Last week, I collapsed in a classroom while talking about Plessy v. Ferguson. I didn’t have any idea what was going on until I awoke, about an hour later, being shepherded into Grady Hospital by an incredibly kind and gentle woman who said: “I guess you never betcha’d have a seizure, huh?”
Nine hours on a gurney — listening to unhoused people and elderly grannies moan in pain, when you have no phone or book or magazine to look at — definitely gets you thinking. Just looking at the bare white wall and counting the minutes.
But my brief internment is nothing. Presumably, I will be fine, and this was a strange occurrence. The whole experience unfolds as a rippling sheet of questions: how much am I going to pay if I let them do a CT scan or EKG, even if I have decent insurance? What’s going on with my neighbors on the gurneys, who have (best case scenario) Medicaid or no insurance at all? How many times have they been in this exact place seeking treatment for the chronic conditions that can only be briefly mitigated in an Emergency Department? How long will this go on, and how long will these people bear this untenable burden, from today until Tuesday, and Wednesday?
As the Book of Proverbs says: How long? How long?
We live in a time of hopes and horrors and mirrors. Just enough funhouse distortion to make everything un-understandable. Many brave Americans have stood up to the clubfooted jackboots of ICE in cities from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, and many more help their neighbors in need in a time of unnecessary privation and predation. The pudding-brained president talks of conquering Greenland and destroying our NATO alliances like he’s playing the game of Risk in Candyland or Chutes & Ladders. There is so much beauty in the world to give us heart, but so much foolishness in the hands of people with power.
Lil’ Marco Rubio just gave a speech to the Europeans saying that colonialism and imperialism were good, and we should start doing it again. His ultra-propagandized mind thinks that the rape of the Americas by the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and others during the age of colonialism was actually a good thing. All of us sensible people know this is insane, but here we are.
The normal person worrying about their mortgage and the price of groceries at the store doesn’t trouble themselves with seventeenth-century fantasies of hegemony and conquest — it means less than nothing to them. But we have these Chuck E. Cheese-ass Fitzcarraldos dragging us up the mountain with no thoughts in their head except a Sam’s Club version of epicness and vengeance. May they all accidentally eat rat poison on a Ritz cracker and die.
Here are our reading recommendations for the week:
- Amy Madigan on Falling in Love with Aunt Gladys in ‘Weapons,’ Becoming Wagner Moura’s Smoking Buddy and Cranking Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show to 11 (Variety)
- The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films (Atlantic)
- Mayhem Rocks Mexico After Most-Wanted Cartel Boss Is Killed (NYT)
- A Shocking Sex Scandal Rocks the Trad Right (The Bulwark)
- The Crypto Chokehold: Trump’s return has vaulted pro-crypto interests into power. As they capture ever more Democrats, the political will to stop them is dwindling (Boston Review)
- Video Games V.I.P.s (Classic Arcade Gaming)
- Protesters take to streets nationwide to decry ICE tactics in Minneapolis (WaPo)
- Minneapolis ICE observers keep showing up despite risk of arrest and violence (The Guardian)
- Listless Liberalism (The Point)
- The Adolescence of Technology (Dario Amodei)
- Occupying Hospitals: From Gaza to Minneapolis, attacks on health care turn spaces of refuge into sites of state violence (Boston Review)
- Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics (Liberties)
- Nuclear Anxiety, That Staple of 1980s Cinema, Is Back (NYT)
- A Digital Fortress: Romana Didulo’s Kingdom of Canada and the Resilience of Online Conspiracy Communities (Queen’s University)
- Minnesota courts buckle from flood of immigration cases (WaPo)
- We are sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe (Responsible Statecraft)
- Poll shows US public support for LGBTQ+ protections falling for first time since 2015 (The Guardian)
- Inside the North’s Only Line of Defence Against the Opioid Crisis (The Walrus)
- The Strange Case of the Disappearing Soviet Waiter (R Discovery)
- Grief has become infrastructure in Minneapolis, a city mobilized by trauma (CNN)
- Groundbreaking Brazilian Drug, Considered Capable of Reversing Spinal Cord Injury, Presented in São Paulo (Folha)
- It Is Not You, Patti Smith, but Clearly Me (Common Reader)
- Synecdoche, New York review – the strangest, saddest movie imaginable (The Guardian)