“2016 was not a rupture, but an acceleration” Whereas his major contribution was to accelerate the polarization and permanently destabilize any shared sense of decency and accountability. Get them pitted against each other, meanwhile selling us all down the river for their ill-gotten gains. I never would have imagined back in Nov 2020 after the country starved off an aspiring autocrat that the acceleration would be put into overdrive. What a betrayal of simply epic proportions. The acts of a soulless devil I can understand as pure evil. The acts of good people caving to the devil is much worse.
on inauguration, or perhaps it was just days later, Biden said he “wanted to move on.” i took that to mean no accountability for Trumps crimes. i had the same feeling the day Ford pardoned Nixon.
To quote the great Sarah Kendzior, ;) “democrats will let you die, republicans will kill you.” I would love a bit more time not getting killed, to build some defenses.
I agree that the only way a mere mortal can survive this criminal, conspiratorial, corrupt world is float and dream of another reality. Because we see the world similarly, Sarah, it is a guilty pleasure for me to read your prose. You DO remind me of my deceased mentor, William Gass. But Bill was cynical on an individual and familial level. Even when the crazies were in power, he confined his metaphor to the characters in a novel or his own alter-ego at home digging in the basement. Bill did not have the courage to challenge authority directly in the way that you do. He focused on internal darkness, while you see the possibility of social illumination extinguished by the Devil. In the end none of that may matter as we head for a much less accommodating world than the one that we have right now. Bert Gold, Falmouth, Massachusetts, March 22, 2024
Bill was very proud of his introduction to Gertrude Stein's 'The Geographical History of America' published in 1973. So much so that he read it out loud in the Basement of Mallinckrodt Center one afternoon. I'm sure you can find it in Olin Library. I'm not discouraging you reading 'Fiction and the Figures of Life'. Just trying to shorten your excursion into Bill's world. I knew him well enough to say that he would be nauseated by what the US has become.
Not sure if Bert would recommend it, but "The Tunnel" is an incredible book about the horrors of history. Personally, I'd suggest "On Being Blue" or pretty much any of the essay collections (like "Finding a Form" or "The World within the Word"), which are consistently brilliant. A stylist's stylist!
What a fascinating comparison, Bill's formalist and philosophical word wizardry to Sarah's intuitive, bracingly natural pith! Bill was a member of my dissertation committee, and he gleefully played the intellectual enfant terrible even in those unpropitious circumstances. I quoted him in several chapters and subsequent articles and even reviewed "Finding a Form," one of his many terrific essay collections. I sent him a copy of the review, and he replied sardonically to the inspired typo that changed the title to "Finding a Farm." It seems absolutely certain that he would have loved Sarah's equally clear-eyed and clever sentences. Got to see him interview Salman Rushdie once in Duncker Hall's Holmes Lounge; would have paid for the privilege of seeing him in dialogue with Sarah!
Another visceral piece that puts my feelings into words much more eloquently than I ever could. I'm a former state legislator and current child policy advocate and I've been in deep burn out for the past year, finally recognizing the extent of what you've described thanks to a betrayal that pulled back the curtain. So much so that I opened a community sewing maker space to ground me in community and be a respite from the treachery. But in my small rural town you better believe Trump t-shirts and toxic nationalist garb make their way in (yes, even in Vermont) and disrupt my naive attempts to protect my peace, along with the patronizing think pieces discrediting our rational critiques of Biden. It's soul crushing, and I'm working hard to find some radical hope...
Thank you Sarah. Beautiful writing. PS every time you link to one of your many prescient and essential "documentary" prior articles on the interwebs, I make sure to save the link to the Internet Archive... :( FWIW also, I'm one of the citizen activists behind the Media and Democracy Project, working to call out the mainstream media for their failures and to help folks demand better media. Would love a follow on Xitter if you're still there: https://twitter.com/FixMediaNow (we're also here on Substack: https://mediaanddemocracyproject.substack.com/ and on the tubes https://mediaanddemocracyproject.org where we are also taking the fight to Fox at the FCC)
1. Long before I knew you existed I read Alfred W. McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" (rev. 2003) (My guess is that you've already read it). McCoy is Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When he was working on his PhD at Yale in the early '70s, he took a trip to SE Asia to interview drug lords. The CIA tried to stop the book's publication, and he very nearly got kicked out of Yale which, by the way, has since granted him a Distinguished Alumnus Award. Scholars refer to this book as "the Bible" on the international drug trade. "Over decades," you write, "intelligence agencies, organized crime, and corporate corruption merged, solidifying their anti-American agenda in the 21st century." Yes, it's not new; it goes back even decades before I was born. McCoy writes that in those days, it wasn't bankers from businesses like Goldman Sachs who became secretaries of the treasury, but people who worked for the CIA. Your writings have greatly expanded my knowledge of this and other subjects.
2. I love your stories about Missouri, especially the ones about its oftentimes weird and fascinating history. You always manage to weave those stories into the subjects of your books in ways that are both delightful and terrifying.
Happy to know you're going to read it. Just like Sarah's books, it's a scary one because you realize just how long it's been going on. Intel agencies, by their nature, have regular contact with criminals and terrorists. So if, for example, a head of state wants to assassinate someone, or to foment a coup, he/she needs criminals to do it, and who better to perform those tasks than the people intel agencies regularly deal with? And there are all sorts of interactions between intel agencies and drug lords at the highest levels. It's deeply unsettling. Long before the 1940s, the problem had already gotten so bad that little could be done about drug trafficking. As Prof. McCoy points out, all heads of state could do was to make agreements with drug cartels so that, in exchange for "allowing" heroin labs in say, Marseille, the drug lords would agree not to sell any of it in France. So it went to the US instead. He says you can trace spikes in drug addiction all over the world based on deals like this:
"Under the terms of their informal alliance with France's Gaullist governments, the Marseille syndicates manufactured their heroin exclusively for export. Marseille may have become the world's largest heroin producer, but France remained drug-free--an essential element in the political equation that allowed this illicit industry to operate. Protected and connected, the Corsicans, according to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, produced an estimated 80 percent of America's heroin supply" (p.48).
One of the consequences of these interactions, as Sarah has written about, is that people who work in intel become corrupt themselves, which then causes agencies to become corrupt all over the world.
Just one more thing: McCoy's conclusion is that the CIA has been merely *complicit* in the drug trade. Other scholars disagree; they think the CIA has been *actively* involved in it.
Excellent piece, Sarah! So many of the same thoughts & feelings running through me as well. And the deepening bite of our being disempowered from the kinds of public pressure & popular movement which have historically allowed us to magnify that urgency. Thank you for your ability to articulate it so clearly.
Just what I needed this morning. After dealing with some serious health issues last year and coming out the other end relatively unscathed, I have also decided to take the sweetness when it comes and not go looking for negativity. 🌞
This line nailed it for me: "Powerbrokers want Americans to respond to policies with the instinctual loyalty of a sports fan, instead of the discerning conscience of a citizen."
I've been screaming for years that our media is doing basically sports coverage (ever notice that?) but then I read this and it makes sense because yes: we're supposed to join a "team" every election and cheer on that team instead of treating elections what they're supposed to be: job interviews. We're supposed to be evaluating people *who will be in charge of a huge part of our lives* based on their character, actions and even more so: their *record*. They're supposed to be working for *us*--public servants, as you've said many times.
Not people we mindlessly get behind and root for because they're our "team". We're supposed to be ONE team. Our media coverage promotes this infantile take on politics, where substance doesn't matter--just who's up in this week's rankings, who's down, who wore it better, who had better "optics" and who can best monopolize news cycles with a media that has a depraved indifference to truth, facts or holding power to account. Which begs the question: WTF was the point of a free press if they voluntarily neutered themselves?
In a country where one of the two choices is a coup-attempting, rapist, Russian puppet, serial lying swindler who stole state secrets, hid them and lied about it, you'd think the media would be SCREAMING to the point where he withdrew but no... we get ESPN-style roundtables with tired, vacuous DC lifers and Steve Kornacki with his Big Board showing us the latest playoff pic... er, I mean polling results? WTF?
The great irony will be when the MAGA voters--should he get back in--realize that oh: you didn't hear? He's not just going to screw those "libs" you hate into the ground--it's gonna be you, too. Second irony: the media outlets that have covered for him for years now, like the NYT? They've literally signed their own death warrant. Everyone goes down, including you, so your "team" could win.
With the sad irony being that I told everyone how to solve the crisis in the first stage, and by the time they get to the last stage, it's too late and the old advice no longer applies. The other irony is that people are falling for * the exact same scheme* over and over. I wrote about all this in THEY KNEW, including why they wild out at the messenger and won't believe reality until it comes crashing down on them.
Exactly. I’ve been agreeing with you since 8 years ago when I read your piece about what to expect in the age of Trump.
Today Jack Smith yet again confirmed YOUR claim and prediction that DOJ is part of the Mafia state as trumper judge Cannon gets a lifeline to stay on the documents case.
About paywalls: it doesn’t take a paywall to keep most Americans in the dark about what’s going on in politics. (Lots of people do not want to know, or are too busy surviving.) There are plenty of free Subtacks, etc, that allow us to choose who to support. I’ve made connections who retweet gift articles all the time.
The monetization worth concern is the one corrupting the “free” mainstream content. Mainstream media for people who read books is like watching the movie Scream: The call is coming from inside the house.
(I’d much rather financially support Sarah, Aaron Rupar, Heather Cox Richardson, David Pepper, etc. not only for their expertise, but because they can link me to free content (with an option to support), books to read and other people to follow.)
It’s the same money behind many legislators. In TN I look out my own window at the idyllic natural features of my property (White’s Creek Pike possesses its own hairpin curve named Devil’s Elbow just three miles from my house) and grapple with a state legislature - a 15min drive away - actively attempting to overturn my marriage, deny me SS benefits and working to remove me and all LGBT people from society.
The conflict of seeing such beauty with your eyes one minute and reading about my own proposed destruction with those same eyes the next is something hard to put into words, but the great thing about communities like the one Sarah is curating here is that we can read about our shared experiences, connect and maintain hope.
Meanwhile, here just up the hill from lock and dam 15, tomorrow looks like a good day for laundry, and putting out fifty feet of wash to dry on the line. Fifteen, twenty minutes of quiet bliss. And what is one to do but the little, decent things? Since most folks I know get antsy at my mention of drying clothes on a line in the yard, there's almost nobody in my circle of otherwise kind and reasonable people who can absorb the vision that I, too I think portends, and that you describe with great ability, and I think, great insight. Meanwhile, I have another bicycle to refurbish into reliable service, possibly for one of the west African immigrants to our community. People who probably will be neither surprised nor flat-footed by the turnings and unravelings of the next decade. Thanks, Sarah, for putting yourself out there.
Hanging out laundry is a quiet, contemplative activity that always reminds me of my mother. We live in a small-ish house with a tiny outdoor space, so my clothesline these days is a folding metal rack cleverly designed to hold a lot of laundry.
Thanks for the note :). It's one of those activities that's tied to the weather, too, in which I need consider something else outside of my "control". Maintaining a supply of split, stacked and dry firewood for the little woodstove in my fireplace is some of the same consideration. I've had the handy folding drying rack, too, and it's also way less industrialized consumerism-ish convenience, and a practical step back. FYI, I'm fortunate to have a 1927 bungalow on a fifth-acre (75 x 120') city lot that comports itself to a saner existence. I can at least shift back to a more sane existence, since the world seems to be headed in one that's less so....
There is no one writing to this moment in history better than you do. Both the unblinking honesty and the beauty of how you express it. Thank you.
Thank you very much!
“2016 was not a rupture, but an acceleration” Whereas his major contribution was to accelerate the polarization and permanently destabilize any shared sense of decency and accountability. Get them pitted against each other, meanwhile selling us all down the river for their ill-gotten gains. I never would have imagined back in Nov 2020 after the country starved off an aspiring autocrat that the acceleration would be put into overdrive. What a betrayal of simply epic proportions. The acts of a soulless devil I can understand as pure evil. The acts of good people caving to the devil is much worse.
Yes -- your last two sentences, exactly. That's what gets to me, too.
Ditto
on inauguration, or perhaps it was just days later, Biden said he “wanted to move on.” i took that to mean no accountability for Trumps crimes. i had the same feeling the day Ford pardoned Nixon.
"A paywalled warning of peril is like a phone sex hotline dressed up as a 911 call."
Ayup - that's our corporate/billionaire media in action.
To quote the great Sarah Kendzior, ;) “democrats will let you die, republicans will kill you.” I would love a bit more time not getting killed, to build some defenses.
Same!
I love nature because it never attempts to deceive me. It always tells the truth.
Thanks for another great article.
Thank you! I feel the same way (about nature, I mean!)
I agree that the only way a mere mortal can survive this criminal, conspiratorial, corrupt world is float and dream of another reality. Because we see the world similarly, Sarah, it is a guilty pleasure for me to read your prose. You DO remind me of my deceased mentor, William Gass. But Bill was cynical on an individual and familial level. Even when the crazies were in power, he confined his metaphor to the characters in a novel or his own alter-ego at home digging in the basement. Bill did not have the courage to challenge authority directly in the way that you do. He focused on internal darkness, while you see the possibility of social illumination extinguished by the Devil. In the end none of that may matter as we head for a much less accommodating world than the one that we have right now. Bert Gold, Falmouth, Massachusetts, March 22, 2024
Thank you for your kind words, Bert! I'm going to have to read some William Gass
Bill was very proud of his introduction to Gertrude Stein's 'The Geographical History of America' published in 1973. So much so that he read it out loud in the Basement of Mallinckrodt Center one afternoon. I'm sure you can find it in Olin Library. I'm not discouraging you reading 'Fiction and the Figures of Life'. Just trying to shorten your excursion into Bill's world. I knew him well enough to say that he would be nauseated by what the US has become.
Not sure if Bert would recommend it, but "The Tunnel" is an incredible book about the horrors of history. Personally, I'd suggest "On Being Blue" or pretty much any of the essay collections (like "Finding a Form" or "The World within the Word"), which are consistently brilliant. A stylist's stylist!
What a fascinating comparison, Bill's formalist and philosophical word wizardry to Sarah's intuitive, bracingly natural pith! Bill was a member of my dissertation committee, and he gleefully played the intellectual enfant terrible even in those unpropitious circumstances. I quoted him in several chapters and subsequent articles and even reviewed "Finding a Form," one of his many terrific essay collections. I sent him a copy of the review, and he replied sardonically to the inspired typo that changed the title to "Finding a Farm." It seems absolutely certain that he would have loved Sarah's equally clear-eyed and clever sentences. Got to see him interview Salman Rushdie once in Duncker Hall's Holmes Lounge; would have paid for the privilege of seeing him in dialogue with Sarah!
Another visceral piece that puts my feelings into words much more eloquently than I ever could. I'm a former state legislator and current child policy advocate and I've been in deep burn out for the past year, finally recognizing the extent of what you've described thanks to a betrayal that pulled back the curtain. So much so that I opened a community sewing maker space to ground me in community and be a respite from the treachery. But in my small rural town you better believe Trump t-shirts and toxic nationalist garb make their way in (yes, even in Vermont) and disrupt my naive attempts to protect my peace, along with the patronizing think pieces discrediting our rational critiques of Biden. It's soul crushing, and I'm working hard to find some radical hope...
Thank you Sarah. Beautiful writing. PS every time you link to one of your many prescient and essential "documentary" prior articles on the interwebs, I make sure to save the link to the Internet Archive... :( FWIW also, I'm one of the citizen activists behind the Media and Democracy Project, working to call out the mainstream media for their failures and to help folks demand better media. Would love a follow on Xitter if you're still there: https://twitter.com/FixMediaNow (we're also here on Substack: https://mediaanddemocracyproject.substack.com/ and on the tubes https://mediaanddemocracyproject.org where we are also taking the fight to Fox at the FCC)
So glad you're archiving my work! I really appreciate that. And I just followed you on Twitter!
Thank you for bringing the internet archive to my attention!
1. Long before I knew you existed I read Alfred W. McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" (rev. 2003) (My guess is that you've already read it). McCoy is Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When he was working on his PhD at Yale in the early '70s, he took a trip to SE Asia to interview drug lords. The CIA tried to stop the book's publication, and he very nearly got kicked out of Yale which, by the way, has since granted him a Distinguished Alumnus Award. Scholars refer to this book as "the Bible" on the international drug trade. "Over decades," you write, "intelligence agencies, organized crime, and corporate corruption merged, solidifying their anti-American agenda in the 21st century." Yes, it's not new; it goes back even decades before I was born. McCoy writes that in those days, it wasn't bankers from businesses like Goldman Sachs who became secretaries of the treasury, but people who worked for the CIA. Your writings have greatly expanded my knowledge of this and other subjects.
2. I love your stories about Missouri, especially the ones about its oftentimes weird and fascinating history. You always manage to weave those stories into the subjects of your books in ways that are both delightful and terrifying.
I’m definitely going to read that book-
Happy to know you're going to read it. Just like Sarah's books, it's a scary one because you realize just how long it's been going on. Intel agencies, by their nature, have regular contact with criminals and terrorists. So if, for example, a head of state wants to assassinate someone, or to foment a coup, he/she needs criminals to do it, and who better to perform those tasks than the people intel agencies regularly deal with? And there are all sorts of interactions between intel agencies and drug lords at the highest levels. It's deeply unsettling. Long before the 1940s, the problem had already gotten so bad that little could be done about drug trafficking. As Prof. McCoy points out, all heads of state could do was to make agreements with drug cartels so that, in exchange for "allowing" heroin labs in say, Marseille, the drug lords would agree not to sell any of it in France. So it went to the US instead. He says you can trace spikes in drug addiction all over the world based on deals like this:
"Under the terms of their informal alliance with France's Gaullist governments, the Marseille syndicates manufactured their heroin exclusively for export. Marseille may have become the world's largest heroin producer, but France remained drug-free--an essential element in the political equation that allowed this illicit industry to operate. Protected and connected, the Corsicans, according to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, produced an estimated 80 percent of America's heroin supply" (p.48).
One of the consequences of these interactions, as Sarah has written about, is that people who work in intel become corrupt themselves, which then causes agencies to become corrupt all over the world.
Just one more thing: McCoy's conclusion is that the CIA has been merely *complicit* in the drug trade. Other scholars disagree; they think the CIA has been *actively* involved in it.
Happy reading, Sharon!
Thank you, Rose! I am looking forward to it.
Excellent piece, Sarah! So many of the same thoughts & feelings running through me as well. And the deepening bite of our being disempowered from the kinds of public pressure & popular movement which have historically allowed us to magnify that urgency. Thank you for your ability to articulate it so clearly.
Thank you for reading!
Just what I needed this morning. After dealing with some serious health issues last year and coming out the other end relatively unscathed, I have also decided to take the sweetness when it comes and not go looking for negativity. 🌞
This line nailed it for me: "Powerbrokers want Americans to respond to policies with the instinctual loyalty of a sports fan, instead of the discerning conscience of a citizen."
I've been screaming for years that our media is doing basically sports coverage (ever notice that?) but then I read this and it makes sense because yes: we're supposed to join a "team" every election and cheer on that team instead of treating elections what they're supposed to be: job interviews. We're supposed to be evaluating people *who will be in charge of a huge part of our lives* based on their character, actions and even more so: their *record*. They're supposed to be working for *us*--public servants, as you've said many times.
Not people we mindlessly get behind and root for because they're our "team". We're supposed to be ONE team. Our media coverage promotes this infantile take on politics, where substance doesn't matter--just who's up in this week's rankings, who's down, who wore it better, who had better "optics" and who can best monopolize news cycles with a media that has a depraved indifference to truth, facts or holding power to account. Which begs the question: WTF was the point of a free press if they voluntarily neutered themselves?
In a country where one of the two choices is a coup-attempting, rapist, Russian puppet, serial lying swindler who stole state secrets, hid them and lied about it, you'd think the media would be SCREAMING to the point where he withdrew but no... we get ESPN-style roundtables with tired, vacuous DC lifers and Steve Kornacki with his Big Board showing us the latest playoff pic... er, I mean polling results? WTF?
The great irony will be when the MAGA voters--should he get back in--realize that oh: you didn't hear? He's not just going to screw those "libs" you hate into the ground--it's gonna be you, too. Second irony: the media outlets that have covered for him for years now, like the NYT? They've literally signed their own death warrant. Everyone goes down, including you, so your "team" could win.
The Four Stages of Sarah Kendzior:
Sarah is just a hysterical liberal.
Sarah might have a point.
Sarah was exactly Right.
SARAH, HELP US!
With the sad irony being that I told everyone how to solve the crisis in the first stage, and by the time they get to the last stage, it's too late and the old advice no longer applies. The other irony is that people are falling for * the exact same scheme* over and over. I wrote about all this in THEY KNEW, including why they wild out at the messenger and won't believe reality until it comes crashing down on them.
Exactly. I’ve been agreeing with you since 8 years ago when I read your piece about what to expect in the age of Trump.
Today Jack Smith yet again confirmed YOUR claim and prediction that DOJ is part of the Mafia state as trumper judge Cannon gets a lifeline to stay on the documents case.
Freakin’ terrifying.
Thank you for illuminating these dark days. 💖Love your nature photos
Thank you!
Great work! Great reading!!
About paywalls: it doesn’t take a paywall to keep most Americans in the dark about what’s going on in politics. (Lots of people do not want to know, or are too busy surviving.) There are plenty of free Subtacks, etc, that allow us to choose who to support. I’ve made connections who retweet gift articles all the time.
The monetization worth concern is the one corrupting the “free” mainstream content. Mainstream media for people who read books is like watching the movie Scream: The call is coming from inside the house.
(I’d much rather financially support Sarah, Aaron Rupar, Heather Cox Richardson, David Pepper, etc. not only for their expertise, but because they can link me to free content (with an option to support), books to read and other people to follow.)
It’s the same money behind many legislators. In TN I look out my own window at the idyllic natural features of my property (White’s Creek Pike possesses its own hairpin curve named Devil’s Elbow just three miles from my house) and grapple with a state legislature - a 15min drive away - actively attempting to overturn my marriage, deny me SS benefits and working to remove me and all LGBT people from society.
The conflict of seeing such beauty with your eyes one minute and reading about my own proposed destruction with those same eyes the next is something hard to put into words, but the great thing about communities like the one Sarah is curating here is that we can read about our shared experiences, connect and maintain hope.
Meanwhile, here just up the hill from lock and dam 15, tomorrow looks like a good day for laundry, and putting out fifty feet of wash to dry on the line. Fifteen, twenty minutes of quiet bliss. And what is one to do but the little, decent things? Since most folks I know get antsy at my mention of drying clothes on a line in the yard, there's almost nobody in my circle of otherwise kind and reasonable people who can absorb the vision that I, too I think portends, and that you describe with great ability, and I think, great insight. Meanwhile, I have another bicycle to refurbish into reliable service, possibly for one of the west African immigrants to our community. People who probably will be neither surprised nor flat-footed by the turnings and unravelings of the next decade. Thanks, Sarah, for putting yourself out there.
Hanging out laundry is a quiet, contemplative activity that always reminds me of my mother. We live in a small-ish house with a tiny outdoor space, so my clothesline these days is a folding metal rack cleverly designed to hold a lot of laundry.
Thanks for the note :). It's one of those activities that's tied to the weather, too, in which I need consider something else outside of my "control". Maintaining a supply of split, stacked and dry firewood for the little woodstove in my fireplace is some of the same consideration. I've had the handy folding drying rack, too, and it's also way less industrialized consumerism-ish convenience, and a practical step back. FYI, I'm fortunate to have a 1927 bungalow on a fifth-acre (75 x 120') city lot that comports itself to a saner existence. I can at least shift back to a more sane existence, since the world seems to be headed in one that's less so....