The American Culture (Part 3)

Dear Pedro,

I've been in a kind of stupor since I last wrote, June felt like a slide into a filthy pit, and I have kind of felt squished inside a stupidity, a helpless feeling, a kind of smoldering mental and spiritual torpor, given all that is happening here.

Somehow the recent political assassinations in Minnesota and the explosion of state kidnappings of thousands of brown people by masked agents across the country, and most especially the systematic murders in Gaza directly funded by AIPAC and congressional money and our tax dollars, all swirling within a far graver and quieter context for us in the US: the rise of a police state -- somehow all of that swirled together has felt actually physically crushing, at once stultifying and enraging.

By physically crushing, I mean that the air actually feels like it has gone through a thickening, our bodies feel heavier, stiffer. So I'm grateful to you and Vinduet and Priya and Bendik for the chance to "talk with someone" who is living in a functioning democracy. It feels helpful to me to know you can literally hear me and are listening from a world that better knows how to care for itself.

Despite how obviously messed up all things here are now, I got worried that all the stuff I said in my previous about driving around with a handgun might comport too readily with all the Hollywood depictions of Americans cosplaying with guns, the way we so self-parodically do here, or that I am somehow otherwise a ghoulish puppet of propaganda, duped by a trollfarm in St Petersburg into believing we Americans are awash with white militias, or like maybe I've succumbed to a paranoia manipulated by some malicious algorithm synthesized and cultured in a digital lab in Silicon Valley. But I'm sorry to report the violence here is real and very tawdry, like violence always is.

And increasingly "it" manifests. The thing about violence is that it masks itself, it camouflages itself, until it presents itself and then refuses to be ignored. Or conditions are otherwise so volatile that it surprises even those who perpetrate it. At the end of June, a dear and old friend of mine and I celebrated the longest day of the year by visiting together a broadlawned mountaintop observatory in the Blue Ridge Mountains, around an immense telescope, and despite that mountain top being cold and windy and cloudy it was the best time ever, wrapped in sweaters and beanies and catching glimpses of constellations with other weirdos in the dark ... but then the next day as I was driving homeward through the mountains of Tennessee I came upon a white man in a pickup screaming with his window down at the long solid snake of traffic I was a part of as it came streaming around a mountain corner in front of his driveway, clogging his world and delaying his arrival somewhere important because some distant highway closure dozens of miles away, in another part of the immense Appalachian range, caused us to stop-up the traffic at his very front lawn, choking off the scrawny thread attaching him to civilization. And I happened to be situated right in front of him when he with window unrolled, shoved his middle finger up into the air like a tiny javelin (knitting needle?) of hate and threw his eyeballs right at me, gunned his pickup right at me, and came lurching and braking at my car screaming, teeth bared, "I'm fixin to shoo-oo-oot someone!" and I had no reason to doubt him, and was happy to leave his white ass in the rearview, and then about a mile later I took a picture of a small house at the back of an immense yard, along this same choked stretch of the Dixie Highway, a small house with a small porch on which were hungTWO Confederate flags side by side, making the little red house look like a weird enraged flag-eyed face.