Rad Geek People's Daily

This was from a while back on the Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast. I made a note at the time but didn’t post it. To-day I’m looking over the note, and I know so much the desolation of the airport delay. But as far as the place and the weather goes, now it all feels like a dispatch from some alien land, in an ancient age far beyond the ken of the fathers of the fathers of men.

April Snow

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world
is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep
their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred
waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle
when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows
the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.
I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various
faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

— Matthew Zapruder, April Snow
From Come on All You Ghosts (2010)
and Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the Day podcast (1 April 2023)

According to some reports, the Opelika-Auburn News may be halting home delivery of their daily print edition. But don’t for a moment let anyone tell you that they have given up on doing hard-hitting journalism with a global reach.

From the online edition:

Just announced to-day — at long last.

Shared Article from nytimes.com

F.D.A. Approves First U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill

The move could significantly expand access to contraception. The pill is expected to be available in early 2024.

By Pam Belluck @ nytimes.com

As I wrote last Fall:

Once again — of course birth control should be available over-the-counter.

There is no reason but pure control-freak politics to require prescriptions from medical gatekeepers to pharmaceutical gatekeepers. — Oh, but what about side effects? The side-effects are minimal for most women, well-known after six decades of research, and not worse than the health effects of unplanned pregnancies. In any case the information is easy to understand and communicate, and ordinary women are perfectly capable in ordinary circumstances to come to their own decisions and make their own choices about the risks they want to take when it comes to their own bodies and their own health. — Oh, but how will the insurance pay for it? If insurance won’t pay out without an Rx, then there’s no law that says a doctor can’t write an Rx for an over-the-counter medicine. In any case over-the-counter availability will also make oral contraceptives a lot cheaper and practically more accessible, even if it does become somehow harder to get insurance specifically to pay for them. This problem has already been solved in many cases with contraceptive products that are already available over the counter (like Plan B emergency contraceptives), and it shouldn’t be hard to figure out how to extend it to this case.

If there’s no victim, there’s no crime. If it’s your body, it should be your choice. Free the Pill, and all political prisoners.

— GT 2022-09-20: OC OTC, 2022 Edition

The publication of a complete English translation of War and Peace allows us to move beyond the rumors that have accumulated around it and decide on our own what sort of book it is. Very little about that task is simple….

— Shawn Wilbur, An Anarchist’s Guide to War
Review of War and Peace: On the Principle and Constitution of the Right of Peoples by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, edited by Alex Prichard and translated by Paul Sharkey
Reason, May 2023

AK Press has released a complete English translation of Proudhon’s monumental late work War and Peace (1861), translated by Paul Sharkey and Alex Prichard. Shawn Wilbur reviews the book and the new translation for Reason.

As always, border policies and the border cops who enforce them impose horrendous suffering on innocent people, for the sake of inflicting the deplorable, invasive and violent means to an utterly worthless political end.

Then they turn around and look at the humanitarian crisis that they themselves have created, they contort their faces into a grotesque mask of feigned pity, and Joseph R. Biden will talk on and on about how people shouldn’t be trying to come to the United States at all, or if they have to then they can wait in prison on the other side of the border waiting for court appointments that never come and fiddling around with a mobile app that doesn’t work, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador will say that it’s all so awful, and he will investigate how the fire started, when of course he already knows perfectly well why dozens of men were caught and could not get out and could not get away from it.

And the politicians in Washington and in Mexico and the military and paramilitary patrols on both sides of the the border all care so, so very much and they are all so, so very sorry, and this only shows how much harder they need to work at discouraging immigrants ever more thoroughly, and at shutting down border crossings ever more systematically and relentlessly, and at securing funds to build ever more jails to imprison the immigrants they have caught, and then rounding people up across the border towns to force them into immigrant jails while they wait, and wait, and wait. So that they can make damned sure that the U.S. government will always be able to go on enforcing all the laws that keep forcing peaceful, harmless people into these awful conditions over and over again.

And when another unintended but utterly predictable disaster happens at another overcrowded jail, then what everyone knows, but nobody in politics is willing to say, is that what happened is that so many people who have done nothing wrong, and who pose no threat to anyone, were locked away in a jail that they could not get out of, and the fact that they were locked in and could not get out is the entire reason that they were left to suffer and to burn and to suffocate and to die.

This is not a matter of complicated and measured considerations of policy. It is a matter of really appalling recklessness and brutality that had no reason to exist. There is no political policy on earth that could be worth this, no system of control and enforcement that could justify or even excuse rounding people up and locking them for God knows how long in an immigration jail while they wait endlessly on a broken system of administrative procedure that will leave them stranded for months, or years, or forever.

There is no clever technical fix to the system that produces horrors like this over and over again, no endlessly and mendaciously perpetuated Trump-era policy, no innovatively progressive feat of technocratic legerdemain that will alleviate the crisis or mitigate the suffering that it causes to any extent that matters.

There is no policy solution except for the urgent, simple, utterly obvious solution of allowing for massive, order-of-magnitude increases to the numbers of people legally allowed to immigrate openly to the United States, regardless of their nation of origin. That’s all. People who are being stopped from crossing the border should be allowed to cross the border, openly and peacefully. People who are in jails along the border should be let out of those jails so that they can cross the border at their earliest convenience.

There is no crisis on the border that is not the obvious and direct result of the crisis of the border, no humanitarian disaster that would not be instantly and forever wiped away just by letting people out of jail, by letting them cross peacefully where they want to cross, and by letting them stay anywhere that they can find a place or a person willing to have them. All you need to do is stand down, let these people out of detention, let them cross freely and openly where they choose and not worry about how to force them through a kafkaesque system of immigration courts, and leave them alone. If that seems politically difficult, then damn politics to hell.

Nobody needed to die like that in this awful jail. Not one man. How dare you? What else is there to say? What could there be to say in anything other than looking directly at the allied governments of the United States of America and the United Mexican States, and the political border that they enforce, and and just screaming, screaming, screaming.