What does saving democracy even mean?
Destruction and creation at once
Today a lovely essay on protesting the DNC in Chicago, working at Trader Joe's during peak Covid, living in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, January 6th, and what saving democracy is supposed to mean.
It goes in part:
I felt the absence of unhoused people on the sidewalks downtown. I saw none of the familiar migrant women and their children chanting “chicles dulces por favor.”
My mother volunteers at a ministry for migrants. Her Spanish is very good. But she never has answers for them when they ask about what America actually is. When they tell her how they did not think that it all worked this way. The same questions we all end up asking when we run out of our own luck. Luck that democracy has nothing to do with or no solution for anyway.
We are so much closer to each other’s cruel lives than we think.
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First some of my bullshit.
Hey listen I know I said that Right Back to It by Waxahatchee was my lock for number one on the Hell World best songs of 2024 list but I think Backyard Lover from Merce Lemon's forthcoming album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild has overtaken it as my favorite of the year. It's so beautiful and sad and sort of meanders along in what feels like standard alt-country fashion before it builds to a stunning climax. I love it very much. I have broken my own heart listening to it about fifty times.
What dying felt like
a wooden spoon tossed in the fire
cause nothings good enough
you fucking liar.
“So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” they said and this song seems to be about that very thing as best I can tell. That sort of thing in any case.
“That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family."
The rest of the album (out September 27) is very good too. Not to mention this brilliant and similarly stunning and sad recent single Will You Do Me a Kindness.
If you want to follow along with my playlist of my favorite songs of the year as I discover them you can do so here.
Th fucking "e" key on my laptop is sticking this morning so if there are any typos in her that is why. Fuck.
eeeeeee
People seemed to really like this tweet for one reason or another.
I went to mass for the first time in a while over the weekend for a funeral and while they have changed a bunch of stuff since my day one thing that is never going to sit right with me is saying "and with your spirit" instead of "and also with you." That is bullshit to me. Get that out of my face.
If you ever find yourself in the mood for just an onslaught of unresolved Catholic guilt and loathing buddy have I got the book of short stories for you.
Here's one related passage.
We went to my in-laws over the weekend as well and look at this monster. Our wedding hydrangea.
Readers of ACWF may recognize it from this story I have shared in here a couple times but I'm going to do it again because who cares.
The first draft of my next book (working title) We're All Fucking Dead is just about done so if you want to publish that let me know!
Here's another tweet. I'm just sharing my own tweets in here now I guess.
I once asked my Dunkies girl how many orders she had memorized since she always knew mine and I thought she was going to say like 100 but instead she said I don't know maybe 10 and I was really let down. I had built her faculties up as a whole thing on her behalf and now she was disappointing me. She never asked for that.
RIP to John McCain gone six years ago this weekend. You would have really loved to have seen Israel's annihilation of Gaza.
Here's an old good one from the time of his funeral.
As Glasser would later write in a piece, in which she inducts Bush into the #resistance, and as hundreds of Beltway lanyard-fuckers echoed on Twitter and elsewhere, McCain’s funeral was not just a beautiful tribute to a heroic man, but more importantly, a stirring rebuke to Donald Trump. Obama, Bush, and Meghan McCain’s eulogies were pointed shots across the bow at the nasty Trump, the first bad president, and a man whom they not-so-subtly attempted to contrast with the honorable war hero.
Needless to say, the occasion of McCain’s death has driven the white collar pundit class absolutely fucking insane in all manner of ways.
But this rehabilitation of Bush and McCain and the other architects of the Iraq War into kindly old grandpas, a throwback to the good old days of politics when we all had our disagreements, sure, but everyone lined up and shook hands then hit the showers together after a sporting debate, is a fucking bridge too far. Imagine seeing Dick Fucking Cheney anywhere outside of an iron maiden in Hell and finding something to be nostalgic about?
A real surprise twist though is that Cindy McCain of all people has been better than a lot of Democrats never mind Republicans on Gaza. That's not a very high bar to cross but still.
Here's something else to read.
Amjad Iraqi
Similarly, Lt. Col. A., commander of the 200th Squadron which operates the Israeli Air Force’s fleet of drones, gave an interview to Ynet earlier this month, in which he claimed his unit had killed “6,000 terrorists” during the war. When asked, in the context of the rescue operation to free four Israeli hostages in June, which resulted in the killing of over 270 Palestinians, “How do you identify who is a terrorist?” he answered: “We attacked on the side of the street to drive civilians away, and whoever did not flee, even if he was unarmed, as far as we were concerned, was a terrorist. Everyone we killed should have been killed.”
This dehumanization has reached new heights in recent weeks with the debate over the legitimacy of raping Palestinian prisoners. In a discussion on the mainstream TV network Channel 12, Yehuda Shlezinger, a “commentator” from the right-wing daily Israel Hayom, called for institutionalizing rape of prisoners as part of military practice. At least three Knesset members from the ruling Likud party also argued that Israeli soldiers should be allowed to do anything, including rape.
Ok man sure.
Alright I'm going to turn it over to Carmen Aiken now. Can't say enough how much I liked how this piece turned out. One of my favorites in here in a while.
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What does saving democracy even mean?
by Carmen Aiken
It was July in the swamp of Chicago when the DNC signs started appearing. Each one filled me with a sense of unease, fury, or exhaustion.
The convention approached as a natural disaster, as an omen, as a common enemy nobody I knew wanted to contend with. The news said approximately 50,000 people were expected to descend on our simmering city. Unable to escape it, I remembered my task, given to me in a Trader Joe’s on January 6, 2021. I was supposed to save democracy. The very thing the Democrats themselves just so happened to claim they were doing.
Trader Joe’s is not a democracy of course. They union bust, steal from small producers, and along with SpaceX and Amazon are working to dismantle the National Labor Review Board. But during the weird doldrums of 2020, I was granted passage as a crew member of Store 697 in Oak Park, Illinois.
Remember waiting outside of places six feet apart? One in, one out. Rain, snow, sleet, hail. When nurses and doctors in scrubs came through our lines we gave them flowers and candy for free and hastily wrote it off with our black sharpies in our boxcutter holsters.
I made it through Thanksgiving week and Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve on the closing and restocking shift. Each day I clocked in and answered questions about my health. Then it was 2021: New Year’s Day, Three Kings Day and Twelfth Night and the 6th of January.
What was I doing before my shift started that day? Probably I was finishing my coffee and joining my parents silently glued to their TV screen. Likely I pulled on my Trader Joe’s sweatshirt and, bewildered, walked to work.
In the break room everyone stared at the spectacle unfolding on their phones. I tagged into a register and fixed my face into bland cheer. Because of the indignity of the socially distanced queue we often had to have a manager direct traffic and break up fights. Perhaps that was a kind of democracy.
There were no fights that specific day though. The People’s Republic of Oak Park moved uneasy and quiet. I rang up person after person taking home what I could tell was emergency emotional booze and frozen pizza. End of the country booze and pizza. People jumped when I greeted them and fumbled with their credit cards. An older gentleman asked me if I was seeing what was happening and pushed his phone towards me. I could not see it from my six foot distance but I had an idea what he meant.
Never before or since was it that quiet in that store.
After cashiering it was time for a cookie and candy inventory restock. While I was up on a ladder a woman wobbled up to me, on her phone like everyone else, then paused and gazed at nothing. I asked if I could help her and she told me she’d forgotten what she came here for. Because I worked at Trader Joe’s I said “Oh, I’ve been there!”
Cheerfully. How we’re instructed to talk.
“You know I’m just so distracted,” she said. I nodded because by then it had been months of working as a mix of a bouncer and kindergarten teacher to furious customers. The ones who thought I didn’t know how to count, or the people who spat when asked to put on a mask, or that one guy who would not put on a mask because of “health reasons.” Maybe that’s democracy?
“I’m so distracted,” she said again, and so I came down from the ladder and said “Yes, of course, of course, there’s so much going on.” Six, five, four, three, two feet, one foot, she came closer and stared directly into my eyes. “You have to save democracy,” she said.
What a few months it had been for both me and democracy. Now a woman had bequeathed me a quest.
I had ended up back in Chicago because as 2020 started I decided I could not live in Minneapolis anymore. Mostly I’d figured this out prior to Memorial Day 2020, but I was waiting out the summer when George Floyd was murdered, five blocks diagonal or so from where I lived in South. I rode my bike to protests filled with teenagers and twenty-somethings because older people were told to be careful and stay home. When the already scarce stores were destroyed in North, I’d drive out to the burbs and the sticks to fill my hatchback with dry goods and diapers and tampons. Perhaps because of democracy Donald Trump had sent us checks and so my unemployment was swollen. I was frantic to do something and so I spent the money.
One day we got an email from our city council person who asked us to pull in items from outside and hose down anything that could be set on fire. Check on our neighbors too they said.
Our least favorite roommate fucked off to a cabin somewhere.
My other dear roommate and I pulled on our masks and safety vests from her recycling truck driver job and walked around the block knocking on doors, asking if anyone needed anything. We said to stay in touch. Perhaps because of democracy the governor soon set a military curfew. That was unless you had an essential worker pass to travel. Essential workers were a thing people talked about a lot then. People like me.
So I would ride my bike to the freeway overpass and stare at the empty highway. Then the National Guard trundled down our street. Later I laid on the hood of my car in an alley and stared into the haze of helicopters and thought of my dad the immigrant veteran and my ma who had lived in a literal fascist dictatorship at one point.
I never thought I’d live through a military curfew in Minneapolis of all places.