I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,
and a silver knife, and a silver fork.
I would complain about it—the spoon was not greasy,
it tasted like braces, my shining access
to cosmetic enhancement. And I complained about
the taste of my fillings in my very expensive
mouth, as if only my family was paying—
where did I think the rich got
their money but from everyone else?
My mother beat me in 4/4 time,
and I often, now, rant to her beat—I wear
her rings as if I killed her for them, as my
people killed, and climbed up over
the dead. And I sound as if I am bragging
about it. I was born with a spoon instead of a
tongue in my mouth—dung spoon,
diamond spoon. And who would I be
to ask for forgiveness? I would be a white girl.
And I hear Miss Lucille, as if on the mountain
where I’d stand beside her, and brush away the insects,
and sometimes pick one off her, sometimes
by the wings, and toss it away. And Lucille
is saying, to me, You have asked for enough,
and been given in excess. And that thing in your mouth,
open your mouth and let that thing go,
let it fly back into the mine where it was brought
up from the underworld at the price of
lives, beloved lives. And now,
enough, Shar, now a little decent silence.
—Sharon Olds

“’If the ruling classes,’ [Brecht] goes on, ‘permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature.’ And generally speaking he then says in these very abrupt remarks: ‘One may say that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.’ This of course is a shocking statement; I think that at the same time it is entirely true. What is really necessary is, if you want to keep your integrity under these circumstances, then you can do it only if you remember your old way of looking at such things and say: ‘No matter what he does and if he killed ten million people, he is still a clown.’”
—Hannah Arendt

“While Mr. Trump has the authority to order the detention of all immigrants apprehended while entering without permission and end the practice of releasing them pending court dates — which the executive order appears to call for — Congress should withhold the funding needed to carry out this plan. Leaders in so-called sanctuary cities, like New York and Los Angeles, have rightly recognized that immigrants, including those here without permission, are more of an asset than a burden. Their defiance is likely now to be tested by renewed calls to turn local police officers into immigration enforcers. The courage of local leaders may help stymie Mr. Trump’s misguided approach.”
—”The Real Cost of Mr. Trump’s Wall”

“The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a forest. In the midst of a troubled long-distance relationship, I sometimes went days on end without talking to anyone but my boyfriend’s disembodied head on Skype. I was demoralized by Turkish politics, which made both secularists and religious people feel like victims. If you were a woman, no matter what you were wearing—décolleté or head scarf—someone would give you a dirty look.

“The first line of Epictetus’ manual of ethical advice, the Enchiridion—‘Some things are in our control and others not’—made me feel that a weight was being lifted off my chest. For Epictetus, the only thing we can totally control, and therefore the only thing we should ever worry about, is our own judgment about what is good. If we desire money, health, sex, or reputation, we will inevitably be unhappy. If we genuinely wish to avoid poverty, sickness, loneliness and obscurity, we will live in constant anxiety and frustration. Of course, feat and desire are unavoidable. Everyone feels those flashes of dread or anticipation. Being a Stoic means interrogating those flashes: asking whether they apply to things outside your control and, if they do, being ‘ready with the reaction “Then it’s none of my concern.”’

“Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations of insults, but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided. Wasn’t it my fault that I lived in such isolation, that meaning continued to elude me, that my love life was a shambles? When I read that no one should ever feel ashamed to be alone or in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. Epictetus’ advice: when alone, ‘call it peace and liberty, and consider yourself the gods’ equal’; in a crowd, think of yourself as a guest at an enormous dinner party, and celebrate the best you can.

“Epictetus also won me over with his tone, which was that of an enraged athletics coach. If you want to become a Stoic, he said, ‘you will dislocate your wrist, sprain your ankle, swallow quantities of sand,’ and you will suffer losses and humiliations. And yet, for you, every setback is an advantage, an opportunity for learning and glory. When a difficulty comes your way, you should feel proud and excited, like ‘a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck.’ In other words, think of every unreasonable asshole you have to deal with as part of God’s attempt to ‘turn you into Olympic-class material.’ This is a very powerful trick.

“Much of Epictetus’ advice is about not getting angry at slaves. At first, I thought I could skip those parts. But I soon realized that I had the same self-recriminatory and illogical thoughts in my interactions with small-business owners and service professionals. When a cabdriver lied about a route, or a shopkeeper shortchanged me, I felt that it was my fault, for speaking Turkish with an accent, or for being part of an élite. And, if I pretended not to notice these slights, wasn’t I proving that I really was a disengaged, privileged oppressor? Epictetus shook me from these thoughts with this simple exercise: ‘Starting with things of little value—a bit of spilled oil, a little stolen wine—repeat to yourself: “For such a small price, I buy tranquility.”’

“Born nearly two thousand years before Darwin and Freud, Epictetus seems to have anticipated a way out of their prisons. The sense of doom and delight that is programmed into the human body? It can be overridden by the mind. The eternal war between subconscious desires and the demands of civilization? It can be won. In the nineteen-fifties, the American psychotherapist Albert Ellis came up with an early form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, based largely on Epictetus’ claim that ‘it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.’ If you practice Stoic philosophy long enough, Epictetus says, you stop being mistaken about what’s good even in your dreams.”
—Elif Batuman

* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the DOJ’s Violence Against Women programs.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Minority Business Development Agency.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Economic Development Administration.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the International Trade Administration.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Legal Services Corporation.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the DOJ.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Office of Electricity Deliverability and Energy Reliability.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
* On January 19th, 2017, Trump said that he would cut funding for the Office of Fossil Energy.
* On January 20th, 2017, Trump ordered all regulatory powers of all federal agencies frozen.
* On January 20th, 2017, Trump ordered the National Parks Service to stop using social media after RTing factual, side by side photos of the crowds for the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations.
* On January 20th, 2017, roughly 230 protestors were arrested in DC and face unprecedented felony riot charges. Among them were legal observers, journalists, and medics.
* On January 20th, 2017, a member of the International Workers of the World was shot in the stomach at an anti-fascist protest in Seattle. He remains in critical condition.
* On January 21st, 2017, Trump brought a group of 40 cheerleaders to a meeting with the CIA to cheer for him during a speech that consisted almost entirely of framing himself as the victim of dishonest press.
* On January 21st, 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a press conference largely to attack the press for accurately reporting the size of attendance at the inaugural festivities, saying that the inauguration had the largest audience of any in history, “period.”
* On January 22nd, 2017, White House advisor Kellyann Conway defended Spicer’s lies as “alternative facts” on national television news.
* On January 22nd, 2017, Trump appeared to blow a kiss to director James Comey during a meeting with the FBI, and then opened his arms in a gesture of strange, paternal affection, before hugging him with a pat on the back.
* On January 23rd, 2017, Trump reinstated the global gag order, which defunds international organizations that even mention abortion as a medical option.
* On January 23rd, 2017, Spicer said that the US will not tolerate China’s expansion onto islands in the South China Sea, essentially threatening war with China.
* On January 23rd, 2017, Trump repeated the lie that 3-5 million people voted “illegally” thus costing him the popular vote.
* On January 23rd, 2017, it was announced that the man who shot the anti-fascist protester in Seattle was released without charges, despite turning himself in.
* On January 24th, 2017, Spicer reiterated the lie that 3-5 million people voted “illegally” thus costing DT the popular vote.
* On January 24th, 2017, Trump tweeted a picture from his personal Twitter account of a photo he says depicts the crowd at his inauguration and will hang in the White House press room. The photo is of the 2009 inauguration of 44th President Barack Obama, and is curiously dated January 21st, 2017, the day AFTER the inauguration and the day of the Women’s March, the largest inauguration related protest in history.
* On January 24th, 2017, the EPA was ordered to stop communicating with the public through social media or the press and to freeze all grants and contracts.
* On January 24th, 2017, the USDA was ordered to stop communicating with the public through social media or the press and to stop publishing any papers or research. All communication with the press would also have to be authorized and vetted by the White House.
* On January 24th, 2017, HR7, a bill that would prohibit federal funding not only to abortion service providers, but to any insurance coverage, including Medicaid, that provides abortion coverage, went to the floor of the House for a vote.
* On January 24th, 2017, Trump ordered the resumption of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, while the North Dakota state congress considers a bill that would legalize hitting and killing protestors with cars if they are on roadways.
* On January 24th, 2017, it was discovered that police officers had used confiscated cell phones to search the emails and messages of the 230 demonstrators now facing felony riot charges for protesting on January 20th, including lawyers and journalists whose email accounts contain privileged information of clients and sources.
* On January 25th, 2017 Trump signs executive order to begin construction on Mexico-America border wall, which confirming it will be paid for by American tax payers.
* On January 25th, 2017 Trump signs executive order to strip Federal funding for sanctuary cities.
* On January 25th, 2017 Trump calls for investigation into voter fraud (despite no evidence) including any person who is registered in more than one state. Steve Bannon (his senior White House advisor) is registered in two states. Steven Mnuchin (his nominee for Treasury secretary) is registered in two states. Tiffany Trump is registered in two states.
* On January 25th, 2017, it is revealed that several senior White House staffers (including Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, and Steve Bannon) are using the private RNC email system, an act which Trump insisted HRC be arrested for.
* On January 25th, 2017 it is revealed that the Republican House, likely emboldened by Trump’s stance on environmental protection, is planning a move to invalidate the Endangered Species Act. An act founded in large part to protect the dwindling numbers of Bald Eagles, or nation’s symbol of freedom.
* On January 25th, 2017 Trump revealed plans to dismantle 15 federal programs- The Office of Energy Efficiency, the Office of Fossil Energy, the International Trade Administration, Legal Services Corporation, the Office of Violence Against Women, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the Office of Electricity Deliverability and Energy Reliability, the Economic Development Administration, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, the Minority Business Development Agency, and perhaps least surprising, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
—via Julia Fierro

“First, voters should elect presidents directly. And once the vote is counted, the president-elect (and the new Congress) should take office within a week. Americans accustomed to the current system will object that this would not allow enough time to assemble a Cabinet—but in England and France, the new chief executive considers ministerial nominations before the election. A shorter interregnum would force the creation of something like the British shadow cabinet, in which a candidate makes public the names of his key advisers. That would give voters important information, and provide the president with a running start.

“Next, Article II should include a specific and limited set of presidential powers. The “unitary executive” theorists should no longer be allowed to spin a quasi-dictatorship out of the bare phrase executive power; like the responsibilities of Congress, those of the president should be clearly enumerated.

“It should be made clear, for example, that the president’s powers as commander in chief do not crowd out the power of Congress to start—and stop—armed conflict. Likewise, the duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” needs to be clarified: it is not the power to decide which laws the president wants to follow, or to rewrite new statutes in “signing statements” after Congress has passed them; it is a duty to uphold the Constitution, valid treaties, and congressional statutes (which together, according to the Constitution, form “the supreme law of the land”).

“After a transformative midterm election like that of 1994 or 2006, the nation should require a compromise between the rejected president and the new Congress. A president whose party has lost some minimum number of seats in Congress should be forced to form the equivalent of a national-unity government. This could be done by requiring the president to present a new Cabinet that includes members of both parties, which the new Congress would approve or disapprove as a whole—no drawn-out confirmation hearings on each nominee. If the president were unwilling to assemble such a government or unable to get congressional approval after, say, three tries, he would have to resign.

“This would not give Congress control of the executive branch. A resigning president would be replaced by the vice president, who would not be subject to the new-Cabinet requirement. This new president might succeed politically where the previous one had failed (imagine Al Gore becoming president in 1995, and running in 1996—and perhaps in 2000—as an incumbent). And that possibility would discourage the new congressional majority from simply rejecting the compromise Cabinet. Resignation might be worse for them than approval.

“As a final reform, we should reconsider the entire Hamiltonian concept of the “unitary executive.” When George Washington became president, he left a large organization (the Mount Vernon plantation) to head a smaller one (the federal government). But today, the executive branch is a behemoth, with control over law enforcement, the military, economic policy, education, the environment, and most other aspects of national life. That behemoth is responsible to one person, and that one person, as we have seen, is only loosely accountable to the electorate.

“In other areas, the Framers solved this problem neatly: they divided power in order to protect against its abuse. Congress was split into the House and the Senate to ensure that the legislative process would not be so efficient as to absorb powers properly belonging to the other branches. The problem now is not an overweening Congress but an aggrandized executive branch; still, the remedy is the same. We should divide the executive branch between two elected officials—a president, and an attorney general who would be voted in during midterm elections.

“As we are learning from the ongoing scandal of the torture memos, one of the drawbacks of a single executive is that Justice Department lawyers may consider it their job to twist the law to suit the White House. But the president is not their client; the United States is. Justice Department lawyers appointed by an elected attorney general would have no motive to distort law and logic to empower the president, while the White House counsel’s office, which does represent the president, would have every incentive to monitor the Justice Department to ensure that it did not tilt too strongly against the executive branch. The watchmen would watch each other.

“This arrangement would hardly be unprecedented: most state governments elect an attorney general. The new Article II could make clear that the president has the responsibility for setting overall legal policy, just as governors do today.

“None of these changes would erode the “separation of powers.” That happens only when a change gives one branch’s prerogatives to another branch. These changes refer in each instance back to the people, who are the proper source of all power. The changes would still leave plenty of room for “energy in the executive” but would afford far less opportunity for high-handedness, secrecy, and simple rigidity. They would allow presidential firmness, but not at the expense of democratic self-governance.

“It’s not surprising that the Framers did not understand the perils of the office they designed. They were working in the dark, and they got a lot of things right. But we should not let our admiration for the Framers deter us from fixing their mistakes.

“Our government is badly out of balance. There is a difference between executive energy and autocratic license; between leadership and authoritarianism; between the democratic firmness of a Lincoln and the authoritarian rigidity of a Bush. The challenge we face today is to find some advantage in Bush’s sorry legacy. Reform of the executive branch would be a good place to start.”
—Garrett Epps, “The Founders’ Great Mistake” (January/February 2009)

“They had been so much in love, remembering it made Peter almost physically sick with regret. Peter would always remember this one particular time, when he and Gina had first gotten together, when they were having sex, and they had looked into each other’s eyes and said “I love you,” which they had just started saying to each other—there was something about that one time, it was hard to explain. It was hard to explain because it was such a commonplace-sounding thing when you’re describing it, something predictable, that anyone could experience, that anyone could say. That’s one of the irritating things about being a person these days, is that love is a clichéd emotion, sadly, something used to sell stuff, and it’s hard to talk about it earnestly without sounding like somebody on daytime TV. But this feeling had happened to Peter exactly once in his life, then. It was a moment that, Peter felt, no matter if he and Gina stayed in love or not later on, would tie them together forever. He knew he might not have a moment like that ever again with anyone. In retrospect he was glad it had happened to him at least once. But by the time the thing with her friends from UIC happened, Peter had lost all agency in the relationship. At first it felt like they had been moving forward, together, at the same time, but by then, Gina was leading and Peter was tottering along behind her every step of the way. She decided when they would have sex and how, she decided what they ate, what they were going to do, what they were going to watch on TV. Sometimes she even walked a pace ahead of him on the street when they were out together. Peter had relinquished any control, and was now helpless, dependent. She removed the need for him to make decisions, she protected him, made him feel loved, safe, taken care of. And she had slid into nagginess, was always castigating him for something, snipping at his every fault, from his pitiful inability to ask his boss at the music store for more hours to what shirt he would wear, and whether or not he would button the collar. Once, when they were driving to a party, trying to follow some complicated, barely sensical directions a stoned friend had given them, Peter, who was at the wheel, had accidentally called Gina ‘Mom.’ But Peter loved her, even now. Since they broke up she had quit drinking and using on her own. She had never been as bad as he was. He saw her the last time he was in Chicago, a few months ago, during the couple of days he had free between rehab and the halfway house. They had lunch together. Lunch. The least intimate meal of the day. She had been impenetrably distant and polite. As if they were acquaintances, Gina hadn’t seemed happy or unhappy. She was just flat. Flat as the green line of a dead person’s heart monitor on a hospital show on TV. She wasn’t the same person anymore. It was totally Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when the aliens replace someone you love with an eerily disaffected doppelgänger, a person who looks exactly like the person you love but who you know just, just isn’t.”
—Benjamin Hale, “The Minus World”

“What he felt toward these kids walking across the grass while he sat on the steps smoking wasn’t quite hate or resentment. There was too much self-loathing mixed into his feelings for that. It requires more self-respect to hate and resent, it takes some self-confidence to believe that they’ve been blessed and you’ve been gypped by a capricious universe. No, Peter mostly blamed himself. He’d started the game on Go with two hundred dollars, same as anyone else, but had bungled it through bad moves and reckless investments. How do other people do it? How do other people navigate the world so easily, as if they already know the way, and never feel unmoored, lost, frantic, like their compasses have been fucked up from too much holding a magnet under them to watch the needle spin and spin, searching for a north that seems to be everywhere at once?”
—Benjamin Hale, “The Minus World”

“Every time she saw the light in the sky, she felt something moving insider herself, in her blood, her lungs, her organs, a feeling that was not quite terror and not awe and not humility, and not a feeling that she was catching sight of something of sublime beauty, but a feeling that combined elements of all these, a feeling that must have been something akin to what early human beings felt millions of years ago when they looked up at the spectacular vault of sky above them, haunted with ribbons of starsmoke, and had no idea who they were or where they were or how big was the universe.”
—Benjamin Hale, “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day”

“Sometimes, as he’s turning off his bedside lamp, he says, ‘Good night.’ He says, ‘I love you.’

“And it sparks something in my chest, a fire that could be love or could be anger—heat that reverberates to my spine, lighting it with a desire I cannot identify: a need to take my husband’s hand, maybe, or to elbow him in the face.

“I love you.

“I always close my eyes when he says it, exhale heavily, as if I have already been lost to sleep.”
—Jess Rafalko, “In the Neighborhood”