“But… but…This is America!” said my father, horror and wonder somehow combined in his voice.
My father had just seen, in 1974, a homeless man diving for scraps of food in a garbage can.
We were busy, that morning, getting to a wedding—my brother John had woken up, shaved, cut himself, and bled all over his white shirt collar. Not a big problem, really, if he didn’t have to stand up in front of a hundred people and say, “I do,” when prompted.
I have no memory of how we solved that crisis—did we buy a new shirt? Find a Styptic pencil? Or did it happen that John and Eric, our oldest brother, were essentially the same size, and simply switched white shirts?
(A Styptic pencil, for anyone that doesn’t know, actually introduces aluminum in cuts and nicks made while shaving. The aluminum stops the bleeding, yes, but does God knows what else to the body, as it courses through the blood stream.)
This is America, and last Monday night, Rachel Maddow also told us what is America. I could tell you what she said, but here’s a screen shot of the clip, and the placard next to Maddow says it all:
It took six months, but it’s here. Yet many things we take for granted may not be here for much longer. In fact, I was surprised to discover that there was a link to a file that I had previously downloaded. This is the link, for however long it lasts:
https://www.justice.gov/storage/Report-of-Special-Counsel-Smith-Volume-1-January-2025.pdf
It won’t be hard to remove it. AI (artificial intelligence) could probably slither through the entire web of the internet and take it down before lunchtime. The Justice Department certainly won’t release it, and the government is already putting the screws on universities and libraries. They had locked cases for obscene works by de Sade and Sacher-Masoch—the report of what happened on January 6, 2021 will squeeze nicely alongside. Qualified scholars (i.e. apologists writing history for Trump and his following) only will be permitted to handle these documents.
The general population? They’ll be ill-educated and incapable of independent thought. No need to burn books—all that Savonarola business was for show. The bonfire of the vanities is excessive.
Smith will be in Lucerne, or The Netherlands, which is where he was before he came to Washington in 2022. Wikipedia isn’t saying where he is now, and I’m not saying either. In fact, I don’t know, but I still am not saying.
Well, America has lost its democracy, and what am I doing?
Making notebooks?
What?
Making notebooks???
Whatever Franny, my mother, was getting up to in her afterlife, well…she stopped and addressed a few words to me. You have a printer, she said. You have a very nice cream woven paper (25% cotton!). You can make a book. And that book—hidden in the attic, or in the basement behind the jars of applesauce, or maybe even in the Norwegian chest that keeps all our family stuff—may be the only thing that bears witness to what happened.
Paranoid?
Yes—remember this paragraph, a page or so ago?
Well-duh. We have Alex Padilla, a senator from California, taken down by government goons and handcuffed on television. We have cherries “mummifying” on the trees because no migrant laborer is going to step into an orchard when ICE may be waiting below the ladder, masked and armed. We have the Federal government now investigating Obama for treason, as well as Jack Smith, the special prosecutor for Trump. We have a president who is telling us that the whole Epstein affair is a Democratic hoax, despite overwhelming evidence that there was a close friendship between the two. No wonder—they both value exclusively the same two, dreary things: they want to make money, and they want to fuck.
It was late, and the mind drifted, as it does. As it has to, really, since who could possibly stay in 9:32 PM, 4 Aug 2025? I had to go back, retreat…OK, I had to flee several centuries, a couple of continents, and go back.
Back to the Irish monks.
