This is as elegiac as anything by an Irish poet. It's hard to find beauty in despair, and yet you have. And whether you intended it or not, that beauty serves as a reminder to keep fighting. Because, should it come to that, even the fall matters.
Thank you! I appreciate that. The style is intentional, if everything is painful, there needs to be beauty in the words. That’s part of the reason for all the photography too.
Beauty and pain are interlinked regardless. Songwriter Even Stevens was so p*ssed at guys hitting on his "pretty" new girlfriend that he composed "When You're in Love With a Beautiful Woman". Dr Hook released it on their 1978 album "Pleasure and Pain". As the lyric spells out, "you watch your friends".
Many prominent 'artists' are the offspring of pain: early parental deaths, infidelities, or bunking's off (McCartney, Lennon, Leonard Cohen}. Cross those chasms unscathed, then childhood or teenage maladies can deliver up prolonged and impactful isolation from contemporaries (Neill Young, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, Tom Jones, Cat Stevens, and so on).
I was in the sheltered UK, with no fear of the draft, and yet these lyrics of Neil Young's have forever touched me.
Ohio:
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
"What if you knew her?"
He's personalised this in an indelible and universal way.
Good point, Lex. I'm not sure what else to do right now, other than seek to find beauty in all the despair I feel. Elegiac. Good word for it. If nothing else we need to articulate our experiences of the mess we are in as it all collapses into ghost world. Articulating is one of the few meaningful things we can do at this point.
Sarah, as ever I love your fire and confidence, and deeply appreciate your role in our contemporary hellscape as jeremiad hollerer. But I can’t follow your equating Biden to Trump. They are fundamentally, organically, preternaturally different creatures. Biden has flaws, and being a politician is one of them, but I do think he deserves some credit. He shouldn’t be the nominee of the Democratic Party, but he is, and now we face the existential moment. I wish we had a different choice; I wish the Dems power structure had allowed a rational transition. But that’s not where we are.
Still, keep writing. Keep tugging at the thread in the quilt.
Did she ‘equate’ them? I suppose we could arm wrestle over a word. I’m a very long time fan of her work and always fresh and mostly on-target analysis. I’m sure she can handle my gentle critique & then some. But I love how ardent her fans, and proud to count myself among them.
Thank you. I agree. I wrote an angry comment earlier... because I am and always will be angry that Biden and every Democratic Party member did not force the seditious members of Congress out (putting them in jail if at all legally possible)... angry that Biden didn't put an AG in charge of the DOJ who would prosecute these enemies of the state towards that end. But I do not think Biden is the same as Trump. Biden is a politician. Trump is a psychopathic dictatorial monster who has raped young girls and otherwise treated everyone like property not people. Trump has no wife (Melania is under contract to be his wife). He has not pets. He is an abomination unique in American political history... and even worse than my violent, malignant narcissist of a father (who tried to kill my mother twice and terrorized the family for decades). But my father was a brilliant musician who also loved animals. So, while he was a monster, Trump makes him look like a saint. VOTE FOR JOE!
Jeff—I really like Fintan O’Toole and read him regularly, but I disagree with his conflation of Biden with Trump. I will say what I said already about Sarah’s generally superb post: as someone who has worked with great respect for his accomplishments, as an archivist at the LBJ Presidential Library, I have also heard people say LBJ was little different than Trump, I would counter that that equivalence inflicts a huge disservice on LBJ’s monumental legislative triumphs (many of which are in the crosshairs of the current Supreme Court); it fails to differentiate the endgames of two very different men who has sometimes similar methods of achieving their aim. Having said that, I respect the discomfort many of us on the left have with Biden’s recent slippage and the immense risk of running him against a certain danger in November. I get it. And I am lamentably pessimistic. It pains me greatly.
Stop pretending the government is legitimate and has control over you. Are you a free man or a slave to government whims. Sounds like people are voting for the jail superintendent rather than a servant of the people.
Step 1 is to realize the USA is founded on a Republic, not a democracy. It was a Representative Republic, but it is that no longer. When was the last time a servant of the people asked you what you thought about anything? Do they not work for you?
Voting for an apparently brain-dead moron, because of ..........is revealing. Pretending a guy who is too incompetent to stand trial for crimes is an ok to run the most powerful country on earth (and fading fast), is revealing. That is illogical.
You write so beautifully about the despair of our current world. Somehow giving clarity and making the unpalatable relatable and easily available. My favourite line …”Trump is the abuser, and Biden is the enabler. This is more effective than overt tyranny.”
I will look this up, your writing and work are inspiring necessities to me. A master class in the personal and political, applicable even though I am in the UK.
So beautifully written and thank you for reminding me of the silliness (I didn’t know when I opened the article I would be weeping over a ball of twine, but here we are), part of why we need to fight and keep fighting. The US is worth fighting for.
But, if there a choice between Trump & Biden, I’ll vote for Biden. We just cannot elect a convicted felon, a narcissistic psychopath & mob leader! Just can’t pull the trigger on that!
What we can do, is push as hard as we can, for that not to be the choice. Biden should just put up, or resign -- not from the "race" -- from the office. There's so much he could do now, but he refuses. His speech after the immunity decision was simply: I don't want to do anything, and YOU people should go out and vote. Fk him. I hope he does get ill from natural causes before Nov, and *maybe * Harris will do something. Or 25th amendment him. He has at least 7 mos left, and he pretends to have no power. How DARE he.
“I still haven’t watched it, because watching Biden and Trump is like staring straight at the sun. Or in Biden’s case, an eclipse: a retina-destroying entity that doesn’t burn you outright but kills your ability to see. “Dark Brandon” was an eclipse all along.”
Brilliant.
I watched 10 seconds and caught Pres Biden staring slack jawed into the sun. I turned it off and haven’t looked back.
Everything, everything you’ve written is accurate.
Sending you love and so damn grateful for your voice.
I believe he was looking at trump. What an impression it might make if Biden came out and fired whoever coached him on the debate-- do SOMEthing -- but he really seems not to care about us, truly.
Sarah you write the way we feel, a fine effort again. We may look upon these days as the good times, come November. It is pitiful that the best the democrats have to offer is a ghost, and I will vote for him, because there is no other viable choice. I give Biden credit for accomplishing what he has, in the face of an insane opposition. It is astonishing that anyone could consider voting for a mob boss and it shows what an utter failure our government now is. No high level official has yet to be held accountable and it may remain that way.
A quote from a longtime Kansan comes to mind, a Mr. W S. Burroughs who once spoke of the "frozen moment when everyone sees what's at the end of every fork".
We just had one of those moments and now some of us are freaking out and pressuring others of us to shut up and pretend that we're being served a delicious feast.
I promise to eat it if I'm forced to but that's not good enough. I can't name what's on the fork because I might frighten others away from eating it and then we'll all have to eat the horror that awaits us on the only other fork.
It's the same thing I heard in 1987, the first time I was offered a serving of Joe. I knew exactly what was being served and thankfully was spared thanks to a quaint plagiarism scandal but months later us troublesome lefties were pressured to smile as we were dished up the Dukakis special lest we be inflicted with Bush the Elder. We all know how that worked out.
Joe went back to the Senate and in between helping enable the war machine to (twice!) bury thousands of Iraqis under rubble found time to enable the finance machine bury millions of Americans under credit card debt.
Now almost 40 years later, as thousands of Gazans are being buried under rubble and his finger is barely being lifted in defense of the system he's pledged to preserve, I'm yet again being harangued into not accurately describing what's on the end of that fucking fork.
Only this time around I'm not a naive 23 year old.
Another f ing brilliant essay! Thank you! Love the pictures too! ❤️❤️❤️
I am beyond furious that the Democratic Party (not just Biden) did nothing to get rid of Trump and the seditious members of Congress! Mike Johnson should be in jail … not Speaker of the House. But of course Adam Schiff et al will never pay a price for this failure… well, not until Trump puts them in jail that is.
Tragic. Truly tragic.
And Richard Dreyfuss saw this coming… about 20 years ago… identifying the lack of civic education as key. (Link below)
Americans are uneducated regarding how to run a self-government based government. If they knew their roles better, I think they would have SHUT THE COUNTRY DOWN until Biden & Co put Trump, Johnson, et al in jail!
trump wont bother to lock up politicians, that's just how he's baiting his base. He just wants money and to make real estate deals -- to sell our country off for parts, as they say on Gaslit Nation. He may go after Cohen -- not to minimize that -- but he doesnt care about politicians.
But he's going to suspend the Constitution -- be a "dictator" -- so why would he imprison politicians? They would have no power -- not that they exert much, now.
In 1944 those closest to FDR knew he was very ill, probably dying. But they kept silent, he was renominated for his 4th term, won the election and was dead by April 1945.
The power brokers engineered the Vice President, Henry Wallace, off the ticket, seeing him as too liberal and too pro Soviet Union. Thus we got Harry Truman. Today, relatively harder to keep health issues under wraps but there is still a lot of unanswered questions about Biden’s health. But the sexist, racist knives are out for Kamala Harris. And mainstream media keeps going ever more lightly on Trump.
the knives will be out no matter who the nominee, is. If there is no obvious issue, they will make one up, keep repeating it, and that's it. Look at the age thing: it's absurd to make an issue of 3 yrs difference. But they did, and ppl just eat it up.
I swear, you always confirm my own feeling of -- despair-ish feelings, I guess, but still-present willingness to fight and call things as I see them? As always, thank you for sharing your work.
You tug away at our heartstrings with an endless supply of truth-serum-infused poetic twine, rendering us helplessly in love with your word-craft, you sorceress you.
This is as elegiac as anything by an Irish poet. It's hard to find beauty in despair, and yet you have. And whether you intended it or not, that beauty serves as a reminder to keep fighting. Because, should it come to that, even the fall matters.
Thank you! I appreciate that. The style is intentional, if everything is painful, there needs to be beauty in the words. That’s part of the reason for all the photography too.
Beauty and pain are interlinked regardless. Songwriter Even Stevens was so p*ssed at guys hitting on his "pretty" new girlfriend that he composed "When You're in Love With a Beautiful Woman". Dr Hook released it on their 1978 album "Pleasure and Pain". As the lyric spells out, "you watch your friends".
Many prominent 'artists' are the offspring of pain: early parental deaths, infidelities, or bunking's off (McCartney, Lennon, Leonard Cohen}. Cross those chasms unscathed, then childhood or teenage maladies can deliver up prolonged and impactful isolation from contemporaries (Neill Young, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, Tom Jones, Cat Stevens, and so on).
I was in the sheltered UK, with no fear of the draft, and yet these lyrics of Neil Young's have forever touched me.
Ohio:
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
"What if you knew her?"
He's personalised this in an indelible and universal way.
This is beauty!
Good point, Lex. I'm not sure what else to do right now, other than seek to find beauty in all the despair I feel. Elegiac. Good word for it. If nothing else we need to articulate our experiences of the mess we are in as it all collapses into ghost world. Articulating is one of the few meaningful things we can do at this point.
Thanks to both of you....Lex and Sarah.
Thanks for your kind words, Chuck.
Sarah, as ever I love your fire and confidence, and deeply appreciate your role in our contemporary hellscape as jeremiad hollerer. But I can’t follow your equating Biden to Trump. They are fundamentally, organically, preternaturally different creatures. Biden has flaws, and being a politician is one of them, but I do think he deserves some credit. He shouldn’t be the nominee of the Democratic Party, but he is, and now we face the existential moment. I wish we had a different choice; I wish the Dems power structure had allowed a rational transition. But that’s not where we are.
Still, keep writing. Keep tugging at the thread in the quilt.
I don't believe Sarah equated them. Also believe a lot can and will happen in 4 months.
Did she ‘equate’ them? I suppose we could arm wrestle over a word. I’m a very long time fan of her work and always fresh and mostly on-target analysis. I’m sure she can handle my gentle critique & then some. But I love how ardent her fans, and proud to count myself among them.
Thank you. I agree. I wrote an angry comment earlier... because I am and always will be angry that Biden and every Democratic Party member did not force the seditious members of Congress out (putting them in jail if at all legally possible)... angry that Biden didn't put an AG in charge of the DOJ who would prosecute these enemies of the state towards that end. But I do not think Biden is the same as Trump. Biden is a politician. Trump is a psychopathic dictatorial monster who has raped young girls and otherwise treated everyone like property not people. Trump has no wife (Melania is under contract to be his wife). He has not pets. He is an abomination unique in American political history... and even worse than my violent, malignant narcissist of a father (who tried to kill my mother twice and terrorized the family for decades). But my father was a brilliant musician who also loved animals. So, while he was a monster, Trump makes him look like a saint. VOTE FOR JOE!
You are far too kind to Trump, the Malignancy.
Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion
Eiremanlite, here's a good essay on how Biden has become his antithesis.
"Those who define themselves by the thing they are not eventually find themselves more and more like their imagined opposite."
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/07/02/savior-complex-biden/?utm_source=nybooks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share
Jeff—I really like Fintan O’Toole and read him regularly, but I disagree with his conflation of Biden with Trump. I will say what I said already about Sarah’s generally superb post: as someone who has worked with great respect for his accomplishments, as an archivist at the LBJ Presidential Library, I have also heard people say LBJ was little different than Trump, I would counter that that equivalence inflicts a huge disservice on LBJ’s monumental legislative triumphs (many of which are in the crosshairs of the current Supreme Court); it fails to differentiate the endgames of two very different men who has sometimes similar methods of achieving their aim. Having said that, I respect the discomfort many of us on the left have with Biden’s recent slippage and the immense risk of running him against a certain danger in November. I get it. And I am lamentably pessimistic. It pains me greatly.
Thank you. This is truly the no bullshit zone.
Very cold water.
“Trump is the abuser, and Biden is the enabler. This is more effective than overt tyranny”
Last chance. I feel like Jim Carrey.
So you’re saying………there’s a chance.
I so desperately want to clean up our Democracy. I KNOW I am not alone.
I’ve made the calls, I’ve stood on street corners with signs, I have always voted, i have donated money, i have screamed!
But what more can we do?
Stop pretending the government is legitimate and has control over you. Are you a free man or a slave to government whims. Sounds like people are voting for the jail superintendent rather than a servant of the people.
Step 1 is to realize the USA is founded on a Republic, not a democracy. It was a Representative Republic, but it is that no longer. When was the last time a servant of the people asked you what you thought about anything? Do they not work for you?
Oh yeah just so we are clear, my vote is for Dr. Shiva for president.
Voting for an apparently brain-dead moron, because of ..........is revealing. Pretending a guy who is too incompetent to stand trial for crimes is an ok to run the most powerful country on earth (and fading fast), is revealing. That is illogical.
You write so beautifully about the despair of our current world. Somehow giving clarity and making the unpalatable relatable and easily available. My favourite line …”Trump is the abuser, and Biden is the enabler. This is more effective than overt tyranny.”
Thank you! I wrote more about that dynamic in this piece: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/behold-a-pale-horse-race
I will look this up, your writing and work are inspiring necessities to me. A master class in the personal and political, applicable even though I am in the UK.
So beautifully written and thank you for reminding me of the silliness (I didn’t know when I opened the article I would be weeping over a ball of twine, but here we are), part of why we need to fight and keep fighting. The US is worth fighting for.
It absolutely is.
Same!
But, if there a choice between Trump & Biden, I’ll vote for Biden. We just cannot elect a convicted felon, a narcissistic psychopath & mob leader! Just can’t pull the trigger on that!
What we can do, is push as hard as we can, for that not to be the choice. Biden should just put up, or resign -- not from the "race" -- from the office. There's so much he could do now, but he refuses. His speech after the immunity decision was simply: I don't want to do anything, and YOU people should go out and vote. Fk him. I hope he does get ill from natural causes before Nov, and *maybe * Harris will do something. Or 25th amendment him. He has at least 7 mos left, and he pretends to have no power. How DARE he.
give this woman a pulitzer a nobel, a booker....... brava
Thanks! I'll take a strand of twine.
😂😂
“I still haven’t watched it, because watching Biden and Trump is like staring straight at the sun. Or in Biden’s case, an eclipse: a retina-destroying entity that doesn’t burn you outright but kills your ability to see. “Dark Brandon” was an eclipse all along.”
Brilliant.
I watched 10 seconds and caught Pres Biden staring slack jawed into the sun. I turned it off and haven’t looked back.
Everything, everything you’ve written is accurate.
Sending you love and so damn grateful for your voice.
Thank you Annie! I hope you’re doing well
I believe he was looking at trump. What an impression it might make if Biden came out and fired whoever coached him on the debate-- do SOMEthing -- but he really seems not to care about us, truly.
Sarah you write the way we feel, a fine effort again. We may look upon these days as the good times, come November. It is pitiful that the best the democrats have to offer is a ghost, and I will vote for him, because there is no other viable choice. I give Biden credit for accomplishing what he has, in the face of an insane opposition. It is astonishing that anyone could consider voting for a mob boss and it shows what an utter failure our government now is. No high level official has yet to be held accountable and it may remain that way.
A quote from a longtime Kansan comes to mind, a Mr. W S. Burroughs who once spoke of the "frozen moment when everyone sees what's at the end of every fork".
We just had one of those moments and now some of us are freaking out and pressuring others of us to shut up and pretend that we're being served a delicious feast.
I promise to eat it if I'm forced to but that's not good enough. I can't name what's on the fork because I might frighten others away from eating it and then we'll all have to eat the horror that awaits us on the only other fork.
It's the same thing I heard in 1987, the first time I was offered a serving of Joe. I knew exactly what was being served and thankfully was spared thanks to a quaint plagiarism scandal but months later us troublesome lefties were pressured to smile as we were dished up the Dukakis special lest we be inflicted with Bush the Elder. We all know how that worked out.
Joe went back to the Senate and in between helping enable the war machine to (twice!) bury thousands of Iraqis under rubble found time to enable the finance machine bury millions of Americans under credit card debt.
Now almost 40 years later, as thousands of Gazans are being buried under rubble and his finger is barely being lifted in defense of the system he's pledged to preserve, I'm yet again being harangued into not accurately describing what's on the end of that fucking fork.
Only this time around I'm not a naive 23 year old.
Well said.
Another f ing brilliant essay! Thank you! Love the pictures too! ❤️❤️❤️
I am beyond furious that the Democratic Party (not just Biden) did nothing to get rid of Trump and the seditious members of Congress! Mike Johnson should be in jail … not Speaker of the House. But of course Adam Schiff et al will never pay a price for this failure… well, not until Trump puts them in jail that is.
Tragic. Truly tragic.
And Richard Dreyfuss saw this coming… about 20 years ago… identifying the lack of civic education as key. (Link below)
Americans are uneducated regarding how to run a self-government based government. If they knew their roles better, I think they would have SHUT THE COUNTRY DOWN until Biden & Co put Trump, Johnson, et al in jail!
https://youtu.be/t8C3MUDVn_I?si=MYqqLq9-wYOohc4r
trump wont bother to lock up politicians, that's just how he's baiting his base. He just wants money and to make real estate deals -- to sell our country off for parts, as they say on Gaslit Nation. He may go after Cohen -- not to minimize that -- but he doesnt care about politicians.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. I say let’s make sure he never gets in office so we don’t find out which one of us is correct. 😉
Of course.
But he's going to suspend the Constitution -- be a "dictator" -- so why would he imprison politicians? They would have no power -- not that they exert much, now.
This is beautiful work Sarah. Really eloquent and timely.
Thank you!
In 1944 those closest to FDR knew he was very ill, probably dying. But they kept silent, he was renominated for his 4th term, won the election and was dead by April 1945.
The power brokers engineered the Vice President, Henry Wallace, off the ticket, seeing him as too liberal and too pro Soviet Union. Thus we got Harry Truman. Today, relatively harder to keep health issues under wraps but there is still a lot of unanswered questions about Biden’s health. But the sexist, racist knives are out for Kamala Harris. And mainstream media keeps going ever more lightly on Trump.
the knives will be out no matter who the nominee, is. If there is no obvious issue, they will make one up, keep repeating it, and that's it. Look at the age thing: it's absurd to make an issue of 3 yrs difference. But they did, and ppl just eat it up.
"Democracy is following orders while being bullied and afraid. You must obey, they proclaim, or else you’ll get fascism."
The build up to the above punch line made me laugh and sigh simultaneously. Your artistry underscores and reveals a troubling truth.
Thanks! And yes it’s grim out there…
I swear, you always confirm my own feeling of -- despair-ish feelings, I guess, but still-present willingness to fight and call things as I see them? As always, thank you for sharing your work.
Thanks for reading!
Dear Sarah,
You tug away at our heartstrings with an endless supply of truth-serum-infused poetic twine, rendering us helplessly in love with your word-craft, you sorceress you.
Thank you!