Stand By for News

So it begins. The news blasts out from the newsrooms—or wherever it is they make news these days—like a hurricane. Like a city-consuming firestorm. Like the seventeenth once-in-a-century-weather-event to hit since the sixth time you hit snooze this morning. Not on an alarm clock but on your phone, which knows you better than you do and decides you need news, new news, not the old stuff, not just information but a new kind of kinetic screaming poetry for a new and smoother kind of brain. Was that really just this morning? It felt like years ago. Behold the news. It eats time like a mouse gnawing through an encyclopedia. It seethes and it shivers and it sparkles in the light. Beneath all the strobing glitter and noise its core is still and silent. Like snow in the bayou. Like dust settling on bone in a crater left by a 2000-pound bomb. Don’t be fooled, there is no core.

The cabinet confirmation process is nearly complete. An enormous, twelve-eyed, sticky-legged spider has been confirmed as Secretary of Self-Driving Savagery. His erection is something to see! It’s fully detachable. It took Kylie Jenner to the Met Gala last year. They both wore Balenciaga. Cerberus has been airlifted from his previous post in Hades and deployed to guard the border and protect this gilded hell. An actual Rat King slipped through the Senate as Secretary of Selective Starvation. It celebrated by untangling its fourteen hairless tails and announced a fresh, new pestilence. Its meme coin is soaring. The Washington Post Editorial Board expects that this pestilence will be better for the bottom line than the last one, what a waste. A butcher naked but for a bloody apron will be waiting outside your door in the morning with a thirty-dollar stimulus check. You can buy an egg with it! Sparks will jump from the concrete as he sharpens his cleaver on the stoop. Say thank you, sir! Say good morning, sir! Say it like you mean it.

Sorry friends, but all of California that has not yet burned has been declared illegal. Except for the four percent of it that the military owns already and the former concentration camps and any remaining white parts that aren’t too gay. Shaking off the last drops of pee before you leave the urinal is a sign of gender deviance and will be punished with castration live on TMZ. Be a fucking man. All uteruses will henceforth be tattooed “PROPERTY OF.” Don’t even think of saying Gaza. Eleven out of nine Democrats in Congress agree that their only mistake was excess wokeness, ick, and vote to have their limbs, eyes, and tongues removed by AI-powered executioner as a show of good faith. An olive branch if you will. Their severed hands, true to form, claw their way across the aisle. If they round up everyone without papers, who will build the camps?

“When the crimes pile up, they become invisible.” Bertolt Brecht wrote that in Germany in the 1930s. Oh, it has been Germany in the 1930s for so long! I know it was Brecht because I read it on my smart phone, on an app for a social media platform owned by the sieg-heiling richest man on planet Earth, an outspoken fan of the ancient Germanic warrior spirit who is definitely not a Nazi. That term must be reserved for people currently undergoing genocide, and for anyone dumb enough to express solidarity with them. I looked up the full poem later with a search engine produced by a company that donated a million dollars to the current President’s inauguration fund, and did it on a laptop manufactured by a company whose CEO chipped in a million of his very own special dollars. If a few puny multi-billionaires can make such a difference, just think what you and I could do if we could only shake off This Overwhelming Despair!

Brecht fled Germany in 1933 and Europe in 1941. He took the long way: Denmark to Sweden to Finland to Moscow to catch the Trans-Siberian Express overland to Vladivostok and a steamer to L.A., where he rented a house in Santa Monica, on 26th Street, two blocks outside the evacuation zone at the height of the Palisades fire. (“I’m like a man,” he wrote, “who took a brick to show/How beautiful his house used once to be.”) He played it safe and threw his copies of Lenin’s works overboard before the ship docked in San Pedro, which did not save him, six years later, from being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Is it true,” asked his inquisitor, “that you have written a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings?” Ha ha, yeah, it was true. Brecht left the U.S. the next day and never returned. 

But I was talking about the crimes, the crimes, the crimes, the ones that pile up so much they become invisible. Did you hear about the latest massacre, 22 Lebanese civilians mowed down by Israeli soldiers who weren’t supposed to be there? Don’t worry, it was easy to miss. To be strictly accurate, though, Brecht was not in Germany when he wrote that line. By then he was in Denmark, lying low on the isle of Fyn. There was no going back. It was 1935, the same year the Nazis stripped him, and all Jews, of citizenship. There are precedents, you see, for some of this. The line I quoted was the first sentence of the final stanza of a poem called, “As One Who Comes.” (Or, in a less elegant translation, “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain.”) These are the last lines:

When the suffering becomes unbearable, the screams are no longer heard.

The screams too fall like the summer rain.

Which strikes me as just right, except that it doesn’t rain much anymore. Especially not in the summer.

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