I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. —John Keats, "Ode to Psyche"

Greetings from the far left coast. On Friday morning last week I thought about hitting the art museum. The Reed College Friday @ 4 concert was on my calendar for the afternoon. I did neither. The morning began with coffee and Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Oxford Univ. historian Pekka  Hämäläinen. From there I moved on to review language guidance documents by Sierra Club, Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and Stanford University's IT department. Well. Some of it I skimmed. Grim, tedious work for an essay in progress in my head. Closed out the morning with a sequence of Qigong exercises, Eight Pieces of Silk Brocade, that has been part of the daily routine since early last year.

Friday laundry and bathroom cleaning, nothing exciting but good to have done, took up a small portion of the day. Baked whole wheat bread in the afternoon, with a 45-minute walk while the dough did its second rising. Then put in a couple of hours of poetry work including a new submission. Closed it out with the PBS NewsHour where Brooks and Capeheart dispensed pundit wisdom on Biden's budget, Trump's legal trouble, and the GOP's presidential field, And on to happy hour!

Such is a day in the life of an obscure man. It was good day. Museum visits are nice. Current exhibits are not always up my alley. I check them out anyway. Then I make my way to the lower level of the Mark Building where Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Morisot, Renoir, Van Gogh, Rodin, and Cezanne have their home. These are my people. It has been too long since a concert where I lost myself in music. There will be other days for art and music as the Portland Art Museum undergoes major expansion and renovation with construction of the Rothko Pavilion and other additions. Those will be good days too.

Perspective.

Israel’s government presides over fourteen million people, of whom only around 60 per cent have the right to vote…Of the roughly seven million Palestinians living in the same area, only the 1.7 million with Israeli citizenship have any political rights with respect to the entity that controls their lives. In 2021 Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organisation, all published reports substantiating the Palestinian narrative that Israel practises apartheid against the Palestinian people.

…

On 27 January, a Palestinian gunman attacked Israelis in the illegal settlement of Neve Ya’akov in Jerusalem, killing seven and injuring three. The following evening, protesters gathered in Israeli cities for the fourth week in a row. The atmosphere was muted. Among those in attendance was Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party and prime minister until last December. ‘I came here to Jerusalem to declare to everyone that we are one people,’ he said, lighting a candle. ‘The government needs to choose if it wants to fight against terror or if it wants to fight against Israeli democracy.’ In the bubble of Israeli liberalism, one could be forgiven for not realising that a day before the Neve Ya’akov shootings, the Israeli army had raided the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, killing ten people. Or that the Jerusalem attacker had been personally affected by the violence of the Israeli regime, which enabled a settler to murder his grandfather without punishment and an army official to execute another relative of his a week before he walked into Neve Ya’akov. Or that more than thirty Palestinians were killed by Israeli authorities in January alone. Or that in 2022, when Lapid was in government, more than two hundred Palestinians were killed by Israeli operations in the West Bank, among them fifty children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians in two decades, with the exception of Israeli military assaults on the Gaza Strip. (Tareq Baconi, Israel's Liberal Bubble, London Review of Books, March 3, 2023)

A few days later US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel. There he declared that America's commitment to Israeli security is ironclad and will never waver. As for democracy and self-governance, maybe not so much.

Recommended reading from the April issue of The Atlantic on subjects about which I may have more to say in days and weeks ahead:

• Adrienne LaFrance, The New Anarchy

• George Packer,  The Moral Case Against Equity Language

Portland is featured prominently in LaFrance's article alongside the anarchist Luigi Galleani, who flourished in the early years of the twentieth century, and Italy's Anni di Piombo (the "Years of Lead"), roughly 1969 to 1988. Not exactly a badge of honor but fitting. My city is the poster child for brawls between the usual blockheads, notably the Proud Boys/Patriot Prayer contingent from one side, antifa/anarchist/nihilist factions on the other. LaFrance describes her impressions from a visit to the city last December. They are similar to my own as I reflect on how Portland has changed since I arrived here in 1998.

In December, I spoke again with Alexander Reid Ross, who in addition to hosting Years of Lead Pod is a lecturer at Portland State University. We met in Pioneer Courthouse Square, in downtown Portland. I had found the city in a wounded condition. This was tragic to me two times over—first, because I knew what had happened there, and second, because I had immediately absorbed Portland’s charm. You can’t encounter all those drawbridges, or the swooping crows, or the great Borgesian bookstore, or the giant elm trees and do anything but fall in love with the place. But downtown Portland was not at its best. The first day I was there I counted more birds than people, and many of the people I saw were quite obviously struggling badly.

…We decided to take a walk so that Ross could point out various landmarks from the—well, we couldn’t decide what to call the period of sustained violence that started in 2016 and was reignited in 2020. The siege? The occupation? The revolt? What happened in Portland has a way of being too slippery for precise language.

We walked southwest from the square before doubling back toward the Willamette River. Over here was the historical society that protesters broke into and vandalized one night. Over there was where the statues got toppled. ("Portland is a city of pedestals now," Ross said.) A federal building still had a protective fence surrounding it more than a year after the street violence had ended. At one point, the mayor had to order a drawbridge raised to keep combatants apart.

LaFrance also met Aaron Mesh, managing editor for Willamette Week, a publication that leans progressive. Speaking of the confrontations that began in 2016, "with right-wing extremists wearing everything from feathered hats to Pepe the Frog costumes and left-wing extremists dressed up in what’s known as black bloc: all-black clothing and facial coverings," Mesh said, "I do want to emphasize that everyone involved in this was a massive fucking loser, on both sides."

The period of anarchist attacks in this country in the early part of the twentieth century and the two decades of "death and bedlam" in Italy toward the century's end each took a generation to play out. Some observers point to the country's deep and seemingly intractable divisions and warn of civil war. LaFrance suggests a different, hardly less disturbing prospect:

what the country is experiencing now—and will likely continue to experience for a generation or more…is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies. Unchecked, it promises an era of slow-motion anarchy.

For the record. I take a back seat to no one when it comes to scorn for the efforts of Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson to rewrite the history of January 6. Unfortunately, these lunkheads and the MAGA faithful they court are not alone in susceptibility to revisionist history. A measure of scorn is reserved for those who would write property destruction and violence out of the narrative when committed under cover of progressive causes as happened in the summer of 2020 and again at present with Atlanta's Cop City confrontations.

Ron DeSantis is a making a play for Vladimir Putin's endorsement in the 2024 presidential campaign (Franco Ordoñez, Ron DeSantis says backing Ukraine is not in the U.S. interest, a sign of a GOP divided, NPR, March 14, 2023). There may not be enough scorn to go around.

New Blog Post: Un amour impossible, a film with Virginie Efira. March 3, 2023. Memo from the cinema desk: two recommendations. In Un amour impossible (2018) Virginie Efira portrays a beautiful but unassuming office worker who falls in love with a man from a wealthy family, cultured, sophisticated, who turns out to be a monster with the intellectual pretensions of a sophomore who just discovered Nietzsche…read more>>

Keep the faith.

Stand with Ukraine.

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