It happens every year, so why I am always so surprised by it? The Christmas “tree” is up on the plaza where I sit on benches and chat with the homeless. The tree is a metal cone some 25 feet high—this year it has footlong strings of light which are supposed to be icicles.
Only in Puerto Rico could they be considered, or even imagined, to be icicles.
Well, we’re going to be merry, goddammit, even if it kills us. Or sends us to the poorhouse, since the consumerism seems excessive even for an American of the 21st century. We are supposed to buy, and a little trip to Marshalls—a store that sells everything that you want (while in the store) but don’t need and won’t like (after a week or two). All of the merchandise is beautiful and cheap—but also exhausting.
I think of Little Women, that dear book written by that dear Louisa May Alcott, and please note that repetition of the tired word “dear.” I use it because Alcott, like William Morris, was a wonderfully neurotic, high-thinking, eccentric who had a considerably crazy life, though framed in Victorian conventionality.
Morris got tea-towelled, which meant that even though he was a socialist and believed in free marriage (or at least put up with his wife bonking Dante Gabriel Rosetti), his decorative work was charming (another word like “dear”) and could be put onto tea towels. Alcott got tea-towelled too, which meant that even though she was an intellectual, hung out with Emerson and Thoreau, created and lived in communes which attempted to be free-thinking and Utopian-seeking, nursed the sick in the Civil War, and wrote “lurid” works which pleased her more (and earned her some very-needed cash)…well, all she’s known for is dear Little Women.
Here's a tea towel—which is the best we could do with William Morris’s life:
Fortunately, these tea towels come from the Radical Tea Towel company, who put Morris’s own words at the bottom of the towel, as ballast for the charm. I know nothing about the Radical Tea Towel company on purpose, since I really prefer to imagine them, not to know about them. In my imagination, they’re a group of oddballs who would make any character out of Alice in Wonderlandseem like an accountant.
And here’s what Dante Gabriel Rosetti thought of Jane Morris, and it’s enough to send even me into a jealous panic—God knows what Morris thought. No man should paint another man’s wife….
Well, well—what a trivial mind I have on this Tuesday morning. I am worried about tea towels and Louisa May Alcott when I should be worried about Donald Trump, and his imminent invasion of Venezuela.
Why are we invading Venezuela?
It’s both a stupid question and a necessary one. We’re invading Venezuela (as far as I can see) because Trump got slapped down, posthumously, by Jeffrey Epstein. There’s a big group of Trump supporters who bought into the theory that a small group of very rich men were preying on very young women (teenagers chronologically and pre-pubescent biologically). They got obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, who was utterly despicable. They didn’t drop the bone after the election, which Trump thought they’d do, since they have a more permanent value system than he does. So he promised them that he would release the Epstein files in all their luridness (ah, if only dear Louisa you-know-who were here to write about it)…and did they forget about it, as they were supposed to do?
Nah—so the clamor got so bad (and the drip-drip of lurid emails grew so constant) that nobody could talk of anything else. Eventually, the shut-down (which was all about preventing the release of the files, since it allowed the Speaker of the House not to swear in a congresswoman from Arizona, who would be the final vote for a resolution for the release of the files) ended. The SNAP benefits were reinstated, so that the poor (about 12.5% of us) could eat again. So Trump saw the writing on the wall (neon is hard to miss), and came out and said that he was all for releasing the files, which had previously not existed and then had become a “Democratic hoax.”
The Republicans, who had shut down the government to avoid dealing with the issue, instantly caved and voted nearly unanimously to force the release of the files. (The one congressman voting against the release of the files was a guy from Louisiana who everybody agreed was nuts—even his constituents, who are nuts as well, and therefore have to be represented).
Trump, by the way, is all over the files, as the FBI agents who worked 24 hour shifts to scrub the files (that didn’t exist) to the tune of over 800,000$ in five days last spring can attest. So now we’re a couple of weeks away from getting the files, which will be heavily redacted, to say the least.
We’re in a freefall, logically and politically speaking, so Trump did what Trump does, which is divert. He’s killed over 80 people in scores of bombings of boats off the coast of Venezuela. He says the boats are filled with drugs, the Venezuelans say the boats are full of fish, and the Geneva Convention…
…well, you know what they say.
Trump is going to do what he has done all through his political career—manufacture an “emergency” and act illegally. His tariffs are built on emergencies, his seizure of innocent people and subsequent deportation to foreign prison camps, his decision to bomb Iran (six months ago) and his decision to invade Venezuela are based on the same flimsy pretext. And we are all following him, shouting “tsk-tsk” as we scramble to keep up with the limousine speeding Trump off to the bank.
There is always a little money to be made, and Venezuela has more oil than Iran, or anybody else, for that matter. It would be a shame, not to get a little piece of that action.
This cannot be, my imagined reader from the 22d century will be saying. A president of the United States cannot really be acting like Nero, providing that fiddle music as Rome burns.
This cannot be, you say, in horror.
I hope that there is some reader, in some century, who can say some words to express shock and horror. I hope shock and horror come back to us, somehow.
What I fear is indifference—a complacency that seeks nothing more than to shop at Marshalls. I fear ignorance as well—where is Venezuela, and why should I care?
I fear the death of truth even more. We’re already changing history (our textbooks now say stuff like, “although some abuses did occur, the majority of our black friends and neighbors lived peaceably with their masters on the majestic cotton plantations that graced the South”). Why bother with seeing reality at all?
Aren’t we already tea-towelling Trump?
