A politics of no translation

On Zohran and the path laid for Worcester progressives

Hello! Today’s posting is an attempt to explain why the entirety of the Worcester progressive movement should be getting sorta juiced up right now. How we’ve a role to play in grander things now.

First, we’ll run through the local news of the week. There was a lot of it! But I won’t be spending any more time than the Weekly Index on any of it. There are bigger fish to fry. Big tasty fish. I happily tucked away a week’s worth of notes and draft sections on the manager review and human rights commission meeting with the police department to make space for today’s main event. But first...

Weekly Index:

On Saturday, a man was shot dead on Southgate Street, the second murder in less than a week. This comes shortly after the cops took credit for the lack of murders in the first half of the year, knowing full well summer tends to be the violent season. ⩫ On Monday, beloved cupcakery Queens Cup announced it will close later this month. Flying Rhino as well. Viva la Renaissance. Greater Good Brewery was bought out by a regional consortium, but will remain open for the time being. ⩫ The Zoning Board of Appeals shot down a proposal to put another billboard along Indian Lake after a packed meeting on Monday night. Candy Mero-Carlson took the opportunity to pull a weird flex: I, unlike my opponent, showed up to the meeting, she said. Rob Bilotta was at another meeting down the hall, the Human Rights Commission, on which he serves. Candy knows that. The HRC had a roughly three-hour and exceedingly frustrating conversation with the police department brass. Bilotta did a lot more than show up, and, like a normal person, he didn’t brag about the act of doing so. ⩫ Tuesday afternoon, Kate Toomey’s public safety subcommittee met for the near-exclusive purpose of taking up an item filed by the police unions in March to smear the DOJ report. Once in the room, the committee dropped the conversation because a police union official asked them to. Toomey read into the record instructions that police union official Rick Cipro emailed her earlier that day then dutifully carried them out. Four pending items, one of them a sprinkler ordinance the Fire Department has loudly pleaded for and which can’t be acted on until the committee holds a meeting on it, went unaddressed. A few hours later, the city manager received a standing ovation from his direct reports after his oversight board, the city council, which does not set expectations for him in any formal way and did not so much as interview him for the position, praised him for exceeding their unstated expectations. The only two councilors who tried to give a real performance review were Etel Haxhiaj and Khrystian King. ⩫ On Wednesday, the Worcester Business Journal received an award for its investigative journalism. ⩫ The Worcester County Food Bank held a public meeting to stress the dire situation locally should the Trump Administration’s cuts to SNAP get passed. ⩫ On Thursday, former City Manager Ed Augustus graced the pages of the Boston Herald, making ghoulish comments about “reforms” the Healey Administration has made to the state’s Right To Shelter law (by ignoring it?), as they continue to close shelters amid rising family homelessness. ⩫ Today at noon there was an SEIU Local 509 rally outside of the local DCF headquarters to protest wage theft, labor violations, and “systemic erosion” of the whole child welfare system in the state. In a release ahead of the rally, Councilor King, a leader in the union, said, “We are here because the system meant to protect children and support families is failing—and it is crushing the workers trying to keep it afloat.”

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Ok onto the main event.

“A politics of no translation”

In a video posted to NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Twitter a few hours before his historic victory Tuesday night, there’s a subtle line that just about knocked me down when I heard it, scanning my feed for Zohran content, basking in the glow of his surprise victory.

We've shown that by focusing on the issues of working and middle-class New Yorkers across this city, that by listening instead of lecturing, that by creating a politics of no translation, New Yorkers will join you in your fight for a new city.

A politics of no translation. This phrase is so loaded and beautiful, so entirely at odds with the empty rhetoric we’re accustomed to hearing even from the politicians we know generally mean well. In a video like this where it’s all smiles and handshakes and sepia B-roll you all but expect to hear rhetoric devoid of meaning. And here this freakin guy is, throwing in an unassuming phrase, tucked in the middle of another thought, that’s dripping with meaning. It poses a question so simple and so profound and so antagonistic to the state of things: Is it actually as complicated as you say? Are these problems really so intractable? Are you really trying to solve them?

We have no collective vocabulary to express this skepticism, despite it being so widely felt. Hard to believe that’s not by design. It’s a gifted mind that can introduce such a necessary new term in such effortless fashion. He continues:

We are showing people that hope is not something that is naive. It is in fact righteous when it is built upon a plan and a vision.

A rush of emotion hearing that line pipe from my phone. Hope—specifically, hope for a city, as Zohran uses it here—is a sentiment I’ve engaged in a rolling five-year tug-of-war match. I’m sure many of you feel the same. Hopes up then dashed then up then dashed. Am I naive? Is hope naive? Should I just quit? No. No, no, no. We press on for pressing on’s sake... unless? One of my attempts to describe this bind, back in 2022: “The World is a bully and hope is the lunch money.”

The futility of it all has been making an especially strong case of late. The evidence is bountiful. The logic is sound. To abandon hope and tune out may very well be the correct decision and I wouldn’t blame anyone for making it. But if I made that decision, if I surrendered the belief that a better world was possible, I know I wouldn’t make it very long. So I’m in a bind here. If you’re reading this, it’s possible you are too. If survival depends on a horizon in the imagination, it’s a matter of self preservation to maintain it, regardless of what the body of evidence suggests. And the funny thing about hope is it’s always technically there, like there’s some sort of subconscious pilot light situation happening in just about everyone, I imagine, but if you want to actually feel it, you gotta put the work in.

One of my proudest moments as a writer came at a recent protest, someone pointing to this line specifically, saying how much it meant to them. And now I’m having the same experience after watching Zohran’s video. What he said about hope was something I’ve needed to hear for months now. I’d almost forgotten. But that’s what the pilot light is there for, after all. And this week, the Kid From New York has pushed a lot of gas past a lot of pilot lights. I am starting to get my hopes up again, and this time it really does feel different. If you feel the same way, you’re in luck: there’s an election upcoming in this little political backwater. There are local Cuomos to topple and while they’re no less evil in intention they are, as a rule, much more mediocre.

An aspect of the singular, historic political moment of Zohran Mamdani’s surprise primary victory just so happens to directly tie back to Worcester.

Zohran was one of the first politicians to make the news for standing up to this new iteration of ICE. In what quickly became a viral moment, Zohran was seen shouting down Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border czar.” It was March 12. Two months later, on May 8, our own Etel Haxhiaj would join the ranks of the moral pioneers willing to momentarily forgo “respectability” for the sake of their constituents’ humanity. Both of them unabashed progressives, both of them with a politics that centers housing, both of them consistently at odds with the old guard Democratic Party consensus around them. And now, both of them, out on the front lines of this new struggle for human rights. Both of them routinely called terrorists.

It dawned on me Wednesday reading Marisa Kabas’ election recap in The Handbasket (quickly becoming one of my favorites). Headlined “We can have nice things,” she describes the dismal, hopeless mood of early March among NYC progressives, and then...

...a week later something happened: New York State Assemblyman and lesser-known mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani confronted Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan in the hallway of the state capitol building about his inhumane immigration policies. “How many more New Yorkers will you detain?” Mamdani bellowed at Homan as he passed nearby. After watching the inspiring clip, I texted another friend saying “there’s a mayoral candidate making a splash who doesn’t suck!!!” Soon the tide would start to turn, and now look where we are.

Zohran’s inciting incident: directly confronting ICE depravity, screaming at Tom Homan, his body pressed against the law enforcement personnel holding him back—assault and battery, so were made to believe by the suspiciously delayed charges pressed on Etel Haxhiaj and the narrative of incitement built around them. In both moments, Zohran screaming at Homan, Haxhiaj putting her body between the jackboots and a fellow mother, we see Zohran’s Politics of No Translation on display. He looked pissed off because he was pissed off. He said what he meant. He stood up for what he thought was right because he thought it was right. No amount of polling or focus grouping can win you what simply taking a brave moral stand wins you with the public. Same goes for when she said “get your hands off of her” to the ICE agents putting their hands on both of them. In the case of Zohran, we’ve already seen how it played out for the critics, the civility police on the other wing of his party. Our local respectability enforcers are sweating if they have any sense.

Zohran beat Cuomo because Cuomo acutely represents the wing of the Democratic Party that has twisted itself, by so many decades of so much lying, into a calcified knot. The lying became professionalized. An entire media and consulting and public relations class constructed to navigate and massage this need for constant translation. A cottage industry of liars, a bureaucracy, a factory. It grew so big as to become self-sustaining. Its exhaust fumes taken for air. Its sewage for potable water. The whole blob of it forgot what it was designed to do in the first place. It forgot it was lying. And, in doing so, forgot about the truth. So removed from the class war it not only lost sight of its role in it, it lost sight of the fact of it even happening. And so the worst casualties—the addicts and the unwell and the otherwise desperate on the cardboard box beds under the facades of financialized skyscrapers, tents in the woods of “nice neighborhoods”—came to be seen, without irony, as a problem divorced from the warfare they’d made untold careers in advancing. Despite it being so obvious, the translators called it complicated. And the solutions sounded complicated but they all boiled down to more jail, more police. More people inched closer to the knife’s edge between poor and homeless as they watched their leaders do nothing for them but offer a steady stream of indecipherable rhetoric that served only to obscure.

I finished Copaganda yesterday and I can’t recommend it enough. In the conclusion, Alec Karakatsanis puts this process of translation, this lying, in clear terms:

The upshot after all these words from all these news stories is that a lot of unspeakable but preventable harm continues to happen every day, and policies no one can justify are called justice. Copaganda, the poisonous spider, weaves its web almost everywhere we turn for information about the world—even in the darkest corners of our collective imagination. But a specter haunts the punishment bureaucracy: the truth. An honest examination of the connection between our professed collective values and the evidence would not support anything like the current policies of mass incarceration for profit. This is why a lot of people spend a lot of money going to great lengths to create copaganda. It takes considerable effort to get so many people thinking that two plus two make five.

This is also why Cuomo was the recipient of ungodly sums from the New York real estate industry. Almost $30 million poured into a sketchy PAC attached to a mayoral candidacy.

I went on Talk of the Commonwealth yesterday morning to talk about all this. It was fun and I appreciate Ben White asking me to come on, knowing as he certainly does I’m the last person a good portion of his audience wants to hear. Pulled the clip.

After I was done, Ben opened the lines and the first guy to phone in was a crank named Gary and he was all fired up about what I had to say (it’s at the end of the clip). “Progressives running for things is like having a voting block of children. Promise them ice cream, promise them candy, and they'll be perfectly fine not realizing the consequences that come in the next step.”

Translation: How dare you veer from the translated doctrine. People who do that are naive, childish, simple. Me, however, I’m a Knower Of The Way Things Are, and as such I know things will always continue to be exactly as is forever. I will never be less comfortable than I am right now. This Thing Is Built For Me.

While he probably thought he got my whole ass, I found it encouraging. Means I’m hitting the right notes. Cranks like this have lost the ability to conceive of a better world, their spirit fully conquered and subsumed by the thing, and they resent you for bothering to resist that process. In other words, this Gary guy, like so many around here, is a victim of one of copaganda’s core functions. Per Karakatsanis, it “convinces people that, sadly, much to our discomfort as caring people, there is no way to solve the serious problems of our society. Having reluctantly come to that conclusion, we now have to expand authoritarian measures to manage those problems through violence.”

Mamdani ran, continues to run, a campaign tightly focused on several of the most widely felt manifestations of the ongoing class war that copaganda tries so hard to disabuse us of understanding as such. By sticking to housing, transportation, food inequities, he directly challenged the warfare that was and is the load-bearing pillar of the neoliberal economic project. His star rose on his ability to tell a truth so many of his peers have simply forgotten they were lying to conceal.

His victory, in that way, contains a significance that threatens this already beleaguered party in an existential way. Many pains will be taken to obscure the fatal flaw, especially by party operatives now claiming to be among Mamdani’s supporters.

In that line I opened with—a politics of no translation—is a recognition of that process-to-come. It is a refusal to participate in the professionalized lying that converts very simple byproducts of intentional upward wealth transfer into very complex bugs in an otherwise benevolent system. It is a refusal to participate in the secondary process of crafting “tweaks” so complicated in nature as to match the supposed complexity of the source code and the deeply hidden, totally accidental bugs. Tweaks which, due to the complexity, require translators. Translators who can’t be faulted for failing to find the bugs because all they failed to do was “find the right messaging” for the obviously brilliant solutions on offer—the problems, after all, are so complex! The bugs are so hard to find!

And so the problem for these translators becomes the messaging, not the supposed problem or ostensible solution. Like cops and crime, the only solution to the fictional problem they offer up time and again after each new routine failure is more translators. We need the Liberal Joe Rogan. Like the cop, the existence of the translator de facto reaffirms the existence of the class war. Their positions exist to advance said warfare. Where the cops use force, the translators lie and lie and lie until the thing is obscured by so many layers of fabrication. The camouflage is sustained by a professional class coterie who, in exchange for their service, are granted freedom from having even to witness the deleterious effects of the war firsthand, in their subdivided and sanitized and heavily guarded enclaves. The ones with nice schools and low crime rates, safely outside of the cities they tell us are under siege.

That lifestyle, for the punishment bureaucrats, especially those within the Democratic Party, is entirely dependent on the lie itself.

No translation, Mamdani said, to all of this, on the eve of his dealing these translators a blow so significant as to have no parallel in recent history.

So of course they’re freaking out!

An anonymous Democrat told Axios Mamdani’s win amounts to a sentiment among the electorate that “We want to fight crazy with crazy.'” Crazy! Which part is the crazy part? These anonymous party operatives never seem to say...

Of course, on the other side of the aisle, they’re just going full racist. “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame. Get ready for Muslims to start committing jihad all over New York,” tweeted Laura Loomer, confidant of the president and Totally Normal Woman.

Of course Trump’s circle of fascist carnival barkers, Loomer included, are sifting around in the dark for a way to deport the man. One of them is apparently a Worcester guy? Alex Lorusso, a west side kid it seems, now a rising star in the circus. More on that another time. For now, he tweeted the following to his almost 1-million-follower account:

All of them, from Steven Miller to Stephen Colbert, are trying to make it an antisemitism thing, borrowing heavily from their British analogs’ successful ratfucking of Jeremy Corbyn. David Frum, the vaunted Atlantic columnist who shares personal responsibility for the Iraq War, tweeted “Well, at least we can retire that faded and false line, "antisemitism has no place in New York City."

The various shades of freakout are all a recognition this political moment is a whole hell of a lot larger than a mayoral race, as Abdaljawad Omar at Mondoweiss deftly put it:

Mamdani’s triumph indexes a shifting horizon—where Palestine, long treated as a “third rail” of American politics, no longer electrocutes those who dare to touch it. It is, perhaps, not yet a mainstream moral consensus, but it is no longer a guarantee of political suicide.

Not four minutes into his primetime interview with Stephen Colbert this week did the host press him on the Right To Exist question. The one that has become the de facto cudgel against Palestinian sympathies the world over. Does it? Colbert asked him. Hmmmm? “Yes, I believe Israel, like all nations, has a right to exist but it also has a responsibility to uphold international law.” Zohran offers an annoyed smile as if to say “next question.”

This is what we’re supposed to believe is the terroristic antisemitism fueling his rise to power. With all the world’s eyes on him, he’s directly challenging the efficacy of that commonly deployed lie. He’s saying my position doesn’t actually need any translation. The situation is not, in fact, all that complicated. And if this—the issue we’ve been acculturated to accept as the thorniest, the most complicated, the most in need of translation—is actually perfectly legible, what else then becomes so?

That is the fundamental threat of Zohran’s politics, of Etel’s politics as well—Nguyen’s, King’s, Cayden’s, Rob’s, Keith’s, mine. What have I been doing with this newsletter all these years but translating that which the local powers that be do not want translated? Another edifying realization courtesy this big beautiful week.

What Zohran did in New York we can just as easily do in Worcester. We’ve been trying for a long time—as long as I’ve been writing this thing. Every inch we’ve taken has been a frustrating, unsatisfying victory. We have lost more than we’ve won. We’re never as good at it as we could be. Our coalition is never as strong and as locked in as we want it to be. Distractions at the fringes have weighed us down. But despite all that we have taken our inches. With the wind always always always against us. As the old guard tries relentlessly to avoid the problems we identify by painting us as the problem.

And in a city three hours south of us we saw someone just like us do the actual goddamn thing, leaving behind him a template to be copied and adjusted in municipalities across the country. I’ve not felt hope like this in a long time. It feels good. The horizon does not hurt like it did a week ago.

If you want to feel good like I feel right now—shed the yoke of these heavy days—might I suggest getting involved in one of our local progressives’ campaigns.

Toward that end me and Gillian Ganesan are teaming up to put on a little election focused Worcester Sucks Bar Night at Steel & Wire on July 31. Come down and we’ll help slot you in where you’re most useful. If you’re already slotted, just come down and hang out! Flyer and more info to come very soon, I promise.

There’s also a Bilotta fundraiser event thrown by my WCT3k compadres Wootenanny Comedy coming up on July 17. Should be a great time!

bilotta4district2

A post shared by @bilotta4district2

All we need here in this city is 1,000 new voters, as I’ve laid out before. That’s it. That’s 100 new campaign volunteers each convincing 10 people in their lives. Can you convince 10 people to get out and vote between now and November? That is the task at hand. Let’s go, girls!

Odds and ends

I’ve never used the term “worker-owned” to describe the business model of this outlet, but that’s exactly what it is. Kicking myself as I scan through the thousands of missed opportunities to do so. I am very stupid, you see. But that’s exactly what this outlet is: I am the worker and I own it.

The term is a better one than “independent,” the word I’ve lazily, thoughtlessly leaned on to describe what it is we do here. Over the five years I’ve been doing this, we’ve seen the meaning rendered out of “independent.” Locally, we see the Chamber of Commerce-owned Worcester Guardian throw the term into the realm of the absurd as it does exactly what a Chamber-owned outlet does. On a grander scale you have people like Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi throwing the word around despite each being lil pets for specific billionaires, attendant media celebs to the richest people the world has ever seen, who control the whole architecture of the online discourse, such as it is. Independent of what, exactly?

I’ve continued to use it out of habit, like I have “progressive.” Both were lacking to begin with, and in recent years have become increasingly so. Best time to break a bad habit is the moment it occurs to you that it’s bad.

The nice part about “worker owned” is that it implies the existence of more than one worker, which is certainly the case here. I’ve long dreamed of the day this outlet makes enough money to afford a second full timer. At that point, it becomes a proper co-op. The only viable path to getting there is through reader support. If you believe in this outlet, the impact it’s had on Worcester, and the prospect of doubling it excites you in any way, please consider contributing $5 a month to the cause.

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Merch Store / Bandcamp

Your money supports not just me but a growing cast of other writers, like Shaun Connolly, who just hit the two-year mark with Worcester Sucks. Thank you Shaun! And Aislinn, whose June brief is fresh up as of yesterday and fantastic as always. And Liz who has a banger of a Worcester Speaks coming up!

I’ve closed the presale on the Bad Brains shirt and submitted the order! Thank you to everyone who ordered one. Updates as I have em. And for those who missed out, I may be ordering a few extras hehe.

New WORCESTER_SUCKS.mp3 track up on the Bandcamp! It’s called Nostradamus and it’s very silly and features yet again a sample of my favorite orator, outgoing District 3 Councilor George Russell. The Awwditta. I also rip a fat Phrygian dominant guitar solo with way too much delay on it cuz why not?

It’s been so fun to do music for purely hobby purposes and not to bare my soul in any way or contribute to some band and the prospect of “making it.” From what I’ve observed the bands that make it these days don’t find much when they get there. And then... neither do the writers. Ah... well. Still gunna try on that second front.

Ralph’s is doing a whole ass renaissance faire on August 2. Going to be a wild time.

There was a nice profile of Cordella’s Coffee in Pulse Magazine. A business I’ve had the pleasure of watching from the front row come into its place as one of the real hidden gems of the city.

Wow Ok Sabrina!!

The new track from Tortoise, especially this remix with Saul Williams, freakin rules. It’s their first output in like a decade or so? Crazy. The instrumentation is deliciously grimy. Saul’s verses go very hard.

END