Every Good Morning

Only their own lives mean something to tyrants. The importance of life for others is dependent on how closely they circle the Sun of the ruler. If they exist beyond the sight of his glancing, disinterested eye, let’s say beyond the orbit of Saturn, a sometime evening star, then the reality of those lives is murky, their humanity erased. “No real person is involved”* in their deaths. Tyrants see them […]

They have always been there. Their bodies have always been there. Their suffering has always been there for all to see. They were stolen, sold, crammed into ships, raped and murdered during the “ Middle Passage ”, sold, raped and murdered by their owners, sold, sold, sold with all their children and children’s children — a few names : Ghar, Dayhoo, Ba, Frar, Humom. More names than you can ever imagine have always been available […]

There is no teleology to history. Nothing is preordained except entropy and death … and as long as there is life, rebirth too, and resurrections and reinventions. At my age, history seems like white hot lava streaming downhill across uneven ground. We give events their pattern. We look at those cross-sections of landscape and flow from 5000 feet up, at the gutters and gullies it takes, the cities it consumes, […]

I have an historical memory. I remember the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy and the attempted murder of Wallace, the Vietnam protests (I was in several, tear-gassed once, whacked half-heartedly with a baton by a bored cop), the cities burning, the tremendous ferment and turbulence of all of it. I remember the rock n’ roll, the concerts, and reading, reading, reading, talking, talking, talking. It felt like living inside […]