These are our choices
What did we do to deserve this?
Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden last night that was so racist it got the New York Times to dust off the actual word "racist" and use it in a headline.
"Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism," it read.
A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.
Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father — with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
All of that barely scratches the surface of how disturbing the night was. How blatant they all were in their gleeful shit-eating taunts. And I'm only referring in part to whatever this fucking dork thought he was pulling off.
The jokes by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage have gotten most of the headlines this morning – imagine being so racist that you steal the show at the Klan rally? – to the point where Trump's people put out a statement distancing themselves from it. “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior advisor Danielle Alvarez said.
Oh ok. Good. Thank god. That settles that I guess. That one joke was too much.
How many Puerto Rican voters can there be in swing states like Pennsylvania anyway?
Later on in the evening Trump continued to spew a deluge of racist and xenophobic lies and threats saying among many other things that Kamala Harris “has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo,” that she had vowed to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and had “called for free sex change operations on illegal aliens in detention at taxpayer expense." He also repeated his promises to retaliate against his enemies and to institute mass deportations on day one of his administration. "The migrant invasion of our country ends,” he said.
Wouldn't it be nice to think that this was all at long last too much? How nice that would be to think. It's not though. This is who he is and always has been and roughly 50% of the voters in this country either know it and do not care or downright love it. So many people absolutely love this shit! Your neighbors and co-workers and maybe your family too.
I know my common refrain in here is that despite how terrible things are we have to maintain our faith in humanity. That we are better than this. And I do think that about humanity. That's something different than American voters though. You cannot underestimate our capacity for violence and hatred to the point of self-sabotage enough. Someone must always be punished even if its also ourselves.
Wouldn't it also be nice if we had an alternative to this that inspired hope that things don't have to be this way? Won't always be this way. Imagine someone whose closing argument wasn't about how much Republicans like her now. Whose stances on immigration and crime weren't only somewhat less draconian. Who was able to muster a full-throated defense of trans people. Wasn't inviting "pro-life" people into the coalition. Who was willing to meet with Arab and Muslim voters and tell them that when it is finally up to her this genocide her administration has been funding might one day end.
We don't get that though. We get this. These are our choices. What did we do to deserve this besides everything as a country we've ever done?
Here's what I posted three months ago when her campaign first kicked off.
Who could have seen it coming?
It didn't have to be this way though. It could have gone another way.
I do still hold out hope that Trump will lose to be clear! That's about all I can give you. We cannot allow this man to regain power. Despite all of the awful things that we also should not allow (and yet still do) that is certainly one of them.
Many have compared the rally last night to another Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939. I'm also reminded of a rally there a few years earlier headlined by 1930s radio demagogue Father Coughlin. David Grossman wrote for Hell World about Coughlin and his similarities with Tucker Carlson last year.
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the first time the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 86 years. As you can imagine that was a very exciting development for a young Luke. Youngish. Perhaps you'll indulge me in sharing this piece from A Creature Wanting Form again.
October 27, 2004
Across the street some kids were playing baseball which felt anachronistic in the first place and one of them socked a big dinger and they all moved instinctively and anxiously like they do when that sort of thing happens. I watched the ball arc up toward the moon which wasn’t out yet but you could tell was waiting there just backstage rehearsing its lines and I thought people that young are walking on a tightrope they aren’t even aware of yet. Not just unafraid of falling but oblivious to the existence of the chasm.
I was listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea I’m sorry I know and I thought that if you skip “[untitled]” you didn’t earn “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2” because in my day we suffered differently about things that didn’t matter.
I never knew if it was meant to be I love you comma Jesus Christ or if it was supposed to be I love you Jesus Christ straight through no punctuation like was he addressing some person or the Son of God himself.
Jesus Christ I love you yes I do.
On my phone there was a grim dark storm cloud hovering over Rhode Island and the blackness looked like it had one little arm or flipper hanging down to do its damage with like a perverted little sky imp would have and there were two bright orange lights right in the center where the storm’s face would be if storms had faces.
I think it was just the reflection of some tower lights though.
Next door the neighbor’s dog was barking so sadly in a language I couldn’t understand. Like when you’re in another country and you need to find the hospital immediately or find your kidnapped wife and no one knows what you’re trying to say.
It’s good to be in those situations. Not the needing a hospital or having a kidnapped wife obviously but to be somewhere where you can’t communicate.
To feel stupid and helpless like that from time to time.
To be elsewhere.
It was the anniversary of the first time the Red Sox had won the World Series after eighty-six years and people were remembering it all over the place. Someone on my phone had asked people to chime in with what they were doing that night and one guy said he remembered watching it at a friend’s house and then calling his dear old nana who had loved the team her entire long life and had never gotten to see them win before then and she cried and her crying made him cry.
The funniest part the guy said was driving home after the game and seeing someone hopping a cemetery fence with a bottle of champagne.
Some kid thwacked a double and you could hear it so loud and clean. I almost spilled my drink. Some guy’s kid and he’s running around the bases now. Look at him running so fast away from God and the Devil and from everybody knowing instinctively where each foot needs to land without even thinking.
Here's some other reading you may appreciate or not.
1. Doctors Agreed Her Baby Would Die 3 Months Before She Was Forced to Give Birth
Two weeks later, we finally had his funeral. We did just a little memorial ceremony. There’s a little place at the mausoleum where some of his ashes are, and some of the ashes we got made into different glass figurines.
I fell into a deep depression and eventually got diagnosed with PTSD, because it’s just a lot of trauma to try to work through and try to heal from, postpartum, you know? It just was a lot — I was grieving the loss of my child, but at the same time trying to recover from postpartum and birth.
We were left with excruciating hospital bills — not only labor and delivery, but also the [neonatal intensive care unit] bills because we had to use NICU for the baby. And there were a lot of bills left over that insurance didn’t cover. Obviously I eventually needed to see a psychologist, and my son needed to see a psychologist. Obviously insurance doesn’t cover psychology visits.
All of the bills afterwards started to pile up — medical bills and then the funeral bills as well.
2. Prisoners Deserve to Survive Natural Disasters, Too
Yet, even as the hurricane barrelled down, people incarcerated in prisons and jails in multiple states were not allowed to evacuate. Instead, they were moved to higher floors or, as was the case in Florida, to “hardened dorms built to withstand high winds.” In other cases, they were simply locked in their regular dorms.
3. Americans split on idea of putting immigrants in militarized "camps"
Last Friday, 13 police officers gathered in the early morning hours outside an off-campus residential building in West Philadelphia. It was the home of several University of Pennsylvania students.
Donning their full tactical gear, including riot helmets, and armed with assault rifles and handguns, the police threatened to break down the door with a battering ram and pointed a gun at a neighbor before storming the residence.
The sound of police coming up the stairs woke the students up. As they stepped out of their rooms, police trained guns on them, according to one student present during the raid who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of their personal safety.
5. Kamala Harris Does Not Deserve The Nation’s Endorsement
We have watched this abdication of moral responsibility by the Democratic nominee with a growing sense of dismay. As young journalists, we think of our colleagues in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 175 journalists in Gaza since last October—and right now, with US support and the Western media’s indifference, Israel is effectively issuing hit lists of reporters in Gaza. During the last year, The Nation has published dispatches from Palestinian journalists, from 14-year-old Lujayn to the journalist Mohammed Mhawish, both of whom have survived air strikes, most likely from US-made weapons. We cannot advocate for a person who is complicit in the murders of fellow journalists and the bombing of colleagues whose pieces we have fact-checked.
We also struggle with the idea that Harris’s domestic agenda can offset the suffering her policies will inflict abroad. As we map even her sunniest domestic proposals against the contours of her foreign-policy program, we remember James Baldwin, a Nation Editorial Board member, who said, “Every bombed village is my hometown.”
6.
7. Literary Institutions Are Pressuring Authors to Remain Silent About Gaza
I’m a novelist. I study and teach the craft of writing stories. I can trace how storytelling has been used to vilify in order to legitimize violence — including the recent framing of immigration as a “border crisis,” insidious misinformation about Haitian Americans and transgender people, and references to Palestinians as “human animals.”
Although stories can be used to inflict suffering, the opposite is also true. Writers choose our words for clarity and truth, to build love and solidarity. Failing to do so can harden our hearts, making us more susceptible to justifying harm done to others. And by dehumanizing others, we also harm ourselves. It is our ability to create connections — and the power of these connections — that makes writers a target for repression, and why it’s critical to withstand it. Our belonging is not contingent on our silence; our humanity is contingent on breaking it.
Here are the two best new songs I heard this week.
Good bye for now. I hope everything works out for the best!