1. Lift one foot & you have to trust something else to hold you.
2. Tree pose where I can see the April gingko leaves unfolding out the corner of my eye.
3. Is that work, the breath & the tiny precarious adjustments, the sweat rolling down my cheek.
4. Is that memory, shifting away from the bruised place on the precarious planted foot, without remembering where the bruise came from.
5. & is it gravity or something else winning then when you fall.
6. 3 people in 3 different languages on Twitter aka in Birdland mentioning holding our breath as we watched the French elections.
7. Election Day on a Sunday, not a work day, imagine that.
8. How it makes my stomach turn now to walk past the school where I voted, across the street from the 201 Varick detention center.
9. Is that work, the mind-flickers in tree pose that make me waver, the mind-flicker to try to flick the flickers away, which doesn't work, or the breathing, which sometimes does.
10. What is work. Marx's question: What is a working day.
11. Whose working day. Who's a worker. Who isn't.
12. Raise your hand if you sell your labor to live.
13. Is the head of JP Morgan's bonus a wage. Is he a worker because he works.
14. & is the woman nodding out in Penn Station not because she doesn't.
15. & who's hungriest for the new day.
16. Francisco-Luis White in Birdland just now: "We have to always be thinking about how we validate this system that really depends on some folks not eating."
16a. If you see some folks not eating as a regrettable accident or as the part of the garden that blooms only at night.
16b. In my $150 sneakers & my $200 headphones running past the man with white hair & not quite enough spring blankets under the gazebo at the end of the Christopher Street pier, where people tango on summer nights, lying on his left side so his view over the river to the Statue of Liberty may be unobstructed.
16c. The men in my neighborhood who look like grown versions of the boys I grew up with, doing the carpentry work renovating the townhouse apartments on the street where I live.
16d. The graffiti on the Barrow Street construction site, Union Pride, This Is A Scab Job!, 4 blocks north of the big Local 157 Carpenters Union building
16e. & the man with an African accent I stopped to talk to because he was carrying one of those circular watchclocks I used to carry when I was 18 & a temporary construction site security guard for Pinkerton's.
16f. How my mother grew up in western Pennsylvania & told me they still called them 'the Pinks,' since Henry Clay Frick hired them to help break the 1892 Homestead steelworkers' strike against Andrew Carnegie
16g. & I read that they fought against the West Virginia miners' union at Blair Mountain in 1921, & that the union men of different races & nationalities wore red bandanas & they called them 'the Red Neck Army.'
16h. "Henry Clay Frick (December 19, 1849 – December 2, 1919) was an American industrialist, financier, union-buster, and art patron."
16i. How I sat around a construction site reading Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me A Riddle," about a dying Russian revolutionary, in the Pinkerton's uniform my mother said made me look like a 12-year-old policeman.
16j. How you had to walk around to various construction site points every hour & punch the clock with a key, to prove they weren't paying you minimum wage to sit around reading Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me A Riddle." They're digital now, the man on Barrow Street told me, but you still have to walk around.
16k. On the Local 157 blog: "Is NYCDCC a real union anymore? I have a brother-in-law that works for Verizon and I have to tell you they fight for their members. Verizon is the company the members work for and the union is the one that fights Verizon to make sure the union members get fair wages, medical, vacation and their rights are protected. A union should be an adversary to the company. With us it feels like the NYCDCC is our company and I need to join a union to protect me from them."
& 16l. "It's fully detailed w/ all the necessary precedent citations you will need to oppose the never ending McCarron raping of Trust Fund Monies & ongoing Criminal RICO Racketeering & extortion rings he's got going under Obama's DOJ, DOL, NLRB & FBI; so we hear - right Doug. Say drywall sheet-counter & throw Momma off the Train & Brother Mike off the bus; what are you gonna do when Ron Tutor dumps your ass when the Federal indictments come down?
"No wonder you are so darn busy pissing away all kinds of money sending out multiple Mass Mailings supporting Hillary Clinton and door knocking & harassing the electorate. Otherwise; God forbid Donald Trump gets in and tears down all those phony bought & paid for walls you've built within the aforementioned phony justice system."
16m. From the college where I work: "As part of our commitment to an open consultation process, three community discussions were held during the week of March 6th for faculty, staff and students to comment on two options for awarding sub-contracts for construction: allowing both union and non-union firms to bid on sub-contracts, with a commitment to award a majority to union firms or, alternatively, permitting only union firms to bid."
16n. @frinklin in Birdland in February: "With Puzder's withdrawal the Trump Administration is expected to go w their second choice, the reanimated corpse of Henry Clay Frick."
16o. How my stomach turns when I pass the Riviera, where I looked in early on Election Night & saw on the tv where Kentucky, Indiana & West Virginia had gone.
16p. & no it wasn't Frick who claimed he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other, that was someone else.
16q. How Nick who I grew up with posted that quote after Micah Xavier Johnson who'd served in the Army Reserve in Afghanistan shot 5 policemen in Dallas at the end of a Black Lives Matter protest & at the end of a standoff police killed him with a robot. In the Army Reserve he was a carpenter. How in Birdland they joked that the robot's name was Jack Ruby.
16r. Frick was the one who said, when Andrew Carnegie wanted to meet with him, "Tell him I'll see him in Hell, where we both are going."
16s. Where my daughter lives, at the edge of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, with an Apple Store at one end & white policemen with unholstered tasers asking Black mothers' children if they want to ride the lightning at the other.
16t. The dizziness when I was 18 & first read Eduardo Galeano's sentence: "Underdevelopment is not a stage of development. It is its consequence."
17. Raise your other hand if you are now or have ever been someone who works for free: have you raised a child, taken care of somebody sick &/or dying, have you cooked a meal or washed a toilet for no money, are you descended from slaves, have you brought a raincoat to your grandson in prison.
18. Raise one leg if that's all you have.
19. How if that's all you have you're precarious.
20. Note from a French professsor, re the 2 candidates the French elections have now left standing: Jeter des millions de travailleurs dans l'extrême précarité, ça serait un barrage contre le fascisme? To throw millions of workers into extreme precarity, that's a wall against fascism?
21. It's the fascist vs. the neoliberal now, does this sound familiar.
22. Daily practice acquaintance with the edge, the verge, the brink. Good morning, brink, Brink how do you do.
23. & with what Bergson called "counterfeit immobility," does this explain atoms aka reality: "The living are relatively stable, & counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a progression, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement."
24. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Berlin, 1932: "The great disintegration of our ideals, of our human systems of order & social structures, puts the question before us anew every day: What should we do?"
24a. His text: "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you."
25. That feeling lately of tipping out of a balance that was itself a tipping out of a balance, & back & back like that to the appearance in these Américan harbors of those first white sails.
26. Where you're standing if it seems that going backward would put things right, & where if it seems that the only hope is going where no one's yet been.
27. The complex task of figuring out who you might go with, & who might go with you.
28. Unamerican Egyptian proverb: First choose your traveling companion, then choose the road.
29. proletariat. n. The group of people at the bottom of the Roman hierarchies who had no property, who had nothing to offer the state but their babies, as per the division of the people by Servius Tullius, son of a court slave.
30. One of those rare words that's the same in almost all the languages: brulitariya in Arabic, proletariaat in Estonian, proletariaatti in Finnish, proletariáto in Greek, proletariat in Polish & Swedish & Indonesian
31. --except Scots Gaelic, where it's mòr-sluagh, which means a multitude.
32. Late 1970s share of total household wealth owned by the wealthiest tenth of a per cent of the people: 7%. As of 2012: 22%.
33. Since the 1970s, average pre-tax income increase for wealthiest 10%: 121%. For top 1%: 205%. For top 0.001%: 636%. For the least wealthy 50%: 0.
34. Equal in wealth: 160,000 richest US families & 145 million poorest, would that be a multitude.
35. Like the conquista replaying over & over. How the repetitions depend on force but also on the words used to frame them.
36. Marx on the primacy of material conditions. Is a word material. Is a mind.
37. How they brought us every year to Plymouth Rock for white settler orientation, the boulder surrounded by a wall so you had to tip yourself over the edge & look down, as if the settlers had arrived via the bottom of a well, or via the pit where they told us Joseph in the Bible had been imprisoned by his brothers.
38. Genesis: "Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams."
39. False flag measures for dreamers, chapter 1.
40. From Mahmoud Darwish's "Eleven Stars Over Andalusia": "Here, on our last evening,/we look closely at the mountains besieging the clouds: a conquest, & a counter-conquest,/& an old time handing this new time the keys to our doors."
41. Raise your hand if you own your doors.
42. Raise your other hand if you can narrate how came they yours.
43. Raise one leg if you own nothing but your labor & 2 computers & a bicycle, a skillet & a pasta pot & a saucepan your friend Shahnaz gave you, 8 cups & 8 plates, a bed & 2 changes of sheets, a chair & a couch & a lot of books, & after 24 years of full-time work at the same place, & 19 years of scattered work before that, enough in a retirement account to provide $10K a year as long as you don't live past 80, about the cost of 4 months' rent now.
44. If you're not part of the 22% of US workers 55 & older who've managed to save $250K or more for retirement, raise the other leg.
45. The plunge of the retirement fund graphs during the looting of 2008, but I avoid the bruise of that, I can't remember the years of labor lost (note the frame: 'lost' vs. 'stolen'), I shift away.
46. How when I see those other graphs with a similar shape, that drop in inequality that begins in 1929, when they built a seawall of benefits to keep back the revolution flood, & then in the 1970s it starts to climb again, & I wonder in my multitude of ignorances, What happened in the 1970s? & think of Chile & Argentina.
47. Allende to the UN, December 1972, on how he came from a country "where universal secret suffrage is the means of defining our multiparty regime, with a Parliament functioning uninterrupted since its creation 160 years ago."
48. How living in Cuba made me feel their fear & trepidations for the precarious Chilean experiment: to try to make a revolution not with guns but with votes.
49. What my country tried to teach them & the world about how that works out.
50. Allende on revolution, as per his UN talk: the transformation of multinational copper profits into food for children. Into 'proteins.' "Only a small part of this amount would assure proteins for all the children in my country once and for all."
51. Was this what David was dreaming of when he sang, Thou spreadest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
52. Marx in a letter: "The world has long had a dream of something which it only has to conceptualize consciously to possess in actuality."
53. Democracy as a precarious balance, vs. as a splayed eagle with olive branches in one claw & arrows in the other.
54. & wouldn't Usahn democracy in particular have to begin with the eagle flying over a burning village, dragging someone in chains.
55. --as the white Englishmen we're supposed to call our fathers make the laws & the patterns of conduct within them that will frame the lives of generations
56. --in a room like that church on Gorée, did I dream this or is it there, with a slave cell in the basement where the light between the church floorboards seeps through.
57. How I was taught to fear not the men burning & dragging & legislating & lying aka obeying the laws of civil liberal discourse, but the people in the cell in the basement.
58. When I was in college in Massachusetts & used to do anti-racism workshops for white students, in the days when they yelled USA! USA! for the national hockey team, the way the fascists yelled it two weekends ago in Berkeley while giving Nazi salutes: what I used to call 'the ooga-booga implant,' like a chip under your skin, so power can push a button & you're terrified, of the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.
59. The MK-ULTRA official after the war who said that the goal of the human experiments was to find the behavioral modification or drug that would make all US adversaries fling down their arms & start singing the Star Spangled Banner.
60. 'ooga-booga' with that puerile echo of the racist British schoolboy slang it is, soldiers referring to the people of Sudan.
61. Winston Churchill, The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, on "the Arab-negro" : "The qualities of mongrels are rarely admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and negro types has produced a debased and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than the primitive savages."
& 61a., on Islam, as forwarded happily around by US Congressmen these days: "How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity...were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."
62. Marion Le Pen, Marine's niece: "We are facing a global menace, Islamism."
63. Times headline as the Weimar brawls in Berkeley unfolded: Concern That Aides Have Nazi Leanings Clouds Le Pen in France
64. Marine Le Pen to Christiane Amanpour: "Some of them would steal your wallet and brutalize your wife...On top of that, they start to remove the wallpaper!"
65. How we on the college basketball team laughed & rolled our eyes & paid no attention, drunk with our arms around each other's shoulders, singing We Are the Champions, the way the Proud Boys did up the street at the Gaslight on election night, when someone not drinking said That's a fascist song, You guys are singing a fascist song.
66. The implant made from jokes & books & movies & tv shows & whispers, privileges & exclusions, generations of thefts & lies & projections. Made of words, of mind, of narrative, implanted in your intimacies, where it grows, & you start to replicate it, & pass it on.
67. The power of it, when someone presses the button.
68. How my uncle & my beloved grandmother pressed it in 1966, when my brothers & I marched in a circle in her living room in New Jersey while the Ballad of the Green Beret played, from the cabinet speaker I used to lean my forehead against to feel the drums, when I was five, wearing a velvet dress, was it Easter.
69. How Bill Clinton pressed it when he posed in front of rows of mostly black prisoners at the Stone Mountain Correctional Facility in Georgia in 1992.
(69a. The new day a candidate who wants to be seen as tough on crime stands in front of Langley & the Pentagon & the Stock Exchange.)
70. How my city pressed it in the spring of 1989, when a white investment banker was raped & beaten almost to death & 5 black teenagers were arrested for something they didn't do
71. & the real estate developer who recommended their execution, & who still insists they're guilty, even after a confession & DNA evidence to the contrary, pressed it again to become president, was that yesterday or 100 years ago.
72. Our current Attorney General to Alabama radio last November: "Trump has always been this way. People say he wasn't a conservative, but he bought an ad 20 years ago in the New York TImes calling for the death penalty. How many people in New York, that liberal bastion, were willing to do something like that?"
72a. "He believes in law and order and he has the strength and will to make this country safer. And the biggest benefits from that, really, are poor people in the neighborhoods that are most dangerous, where most of the crime is occurring. And I think people can understand that if the message continues to pound away."
72b. Jefferson as in "July 18, 1817: Thomas Jefferson assigns ten slaves to clear what had once been James Monroe's cornfield. This marks the beginning of what will become the University of Virginia."
& as in Confederate President Jefferson Davis, sworn in on the Capitol steps in Montgomery, Alabama, who "operated a large cotton plantation in Mississippi but never owned more than 74 slaves" #Heritage
& Beauregard as in PGT the Confederate General who commanded the assault on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, who owned someone who waxed his mustache every day
& Sessions maybe as in the slightly mysterious ancestor described in Miss Ellen Washburn Sessions's 1891 letter to FC Sessions: "I inclose you an account of our ancestor, the 'Black Sessions,' as he was afterward called probably from the blackness of his crime...I think his name was John. He was also a judge of the county courts.
"The grandfather was a man of much eminence, living in Westminster, Vt., a member of the Continental Congress, and a deacon in the Congregational church. In a time when provisions were very scarce in that section of the country, when they had little to eat but potatoes and salt, the good deacon saw a deer come out of the woods near his house late Sunday afternoon; he seized his gun and shot the deer. For this the church brought him up for discipline. He pleaded that it was both a work of necessity and of mercy, and that he was justified in killing this game, so providentially brought within range of his trusty gun, even if it were before sunset on Sunday. The church, however, instructed the pastor to read the sentence of excommunication on the following Sabbath. The deacon was asked to rise in his pew while the sentence was read severing his relation to the church for Sabbath breaking. He arose, and as the pastor was about to read, reaching behind him, he took his gun which he had carried to the meeting-house, levelled it at the minister's head, and in the most determined tone said, 'I forbid that paper being read from the pulpit.' The pastor quietly remarked, 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient, and I do not think it expedient to read this paper.' The deacon not only lived but died a member and deacon of the church."
73. Some pedagogical game at the Congregational church in Scituate, the Sunday night youth group meeting, & for some reason my brother & his friend on the football team were there, was this penance for something--how the game involved several teams, each with a ball & a series of complex choices, & my brother & his friend stole all the balls & kept them & that was the end of the game. How I can still see the faces of the other kids hesitating, uneasy, trying to be polite, & the junior minister in charge trying to permit all the liberal freedoms, & can still hear my brother & his friend unable to stop laughing.
74. How little we learned to move together except in competitions, & how detailed the obfuscations & instructions re force & theft. How it comes back to me lately especially, the remembered childhood pleasure of a solidly landed punch, of taking one & living, of the solid illusory complexity-erasing weight of a cap gun in the palm of your hand.
75. How many torment questions would be answered if only fascism could be fought with more killing. The amount of energy my country has devoted to the colonial question of how to kill better.
76. The US machine guns & ammunition shipped to Chile in the diplomatic pouch after Allende was elected in 1970, & the murder of the commander-in-chief of Chile's armed forces soon after, 48 hours before the Chilean Parliament confirmed Allende's election. Cable to CIA station chief in Santiago: IMMEDIATE SANTIAGO (EYES ONLY) SUB-MACHINE GUNS AND AMMO BEING SENT BY REGULAR COURIER LEAVING WASHINGTON 0700 HOURS 19 OCTOBER.
(76a. The rueful incredulous Latin American laughter at the idea of a USA outraged that another country may have influenced our election, by pouring money into it or publicizing emails pertaining to it or spreading lies about it on the internet.)
76b. William Broe, who lived in Scituate, where I grew up, whose grandparents were born in Ireland, whose daughters worked with my mother at a store in the harbor, whose house was on Indian Trail, who helped arrange that Che Guevara would die like Metacomet aka King Philip of the Wampanoag, re his work as deputy chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA: "I have never gone through a period as we did on the Chilean thing. I mean it was just constant, constant...just continual pressure...from the White House."
76c. The Havana stencil graffiti with Che's clear-eyed face & his arms bleeding from where his hands were amputated by the Americans. How William Broe who lived into his 90s & raised roses & went to church in Cohasset was probably among those who reviewed that package when it arrived in Washington.
76d. Andad con cartas, the conquistadores said to the Native people whose hands they cut off & hung around their necks, Go to the rebels in the mountains & carry these letters. #ColonialGestures
77. William Broe's face a little like McGeorge Bundy's, who died the same week as Tupac Shakur 21 Septembers ago, both their faces on the Times front page.
78. Emanuel Levinas: "The face as the extreme precariousness of the other. Peace as awakeness to the precariousness of the other."
79. The frames--
a. McGeorge Bundy Dies at 77; Top Adviser in Vietnam Era
b. Tupac Shakur, 25, Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies
--to tell you of whom you should be afraid.
80. Bundy responsible for the deaths of millions: "My own view of bombing of the north was uh, in a sense never the majority view. Uh, I believed in a policy of uh, what I think we then called sustained reprisal, in which the level of bombing would be very, quite explicitly related to the level of Communist activity in the south."
81. Tupac, "So Many Tears": "Inside my mind I couldn't find a place to rest/Until I got that Thug Life tatted on my chest."
82. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, George Wallace's running mate in 1968, who once killed more than 100,000 people in one night of coordinated firebombing in Japan, re Korea: "Over a period of three years or so, we killed off--what--20 percent of the population."
82a. When he died: Gen. Curtis LeMay, an Architect Of Strategic Air Power, Dies at 83
83. The CNN banner with the MOAB bomb drop on top & the dragging of a bleeding Asian man off an airplane just beneath.
84. Airplanes as messengers of what's to come: Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers' union in 1981, after the post-Blair-Mountain New Deal union protections, to open the door to those no-gain income graphs mentioned earlier, & Save up to 70% on Labor Cost With Our Virtual Workforce Solutions! Click Here!
85. Allende at the UN: "In a word, the entire political structure of the world is being undermined."
86. NYT: "Responding to Dr Allende at a press conference immediately after the speech, George Bush, the United States representative, said that the investment of American capital abroad was not intended to exploit foreign countries, but rather was of mutual benefit to the investor and to the people of the country in which the investment is made."
"We don't think of ourselves as imperialists," Mr Bush said. "Foreign trade is not necessarily evil."
87. From Bundy's obituary: "His prominent family had a long tradition of public service."
88. Which of our long traditions resulted in the fact that no one stood up & blocked the aisle of that plane.
89. & which resulted in the helpless joy of the pilot in Peter Davis's 1974 "Hearts & Minds," watching the results of his napalm drop: "Absolutely outstanding. Look at them run. Look at it burn."
90. & which is waiting under Peter Dale Scott's Coming to Jakarta description:
There must be two of me
I remember the surge
of almost too vivid pleasure
when the sheriffs lined up
their faces and numbers masked
The streetlights' reflections
caught in the burnish
of their identical helmets
and we found we could hold our terrain
the smoking canisters
of tear gas hurled back
There were so many more of us
91. State Department report to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, July 1976, on what would happen when the killing finished in Argentina: "What will remain is a chain of governments, started by Brazil in 1964, whose origin was in battle against the extreme left."
92. The documents released in 2004, 40 years after the Brazilian coup, LBJ: "I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do." US ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon: "If our influence is to be brought to bear to help avert a major disaster here—which might make Brazil the China of the 1960s—this is where both I and all my senior advisors believe our support should be placed," recommending "that measures be taken soonest to prepare for a clandestine delivery of arms of non-US origin, to be made available to Castello Branco supporters in Sao Paulo," delivered via "unmarked submarine to be off-loaded at night in isolated shore spots in state of Sao Paulo south of Santos."
93. Emily's note that the church I was remembering wasn't on Gorée but on the coast of Ghana, just south of Accra, El Mina, built by the Portuguese, the oldest European building south of the Sahara, one Columbus visited. Its door of no return, through which passed the people in chains bound for Brazil, its private staircases directly from the Governor's chamber to the cell where the women were imprisoned, the church on the second level & a thousand Africans below.
94. The El Mina Castle quarters for the soldiers, the traders, & the pastors. Acronym for the coalition that just overthrew the government of Brazil: BBB, for Bullets, Beef, & Bibles.
95. 1976 State Department memo on what the Condor regime offered, in addition to anti-Communism: "There is also an ideology that is more positive in origin: that of national development."
95a. "National developmentism has obvious and bothersome parallels to National Socialism. Opponents of the military regimes call them fascist. It is an effective pejorative, the more so because it can be said to be technically accurate."
but/& 95b. "...some of these regimes are producing really solid economic successes."
95c. State Department meeting with the Argentine Foreign Minister on the joint struggle against terrorism, June 1976:
The Secretary
The private sector can be of greatest assistance. I will call David Rockefeller.
Undersecretary Rogers
Yes, Chase could be very helpful.
The Secretary
And I will call his brother, the Vice President.
95d. Kissinger: "We understand you must establish authority."
& : "If there are more things that have to be done, you should do them quickly."
96. To frame 'communism' as a race, as a gender, as a class, as a sexuality, to provoke those same useful levels of feudal vassal court-slave hatred. To plant under your skin the idea that the king's interests & yours are the same.
96a. State Department memo on this version of the ooga-booga implant: "Fighting the absent pinkos remains a central goal of national security." "Long after left-wing threats are squashed, the regimes are still terrified of them."
96b. To frame democracy this way. Easter tweet from Action Française: Democracy, The System That Chose Barabbas Instead of Jesus.
96c. To frame the precariat this way, the hoi polloi, the rabble, the riffraff, trash, dregs, scum, the obstacle to social happiness, the filth that must be cleansed, the peril that must be eliminated. How in Argentina they called the people 'perejil,' 'parsley,' because you throw it away.
97. How many friends 'national developmentism' may have when it's focused on lifting trade restrictions & making a more corporate-friendly tax code, on 'austerity,' to let the rising tide of profit that lifts all boats seek its own sacred level
97a. & how many to serve as the tide's conduit, as in its mysterious & inevitable benevolences it figures out how to go where it wants, without archaic impediments, into the public schools, the public clinics & hospitals, the housing, the systems of food distribution & transportation, the legislatures & judicial & executive chambers, sluicing through the hallways, spreading free speech & enlightenment wherever it goes
97b. & how many willing to make the sacrifice of persuading journalists & elementary school teachers & historians to frame murder & theft as misunderstood manifestations of this heroism, to ensure the maintenance of the proper perspective
97c. & others to sponsor professorships & cancel the search when the 3 economist candidates haven't demonstrated proper team-player project understanding, & others to keep this from being discussed
97d. & others to pay off the doctors who provide human subjects for drug experiments, to promise patriotic professional silence when some of them die
97e. & sometimes, in crisis, as in Argentina in the 70s, others to arrest a generation objecting to these arrangements, & disfigure & destroy them, in pop-up prisons on the outskirts of the capital
97f. & seal their bodies in 200-liter barrels with sand & cement & throw them in the canal or bury them
97g. --for another generation to find 37 years later, while playing in a field, a rusted barrel with an anticapitalist bone sticking out
97h. --one like those that surfaced soon after manufacture, in 1976, with the son of the great poet of anticapitalist grief & fury, of tenderness & persistence, Juan Gelman, inside
[ deshijándome, a word he invented: 'unsonning me' ]
[ Cornel West at the Coltrane documentary Q & A on Easter Sunday : To be hated & to teach people how to love. To be dehumanized & teach people how to be human. ]
97i. & sometimes the patient skilled forensic anthropologists, parts of the state not murderous now, reclaimed from necrophilia, intent on reclamation, can make an earthmover's work be gentle, delicate, & find another barrel nearby
97j. : a barrel surrounded by a cloud of bees, who've made honey inside it
97k. & they call in the bee man who sets up a house like the one on calle 13 in Havana that lives near the Chinese embassy in the roots of a tree, its trays smeared with honey
97l. --near the booth with the guard who tells every woman passing she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen
97m. & the bees move to the new place, so the drum can be lifted & transported & opened, to reveal the man inside, Jesús, the Cuban diplomat kidnapped & tortured & murdered in the middle of Buenos Aires by national developmentism in 1976.
97n. How in June 2013 they brought him home: Jesús Cejas Arias, pinareño, from Pinar del Río, the oldest of 9
97o. --the age of my youngest child now when he was a Cuban diplomat in Argentina in 1976, kidnapped in broad daylight in the middle of the street by men in a Ford Falcon
97p. & interrogated & tortured by 2 CIA agents, one who arrived from Santiago & one from Miami for the occasion
97q. --from Santiago Michael Townley, born in Waterloo, Iowa, whose father was a Ford executive in Chile, who killed Orlando Letelier in Washington & maybe Pablo Neruda too
97r. --& from Miami Guillermo Novo Sampol, an accomplice of Luis Posada Carriles, who that same year blew up an airplane carrying the Cuban fencing team, who the cubanos like to call the American Osama bin Laden
97s. & forged an unsigned letter from Jesús & his colleague: "We (Jesús Cejas Arias y Crescencio Galañena) both Cubans address ourselves to you to communicate that we've deserted from the Embassy to enjoy the liberty of the western world."
97t. Townley living somewhere secret under witness protection & Novo Sampol & Posado Carriles celebrating the birthday of another FBI-supported Alpha 66 socio Reinol Rodríguez at Finca Media Luna in Miami in 2015 & discussing Cuba & Venezuela.
Finca Media Luna, Miami, October 2015. Far left in pale jeans: Guillermo Novo Sampol. 4th from left, in blue shirt & white hat: Luis Posada Carriles.
97u. How once Allende was dead the Chilean economy magically stopped screaming.
97v. @ericgarland in Birdland: "The men and women safeguarding western democracy are people content to seek knowledge tirelessly and without glory for the good of all."
97w. Claude Taylor, former Clinton White House staff @TrueFactsStated: "So grateful to IC of many nations that have come together and are helping do what the Republicans failed to do--rid us of Trump. Thank you!"
97x. @InDaZone replying to @ericgarland: "I consider the men and women of the IC our only hope."
97y. Beautiful otherwise clarion Masha Gessen, to In These Times: "If suddenly, tomorrow, there's a military coup, that may not be a horrible thing. I sort of agree with people who say, 'Anything is better than him.'"
97z. @joshuamanning23 retweeting @ericgarland: "They are great people who know how to speak truth to power."
98. How you can't take the implant out, but you can retranslate its transmissions.
99. & turn your fear & fury into something else, would the anthem of the precariat be Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," "The Sound of Music" dismantled & put back together in the soprano voice of the colonized world, or would it be "Alabama," after the murders of those 4 Birmingham girls, following the cadences of MLK's voice.
100. If the refusal to let them make you their accomplice in murder is the last thing you let them take from you.
101. Cornel West after the Coltrane movie: "You don't lose sight of the humanity even of the gangsters who killed your precious child."
102. Víctor Dreke, Che's second in command in Angola, talking to students in Havana last May re the Colombia peace talks, calling la lucha armada una locura. Eso ya pasó. The armed struggle as insanity. That's over now.
103. ANNEX TO APPENDIX TO ENCLOSURE A / JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF 1962
PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA
(Note: The courses of action which follow are a preliminary submission suitable only for planning purposes. They are arranged neither chronologically nor in ascending order. Together with similar inputs from other agencies, they are intended to provide a point of departure for the development of a single, integrated, time-phased plan. Such a plan would permit the evaluation of individual projects within the context of cumulative, correlated actions designed to lead inexorably to the objective of adequate justification for US military intervention in Cuba).
1. Since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba, a cover and deception plan, to include requisite preliminary actions such as has been developed in response to Task 33 c, could be executed as an initial effort to provoke Cuban reactions. Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban responses justifies.
2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.
a. Incidents to establish a credible attack (not in chronological order):
(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform "over-the-fence" to stage attack on the base.
(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
(4) Start riots near the entrance to the base (friendly Cubans).
(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
(6) Burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage).
(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installations.
(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea of vicinity of Guantanamo City.
(9) Capture militia group which storms the base.
(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires -- napthalene.
(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims (may be lieu of (10)).
b. United States would respond by executing offensive operations to secure water and power supplies, destroying artillery and mortar emplacements which threaten the base.
c. Commence large scale United States military operations.
3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:
a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.
b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.
4. We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.
103a. But these documents invisible until many years later, long after you've heard your gutted city's Assistant Commissioner of the Fire Department say, "You know like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That's what I thought I saw. And I didn't broach the topic to him, but he asked me. He said I don't know if I'm crazy, but I just wanted to ask you because you were standing right next to me. He said did you see anything by the building? And I said what do you mean by see anything? He said did you see any flashes? I said, yes, well, I thought it was just me. He said no, I saw them, too."
& after you've watched the videos anyone can watch, of the north tower & the flashes from the floors far below the plane & the cutter charges pop pop popping on the undoctored sound track.
& after you've heard the warporn swoon in the voice of George Bush II announcing "The first war of the 21st century."
103b. From Harold Pinter's Nobel speech: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
104. Coltrane in a train car by himself during his Japan tour in 1966, the year before he died, asked why he was playing the flute: "I was searching for the sound of Nagasaki."
105. Ruth when my daughter was little & wanted to know why no one killed Hitler: "It's not a man, it's a system."
106. Could it be overturned by the dictatorship of the first lilacs since last May, come back in spite of everything, of the cherry blossoms opening near the West 4th Street basketball court
107. --where I stood on September 12, 2001, listening to an argument between 2 precarious soldier-age young Black men: the one on the outside yelling about wiping cockroaches off the face of the earth, the other on the inside, his hands in the meshes, yelling Okay, I know who killed my cousin. I know where his family lives. Should I go find him? Should I go get him myself? Should I go get all of them?
108. How he reminds me when I waver, re whose tools will & will not dismantle the master's house, & who'll be holding them this time: the ones who see the patterns, who don't buy the bullshit, who retranslate the implant's orders, who don't sell themselves or anyone else--the ones who balance on what looks like nothing, who know that part of every dialogue is a love-close look in a stranger's face--whose movements argue with gravity & whose skilled fingers argue with chain link, the ones rubbing their beautiful eyes from nearness to the smoke. "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you."
Jesús