The First Independence Day After The Fall Of The So-called Republic
get on board that train
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Friday, the Mennonites and I pulled out of Chicago’s Union Station at about half past 2pm on train number 49, The Southwest Chief, bound for Los Angeles. There was nothing much to remind me of the 4th of July, unself-consciously called Independence Day in the United States of the Americas. There was mention of the date, of course, and various social media commiseration over fireworks on behalf of pets and their owners.
I knew I would be missing both a banner day of grilling in the beer garden of Cary’s Lounge in the most diverse neighborhood in the USA, Chicago’s West Rogers Park multi-mile strip known to some tourists as Little India and to locals as Devon Street, emphasis on the “on.” I was also going to miss the Encino, California Pollack/Falcone pool, cocktail, and cuisine bash. Each missing on either geographical end of my trip was a tragedy in its own right, but days prior to my journey I had shed my tears and made peace with those bereavements.
As the USA enters its 250th year of declaring its existence, I am over it. After the Occupy Wall Street and then the Black Lives Matter protests dissolved, after what we learned during Covid about the economy being organized completely upside-down was so promptly and often maliciously forgotten at the command of the überwealthy, I have not even the thinnest thread of hope that this nation will be healed through lawful means.
I was born a year and a half before JFK’s assassination. Looking back with eyes jaded by decades of anti-leftist violence, regardless of the targets’ degrees of leftism, I can say, as a potential target myself: “FUSA.” I am no longer participating in your drunken dreams of your redemption. I’ve been weaning myself off of your toxic udders of false hope since I first understood what the Vietnam War was and that it was happening as I grew throughout my childhood. I admired those who protested the war and those with the will and courage to reveal the lies behind it, but all that is over now. Roger Ailes has seen to that. The Heritage Foundation has seen to that. William F. Buckley has seen to that. Gerald Ford has seen to that. Stephen Miller has seen to that. Even lazy Joe Biden and non-confrontational, user-friendly Barak Obama stood by at best while it happened, holding their dicks.
I’m glad I didn’t have to watch the first woman president betray the unhoused and working poor with self-congratulatory Democratic Party faux-progressive lip service and half-assery, not that Obidenama had left her any defensible turf on which to stand.
The first in-real-life visual reminder of this year’s holiday/3-day weekend was the one-woman security detail at the Princeton, Illinois station platform, whom I hope I am not misgendering. She wore serge-blue shorts and a broad polo shirt depicting a full-shirt-size US flag. She carried a radio with an antenna that reminded those I texted my photo to of a telescoping police baton or a cattle prod. Cattle prod or not, she was certainly armed to shock the populace out of its fashion complacency.
I would swear I’d never vote Democrat again in a presidential election if I thought we’d ever be allowed to cast a fair vote in such an election again in my lifetime. But since the Democratic Party as a viable federal force for change has withered, blackened, and dropped off like a gangrenous toe, such swearing would be superfluous.
The train was more laden with Mennonites than any I’d ridden yet. They were hyperactive, too, always choking the aisles with old and young women, giant bearded men in Prince Valiant haircuts, and children, girls in miniature Handmaid’s Tale bonnets, boys in the miniature black vests and laser-blue sport shirts of the Mennonite costume, all going to and from the observation car, hogging the tables at times, though not averse to an English taking a seat among them. I do not know what sect of Mennonite they represented. They were not technologically averse, as far as I could tell. One had a camera. They didn’t seem to be hardcore Amish, more like the Lubavitchers of Mennonites.
It got me singing that old Crosby, Stills, and Nash song:
Don’t you know we’re riding On the Mennonite Express Don’t you know we’re riding On the Mennonite Express They’re taking me to Peterloo
I had a brief interaction with one of the adult males when we stopped in Kansas City. It was after dark when we arrived at the platform to let passengers off and on and step out for an extended fresh-air break. Fireworks, many launched by amateurs, had been bursting over the city as we approached, and now, as we stood on the platform, an entire official fireworks show appeared as if for our benefit. The explosions were many and large, never a flame blossom blooming alone but always overlapping with the next and the next. To outdo those volleys the finale was therefore even more furious. Bright white tracers and missile flashes exploded violently, bringing to mind the logic-defyingly persistent war on the pulverized population of Gaza, and rockets launched into Tel Aviv, too. And scenes from the old US war in Indochina, both journalistic and artistic.
When I went back inside the train’s lower-level passage, the aforementioned adult male Mennonite remarked, “We have nothing like that where we live.”
Still a mite perturbed by the ordnance that had been deployed overhead, I asked him what he’d said.
“We never see such things where we live.”
“Looks like we arrived just in time for the show,” I said.
“It’s something.”
“That finale was very aggressive,” I ventured.
“Yes, it was,” he agreed.
I was put in mind of a poem my frequent creative partner had sent me earlier in the day:
No Explosions
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of lifeThe poem is by Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet living in San Antonio. Her father brought her family to Missouri when she was about nine years old. They went back to visit in 1975. Her grandmother had been evicted from her home and relocated to Gaza, and among other random indignities had had all her porcelain plumbing accoutrements smashed during an arbitrary raid by the IDF, not during any particular war action, simply as an act of unprovoked cruelty of a kind no Jew who supports Israel’s persecution of Palestinians as justified ever believes any Israeli ostensible security force capable of. As if somehow the soldiers and cops of Israel behave completely unlike those of any other nation, as if by some magic of being associated with Judaism. Effing idiots.
Coincidentally, two days before the 4th, on Wednesday – or Polish Tuesday as the Greek proprietor of the Irish bar in the Indian-Pakistani neighborhood calls it – during a famous This Is Hell! meet and greet that’s really a drink and think, producer Daphne gave voice to something that’s been on my mind. She suggested the term “antisemitism” and its adjective and noun forms be retired as unuseful. After all, Arabs are a semitic people, and the accusation of antisemitism as weaponized by the brainwashed blockheads who wield it is most certainly not meant to include them. Therefore, if someone wants to call me anti-Jewish, they will have to specifically accuse me of being anti-Jewish. If they want to call me anti-Israel, they’ll have to specifically accuse me of that. If they use the words antisemite, antisemitic, or antisemitism, they will receive in return either a withering, faux-confused glare or an earful of four-letter scatological and genital invective. Got it, you sticky, sloppy pig scrota?
I’ve been fully done with the Israeli illusion for at least a couple of decades now. Netanyahu’s unilateral unprovoked attack on Iran was the final straw. Sorry, no more patience for the gullible. He doesn’t care about the hostages that somehow prevent you from seeing the genocide he’s committing. Doesn’t mean I don’t care about hostages on either side or want any state destroyed or denuded of Jews, incidentally, which goes without saying if you have the kind of mind capable of discerning between anti-Judaism and anti-Israeli policy toward its occupied non- citizens.
And the US illusion, which I’ve kept allowing to tease me with its carrot that turns out to be an inedible cudgel, has been utterly dashed to smithereens and ground to dust. All done playing that no-win game. I choose what to be and how to be it, and I’m no longer going to deprecate myself for laughs unless there’s a really good opportunity. Anyone who thinks me unpatriotic or anti-Jewish, or in any other way disapproves of my work ethic or lifestyle or lack of adherence to social norms, I urge you to open your mindscape and let in some light and fresh air. Most of you are well beyond requiring such admonishment, I know that about you. But some of you will never be capable of heeding it, and maybe that’s just how it has to be. If we can survive this and remain friends through it, I think we will have much of interest to discuss on the other side.
Something that struck me as the train the was rolling through Colorado and New Mexico the day after FUSA Rubicon Day or whatever you want to call it: what I love about this country looks a lot like what I love about Africa and Asia and Canada and Mexico and Europe, food not included.
No, no, no. I do not think everyone’s stupid or unenlightened but me. That would be silly, like thinking the Earth is the center of the universe. It’s not even the center of our solar system, nor are human beings the most important of all living things, and if you work through the categories that apply to you, going to narrower and narrower specificity, recognize the delusions holding you falsely in utmost importance at every level of existence, and do your best to disentangle yourself from those egotistical webs, who knows? You might become as great a thinker of your generation as I am! For your sake, I hope, with better anger management skills.
Donald Trump can be proud of his image. Thanks to a SCOTUS majority with a taste for gargling his balls and a legislative branch willing to play ball with that same sack and a press that has normalized his antic fascism (as they’ve been preparing to do at least since Nixon was pardoned), he is the first true Emperor of the FUSA.
What does the “F” stand for? Use your imagination. I’m sure you can come up with something just as rude as what’s on the tip of my tongue.
"We never see such things where we live"
Last month, when I was in Chicago for my kids' graduation, we put my dad on a train to St. Louis. That was when I discovered the Mennonite groups. And I'm still wondering where they were going, why take the train, why is this a regular thing? I, too, have given up. We just have to get through it.