It’s been a while since we did an update on our Aneurysms series that Casey and I have been writing over the last few years, but we’ve got bad news — we’re back! And the beatings will continue until morality improves.

The good news is that we live in a time of monsters. As friend-of-the-blog Cormac McCarthy put it:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

We do not mean to belittle any of the horrors today: mothers and fathers dragged from their children at worksites and hospitals, Israeli executioners gunning down children when their parents are lining up to get desperately needed flour in the midst of a famine and genocide. Talk about “a mudded field [that] is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”

No, there is no way to put any of this lightly. But we still try to find ways to laugh through the pain, even while looking at the grinning executioner. We worry that our friends and neighbors might be picked up by the masked and unnamed Stasi that are somehow allowed to run riot in American streets. I carry my passport in my purse everywhere I go, as if that would actually protect me.

A time of monsters and morons.

But we hope and pray that McCarthy was wrong — that it is all not “beyond reckoning.” One of my favorite records is R.E.M.’s 1984 Reckoning, which gave a glimpse of the mumbly and mysterious Georgia band’s Southern roots. “Reckoning” is a very Biblical word, and also part of Southern idiomatic speech. Every ICE agent who brutalizes a child or mother and gets a sick thrill out of it will some day, hopefully, face some kind of karmic rebuke.

Reckoning, of course, came out in the same year that ToM’s favorite president Ronald Reagan won a massive, soul-crushing 49-state reelection victory, definitively ushering in the Hell we all now live in. While the white supremacist, neoliberal, big business, yuppie army seemed to be on the march in 1984, other things also changed. ACT-UP was creating noise about the HIV epidemic and putting a giant condom on Jesse Helms’s house. Jesse Jackson was promoting a cross-racial, social-democratic alliance to surprising electoral success, even if he did not make it to the White House.

And then there was Proposition 187 in California. The 1994 ballot measure, promoted by human wilted dildo Pete Wilson, passed with 59% of the vote, mandating that undocumented immigrants could not receive non-emergency healthcare, public education, and other social services. It also mandated the reporting of suspected undocumented immigrants to federal authorities. It seemed like a super-awesome slam-dunk by California Republicans. Who doesn’t want my gardener to be denied healthcare or their kids education? It’s a no-brainer.

Until it wasn’t. California gave us ghouls such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Darrel Issa, Larry Elder, and Stephen Miller. It was once a Republican state, yet no one would really dream of it going red today. There are many (and I’m one of them) who believe that Prop 187 was a Pyrrhic victory — it may have passed by a solid margin, but it was ultimately blocked by the courts and never fully implemented. (Kevin Johnson has a great article here at the UC Davis Law Review.) Meanwhile, a generation of young people of color and particularly immigrants or children of immigrants were catalyzed by this as their defining political memory, and they were mostly never going to vote Republican.

Think of how much more gruesome and impactful these ICE abduction campaigns are than a simple (racist) ballot measure. What will people young and old take from all this? There are many brave people out in the streets risking their lives and freedom to stand up to these tin-plated dingbats. If we have a future, they are it. And hopefully the rest of us, too, will be part of this better, ICE-free future.

As R.E.M. said in 1984, “there’s a splinter in your eye and it reads ‘react.'”

Anyway, here are some pieces worth reading, picked by our editors:

• Ted Gioia on a concept that is dear to our hearts at ToM: Audiences Prove that Experts Are Dead Wrong about longform content
• The King of X: As Texas led a global revolution in designer party drugs, one restless club kid built an empire of ecstasy. His life is an all-American story of entrepreneurship, moral flexibility, and the heedless pursuit of happiness. (Texas Monthly)
• David Wazana’s part one on Rumors, Paranoia, and Repression: The American Left, 1919 to the Present (ToM)
• ‘Incredible video’ captured during Alberta storm could be rare ball lightning event: scientist (Global News)
• The US has a plan to breed millions of flies and drop them from planes. Here’s why (CNN)
• Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse (New York Intelligencer)
• Jonathan Ablard on family memory and Trouble with the Brothers: Booze, Divorce, and Madness in the American West (ToM)
• Beyond a threshold of similarity, our brain stops making distinctions (Metafilter)
• Don’t wrestle with a pig, they say: The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel (404 Media)
• You already know: cabbage cabbage. From beanies to binoculars: Why costume is key in this director’s cinematic universe (CNN)
• Investigating the mysterious man behind the Drudge Report (Jewish Insider)
• Salwa Halloway on diaspora: The Beat of Goombay (Aeon)
• Emmett Rensin on why Whatever a sustainable world looks like, Los Angeles won’t be in it (Boston Review)