They point down at the drowning people and laugh
The fascists make fodder of our neighbors
Hello hello! Lots to get to. As I’m writing it’s Saturday at noon and I’m staring at a ton of notes and almost no writing. Not ideal! It’s gunna be a fun day.
Where to start where to start where to start...
I finished ¡No Pasarán! Matt Christman’s Spanish Civil War this morning.
The book was put together by his friends after his stroke, taking the raw material of what was to be a narrative podcast series and turning it into a manuscript. Much of it is spent detailing the pitfalls that the country’s various left factions fell into as the right united under the single banner of God and General Franco. Hits a little close to comfort, you know, In These Times.
We still live in the terminal stage of this technological matrix, the tools of counterhegemony rusted and broken at our feet. But living after the rapture still requires living, and if there's hope to be had in this existence, it's that capitalism has at least brought us together in one globalized temporality. At the end of total atomization is the pull back to community. The technology that pulls us apart will become the tools for our reacquaintance, forging trust from a common experience of alienation rather than breaking it on rocks of difference.
That’s from the conclusion—spoiler alert: the fascists won, and the intervening decades, then to now really, have seen the slow global process of liberalism wresting the consolation prize from communism—and as I was reading the above passage the song “Long Violent History” by Tyler Childers came on the stereo.
Released in 20201, it’s the last track of a record by the same name. It’s also the first with a vocal part. The dozen or so tracks that precede it are pure, fiddle-driven, traditional bluegrass. After steeping us in the tradition of his working class Appalachian roots, Childers finally takes the mic and delivers a firm position on Black Lives Matter.
How many boys could they haul off this mountain
Shoot full of holes, cuffed, and laid in the streets
'Til we come in to town in a stark ravin' anger
Looking for answers and armed to the teeth
30 aught sixes, papaw's old pistol
How many, you reckon, would it be, four or five?
Oh, would that be the start of a long, violent history
Of tuckin' our tails as we try to abide?
Just something to think about. The traditional bluegrass standards serving as an extended intro to this song are itself a statement—an attempt to draw a parallel between the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020 and the 1920-1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, one of the bloodiest and most significant uprisings in American history, occuring in the heart of Appalachia. West Virginia, where the battle took place and where Childers was living when he broke out as an artist, is a firmly red state now. There’s a challenge in Childers’ words, situated as they are over the lush instrumentals that recall of the West Virginia of the 1920s. In a way he’s asking what happened to West Virginia’s backbone.
So today I’ll ask the same: How many of your boys could they haul off your mountain? And will you have formed the tight and necessary social bonds with your neighbors to do something meaningful? Are you engaging with politics now for that one specific reason? And do you understand what it is that we’re up against? Unfortunately these questions get less rhetorical every day.
Where to start where to start where to start...
Worcester was featured on Fox News yet again this week. That’s as good a place as any.
Fox News comes to town—Pacillo’s betrayal—Bigfoot sighting!—odds and ends
They point down at the drowning people and laugh
The clip has 200,000 views as of my writing this—100,000 per day it’s been live. It’s on a Youtube page with 13 million subscribers. The headline is “Massachusetts city becomes 'transgender sanctuary city'”
The host, Laura Ingraham, begins: “Coming up, you got bright blue hair, you got white gloves. You got a lot of shrieking. This is the state of the resistance.”
The “trans resistance,” as she calls it, “seems to be losing their minds.” All Trump wants to do is “protect girls” and “keep men out of women’s bathrooms.”
Cut to video roll from Tuesday’s city council meeting. Lady LaRouge, a drag queen, is in costume, making a joke about glitter. Really it’s a nod to the fact this resolution took a month of organizing, culminating in an objectively fun and cool performance LaRouge had given before the meeting, in the hallway. (I’ve got the whole thing up on the Instagram. “G-O-T-T-O-T-O Colorio has got to go.” It rocks.) It appears in this Fox News segment without that context, of course. The intent is to mock and the clip, like all the clips, is cut toward that end.
Then it cuts to another drag performer at the mic. Then to Josh Croke, one of the main organizers, speaking as eloquently as ever. Perhaps Fox chose it because Croke’s wearing earrings and a cool dress. Regardless, the necessary evidence is provided to their audience.
Cut to Jim Polito, a Shrewsbury resident2 and crank radio host, for a live, on-air interview. He’s got the skyline of some other city green-screened behind him. He can barely contain his grin as Ingraham tees him up to further mock our queer community.
Ingraham says Worcester “was like a blue collar, a factory town.” She summons up the image of stodgy, hard-working whites with two eager fists in front of her, pumping them as if to say this is what we could have. A place that Used To Be Great. “How did this happen?”
“Laura, I grew up there,” says Polito. “It happens because the town... the city has gone crazy, Laura. My pronouns on this one are ‘I can’t go back there.’”
Zinger.
They were intolerant ones, he says. Chum hits water. Ingraham nods knowingly. Did you know, Jim says, that some of these demonstrators targeted the one Jewish member of the council? They called him a fascist. They made—gasp—pig noises! “This man who voted against this? His parents were Holocaust survivors.” Goes without saying he’s the real victim here, Polito intones.
Jim McGovern is “partly responsible for this transformation,” Polito continues, “of what was a working class, quiet city. And then we have this kind of craziness.”
The chyron under him reads “THE TRANS RESISTANCE IS LOSING ITS MIND.”
Picking up what Polito puts down, Ingraham takes the conversation wider. She says the Democrats have been accusing the Republicans of “pushing the envelope” of protesting. She cites Jan. 6 and Charlottesville. “They say ‘oh they’re the violent ones. They’re the threatening people.’ Well, who’s threatening now? Using pig noises to a Jewish American who has the right to vote any way he wants on an issue like this?” The fact that Charlottesville was an expressly neo-Nazi rally goes unacknowledged, as does the murder of Heather Heyer. The tiki torch rally with the murder was not the big deal the Dems are making it out to be. But these pig noises at the city council meeting?
Anyone else would have been tossed out of the chamber, Jim Polito says, unaware of or unbothered by the much more pointedly threatening show the cops put on in the same room a few months ago (my post on that from the time: “The Polite and Naive Owner of A Large Rabid Dog”).
You can tell he’s so eager for the big time. His lies are well rehearsed. He delivers them with glee. Ingraham hears exactly what she wants to. They’re vibing. The chemistry pops off the screen. Millions of viewers at home are certainly relishing this moment. Vindication of their ambient moral panics. The Democrat Cities, infected. A cleansing sorely needed and sure to come.
Ingraham cues a short clip of a trans person explaining that they’re angry and scared. “It’s so phony,” she says.
Not a single mention of the Trump Administration policies targeting trans people, which have gotten so dire that even the patently anti-trans editorial board of the New York Times has started speaking up. For Ingraham, specifics complicate the ‘phony’ argument. Without them, it’s easier to present the concerns as ridiculous. Which is what they do before they both shake their heads in contemptuous disbelief.
“Time to take back New England,” Ingraham says, wrapping the segment.
Five minutes of air time spent ridiculing our local queer community for the benefit of a massive national audience of reactionaries grasping for a scapegoat to channel their diffuse grievances. Segments like this explicitly serve that end. Ingraham and Polito only wink and nod at the thesis statement. They leave it to the viewers at home to come to the one conclusion that can be drawn from their narrative. And on La-Z-Boy sofas around the country, viewers come to it. They see what stands between their American reality and the America they were promised. They dream of the America-of-old on offer—When the cities were quiet and blue collar. When these people did not exist. Of course, they did exist. Have always existed. But in the narrative provided by Polito, they did not. In doing so he offered the viewers the thing they yearn for with an intensity that blinds them.
They subsume the subtle fiction as obvious fact. The solution then becomes clear. The final conclusion, one they believe they arrived at themselves because no one on the TV said it out loud: eradication. The “Trans Resistance” must be destroyed in order to save America. The viewers have found their new Unknowable Enemy. The bugs must be squashed. As these viewers find their material conditions worsen—and they surely will—their resolve in this belief strengthens. Their appetite for Bug Squashing grows. They demand more drastic means from their leaders. They reward those willing to provide them.
This is the road we’re on. This is the gravity we must contest, and at the moment we’re failing.
It’s in local organizing like the demonstrations of the past few months that we begin to lay the mere foundation for meaningful resistance. It is so much bigger and more important than the city council or any vote they take. The council is merely a vehicle, and it should be used as such. No more, no less.
We should take it as a victory, in a way, that the organizing was so effective that it caught the attention of the nation’s largest news network. That it was negative attention is to be expected, of course. But the producers of Ingraham’s show felt they had to dedicate significant air time to it, and that decision is itself testament to the significance of the act. A midsized and mostly irrelevant city was pressured by grassroots organizers to take a clear position on one of the pressing issues of our times. A community coming together in defense of its trans neighbors is a community that rejects the scapegoat Fox News types are actively manufacturing. All they had to counter it was cheap ridicule. They tried to make it sound dangerous, but that attempt relied on the already-eroded consensus that anything can be antisemitism if the TV says so.
They had nothing, in other words. The scapegoat was shown to be hollow.
In Christman’s book, the one I opened this post with, he paints the rise of Spanish fascism in nuanced detail. The seeds of it will sound familiar: the sentiment that the real country was being overrun by godless and morally perverse hordes, which were in reality just trade unions and anarchist collectives. As the budding fascists saw it, the far left and the moderate liberals had both abandoned the God-fearing tradition that Made Spain Great. They called this historical fiction “Eternal Spain” and painted all political opposition as “anti-Spain.” Manifestations, across the board, of a new and dangerous social contagion. “They needed to learn to love their God and Nation again. And that meant the ceaseless agitation of the secular, cosmopolitan liberals had to be constrained.”
The dream of a return to “old Spain” was a potent one. The country, once a great empire, was struggling to adapt to a new modernity. The centrist consensus builders proved ineffectual. Times were tough for working people. The church was losing its hold on the public. The fascists made use of the association between the old glory days and God. They consolidated power and escalated tactics around an easy enemy in a simple narrative. The communists and anarchists were godless, and thus a cultural virus. Killing became healing. The necessary means by which Eternal Spain would rise again. Weeding the once-beautiful garden.
There were spontaneous mobs first and then there were organized columns, led by power-hungry generals, happy to capture and channel the fanaticism. These generals were aided by the larger fascist powers of Germany and Italy, both happy for an excuse to test their new weapons of war. So, eventually, there was war. The left fought for survival, and while they believed in their varying ideologies, they weren’t unified under a single guiding principle. They squabbled and hesitated and suffered for it. The right, however, had their Eternal Spain. A mystifying fiction. They rallied around a simple slogan: “Unity, Totality, Hierarchy.” They submitted to its blunt logic of power. They massacred thousands with a similarly simple justification: those they killed were “anti-Spain.”
I don’t know if I need to spell out the parallels here. Almost all of the themes in the above summary are present in that Fox News segment. Ingraham and Polito identify their Eternal America and their anti-America. They present their viewers a spectacle of godlessness. They do so with winks and nods, knowing they’re playing their small roles in the larger ongoing project of laying out that simple, potent axis. They understand their job is to stoke resentment of the godless and evoke the eternal. In that clip, they used our neighbors as fodder to do so. They make mockery of what is in reality an extremely brave act. Neither Ingraham nor Polito have the temerity to stand up in public and articulate their vulnerability the way that any of the speakers they highlighted did. They wouldn’t have the courage to fight off the fear and speak truth to power. They are cowards, hiding behind a state that has always served them at the expense of others. America has never made them afraid to be who they are. For their entire lives the violence has been administered elsewhere, on other people. Comfortable in the belief that will continue, they relish, like any bully would, the fear of those in the path of the violence.
From their mountainside villa they watch the flood rush in and swallow a town in the valley below. They are comfortable in their assumption the water will never reach their home. They take their relative elevation as evidence of innate superiority. They point down at the drowning people and laugh.
It’s in that wider context we can see the full contours of a certain failure to meet the moment from Councilor Jenny Pacillo. But first, a commercial break.
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Now I’m writing this part on Sunday morning. This morning. I do the plugs last because it’s my least favorite part, but it is also the most necessary in a way. I can’t do this every week, nor can I pay the growing team of people who do it with me, if not for the people from this community who pay me for the community journalism! What we’re really doing here is figuring out how to articulate this community’s true sense of self—a radical and necessary act at this, the end of atomization. That we have no fiduciary responsibility save to our direct supporters allows us to do so in a way other outlets simply can’t. We’re allowed to mine certain depths that tend to make advertisers uncomfortable.
A big part of being a newsletter writer is being a newsletter reader. I myself pay for a good number of them. One of my favorites is Read Max by Max Read. The way he wrote his subscriber pitch the other day made me feel seen, so much as advertising copy can. The post is really good too. You should check it out: “Soy Right ascendant”
A reminder, as always, that every Read Max newsletter is the fruit of a full-time job’s worth of hours reading, analyzing, discussing, thinking, staring into space, pacing nervously, etc. The 5,000 or so words I write every week are generously enabled by my paying subscribers, who fund not only my life and snacks, but also allow the many free subscribers to access these weekly dispatches.
It’s the pacing nervously that got me. Soooo much of this work that me and Max do involves pacing about, pondering.
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As I’m writing this Katie is behind me at her glass workshop spitting toxic fumes into the air. She has an absolutely stunning piece at friend-of-the-newsletter Travis Duda’s studio. It’s there and for sale for the next month!
Ok plug over. Back to the news! I’m going to do my best to keep the rest of this light and brief, having got my pontificating out of the way in the first section.
A subtle betrayal
The news you’ve likely gotten so far on the council meeting Tuesday was that the council declared Worcester a sanctuary city for trans and gender-diverse people. You probably got it slyly packaged as being the mayor’s idea. And you’d be excused for then coming to wild conclusions like this one:
It’s a lie of course. All the mayor had to do was lend his tepid support and he just barely found himself able. The sanctuary declaration was an idea introduced by the queer community, as part of a months-long campaign waged by said community. This campaign expressly targets the mayor, imploring him to play Bushido second to Candy Mero-Carlson’s political Seppuku. He has not done so. He has resisted it at every turn. And in taking that posture he’s really betrayed the queer community he’s supposedly championing.
We see that most clearly in another vote the council took, shortly before the headline-grabbing 9-2 vote on the “sanctuary city” language. Councilor Etel Haxhiaj introduced an item to have the mayor initiate a council-led investigation into Candy Mero-Carlson’s use of the slur “it” regarding Thu Nguyen, as well as disparaging comments made about Etel’s refugee status. The “it” comment, you’ll remember, is what initiated this whole thing: Nguyen’s month-long break, the weekly queer-led demonstrations outside the council chambers, the hours of public comment every week. The vote on that was 4-7. Seven councilors voted to “file” it (aka put it in the garbage), and thus the idea of the council holding itself accountable for transphobia in its own small ranks died on the vine.
Those seven councilors were: Joe Petty, Candy Mero Carlson, Moe Bergman, Donna Colorio, Kate Toomey, George Russell and... drum roll please!
KakakaKakakaKakakaKak...
Jenny Pacillo!
The other six we could expect. These are the crank coalition blocking the council from doing, well, anything. They naturally saw no hypocrisy in voting to say Worcester is a sanctuary for the gender diverse while also declining to investigate their own bigotry.
But Jenny? She should know better. Her vote on this one was both tremendously disappointing and darkly illuminating. The motion to file would have passed without her! She voted that way because she wanted to. And in doing so she failed to rise to the occasion. She let Candy Mero-Carlson walk, along with the six cranks. She showed herself to be a member of that coalition. Until next January, when Pacillo will be freed of her councilor responsibilities, we’re actually operating with a seven-crank coalition.
Before the vote, Pacillo attempted to explain her position. She said the better venue for an investigation is the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She didn’t mention the 18-month backlog or the toothless nature of it. She presented it as the ‘yeah, duh’ solution in the same way Petty and Mero-Carlson have presented it. She co-signed their deliberate attempt to throw a smoke bomb in front of their escape from actually investigating bigotry they all know to be true. Then Pacillo had the stones to say stuff like this about the sanctuary resolution:
“Your words have so much meaning and so much weight and I really do think about them throughout the week and I look over my notes and I just try to understand and to do better,” she said.
While voting to do the opposite of trying. Gross!
I’m really happy Pacillo decided not to run for re-election. There’s no difference between her and the running favorite Tony Economou besides the fact we know better than to expect anything from Tony. Jenny, we had some hope for. And we were naive for that. We didn’t anticipate how wholly she’d be swallowed by the city hall blob. (In the future, we need to measure our candidates on their ability to 1. Acknowledge and 2. Condemn said blob. No winks, no nods. We need to hear it.)
With Tony at least we approach the situation with the cold clarity that optimism obscures. That said, we need a good challenger in District 1 ASAP. Feel free to reach out to me if you’re thinking about it. Billshaner at substack dot com.
Of course it’s not all bad. In the most recent Outdoor Cats, Chris and I do a clip show, focusing on the many great public commenters. It’s a good time. Check it out:
BIG FOOT SIGHTING!!!!
Close friends will know I’ve sorta got a Bigfoot thing. So much so that I'm sitting on a pilot script for a political near future sci-fi Bigfoot comic and an attendant 100+ page document of outline and ideas and research. Working title: GREATER APE. (If you wanna read it, hit me up. If you wanna draw it, hit me up twice.)
So it was a special thrill to read this the other day: “Possible Bigfoot Sightings at Massachusetts’ Wachusett Mountain,” posted on the website for the New Bedford radio station WBSM for some reason.
Upon further investigation, it seems the sighting was from 2023. A post to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization provides an extended narrative of the encounter.
Day three, same kind of hike. As I was hiking down I noticed three deer on the Conifer trail. They were not nervous but aware of me. I moved down to the 10th mountain trail to see if I could see anything. On the military crest of the slope, right where the flat section of the trail has a sharp drop off I saw a large dark shape move from my left to the right for a few feet then made itself small like it squatted down. I saw what looked like a head and shoulders. I did not see any further movement or smell any odor. I headed down the road back to the parking lot . As I got close, I heard a branch snap on my left in the woods and then a few feet later I heard a branch snap on the right.
The encounter was investigated by an official BFRO researcher, whose findings were inconclusive yet optimistic.
The area is secluded and there's definitely enough forest where a sasquatch could roam undetected. During the summer months only limited human visitors will be seen up there.
The ski slope area does not look inviting as a place for a bigfoot to hang around continuously, but some bigfoots could be living permanently in woods to the west. If so they would come over to Wachusett Mountain at times when stalking deer.
You bet your sweet ass I sent the BFRO an interview request. Will report back.
Odds and ends
Thank you for reading another edition of Worcester Sucks! Hope you got to spend the day indoors like I did. It’s awful out there.
One more pitch for the road!
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Few more quick things...
This is tomorrow and I think I’ll swing down. See you there?
UPDATE: This action has been postponed due to weather
Trump’s tariffs are apparently going to increase the price of a can of Polar Seltzer so if nothing else has gotten you off your ass yet that should.
Over in West Boylston, a very West Boylston sort of story: “The town's longtime police chief said he was “targeted” by the new town administrator due to a Trump flag that was hanging inside an area of the Police Department that is usually not seen by the public.”
The WooAnon Instagram account has some very funny #Worcpoli Valentines Day cards.
Very sad to report the QAnon Jan 6 Speakers Tour event at the Hudson event has been canceled. I don’t have a link for that but I saw it somewhere, probably Facebook. Don’t feel like looking it up. I was really looking forward to going though. Oh well. We’ll catch the next one.
The guy with the gold Cybertruck is very upset about how much Worcester is bullying him. Definitely cut it out. It is not hilarious.
Lastly my dad sent this absolutely nasty song to the family groupchat. New favorite punk band he says. It’s an awesome song I can’t lie. Love you Dad if you’re reading this never change.
First version had a typo listing this as “2000” not “2020”
When I first posted, I had this as “native,” but apparently and unfortunately he is a Worcester native and Shrewsbury resident. I stand corrected!
@Bill - just to keep facts straight - Jim Polito is indeed a Worcester native who grew up in the Burncoat neighborhood. He currently resides in Shrewsbury. I was born in Shrewsbury and would prefer my town not claim him as a native son :)
Jim Polito is what you get when you order Howie Carr on Temu.