Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: America

  • the crimes of President Trump, as listed in the Declaration of Independence

    The Declaration of Independence lists crimes against the American people which drove them to reject British rule. Replace ‘the King’ with ‘Trump’ and this list still makes sense.

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

    “Indictment

    A bill of particulars documenting the [President’s] ‘repeated injuries and usurpations’ of the Americans’ rights and liberties.”

    “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

    “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

    “He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

    “He has called together legislative bodies at places [like Mar a Lago,] unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”

    “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

    “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

    “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

    “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

    “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

    “He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:”

    “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

    “For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

    “For transporting us [if we are Muslim] beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”.

    “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

    He is at this time transporting large Armies of [American soldiers to lands overseas] to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

    A President “whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

  • the meagrely satisfying throne

    He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers. 

    What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape parade, and have flags waving, and maybe people would make Donald masks and schoolchildren would wear them and Melania would float into his arms like a giant swan.

    Same when he builds a hotel. He doesn’t really want to build a hotel: he wants to put his name on a big building in gold letters and it’ll have a glitzy big foyer and people will come in and swank around. He pays minimum attention to the hotel-building chore that gets him there, as we see when it starts falling apart, is cheaply built, and he hasn’t paid his contractors. A man who took pride in the thought that “I — have built a hotel” would pay his sheetrockers. 
    This expression, the day after his Presidential Inauguration, says it all. She is angry — possibly a thwarted Trump is no fun to go home to Friday night. She’s put up with him ever since the doors closed and the cameras dissolved away.

    But he is baffled, furious, bored, bamboozled — what is happening? This wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

    The greatest weekend of his life has been stolen from him — by a march. And life has not just stolen a march, it has shown him up with ratty thin combover crowds, hustled into position behind the Great Leader to swell the photographs; and dismal responses from the music community refusing to play at his party. The world is laughing at him.

    Half the jokes are infuriating to Donald because he can’t understand them. How could he? This is a guy who all his life has learned that you get what you want by getting your own way. You rant and shower some half-baked ideas and ream people, and they hurry off and make it happen. You don’t need to know how it works.

    He has no idea that he would now be wealthier if he had just let the fortune he inherited sit in boring bank bonds on Wall Street. His experience has taught him that success is more important than happiness or enjoyment, and success comes from making an appearance. He’s the shopping mall god. He’s a boy band with only one member, the one kept at the back of every group photograph.

    Screen Shot 2017-01-22 at 11.48.39 am

    He’s outclassed by his wife, the porn queen with her carefully prepared speeches, his daughter, smart enough to play along when she must surely see through him, the real King, that daughter’s husband, and now by the coterie of White House staff who have seen it all before and it was better. Poor Donald. Embodying all that’s most grating in America’s overblown sense of itself, he’s out of touch. And this weekend, the crown, the dream, the White House in the air, has taken everything away from him. If all you know how to do is bully and the most powerful seat in the land brings nothing but millions refusing to listen to you — what’s left?

  • if this is democracy, I’m a jam donut

    The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’

    Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom have been women. For a long time I have been understanding their appeal as a longing for certainty in perilous times. In our heart and in our gut each of us knows we are in trouble. Climate chaos, mega fires, top soil stripping to the bones of our sea-eaten land. Sea levels rising to drown whole Pacific nations. Population explosion, terrorism, and refugee crisis. Our drinking water is at risk and the world seems everywhere at war.

    How to deal with this? The honest way doesn’t soundbite well. As the banner says, if your beliefs fit on a poster — think again. Any honest leader in these times is saying something like: This is unprecedented. I’m not sure how we best handle these pressing disastrous issues. All these massive interlocking crises are unbalancing each other, making our difficulties more complicated. Let’s all pull together and pool our wisdom; we need all hands on deck; all aboard, and it’s going to be a long night.

    How comforting, then, to take refuge and fall in behind the skirts of a raised-fisted demagogue who claims he knows the way out of this place. “Follow me! I have the solution!”

    Such simple mindedness has always had its appeal, hence the abiding popularity of sentimentality, cults, and religions: but the fact is no one on earth knows for sure how we are going to get ourselves out of trouble. From terrorism to water wars, we are facing new perils. The solutions are complex and require much sacrifice. What a relief to imagine we can evolve some magic pill that finds a scapegoat for our fears and renders us immune.

    In 2006 I attended a public meeting at the edge of the desert in South Australia, Australia’s driest state. Its purpose was to discuss the state government’s plan to build a water desalination plant. The idea was they would reef in sea water and desalt it, then pour the waste salt back into the bay in a deadly, suffocating spume.

    This stretch of South Australian coastline is barely tidal and is home to an enormous proportion of the world’s most exotic and rare sea animals. There lives in these waters a creature called the Leafy Sea Dragon, resembling a seahorse who’s gotten tangled in seaweed. These majestic and bizarre fellow beings would have smothered in large numbers, taking with them — as a side effect — chunks of lucrative tourism.

    Meanwhile the crudity of the proposed solution seemed to ignore even its own best financial interests. A man in the crowd was wearing a red t-shirt which said: Well, At Least Sell the Salt.

    A councillor spoke from a neighbouring region twenty kilometres north. Same low rainfall, same climate, same parching, blaring heat. He told us how their council had been harvesting rainwater and driving it down to store in the groundwater aquifer. They resell this water, which virtually everywhere else in Australia is wasted, to households, football clubs, schools. He told us how they had more business than they can keep up with.

    Call me stupid, he said, but maybe what is working for us might also work for you.

    We don’t have a manual for dealing with mass species loss and the human loneliness it leaves in us. No one knows how we’ll cope with a three-degree global temperature rise because no one has ever been through it. “The government better do something!” becomes “We Are Currently Constructing a 16 Billion Dollar Desalination Plant!” and drowns out the more realistic response of perhaps, “See, it’s like a patchwork. We all need to conserve more water, stop washing our concrete driveways and sweep, take shorter showers; and you should install a rainwater tank if you can; and let’s look at industrial waste and stormwater catchment.”

    The man who says I Have a Magic Silver Bullet can sound so persuasive to a population desperate with suppressed fear. For one thing, these seemingly easy solutions do not demand that we think any further about such terrifyingly complex and new issues. To face the looming disasters of modernity takes so much courage, and it hurts. Energy crisis? “Nuclear power plant!” Or: “Well, see we’ll need to maximise our use of the sun’s energy, and use the wind; and coastal areas can harness the waves and let’s redesign our appliances so they don’t waste passive energy all night and all day, for starters.”

    The delusion in our disaffected and bored suburban lives that one Good Guy with a Gun can be a hero again, as his bear-shooting ancestors were; that a single man can bring us back from the brink of disaster by banishing one group of people or persecuting another; that job loss can be blamed on something visible — migration — rather than something seemingly irreversible — automation: all of these delusions in their shoebox have brought us this week to a potentially ruinous election result in the US. It’s happening elsewhere: Egypt, Turkey, Denmark. I fear the toxic masculinity and Hollywood hero narrative that have enabled this disaster. At this instant I am watching Trump and his Trumphalist family taking the stage in New York City — he is applauding himself, like the class act that he is — and all I can see in his expression is the fearful wryness that confesses: he cannot deliver the fantasy he has promised. No one can.

    Maybe it would be wonderful to be rescued, rather than having to knuckle down, ourselves. Maybe the fight against prejudice and privilege would be easier if it didn’t entail anyone making sacrifices of their own. But as Trump with his thin-skinned narcissism eloquently demonstrates, pseudo heroes and demagogues seem protective because they’re so defensive. Trump seems strong, because he is weak. It takes far more courage to face the unknown and the uncertain, to open our hearts and tune our ears to one another — even people we dislike, even people who challenge us — and to embrace the crucial issue of our time: how our fear is driving us deeper into the behaviours, such as expansionist, exploitative industrialisation, that have brought about these emergencies in the first place. You can’t fight fear with fear. The only way to fight fear is using our courage, and courage is love.

  • Trumped

    The Senate and the House. They are just going to do so much damage. I can hardly breathe, hardly swallow, it’s like iron in the chest. Now we see how dangerous our fears are, how fatal this cleaving to the lying pseudo-certainty that fist-raising white men seem to offer – in the face of unprecedented disaster, in the face of loss. Truthful people now are saying, we’re not sure how to deal with all these new and perilous situations, they have never occurred before and they imbalance each other, let’s all pull together and get all our wisdom, all hands on deck. The pseudo hero ‘lone man with a gun’ fantasy is now ruining the country. I feel afraid for habitats, for furry and slimy creatures, for any human who does not fit the pattern authorised by Trump’s arrogant male-centric white supremacist tune. God help us, even though there is clearly no god.

  • presidential debate

    Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but his wife, heavily pregnant, presumably now has to just resign herself.

  • gun culture

    Let’s think about the whole gun control question from another angle for just a moment. Imagine everybody has their own nuclear device.

    The Constitution enshrines our right to own these nuclear bombs and besides, we need our nuclear bombs in case the Government one day comes for us and we need to form a militia.



    The fact that many backyard nuclear bombs are detonated by toddlers who find them lying unlocked in their parents’ closets is immaterial. We will hold to our weapons until life is prised from our cold, dead land. All we have to do is rely on each and every fellow American to use their nuclear bomb sparingly, wisely, responsibly, and well. We simply trust every citizen to remain aware at every moment, even when humiliated, angry, drunk, sleep-deprived, heartbroken or feeling insecure, of the catastrophic long-term consequences of this short-term stress relief.



    I can’t see how this is ever going to work. It doesn’t even work with lemonade.

  • New Zonked

    In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.

    Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.

    At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”

    I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.

  • New York is hard to write about

    New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”

    Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.

    We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.

     

     

  • New York, I fucken love you

    In New York we stayed off-island, on the sprawling mainland of the USA. I found it thrilling to go walking in the early morning light, while everyone was sleeping, admiring the funny little wooden frame houses and hanging over retaining walls at the back of the hill in Union City. From up high there you could see the green troubled plains spurting with industry chimneys which defined the settlement, the invasion – a train was snaking by across an immense landscape the first morning and I said to myself, this is where America begins.

    The name of Union City gave me thrills, and every time I passed the Madonna-blue Union City Laundromat, filled all day long with Hispanic mothers and their children, settled in and gossiping while they fold, the greatest song by Blondie came through my head: power, passion… plays a double hand. Chrissie Hynde, consummate rocker, was interviewed and the journalist said, New York, punk rock women, you and Debbie Harry, ya know… The hissing intake of breath was almost visible on the page. With evident restraint she said, Well… I actually write my own songs, I play an instrument…. Blandly the unhearing journalist persisted with her. “What’s your favourite Blondie song?” I don’t really have one. “Aw c’mon, you must have a favourite Blondie song.” “Oh, must I? Ok… that, like, Union… Union City thing.” That’s what ran through my mind every time I came home along the avenue and passed the dreadlocked barber who is always trying to get my friend to jam with him, the sky blue launderette, the falling-away streets of the dingy houses, and the kids sitting out front on their stoops playing dutifully the games that can be confined to a palm-sized screen.

    New York is a strange and dramatic thing, as much an event as place, a complex of unending events telling stories of itself all day as it rolls round the tilt of the earth, helping to tip the planet perhaps a little further (so it seems) with its wealth of heavy buildings, giant prongs struck into the stone, its thin crummy soil and the island extended by refuse and landfill in the sea, its sprawling park immaculately mowed and spread with bikinis, its returned vets disabled by war and grief and sleeping on the subway on cardboard, its screeching underground trains, its spires into the blue eternity, its forever sleepless bleariness, jostle, crowd, and lace. It exists in all our minds even when we can’t touch it – like the internet – and have never been in it. The dream city hovering forever in your mind gets on the instant dispersed, it never exists again, and the real place you find yourself almost flattened by is more than you even imagined, like nothing you’ve ever known, yet punctuated with known experience like the Monopoly board come to life that is London.

    It was four years exactly since I went over for six weeks to record my first album, gathering a strange international collective of musical souls (the New Government) to work with me and dragging in some of them literally off the street where they had cat-called me and I said, “Hey. I need backing vocals.” Some of those people I will never meet again and some are now among my dearest friends: the guitar goddess who teaches in the West 30s, upstairs from the studio in which we recorded our album Hey, Big Splendour four years ago. Four years exactly. It felt strange to be going back to the same rooms, the same streets. I ate street meat here from a cart, I had a conversation with the man who said, You look like. On this much more recent return visit we stayed with her, in Union City on the Jersey shore, and every day we rode home on the jitney which leaves from outside Dean & Deluca’s every ten minutes all night and all day. You pay the driver in dollar bills – $3 – and he folds the notes in greasy fans stashed in the open-sided cup holder by his steering wheel, you climb aboard and you’re the only white folks on the bus, a more normal kind of normal, in the tunnel you pass a brother jitney from the same company that’s broken down, he takes the corners like a racing driver and at the unofficial stops he lingers, hoping more passengers will show up to make the ride worthwhile, and if he takes too long to get going a huge black lady up the back will sing out, Let’s go!

    Let’s go! A week from today I’ll have landed in New York – and be up in the Bronx – where I have never been before, staying with someone neither of us have ever met. It feels like entering the world’s filthiest cathedral. A fortnight to walk the streets, record maybe two or three songs towards an eventual new album. I hope they’ll be filthy with real soil and not just street grime, I hope they will ring and chant and stomp their feet, I hope they’ll be just divine.

  • don’t shoot

    Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books.

    I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park which seems to have salvaged all the bits of bombed-out churches and cathedrals in Europe that had survived, as splinters, the War to Unending War. We saw the daunting entry price and had retreated to the entrance hall to confer. “We have our tours available in German,” she told my companion, twinklingly. Then, turning to me, the Australian, “I’m not sure we have anything available in your language.”