Well, I could tell you that Charlie Kirk was no angel, and I could run over to Facebook and get three or memes to prove it. He hated everyone except the people who agreed with him, felt that having 45,000 gun deaths a year (including the school kids at their desks) was worth it to protect the Second Amendment, and derided the LGBTQ community. But there are two problems, the first of which is that I don’t know if any of that is true. The second problem is related to the first: I have no idea who Charlie Kirk is.
That’s the point—we’re not just separated. We’re living in impregnable fortresses, ideologically speaking, and they’re heavily fortified. All that was clear to me when I spoke to a man of 32 years. He mentioned Charlie Kirk, knew who he was, and mourned his passing. Later, in the conversation, he asked me for clarification of who Epstein was—he only knew that he was some sort of sex offender. Not much more.
Once again, the entire country is on edge. We have had nothing but Charlie Kirk stories since he died. Vice president Vance flew to Utah to condole with the wife, take Kirk’s body back to Arizona, and then to do his podcast today. My Facebook page is filled with quotes from Trump about not calling the governor of Minnesota (Tim Walz) after the killing of two Democratic politicians three months ago. Then there’s this:
Trump was true to form. He went on Fox News on Friday morning to announce that the suspect was in custody. He was asked how we can ever come together as a country, and he responded by saying he didn’t give a damn about the country coming together. He wants, and apparently is planning, the annihilation of the radical left—that’s me!—and only then will he be satisfied.
I’m meeting him halfway, since I don’t care about the country either. I’m done with caring about the country, worrying about the country, grieving for the country. You don’t want me?
Fine.
I vowed never to return to the continental United States until Trump was in prison, and the madness had died down. The United States has not missed me, but I suspect that it might be missing the revenue from a whole bunch of Canadians, Mexicans, foreigners in general who are unwilling to travel to the states. I think that my cousin, a very successful farmer, is wondering who’s going to buy his soybeans. Kennedy Center won’t be hearing Yo-Yo Ma, since he politely gave the middle finger to an invitation last month. Trump has isolated us from the rest of the world, all the better for us to hate (and perhaps kill) each other.
I have no idea if the country is at a tipping point, but it seems likely. The conservatives didn’t self-correct when the news came out that the killer was, once again, a straight, cis male, age 22, who grew up in a Mormon family devoted to MAGA. My Facebook page is showing me photos of the killer’s mother wielding what looks like a pretty impressive weapon. This information created a ten-second ceasefire in the verbal hostilities. Then they were back with the revised script, which seems unchanged from the previous one: The New York Times, this morning, had this to say:
The conservatives didn’t self-correct either when it was suggested—in my Radical Left media, at least—that the Kirk’s killer could have been a Groyper.
I’m delighted—I guess—to see that my computer doesn’t know the word “Groyper,” either, and is red-lining it. Groypers are to the RIGHT of
Charlie Kirk, and targeted him as early as 2019. Tyler Robinson, the self-confessed killer of Charlie Kirk, was apparently a fan of Nick Fuentes, one of the lead Groypers. We radical lefters are entertaining the idea that Kirk was killed by the right, not the left, and there’s some reason to believe that. Kirk was one of the few conservatives that challenged Trump to come clean about the Epstein files. Would it be enough to kill him to silence him? Or do we have to hype the death and blame it all on the trans community (thanks, Don Trump Jr., who clued us in that the trans community was the most dangerous group of domestic terrorists the country had ever seen)?
Everything has shifted—or has it? Last Tuesday, I went to the Poet’s Passage to bind the birthday book of Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, I had been totally into the story of the birthday book since I first heard that it was a black leather (of course) hand-bound book.
The book was compiled (it’s not a written document) in 2003 by Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s coconspirator who was found guilty of sex trafficking with Epstein. A PDF file of the book was online, all 238 pages of it. Unfortunately, the book itself has not been photographed, to my knowledge. Too bad, because I would love to see it. And it would be no problem, I think, to determine if the book had been altered. If anybody had written, six months ago, the letter from Donald Trump to Epstein and then tried to insert it…well, it would be clear.
There are, in fact, ways to insert (although usually to re-insert) pages into a book. You open the book as wide as possible (and if it’s a well-bound book, that should be pretty open) to get as close to the glued spine as possible. Then you “slip-in” the page by gluing a ¼ strip of the left-hand margin of the page to be inserted. Press the book for an hour and it should be fine. The tipped-in page will not have the signature holes that you would expect in the rest of the book, assuming that the book had been sewn and then glued.
The real question in my mind is how Maxwell submitted the manuscript to the binder. I didn’t see any blank pages in the 238 that I bound last Tuesday, but I was so greatly horrified by the whole thing that I may not have seen them. Since a book is bound from the back to the front, I got all of the seediest stuff first. Whole pages of Jeffrey Epstein surrounded by pubescent schoolgirls with blacked out faces passed through my hands and needle. The charming letters and photos of Epstein’s boyhood friends and teachers (found at the beginning of the book) made no impression whatsoever. In fact, only Mein Kamph and Protocols of the Elders of Zion are more depraved.
Maxwell must have gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to produce this book. There were all the letters to get. There was the order in which to put them. And finally, there was the bookbinder, whom I now know is Herbert Weitz, since the notice / advertisement for the firm appears in the middle of the book. Here is Weitz and Coleman, busy tooting their horn:
Artificial intelligence tells me that the company is no longer in business. Weitz, one of the partners, is still alive and active. An email that I sent to weitzcoleman.com was returned to me.
I think someone should talk to Weitz, and I’d be happy to step up to the plate and be flown to New York (you can put me up at the Plaza). I’d ask him whether Maxwell had pasted all the letters together, since the letter Trump allegedly wrote was (presumably) blank on the other side. In the book, it’s preceded and followed by other letters / text. If Maxwell didn’t have the glue-pot ready, she might just have copied and printed everything she received. That would make the most sense, since presumably people had sent post cards, actual birthday cards, and regular letters on standard 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
I’d ask Weitz as well why he chose to bind this manuscript into two if not three separate volumes of the finest calf and Moroccan skins. Was this at Maxwell’s request? If so why? The only reason I can think of is to segregate the childhood / boyhood / young adult Jeffrey from the later Jeffrey. The first volume is perfectly respectable and would be a delight to show Epstein’s mother, the next time she dropped in to Palm Beach. The last volume would send her to an early grave.
There’s the terrible idea, immediately dismissed, that there is a certain cost in selling and binding the 238 pages into separate volumes. One book might cost 150 bucks—three would get you 450$. But no bookbinder, I am very sure, would ever stoop to such chicanery.
So there I was, last Tuesday night, at the poetry slam in front of a mercifully sparse audience, utterly unable to say a word. It takes a lot to rob me of speech, but there it was.
Then Jack turned up.
