Category: Uncategorized

Starlings fill the sky. They circle a large whitewashed mansion with green shutters raised above the bay. Scarlet blooms grow in turquoise pots and trees bend in the breeze inside the walls of the garden. There is shade in that garden. And a hammock strung between lemon trees. There is health in that garden. Cool walls and birdsong. I’d get to look young in that place. I’d come home to rest in that place. I’d stop running, running through airports and railway stations, running through European cities looking for rooms and coffee and company and comfort. I would stop running away from this beast inside me. We would rest here and stop being frightened of each other.

Released in 2005 in the midst of the George W. era, Revenge of the Sith was perhaps the most overtly political of the entire saga. Nixon was no longer the emperor. As Lucas explained, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” Supreme Chancellor Palpatine manipulates fear to turn the Republic into the Empire. With eerie prescience, Lucas told the Chicago Tribune, “Democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”

As a strongman , T’Challa bears some resemblance to Kwame Nkrumah, the leftist president of Ghana who was overthrown by a coup allegedly aided by the CIA in 1966. There’s little about T’Challa that would suggest he’s a leftist, save for the fact that he rules over a country untouched by colonialism. If anything, he leans right. His beneficence does not extend beyond Wakanda’s borders, sealed against as they are against the povertystricken tribes on all sides by a ring of mountains. T’Challa believes that only by refusing to share its wealth and technology can his country protect its unique way of life. His Wakanda First isolationism flies in the face of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, and even has a whiff of you-know-who about it. In fact, in this important way, he is more like Donald Trump than he is like Nkrumah.

An index of the pessimism that pervades these shows is that the dystopias they picture are not sited in the indeterminate future, but only a few years off. In 2017’ s Blade Runner 2049, a crisis occurred in 2022, the year after my driver’s license expires.

And I don’t find that I have any problem understanding other parts of the world, because all parts are pretty much the same when you get down to a certain depth. All cultures in the world, there’s still a basic human bedrock that we all rest upon. And by understanding Northampton very deeply, I find that I’ve got a way of understanding any culture very deeply. Whereas if you were to take somebody who’d visited a country, and you were to take me and give me a week to do the research, and then asked us to both write an account of the time we’d spent in that country, I bet I’d write a more convincing one. I bet I would.

People say all the time, “Aren’t you curious?” But I’m not a curious person. I’m not curious to travel, but I do because my wife likes it. I’m not curious to see other places, I’m not curious to try new things. I go to the same restaurants all the time, and my wife is always saying, “Let’s try something new!” I don’t enjoy that.

On a cloudy day in early November 1979, a caravan of Nazi and Ku Klux Klan members careened into Greensboro, North Carolina, winding toward a local Communist Workers’ Party protest that had gathered in the city to march against the state’s white supremacists. The communists, wearing berets and hard hats, spotted the fleet and taunted the new arrivals with chants of “Death to the Klan!” The KKK convoy slowed, and stopped. Far-left protesters, bearing both wooden planks and concealed pistols, began surrounding the motorcade, beating the doors. As TV cameras rolled, the trunk of a Ford Fairlane, stuffed with shotguns and rifles, popped open. Someone yelled from one of the cars, “You asked for the Klan! Now you’ve got ’em!”

Eighty-eight seconds and 39 shots later, five communists lay dead. Eight other demonstrators were wounded, some permanently paralyzed. For a brief moment, the Greensboro Massacre became one of America’s most notorious acts of political blood-letting. And yet, unlike Wounded Knee or Selma, Greensboro has over the decades largely faded from memory.

Except in Portland.