https://www.artbook.com

https://www.as-is-press.com

https://colourbloccreativ.com

https://www.ediblela.com

https://errant.press

HOME

https://hatandbeard.com

https://heavymannerslibrary.com

https://hessepresse.com/home.html

Home – Alt

https://www.cindyrehm.com/hexentexte

https://insert.press/pages/about-insert-blanc

https://www.inventorypress.com

Home

https://www.legacyunbound.org

https://www.magrabooks.com
DISPLACEMENTS – Bill Mohr
https://www.magrabooks.com/books/displacements
Displacements
$10.00
DISPLACEMENTS features two previously unpublished prose poems, as well as a monologue and a sermon. If the mutability of collage, as Alan Wald suggests, engenders the poetic logic of prose poems, Mohr’s comic permissiveness tethers their unfamiliar juxtapositions with puckish vivacity. The other pair of pieces strike a more contumacious note in the narrator’s refusal to reconcile himself to a specious fate. In each work the lift-off of each sentence pushes aside not only what has preceded it, but the recoil of what might yet happen.

https://nueoi.com

https://shop.paperchasepress.com/pages/about-us

https://parallevarmag.com/About

https://rarebirdlit.com/about-rare-bird/

https://www.smc.edu/sm-review/index.html

https://www.semiotexte.com

https://www.slantd.com/our-story

https://www.catranslation.org

https://www.catranslation.org

https://www.whatbookspress.com/poetry.html

https://www.wordsuncaged.org

Home – D

Home |

November Poetry Curator Carrie Etter

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Caliban Chronicles: Special Edition

http://calibanonline.com/newsletter/CC37.pdf

Two weeks from today will be the final day that anyone can cast a legal ballot in the nationwide elections for which voting has already started. Approximately 16,000,000 citizens who are enfranchised, or one out of ten of every likely voters, has already made irrevocable choices. As I predicted a couple weeks ago, I believe that Trump is going to win a buzzer-beater election in which less than a total of 10,000 votes distributed across three or four states will eke out his victory. In those “swing states” Jill Stein will probably receive a total of slightly more than 100,000 votes. I do not make this prediction with any pleasure. Rather, I tremble as I write these words because that will mean the FCA (Fascist Christian Association) has triumphed. This cluster of American citizens wants more than Trump in the White House, however. They want an Ayatollah with a Crucifix to be be in charge of all matters: religious, social, and cultural.

These fanatics are not nationalists. As Ava Kafman’s excellent article points out, what I have called the FCA objects to the conflation of their religious agenda with nationalism. Modifiers matter, and from the point of view of ulta-Christians, nationalism as the primary keyword denigrates the only “deep state” that deserves our loyalty: the Kingdom of God. This is the cause that Jill Stein is aiding and abetting.

Trump’s victory in the Electoral College will be due in large part to his appeal to the MAGA legions of the FCA, which were his bulwark in the past two national elections. In addition, Trump has understandably gained the support of many working-class voters whose economic well-being has been ravaged by inflation. Trump’s narrow but decisive victory will also be due to the intransigence of Jill Stein in a buzzer-beater election. I fear tor the worst, of course. Jill Stein justifies her self-aggrandizement because she thinks her ideals are worth the rest of us enduring Trump for another four years. I actually loathe her more than Trump, who could at least plead that he is incapable of controlling his narcissism. Stein is perfectly capable of doing the right thing; she just lacks the integrity to do it. Nadar and she have done more damage to this country that Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell combined.

A fellow poet-editor, Lawrence Smith, has posted an eloquent appeal to all voters to consider the consequences of voting for a candidate who offers nothing more than a fantasy high of self-indulgent self-righteousness. I hope you will read his statement and take it into account as you cast your vote. I posted the link to his special edition at the start of this blog entry.

If you want a woman who is also a person of color to be elected president for the first time in this nation’s history, then this is no time to be voting for a woman who has no chance of winning the election. In case you wonder if she might have even have a million to one chance of winning the election, just ask yourself if she receives secret service protection. Of course not! And I can safely say that she will be finish yet another campaign without receiving a single threat to her physical well-being. Just as Donald Trump will have “absolute immunity” in the White House, thanks to her efforts, she has “absolute immunity” on the campaign trail. I’m glad has it. That’s how the First Amendment should override anyone’s temptation to abuse the Second Amendment. I only wish that I did not lose sleep at night as I think about the internment camps that Trump and his heir apparent have planned for people like me, who support “the enemy within.” Perhaps Stein’s real goal is to hope that she will be exempt from sharing my fate.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/magazine/texas-politics-billionaire-preachers.html

How Two Billionaire Preachers Remade Texas Politics
They control Republican politics in the state. Now they’re poised to take their theocratic agenda nationwide.

Oct. 2, 2024 Updated 8:41 a.m. ET
by Ava Kofman

Almost from the start of his interjection into the catastrophic dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, T.E. Lawrence most probably harbored a desire to write a book that could hold its own alongside other enduring memoirs of warfare. It’s doubtful that he anticipated how much the personal consequences. of being one of the originators of “special forces” would end up impinging on his imagined epic. His memoir tried to do too many things as a summation of his “ordinary effort” and the book holds its spot on one’s shelf largely as something to be read intermittently.

Lawrence was also a prolific letter-writer, and many readers enjoy the letters for more than just a glimpse into the daily life of an enigmatic hero; his correspondence prances through many moods with a puckish style worth savoring late at night, when one needs a literary aperitif. His single best increment of writing, however, is not to be found in his letters, but in a posthumous book, “The Mint,” which was a diary he kept of his service as an enlisted man after the Great War. The writing throughout is solid English prose, with just the right proportion of droll humor. In the chapter in which Lawrence records his response to an officer’s inquiry about why he joined te Air Force (“I think I must have had a mental breakdown, sir.”), Lawrence appears to have set himself up for a charge of “insolence,” but the incident resolves itself wit Lawrence not only getting off scot-free of any punishment, but being complimented by the officer who was performing the original barracks inspection.

Subservience was Lawrence’s method of dealing with PTSD, and by all accounts the men with whom he served benefitted from his presence in the ranks. Submission, however, cannot completely escape the recoil built into its suppressed cantilevering; the desire to hold oneself apart from others cannot help but rear up even as one immures oneself in a larger mass of obedience. What Lawrence called his “surplus emotion” found an outlet in riding his motorcycle. “The Road,” which comes very near te end of “The Mint” (it is chapter 16 of the book’s third and final part) is a five page description of one of Lawrence’s typical expeditions on his motorcycle after the day’s work was done. It is one of the ten most perfect pieces of short writing on any subject I have ever read. Lawrence’s sentences flow with a dexterity that is free of any aspect of rhetorical inefficiency. Each word thrums in an attuned demarcation.

“A miracle that all this speed waits behind one lever for the pleasure of my hand.”

The other day, I was walking near Los Angeles Harbor Arts in San Pedro and saw this motorcycle parked on the sidewalk and thought yet once again of the sentence I just quoted. Indeed, any sentence a writer has devoted full attention to seems in and of itself to be an equal miracle.

The best book about Lawrence’s involvement in the Arab Rebellion during the Great War remains Scott Anderson’s “LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” The current expansionist retaliation of Israel against Hamas and Hezbollah was predicted by Lawrence, who foresaw that the only way a Zionist nation could be maintained on the Mediterranean coast was by force of arms. A two-state solution, I would add, would still be possible, but only at the cost of a transparently coordinated policy of “mutual assured destruction.”

I just filled out my mail-in ballot and will put it in the post box tomorrow morning. It will be no surprise to anyone that I voted for Kamala Harris for President. In making that selection, I fully expect Donald Trump to lose the popular vote for the third election in a row.

Whether Vice-President Kamala Harris can break “the (gendered) glass ceiling” of American politics, however, and become the second person of color to occupy the Oval Office of the White House will probably depend on the choices made by less than a total of 25,000 voters in a half-dozen states. If the very thin margins that polls show her winning by manage to hold as votes are counted in the week following the deadline of Election Day, and if Trump refuses to concede his defeat in the Electoral College, then President Biden should resign his office, effective December 1st, and Vice-President Harris should become acting President as well as President-Elect. If the votes of the Electoral College fall in her favor, then it is crucial that the nation recognize the transition authorized by the election as quickly as possible. Waiting until mid-January will only allow a pathological liar to foment even more mischief the he did after being defeated by Joseph Biden. Trump is not a good loser, and he will do everything possible to thwart the will of the electorate. The only way to rebuff a bully is to play hard-ball and to make it emphatically clear that his rejection as a candidate is irrevocable.

Nothing should happen until the national vote totals are firmly tabulated, of course, but once those totals are known, and if Harris prevails, she should immediately begin announcing her cabinet choices. If one is chosen to be the President, then one should not hesitate in the least to act presidential.

In the fall of 1970, I saw a notice in a newspaper that the British poet Michael Horowitz was putting on a poetry reading. I had purchased a copy of his anthology, CHILDREN OF ALBION, just the week before and had been spending a fair amount of time reading the work of Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Pete Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Spike Hawkins, John Cotton, Anselm Hollo, Edwin Morgan, Tom Raworth, Gael Turnbull, and John Arden. Fortunately, I spotted the notice just in time to attend and read one of my own poems. The most memorable moment in the evening was Bernard Kops’s “Shalom Bomb,” which was received with considerable appreciative laughter and applause. It would take me years to fully absorb everything I learned from his poem and his performance of it, but even as I was hearing it out loud, I recognized that it was a crucial early lesson in poetry directed to the public sphere. Given the history of terrorism by bad actors the past half-century, on behalf of any number of dubious causes and insidious organizations, Kops’s poem remains one of the great rebukes of that kind of reprehensible behavior that I have ever encountered.

You can find Kops’s poem in Horowitz’s anthology, CHILDREN OF ALBION, as well as on-line.

https://www.andrewwhitehead.net/blog/shalom-bomb-for-peace

The three story building at 401 S. Mesa Street in San Pedro, California was known as “The Loft” for well over a quarter century. A hundred years ago, it was the site of a laundry for the ships that used San Pedro as a harbor. In more recent decades, it was a warehouse for the Harbor Shipping company. Artists started using spaces in the top floor in 1995, and eventually almost a dozen artists were in residence there.

The building is now known as Los Angeles Harbor Arts, and it will officially open under that name on October 3, when a ribbon cutting ceremony will take place, along with music and food, starting at 5 p.m.

The event is taking place on the First Thursday of October, since “First Thursdays” are the day that the artists in the building traditionally open up their studios to the public in the evening.

LAHA
401 S. Mesa Street
San Pedro, CA
Thursday, October 3
5 p.m.
FREE

****************

************

The paintings underneath are by Bill Mohr.

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Amidst all the social turmoil and brouhaha of national political campaigns, each home has its private sorrow. The Ohio and Molino Avenue junctions with Sixth Street in Long Beach include a set of neighbors that have gotten to know each other over the past two decades. Almost all of us have and have had animals as part of our extended families. The passing of one of our companions is a poignant moment of tender reflection for all us living in this section of South Rose Park.

Today I want to pay homage to Pepper, who always made us smile a little more emphatically when we encountered him as he walked with Barry and Betsy.

Thank you, Pepper, for being part of our lives.

In loving memory
Pepper December 7, 2010 – September 7, 2024

(The photograph is derived from a 3-D image, so forgive the blur.)