Recent Writings

Supporters of GEHO in Jinja, Uganda

After a long dry spell, I've been doing some more writing, all of it over on the Kasama website. Working with other members of the editorial collective, I've been helping to flag and introduce interesting articles from outside websites, as well as generating original content.

First up, I'm most proud of a long piece I spent a week researching and writing. Entitled "Real Enemies, False Friends: Imperialism and Homophobia in Africa," it covers the causes behind the wave of terrifying anti-gay repression in Africa. I've coined the phrase "weaponization of gay rights" to describe the hypocritical embrace of LGBT rights by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a neocolonialist cudgel in the arsenal of US imperialism. It's pretty timely in the context of the orgy of hypocrisy during the Sochi Olympics in which anti-gay, repressive Russia is being pilloried by the professedly pro-gay, but still repressive US. I take aim at local demagogues, American evangelicals like Scott Lively, imperialist politicians, and the worst alleged gay rights organization ever, the Human Rights Campaign.

Next up are a bunch of short introductions meant to frame and introduce articles for discussion:

"Sochi Olympics — stop anti-gay violence in Russia" is a Human Rights Watch report  on the disturbing increase in antigay violence following the passage of Russia's gay propaganda law. My introduction just presents some of the issues for those not familiar. I'd like to follow this up with a discussion of the attempted gay boycott of Sochi and its corporate sponsors, addressing some of the same issues of hypocritical imperialism as in my Uganda/Nigeria piece.

"East Baltimore — What the fuck is a selfie?" is an article about life in a world where social media doesn't reign supreme. My introduction is a call to examine the bubbles and presumptions leftists inhabit when thinking about interacting with the real world.

"Atlanta, unfit rulers should get out of the way" is an article about the calamitously unusual snowstorm that swept the south. My introduction talks about the clash of extreme weather and capitalist crisis.

"American Studies Association penalized by NY Senate for Israel boycott" talks about the attempted retaliation against supporters of the BDS movement in New York. My introduction introduces the BDS movement as a way of materially supporting the Palestinian struggle.

Since Kasama front paged my fairly critical piece on Peter Seeger, we chose another article that was more personally laudatory as a counterpoint. I introduced "Music journalist Dave Marsh remembers Pete Seeger" in the hopes of keeping a discussion going.

My personal life is still quite unsettled, but it feels good to be speaking my mind again and keeping up with the writing. I'd love feedback from readers.

Shovelling Out Again

Last night we had another massive snowstorm in New York City. As you can see from this picture of my Brooklyn block, there's over a foot of fresh snow on top of the remnants of two earlier snows. While school was cancelled and some buses were halted, the big story is that unlike the post-Christmas "snowpocalypse," the city seemed to keep functioning. When I woke up to shovel at 6:30 this morning, the street had already been plowed. There was less snow than before, but still quite a bit. Walking home from the subway tonight I saw that most people have about three or four feet of snow piled in their front yards, a combination of natural accumulation and what shovellers have flung there because the snow from the sidewalks has to go somewhere.

Mayor Bloomberg was on the radio and TV all morning sounding calm and collected, and making himself sound thoroughly in charge. The disaster of December was not repeated; he seemed anxious to avoid another media shitstorm like the one that's kept the mayor and his minions on the defensive for much of January.



One of the creepier things that happened after the last storm was a typical attempt to blame last month's infrastructure failure on organized workers. For weeks the media was full of fairly vague reports of some labor conspiracy to slow down the cleanup after the storm. The reports were always short on details. Well it turns out the reports were coming from one place, a newly-elected Republican city councilman named Dan Halloran. Halloran is a right-wing lawyer who campaigned on a "tea party" platform. Which is hilarious because somehow the teabaggers who claim to be such champions of "we the people" seem to revel in blaming working class people for the country's problems. Halloran has spun an elaborate fantasy around his claims, which seems to be coming completely unravelled through, of course, lack of any evidence whatsoever.

Making the story a little odder is Halloran's unusual faith. Although he is a political and social conservative, he's also a Neopagan, a member of the Asatru-related religion of "Theodism," one of the modern reconstructions of ancient Norse religion. Some such reconstructions of Norse religion are notoriously racist, since of course, getting in touch with Norse roots seems to involve finding one's inner pure-white/Aryan core. I have no idea if Halloran's sect is tainted with that, but it does practice a sort of mock indentured servitude called "thralldom" where newbies in the faith have to do chores for their elders. I try in general not to criticize how people choose to experience their spirituality, but I find it interesting that an adherent of a religion that waxes nostalgic about feudalism and social hierarchy should be trashing working people. Separation of church and state is to me not negotiable. Interesting that a Pagan can get elected to office; and a useful reminder that "alternate spirituality" does not equal "progressive and open-minded."

I'm glad that in addition to shovelling out of this latest snow we seem to be shovelling out of Halloran's elitist bullshit as well. Winter is almost half-over...I wonder how much more snow we're gonna get?

(All photos by me this morning.)

Editorial Viewpoint

Yesterday in Brooklyn we had another few inches of snow. After shovelling the sidewalk when it was barely getting light, I came up to my home office to eat a bowl of cereal and check in with the world. Sitting at my desk in front of the computer I was looking out the window when I saw the proverbial rosy fingers of dawn grace the snow-covered trees right outside in front of the house in a particularly beautiful way. Fortunately I had my digital camera on the desk, and miraculously the zoom lens was able to catch the sight out the window without me even getting up...to my amazement with a little adjustment in photoshop the colors I saw seem to have come out exactly as I remember them.

It's cold on the top floor of the brownstone: the building was built in 1907 and cheap replacement windows and a poor renovation job that did weird things to the steam plumbing a few years before we moved in means that sometimes I'm bundled up in a thick shirt and a sweater right here at the computer: Tonight it's supposed to drop down to the single digits fahrenheit, in fact. But a view like this reminds me why I love Brooklyn even if sometimes I do long for a view outside my window of ocean and palm trees.

Snowpocalypse Part 2: NYC FAIL

I snagged this really cool picture of the highway up in the 'burbs from facebook. It's pretty incredible. We don't have quite that much snow in the city, though it seems to have been plenty, because the real story of the snowpocalypse turns out to be that it's yet another sign of our failing urban infrastructure.

My street had a stalled bus at the foot of the hill from Sunday night til this afternoon -- Tuesday -- and the street is still not plowed. Which means the busline can't run on the street at all. The crosswalk up by the main avenue is a jumbled mass of snow that people can hardly walk through. While the avenue itself is cleared there are few cutaways to the sidewalk. Any subways which spend part of their route operating above ground are still iffy. And there's been no mail delivery since last Friday; apparently that "neither rain nor snow nor dead of night" line was just a line. And it stopped snowing before dawn on Monday.

Mayor Bloomberg has come under severe criticism for his handling of the cleanup in the storm's aftermath. Budget cuts have meant layoffs and staffing reductions through attrition and it's obvious that this has had an effect on the city's ability to deal with the weather. Not a big surprise since Bloomberg values the richest residents of the city above all others. Coupled with the debacle of the rollout of electronic voting machines this last election, and subway cutbacks which have lengthened rides and dramatically increased costs, Bloomberg's last term is not chalking up a roster of achievement. His government seems callous and out of touch, living in a rarified universe far above the streets and the rest of us.

It's completely empirical, but having lived in NYC since 1981 I've seen a lot of bad weather and it's only in the past few years that the city has been brought to its knees so completely by precipitation. Even a heavy rain seems to throw the subways into crisis, and seeing normally busy streets go unplowed for two days would have once been unimaginable.

Snowpocalypse Now?

While I'm not sure last night's snowfall truly counts as the "snowpocalypse" it's being called on the news, it was an impressive storm. The wind was really something else: looking out my window you could barely see across the street. I woke up this morning wondering where the snow had drifted, and opened the front door to see that the answer was my side of the street. See photo above!

When I was a kid I was haunted by a movie whose name I never found out of people trapped in a house during a snowstorm; they had to escape out the second floor the snow was so high. So it wasn't that bad but still I had to shovel almost two feet of snow away from the door merely to have the pleasure of shovelling the snow from the front yard and the sidewalk. There were a few people bravely trekking off to work, and looking miserable for all the beauty of the snow-covered street. As of this evening the street itself has not been plowed; I saw a cross-country skier out earlier but anybody with a car is out of luck.

I was asked to take the week off from my job, and frankly I'm not complaining. I'm thinking of various friends who travelled off for short visits to family out of town and am glad I'm not dealing with that kind of uncertainty about being able to get back home.


So for now until the soot and city dirt and the dog piss kick in, my block is a bit of a beautiful winter wonderland. I'm staying inside where it's at least slightly warm, counting my blessings for a full pantry. Also counting my blessings that I'm not one of the feral cats living out back. The Christmas lights are still on up and down the block; it's the second night of Kwanzaa, and all is well.

A snow day in Brooklyn

A foot of snow. More than the "snowmageddon" last time.

Cold, cold winter

Well the almanacs all warned it would be a cold winter. Unfortunately they seem to have been right. Besides just being damn unpleasant, I'm really not enjoying paying $300 a month gas bills.
Let's celebrate with some Klaus Nomi, the quirky NYC performance artist. Here is his live version of the Elizabethan "The Cold Song." It should chill you to the bone nicely. He succumbed to AIDS shortly after this performance. Stay warm!