Month: November 2024

No Thank You

A liveblog poem

On this Thanksgiving day
In front of the Macy's Thanksgiving 
Day America Fuck Yeah Parade
I am here to say 
No thank you
I'm not feeling it
I don't want a tasting bite
I don't have the stomach for the lies today
I don't want Hoda and that other lady telling me 
as his balloon floats by
that Ronald McDonald will be stopping by local franchises 
to thank employees for their hard work
on Thanksgiving
I don't want Al Roker introducing the Peacock float
Extolling the virtues of its streaming content
As its electronic head swivels its electronic eye
Surveilling the crowd standing in the rain 
Telling them what to buy and watch and cheer for and be
No thank you, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Interpellation Parade
Not today
What am I most thankful for today, Al Roker?
I know you were asking Cynthia Erivo
But let's say you were asking me
And to your question I say
No thanks
But also thank you for reminding me of what you did
in the White House that one time
And also what the fuck are we doing
Yes we should we be in the streets
But we shouldn't be helping the corporations sell themselves
We should be saying no thank you in the streets
And we should be saying it to the asshole New York never liked
The asshole who wanted to be the richest man in Manhattan
The asshole who didn't pay his workmen or keep his promises
The asshole who just pulled the biggest con
Again
And to all the assholes eager to help him sell
himself, lies, and America, for parts
We should be in the streets saying No thank you
To the social media moguls flying their private jets to Mar a Lago
To the billionaires selling us 
Out
Instead, understandably, for now, we're home
Being thankful for each other
Being scared for each other
and of each other 
Being angry
Watching this stupid fucking parade
Tomorrow let's say no thank you
No thank you to the Robber Baron in Chief 
who never really even baroned but just went straight to the robbing
No thank you to this parade liveblog poem even
And sorry for the cursing

FUBAR

It’s been eleven hours and three days since the AP called the Presidential election in favor of the man who held the office during the worst presidency we’ve ever had. Nothing compares 2 him, of course, but I think it’s safe to say the 2024 version of Trump will supplant the 2016-2020/early 2021 version. Many of us think this is a bad thing. However, in spite of what is to some of us a confusing set of numbers, it is clear that our next, sure to be even worse president seems to have gotten significantly more votes than his opponent, and he’s gotten them from people who one assumes do not think this is a bad thing. Which raises questions, such as Why do they not think it is a bad thing? and What is wrong with this country? and What the fuck?

I don’t know how to answer those questions (especially the last one, which isn’t really a question). But I do want to talk about the title of this post, which I swear has something to do with all of this: I went to a high school headed by a man whose (I hope but seriously doubt secret) nickname among the students was FUBAR. Not coming from a military family, this was how I learned what the old Army-originating term FUBAR meant or, more accurately, what some people meant by it. At that school in central New Jersey (you’re damn right it’s real, @njgov), we thought it meant Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

I have learned at some point in the intervening almost forty years that some people think it means Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Merriam-Webster has it as Recognition. The Oxford English Dictionary also has it as Recognition (and includes the sanitized “Fouled” that even I, who do not come from a military family, know is a coverup).

The OED also tells us that the first recorded use of FUBAR in print was in 1944 in Yank, a weekly magazine produced for US soldiers during WWII. Yank was the idea of a man named Egbert White, who had worked for Stars and Stripes in the war before WWII, which nobody then knew to call World War I, so they just said it was a great war. The great war. Apparently the inclusion of a pin-up photograph was a big draw for the magazine, whose name, again, was Yank. White himself got yanked from the leadership of the paper over certain editorial decisions; you can read about it in his essay, “A Free Press in a Citizen’s Army,” which for some reason appeared in the Journal of Educational Sociology.

I never saw any evidence of FUBAR’s being actually fucked up, beyond repair or recognition. He was a genial and to me distant presence. He came to a track meet once and watched my race and had a chat with my mom. My sense is that FUBAR was just an old nickname that some boys a long time ago had given him because they were boys a long time ago. But I was as oblivious then as I am now, so who knows. I do know that before graduation my friend Taylor and I stole a personalized From the Desk of, &c. notepad off of his desk, and he found out about it some time later because I used a sheet from it to write a thank-you note to my college counselor, who helped me get into a much better college than I deserved to, and it was reported back to me that FUBAR was amused. He has been dead for a quarter century, as has my college counselor. I think I still have the rest of that pad somewhere, but I wouldn’t know who to write to using it.

I’ve gotten a little deeper into all of this than was strictly necessary because I’ve been putting off saying what I want to say about the bad thing that has happened: it’s really, really bad. I don’t need to go into how right now. As I said on here a couple of weeks before election day, Trump is a bully who’s never demonstrated he has any interest in right or wrong, the Constitution, or the welfare of other people. A few days after that, again on here, I was wondering about the effects of seeing a man like that on our ubiquitous screens, on us and especially on the youngest of us. And a couple of days ago I was thinking about my students’ reaction to what happened the day before. His presidency very well could be as much of a disaster for the people he’s conned into thinking he will take care of them as for the people who know he won’t. Most of my students seem to think it will be a disaster for them, for people they love, and for people they don’t know but don’t want to see hurt, and I can’t say they’re wrong.

My question for right now is which kind of FUBAR we are. Are we Fucked Up Beyond All Repair? Or are we just Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition? Is there a difference? Say it’s the latter. Many people are saying they don’t recognize their country anymore, seeing so many of their neighbors vote for someone they think we all ought to have rejected a long time ago. Is that the kind of FUBAR we are? If so, can we imagine the country becoming more like we thought it was, more like we want it to be? Can we hope that our neighbors will wake up to the reality of what just happened, to what the country will really be like under Trump 2, to what he will do to them too?

Or say it’s the former, that we’re Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. He’s packed the courts with people who don’t seem to care about the law except in terms of what it can do for certain people, classes, religions. He’s got legislators and captains of industry in line. He’s got journalists bothsidesing the apocalypse. (On tonight’s panel, for an opposing view, Satan.) He’s got some people scared and some people feeling they’ve been given permission not just to think but to say and do what they say we all are already thinking and have always wanted to say and do. (Except we weren’t, and we haven’t.) He’s got everything lined up for four years of unbridled meanness and limitless corruption.

Maybe the most important question for right now isn’t which kind of FUBAR we are. But maybe it is–maybe we can’t ask ourselves any other questions about what to do, or what we can learn from how we got here, or how we can end up somewhere better, until we answer that. And the answer won’t in the end be about facts. It will be about what we want to accept. Knowing how hard so many people worked for an outcome different from the one we have apparently gotten, I don’t think Beyond Repair is it.

The Things They’re Carrying

I taught class this afternoon. My students looked tired.

I’m back in my office, at my desk, starting this post for the fourth time, trying to say something about what happened last night. I’ve got a few ideas but I’ve got a hole in my heart and I’m realizing that it’s more important what the roomful of twenty-year-olds I just spent an hour with today are feeling. They didn’t want to talk about the election; I asked. They wanted to talk about The Things They Carried, and they did a good job, talking about the material and emotional things O’Brien’s young soldiers carry around with them and the stories they tell themselves in order to try to understand their experience of the war in Viet Nam. Some of them seemed distracted. They’re also stressed out and anxious and scared, and some of them seem angry, and who can blame them. Look at the world we’re giving them.

I ended class five minutes early when I noticed how down many of them looked. I asked if they felt like they looked and they said yes and we talked about what might help and we came up with getting some sleep, hydrating, calling moms, and getting off of social media. I’m going to try to take our advice too. We’re all going to have to think about what comes next, but for now we need to avoid listening to people who think they have the one true story of whose fault this all is and we need to take care of ourselves and the people around us. I try not to call my students kids, but they sure seemed like kids today, and they sure seemed to be carrying some heavy weight.

In the Homestretch

Cartoon, presidential election of 1836

One of the worst things about US politics is our campaigns–the incredible length, the obscene amounts of money, the pandering both to the base and to the ever-shrinking number of somehow, unbelievably, inexplicably undecided. The horse race coverage by journalists doesn’t help, milking the drama for clicks, leaving their obligation to inform by the wayside, save for scandals and gaffes. Following the metaphor of the campaign as something to be handicapped and bet on, we’re in the homestretch. We’ve rounded the final turn, we’re headed to the finish line.

So this campaign season is over in a day or so, and it couldn’t end soon enough. As my future state senator put it yesterday:

I knocked a few doors yesterday, just supporting my wife, who’s knocked a million. I have been mostly reading too much, giving what I can, worrying, blogging into the void. I’ve been going to some campaign events and, as always, have been impressed by the hard-working, heart-in-the-right place state politicians I’ve encountered. Yesterday I met Crystal Quade, the Democratic candidate for governor, who Missourians, if they knew what was good for them, would elect, but if there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that people have been voting against their own interests every two years for decades.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas was published the summer we moved to “the real America,” as one Missourian described the Midwest to us after finding we’d just moved here from New York City. For the past twenty years, we’ve watched gerrymandering, culture wars, and the nimble weaponizing of bigotry and xenophobia turn our new home state from purple to ostensibly red; as a result, we’ve watched the politics and the governing get meaner, we’ve watched support of public goods and private rights erode, and we’ve tried to do what we can to fight it. It’s been tempting to give up on Missouri, just as watching the national GOP elevate its worst to the top of their party has made it easy to despair for the country, but we can’t. We have to hope.

One hope is that what’s the matter with the undecideds of Kansas, Missouri, and the country is that they just don’t have all the information they need, and that the armies of people out knocking doors and making calls can get that information to them in time. The other, more realistic hope is that the decided but under-motivated will be moved to turn out and do their part to get the right people past the finish line first so they can move on and do the actual work of public service.

Candidate & hopeful future constituents

Of course it’s not a race, it’s not a sport, it’s not a game, it’s not even very much fun. It’s staving off the worst of the current GOP agenda and doing it for women, people of color, people from elsewhere, queer people, people who value public education and the Constitution and all of the better ideas and impulses we have. Nobody needs me to tell them about it this close to election day:

1730829600

  days

  hours  minutes  seconds

until

Election Day

Nobody needs me to tell them anything, probably. Sometimes it just makes me feel better, in the midst of all of this anxiety and all of this outrage, to say some things. Sometimes it makes me feel better to say that in spite of this country’s mixed history and all of the hate and bigotry and selfishness we’ve seemed happy to display over the past few centuries, we can be better. We’re not better than this–we are all we’ve done and all we continue to do–but we could be better. One of the ways we can is to vote for people who want that. And help get the information to others that might help them do it too.

I’ll see you on the other side of election day.

& & &

YOUR FART DENIED

A young visitor to my house on Halloween used our sticky “blood” letters to spell out this message on our porch door. Knowing that I can’t ask him what his intent was in crafting this message, and aware of the intentional fallacy, I choose to interpret it as a comment on the election. It says, to the clever Republican politicians who know better and the idiots who don’t, to the liars of the alternate reality universe, to the spineless and/or craven oligarchs, and to the saps who have fallen for the Man Who Will Say What We Were Thinking But Wouldn’t Say in Public, thinking he gives a shit about them: we won’t let you put him in office again. That’s what I think it says. Say it with me.