This is the gravity we must contest
The year in freak-flag detours
Happy New Years to everyone reading this including in fact especially the haters and losers. We’re all under this dome together. Never forget that you’re stuck with me.
Today’s post is a recap of a truly wretched year in Worcester politics. But I’m taking a different approach with it. In years past I’ve done a traditional month-by-month summary of the significant events of the year. For this year I do not think depression will allow me to do that. I simply would not finish it. Too heavy to look at all at once like that. Instead, we’ll look at the year by way of the Freak Flag Detour.
Longtime readers of this newsletter will know I’m a fan of taking the proverbial long way home. Veering unexpectedly—to myself as much as anyone reading—from one terrain to another. Zooming in, zooming out, this way, that way. Going ‘computer, enhance.’ Like that guy who can find the thing on street view really fast. You fuck with that guy?
When I did the reading for Luke O’Neil’s new book back in uhhhh November? I was like what the heck am I going to read to a non-Worcester audience and that’s when I was like oh yeah just pull out some of the weird stuff. The Freak Flag Detours I called them and a few people mercifully chuckled. So here I am rolling it out again. Rather than do a year in review and a ‘these are my favorite pieces’ post, I’ll combine them. My favorite parts of my favorite pieces, telling what ends up being a pretty cool 10,000 word story. Someone give me a book deal already. That’s like two whole chapters I think. Short of that a subscription would be nice.
Before we get to the Freak Flag Review though, some late breaking news. Headline:
Crybaby Tommy Goes Wah, Renews Interest In Brady List Disclosure
Thomas Duffy, president of the patrolman’s union, has sued Tom Marino of This Week In Worcester, alleging one count of defamation. In a December 29 filing in Worcester Superior Court, he’s claiming $10,000,000 in damages.
Marino, in Duffy’s imagination, is guilty of horrible character assassination. All Marino did in reality was repeat Duffy’s actions back at him.
A fitting way to end a year marked so heavily by this fucking crybaby with a gun playing his little games. A seven-month public meltdown starting at Eureka Street that’s only showed the public there is no one controlling the police unions at all. If there was, they’d be putting an end to this embarrassment.
Particularly embarrassing is the assertion that DA Early has denied “the existence” of a Brady List—the famously definitely not real nor legally required list of cops so disreputable they’re a liability on the stand, kept by DAs the country over as a matter of judicial compliance. And the Worcester County DA’s Office as well as the Worcester Police Department are—surprise, surprise—out of compliance. That they have not shared the list does not mean there isn’t one. Everything else on that bulleted list I could link to but I’m pressed for time at the moment. Run “thomas duffy site:worcestersucks.email” and revel in the scumbaggery. Then when you’re done doing that, Tommy, sue me too.
Also Duffy’s lawyer removed the attribution from the Brady List quote referenced in the lawsuit. The full sentence reads, “According to sources inside both city and state government, Duffy is one of the Worcester Police officers on the so-called Brady List.” A safely protected statement if there ever was one. But that’s what you get when you use a personal injury lawyer (Rafferty) to attack the First Amendment, as a public figure going against a journalist no less. You are out of your element, Donny.
Anyway if I was a civil rights attorney I’d be thinking about discovery motions on the Brady List items going...
If you know of or even better are a civil rights attorney and you’re interested in learning more getting involved, billshaner@substack.com.
Friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere has a great database function on his newsletter, The Mass Dump, where you’ll find a bunch of documents about Brady Lists in other Massachusetts counties. But, you know, the Worcester DA denied the existence of such a list here in Worcester County, according to Duffy!
That statement is going to hold up like particle board. It could actually lead to the long-awaited disclosure of the Worcester DA’s Brady List. A backfire of world historic proportions for Crybaby Tommy. This is the outcome we should all be rooting for.
What a vile, stupid man. This lawsuit has no shot in hell and he knows it. He just wants to break some fingers. Incidentally, I was listening to David Bowie’s 1980 Scary Monsters this afternoon, putting this post together. On “It’s No Game (Part II)” verse two ends this way:
So where’s the moral
People have their fingers broken
To be insulted by these fascists
Is so degrading
Ok on to the main event! I’m in a rush to get to some festivities this evening so this is the last you’ll hear from present-time me. The rest of the post is from past-me, which, by the time you’re reading this, I will also be… ow. Heady hurty.
See you next year! Ha ha ah. Ahhhh
“This is the gravity we must contest”
The year in freak flag detours
[Each segment below is pulled from the story linked above it. It is left unaltered and out of context and that’s on purpose. There’s a whole literary genre of this stuff it’s called “cut-up technique” and it’s not a fucking phase, Mom.]
January 5: To hold the mirror of moral clarity
To plainly say ‘genocide bad’ takes a temerity unavailable to most of the council. Similarly, to say ‘genocide good’ is impolite and too honest for comfort. So they’ll squirm to get out of it. Expect a discussion mired in process questions so as to avoid getting too close to the actual question. It will look pathetic. It will engender secondhand embarrassment.
The councilors themselves will remain blissfully unaware of this. Rather they’ll adopt a posture of indignancy. Aggrieved by a disobedient public. Their default position—the corner they safely retreat toward, fingers in their ears. Lalalalalala. I’ve seen this outcome enough times I’d bet real money on it.
It’s on us to hold the mirror of moral clarity up to their faces. To say that if you can’t take a stand on this, what can you take a stand on? And, if it bothers you so much to see an organized and motivated public demand something, maybe politics isn’t for you, actually? Maybe just hang it up? No one would blame you... Just think about it, okay?
Every time we hold this mirror up to these six or seven councilors reliably standing in the way of everything, they take damage. It doesn’t look like it in the moment. It looks like we’re getting ignored. Told to fuck off. But under the surface it chips away at them.
They didn’t take the job to do politics, they took it to look like they’re doing politics. Feel like it. Put the American flag pin on the lapel and see a proud statesman in the mirror on their way out the door, into the community over which they fancy themselves a responsible steward. Frolic around city hall like some pissy flâneur on a power trip.
Every time you put them in a position to actually do politics, it desaturates that filter a little bit. They resent the reality introduced to their walking dream. They lash out in self-righteous anger. The lack of respect! But the damage done to the illusion is irreversible. After so many times it’ll wear off completely. Made at last to take that first honest look at why they’re sitting there, will they like what they see?
January 9: A million tiny acts of cowardice
Our city council voted against a ceasefire in Gaza. That’s the fuckin’ story. They are complicit. We, thereby, are complicit. When the dust settles on this chapter of history it will be Israel’s genocide of Gazans that defines it. The great atrocity of our time. And our city council just gave Worcester’s answer to the ‘what would you have done?’ question.
The answer was: nothing, uncomfortably. We’d have made strange little excuses with thin tortured logic and then we’d have done nothing at all. Because that’s what we are doing—in this moment that future generations will look back on and ask themselves ‘how was that allowed to happen?’ And the answer will be a million tiny acts of cowardice like the one we witnessed Tuesday night. A whole nation saying what can be done about the thing while paying for the thing to be done.
I opened up my wallet and it’s full of blood
...
So the majority of the council found it quite easy in October 2023 to condemn the barbarians planted in their imagination. The condemnation was all around them, in the air. We were whipped into our consenting frenzy back then. Like good Americans we hooted for blood. Like good Americans we rooted for the eradication of the inhumans. The bugs needed squashing, and the Worcester city council said “I’m doing my part.”
Information from Palestinian authorities, however, always comes to us with the critical distance, often mandated, of attribution that implies skepticism. For instance how many times have you read “according to the Hamas-run health ministry” directly after a reported death toll? You’d never read something like “The Israel-run IDF killed seven children today.” No, it would be “Seven children died.” According to Hamas, at least. So take it with a grain of salt.
It should come as no surprise then that the Worcester City Council would only pull the rulebook down from the shelf when it’s Palestinians they’re asked to support. These councilors are, after all, products of the American consent factory—and not especially bright ones.
January 18: The Unbearable Bigotry of Townies
When those manhole covers over by Union Station flew off the street and up into some unknown oblivion never to return—I think we peasants used to call stuff like that an ‘omen.’
A sign of ill tidings to come, surely. Or perhaps a bit of sage advice? Should some members of our community fly up and away from this place, twirling, twirling, twirling, same as those iron slabs? Might they find their freedom somewhere else?
…
The unknowable blast that sent those manhole covers up and up into the great nothing may well have emanated from the depths of some hell, ushering in a new, chaotic chapter in Worcester. No time for zooming out... we gotta zoom in, in, in, baby, toward our new deity in the dark recesses beneath the train station. The law of Roko’s Basilisk applies. We do as it commands now so that we may later be spared. Lest we end up another Russell, another Mero-Carlson... Lest our outlook be as bleak as Polar Park’s pro-forma...
What I mean to say is it’s been a rare news week. This post is an effort in sorting and synthesizing so you don’t have to, which is of course why you pay me the big bucks (about a beer a month, please and thank you).
January 21: Deny, Deflect, Retaliate
In the current moment, the prevailing civil rights struggle is that of trans people. There is an assault being carried out by the Trump movement in such an open way as to neatly compare to the racial segregationists of King’s time. And, similarly, Petty and all the feckless liberals like him across the country are failing to identify it, let alone confront it. They are, yet again, the polite and uncomfortable facilitators of discriminatory violence. The inherent inferiority of African-Americans swapped for the “mental health issues” of trans people. History repeats.
January 26: What a drag!
We need to re-center a very simple fact in the way we’re talking about the bigotry in city hall: there is a massive difference between accidentally misgendering someone and using a slur. Candy Mero-Carlson used a slur. When she used “it,” she was using a slur. Everyone else now using “it” gleefully is also throwing around a. slur.
That it’s a gender-based slur and not a racial one perhaps accounts for the apparent failure of a wide swath of the local population to grasp this. The net effect is that Candy has been allowed to skate on the conflation of letting a “she” slip by accident and using “it” on purpose, to be purposefully hurtful. Sometimes this conflation is willful but many times it is also itself accidental.
The boundary lines on race are fairly well settled. Using the n-word as a white person gets you automatically jettisoned from public life. The idea of using the n-word by accident is ridiculous.
Gender is different. It is the vanguard issue of our times, analogous to race in the 1960s, and the lines are far from settled. In fact if you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on.
To accidentally misgender a non-binary person is not an evil act. You can be on the right side and easily do it. Khrystian King misgendered Thu twice at city council while loudly stating that he has their back. That’s fine. There is no contradiction there. If you don’t get weird and defensive and just say sorry and earnestly try not to do it again, you are not evil. Kate Toomey and Joe Petty are not made evil by the fact they misgendered someone. They’re made evil by what came after—how they responded, and who they ran cover for.
Calling someone “it” is never an accident. It is not a slip of the tongue. Not a whoopsies! It would be just as ridiculous to claim as accidentally using the n-word. Candy has not outright denied using it, saying only that she “can’t recall.” Meanwhile it’s been confirmed (confidentially, for well-deserved fear of retribution) by several people.
Perhaps because gender is such uncertain terrain, even well-meaning people have taken to labeling Candy’s malicious use of a slur as a “misgendering.” This plays directly into the hands of people who do not mean well. Candy, of course, benefits tremendously from our overall failure to call a slur a slur. But so do Joe Petty and Kate Toomey. They both had opportunities to draw a distinction between what they did and what Mero-Carlson did at the city council meeting Tuesday. They declined.
It’s in that moment—not when they let a “she” fly some years ago—that they mark themselves as opponents.
February 2: Ain’t I A Person?
Hello hello! Happy Black History Month to all who celebrate! And to those who don’t—who may in this incredibly dumb cultural moment be saying what about White History Month?! with renewed gusto, may I suggest opening up a calendar and thumbing over to the month of July. There it is. Now stop recording your little video in your big lifted truck and try putting on “For Whom The Bell Tolls” instead. There, don’t you feel better now? Like it or not time marches on. Even for the politically incorrect and other such tactical operators in the war on woke. Even the tier 1 guys, I regret to say, report directly to time. Even they march on.
I’m in a cool little reading group with some local professors and organizers and such, digging into the type of material that’d get you blacklisted from Hollywood back when America was Great. Just so happens the current book is Angela Davis’ Women, Race & Class. This morning I read the following:
Two years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the first National Convention on Women’s Rights was held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Whether she was actually invited or came on her own initiative, Sojourner Truth was among the participants. Her presence there and the speeches she delivered at subsequent women’s rights meetings symbolized Black women’s solidarity with the new cause. They aspired to be free not only from racist oppression but also from sexist domination.
The Worcester Convention, as Davis tells it, was the start of a tour of sorts for Truth, imposing herself on what were predominantly and at times fiercely guarded white spaces of the nascent women’s rights movement. To simply have been in attendance at the Worcester convention was a profoundly political act. In Akron, Ohio some months later, she upped the ante, rising up to directly counter some “disruptive jeers of hostile men.” This was the iconic “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech. One of the jeers apparently had to do with puddles, and how women need help walking over them.
Truth, who had been enslaved, began her argument by simply pointing out that no one’s ever helped her over any puddle. Then she rolled up her sleeve and flexed her powerful bicep—can you imagine the segment Jesse Watters would do on that alone?—and she said “ain’t I a woman” then she let it rip.
I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
The year was 1851. In the intervening 174 years the question of whether Black women are women has been mostly settled, though we and the white supremacists still have our minor disagreements, and they still tend to revolve around muscular arms. But ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ unfortunately remains a necessary question—one that’s shifted from the arena of race to gender. Having mostly lost on the race question, the disruptively jeering hostile men that Truth confronted still exist, still carry the same banner of patriarchal white supremacy. Now they do it on the TV stations they own, the social media platforms they own, the White House, the Supreme Court, Congress, etc etc. And they have a new target. When a trans woman today asks “Ain’t I A Woman?” the question is just as provocative, just as confrontational, the answer just as unsettled, as it was for Truth when she first raised it.
But today the question needs a slight augmentation: “Ain’t I A Person?” That is the true disagreement we’re currently having with the jeering white supremacists of our time. Are our trans, non-binary, gender-fluid neighbors human beings, same as everyone else? Or are we going to deny that humanity based on the complications presented to the agreed-upon sex definitions we see as central to the smooth functioning of a patriarchal order, and thus cling to out of the fear of it eroding?
Feb 16: They point down at the drowning people and laugh
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...
...
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.
March 28: “We’re sort of like partners in this”
There’s a quote from Jon Schwarz in Eoin Higgins’ new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought The Loudest Voices On The Left, that’s sat heavy since reading it. Funding from image-obsessed tech oligarchs and the obvious attendant grifters and the online flame wars make up much of what we might call the Current Media Landscape. To Schwarz, it’s all a symptom of a larger collapse—the rot that sets in when newspapers, unions, and political parties no longer serve as the “mediating institutions” that give the public an outlet to actually do something about the horrors that good journalism exposes.
“This is a dead end,” Schwarz said. “You shouldn’t expect too much from journalism and journalists by themselves. In the past, the mediating institutions that existed could take reporting and use it to agitate for genuine government change. But since those institutions have evaporated, journalism is like a button that doesn’t do anything anymore when you press it. Everybody should be focused on recreating the wiring behind it, rather than getting emotionally invested in loving or hating the button.”
I want so badly to be a part of recreating that wiring for Worcester. Just look around: People are getting disappeared for expressing their views. We need a button that works, and fast. And once we have a working button we need to draw up the schematics and share it with every city in the country.
April 6: Rejoice for the wicked is disappeared
In her 2004 book Caliban & The Witch Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunt was the tool by which capitalism accomplished a disciplining of the peasantry necessary for its nascent period of growth. Hundreds of thousands of women were murdered and tortured so as to make the rest amenable subjects of domination. The practice only fell out of vogue when it was no longer useful—the social order already rendered compliant—but its legacy has survived. To this day, the witch hunt ripples quietly through history. Echoes from the cave. Wherever capital goes the witch hunt goes with it.
Here’s a passage that made me go ‘ohhhhhhhh’ the other morning:
“The witch-hunt was also the first persecution in Europe that made use of a multimedia propaganda to generate a mass psychosis among the population. Alerting the public to the dangers posed by the witches, through pamphlets publicizing the most famous trials and the details of their atrocious deeds, was one of the first tasks of the printing press.”
Hmmmm... use of a new media form to engender a mass psychosis among a population? You don’t say! What immediately came to mind was the White House Twitter’s Ghiblification of a deportee—using tacky AI art to make a meme of a woman’s ruination, posting it on a platform where people are encouraged to gleefully participate in the cruelty with the “like” button. As of my writing at least 161,000 people have done so.
Federici draws a line from the 16th century ‘witch’ to the 21st century ‘terrorist.’ In both, it’s the “vagueness of the charge” that ties the whole room together, Federici argues. Both charges are at once impossible to prove and evoke images of widely understood horror—a dynamic that allows a ruler so inclined to “punish any form of protest and to generate suspicion even towards the most ordinary aspects of daily life.” Find a better explanation of this than the disappearing of visa holders like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for merely speaking in favor of Palestinian humanity. You can’t.
Öztürk Khalil, and a growing number of others have been found guilty of a crimen exceptum, as Federici describes:
...witchcraft was made a crimen exceptum, that is, a crime to be investigated by special means, torture included, and it was punishable even in the absence of any proven damage to persons and things — all these factors indicate that the target of the witch-hunt — (as it is often true with political repression in times of intense social change and conflict) — were not socially recognized crimes, but previously accepted practices and groups of individuals that had to be eradicated from the community, through terror and criminalization.
It’s like Federici was writing specifically about Öztürk and her harmless (and morally correct) student paper op-ed. She was punished to turn writing such op-eds into a socially recognized crime, when it was once an accepted practice.
April 13: “The Federal Government Will Find You”
It’s been a ”hell of a week” for what feels like the hundredth week in a row. This one, though—this is something different. One hell of a “one hell of a week.” This is the “one hell of a week” she tells you, a normal week, not to worry about.
Trump administration policies have come home to roost here in Worcester in brand new and especially cruel ways… the many-fronted witch trials of the moment hitting the city seemingly all at once. Student visas revoked, cuts to HUD, spurious letters sent out to people of all kinds, begging them to self-deport...
Walter Benjamin apparently joked about how if he ever made it to America and away from Nazi Germany he’d be treated like a freak show. Hannah Arendt in the foreword of Illuminations relays:
Besides, nothing drew him to America, where, as he used to say, people would probably find no other use for him than to cart him up and down the country to exhibit him as the “last European.”
Imagine the last Americans, carted up and down the streets of Beijing... Certainly won’t be you or me haha.... Unless?
The year is 2049. I say “Dunkies” and the crowd cheers. An attendant hands me five $1 scratch tickets and a quarter. I perform for the audience the ancestral ritual of my people.
Right, so. We have much much much to get to.
April 20: Words written on water
It has been exceedingly difficult to write, especially about the tiresome goings on in this unsolvable townie Rubik’s cube of a city. The question of ‘why bother?’ becomes at once more difficult and more important as we continue this headlong plunge into a dark new world. What happens down here in this city and up there at the top of the federal government? There’s a lot of bleed. The national question of the moment—“opposition party, please?”—may be easier to answer at the local level. We see, in the minutiae of a city like Worcester, that the majority of the “opposition party” are not opposition at all, but rather quite in line with the Trumpian vision of the world, and in that position they’re politically secure. We see the would-be bench of a true opposition party bludgeoned out of caring, out of participating, pushed out of the realm of “respectability.” We see the way that the majority of entrenched local Dems relish in the process of making these pariahs. Top to bottom, the real enemy is to the left of them, not the right. If need be, they will lose to the right to shore up their position relative to the left. They exist to lose on purpose, in other words. The second-place bulwark against the future formation of any real opposition party. But anyway.
...
On the radio the other morning, I caught “You Can Never Hold Back Spring,” by Tom Waits. The world keeps dreaming of spring. Forced me to pause, take it in, a soft rain, that singular smell. Inner monologue muted for a second then it was back of course. Always comes back.
A powerful longing followed: to be able to enjoy the dream of spring, the arrival. My favorite time of year, I relish in the excitement and renewal of it. But today, a thick dread coats the spring, same as the winter preceding, the fall before that.
When will it harden? When can I crack through? It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted. The dread—sickly dread, futile dread. Orwell said, “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
The dread of the pamphleteer: to look at the guitar next to my desk and think of the songs half finished. To look at the scraps of essays and short stories and podcast series in my ideas document. Can’t get to either. The songs or the pieces. The ornate or merely descriptive things. Not today, likely not tomorrow. As it is I must go about the endless pamphleteering.
From his Louisiana jail cell Mahmoud Khalil published an open letter on Thursday. He said he hoped it would shake the reader into action “before it is too late.” When is that exactly? Turns out, in the moment, you don’t get to know. You suspect it already has come to pass. But you push that thought down, way down deep where it can’t hurt you.
The bravery of this man, the unwilling symbol of a brand new horror, rising to the moment. It’s inspiring, crushing. He writes, of one of America’s myriad hard-forgotten horrors:
The incarceration of 70,000 American citizens of Japanese descent is a reminder that rhetoric of justice and freedom obscures the reality that, all too often, America has been a democracy of convenience. Rights are granted to those who align with power. For the poor, for people of color, for those who resist injustice, rights are but words written on water. The right to free speech when it comes to Palestine has always been exceptionally weak. Even so, the crackdown on universities and students reveals just how afraid the White House is of the idea of Palestine’s freedom entering the mainstream.
Words written on water. What to do with that? Khalil calls for action. What action? When? Where do I sign? To crave the spiritual ignition of action.
Instead, doldrums. Another miserable week for Worcester: we’re losing our one competent executive, we watched the police chief engage in garish conspiratorial handwashing of documented abuses, we watched the cranks on the city council zero in on and define the grievance machine they plan to use to squash progressives: go after the colleges, in the same know-nothing fashion that put Khalil in jail, albeit on a much smaller scale. They needed blood in the water and they found some palatable blood. It will work, the question is to what extent.
May 1: Unwittingly, voraciously, disgustingly
The majority of the council, clearly unable and unwilling to carry out the project of reform, is basically allowed to get away with it. The withering death of this push, which once carried so much promise. The issues instead flippantly explained away. Others, the chief promised a quick solution to when the city carries out its new contract with Hexagon for a new police data reporting system which will allow for better recording of demographic data. The idea is, that system will help us look at the trends and root out the bias. Across the board, everyone involved in the discussion seemed to take it for a fact: better data will lead to better outcomes. It is an intuitive idea and yet, it’s sat heavy with me. There was something off about the premise—racial disparities solved by data aggregation.
It’s a thought I’ve struggled for a while to articulate—but an ‘aha! moment’ came this morning came as I cracked open Shoshana Zuboff’s massive 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Many if not all (?) of the measures available to us in the general lexicon of left-liberal and/or progressive police reform are contingent on entangling the municipality in the extractive mesh of surveillance capitalism. Body cameras, brought to us by Axon. More sophisticated data collection brought to us by Hexagon. The core idea, flawed to begin with, is that better documentation and data collection will curb police abuses.
This is an exercise in what Zuboff calls “hunting the puppet,” when we should be going after the puppet master. The “puppet” here is how abuse of power manifests in the aggregate: racial disparities in traffic stops, use of force incidents and levels, most hilariously the “dog bite ratio,” which the mayor and police chief have deemed acceptable, if even a little low.
The “puppet master,” unhunted, is the bloated bureaucracy of criminal justice that, for its own survival, requires the production of a criminal class. I made this case at length last year in “A streamlining solution for crime manufacturers,” focusing on Shotspottter, a smaller, weaker company than Hexagon.
If you look at the containment zones as a sort of mine, and the cops as a mining company, and “crime” as the ore, Shotspotter’s true value is its ability to discover new veins. More reason to send more miners down the shaft. More raw crime material for the manufacturing plant.
What we’re left with here is more streamlining, at a greater expense to the municipality. Paying the puppet master a premium for the optics of reform achieved, eventually, in aggregate data analysis. In other words, a gentler-seeming puppet. Reform or no reform, the criminal justice bureaucracy grows. The puppet master is happy either way.
May 11: The Backlash Blues
The police are fabricating stories about how a woman in elected office assaulted them so they can cry to ~the media~ about having been hit by a woman. Mommy she hit me. Literally. Lying in the smarmy way a brother would to get his kid sister in trouble. This Boston 25 article is a top-to-bottom embarrassment.
Local 911 President Thomas Duffy is a leader of the gang unit and he has a long and well documented history of let’s just say... hitting people.
I was there. I saw what Etel was doing. None of it came close to assault. They were assaulting a woman. Etel was saying hey don’t do that. That is “assault” now to these little cry babies we give guns.
Just look at the screengrab Boston 25 pulled to back up their boys in blue.
Hunting through the hundreds of available videos for evidence of assault and this is what you pull? Embarrassing.
Here’s the full statement from Duffy by the way, which Boston 25 prints pretty much word for word of course.
No one has the right to act in such a reckless manner towards police officers, and we demand accountability for all criminal and ethically deplorable behavior.
This is how the police describe sticking up for your neighbor in the face of a forced removal regime senselessly ripping families apart across the country to push good numbers up to the big man in Washington. Un-reformable and irredeemable and our city police department now deeply complicit. So lost in that complicity they look around for someone to blame and can see only the two dozen people brave enough to stand in the way of it.
The only person it would do any good to fire is Thomas Duffy by the way. You can get rid of the manager you can get rid of the police chief if Worcester Vic Mackey is still there this stuff is going to keep happening.
May 18: More balls than you guys
Back to the matter of balls, everyone who showed up to stop this forced disappearing proved they have ‘em. The cops, in turn, demonstrated their core function is not preserving “the peace” but rather suppressing anyone with balls enough to stand up to this senseless cruelty.
That the police showed up to assist something monstrous has been documented far and wide—most notably, to my mind, in a Rolling Stone story from Tuesday headlined “Trump’s ICE Used a Woman’s Kids and Grandchild as ‘Bait’ To Arrest Her.” I’ve since seen some unreleased video that confirms everything about the baiting described. Pure evil, and the WPD, which sucks up our public funds but bows to no public accountability, wantonly and aggressively facilitated it.
It matters a great deal, when you think of it that way, that an unarmed woman looked a cop dead in the eye, an agent of the federal government feet away from her, and said “man up.” It becomes necessary to understand why the cop said, in so many words, “I can’t.” That is why this story went national. It was not the “chaos.” It was that someone dared to say fuck this and found out what happens when you do that.
What we are staring at here—point blank—is the limits of “police reform.”
May 26: Keep it alive until you know what to do with it
I just finished the second season of Andor the other day and while I’m saving most of my thoughts on this brilliant piece of television for a vacation filler essay coming up, there’s one moment I want to pull out for readers who may be feeling the way I’m feeling…
In a flashback that comes late in the season (no crazy spoilers incoming), Luthen Rael, a spymaster who set the whole rebellion in motion, is traveling with his assistant Kleya, at this point a young girl. They stumble upon an Imperial firing squad about to execute some peasants in a village square. Luthen walks away but Kleya stays to watch. She sees a boy her age, chained to the others in the firing line, meet his fate with steely, hateful resolve. Kleya watches him die in hate and horror. She catches up with Luthen and demands to know when they’re going to start fighting back. Luthen responds, “We have.”
Kleya: “By walking away?”
Luthen: “We fight to win. That means we lose and lose and lose and lose until we are ready. All you know now is how much you hate. You bank that, that you hide that, that you keep it alive until you know what to do with it. And when I tell you to move, you move.”
He gets back to walking away. “Move.”
I found myself needing the advice dispensed here. Maybe you do too. How to keep it alive and how to build. How to recognize you can’t do anything right now but one day you will. How to hang on to the hate until you know what to do with it. To not let it burn you down, or force you to do something stupid...
The thing we have and they don’t is that we give a shit. That we’re willing to lose and lose and lose and stay in the fight. Your average cop is not going to do that for the side he’s currently on. Once that side starts losing he’s running. He doesn’t believe in it. How could you? There will come a point in our lifetimes when a great many cops find their hearts unshackled from the all-consuming fiction currently enclosing their world. They will become winable, or they will become broken. It’s on us to avoid becoming either of those things in the interim. We stay in this fight knowing it’s one we may not live to see our side win, but ahhhhh nevertheless we have to be sure of it. We have to.
Meanwhile, dear reader, keep it alive until you know what to do with it.
June 14: The War on Terror comes home as a TV Show For A Death Cult
The Imperial Boomerang of the War on Terror finally comes home, and Dr. Phil is embedded with it, taking the opportunity to launch his new TV network, Merit, with a two-night special on the heroic actions of the troops in LA. It even has a sit-down interview with the Border Czar himself, Tom Homan, in which the pair “break down the multi-agency raid targeting cartel-linked businesses in LA’s garment district.”
All these cowards in masks and cowards wringing their hands about how to protest, all for the sake of content. They sent the military into LA for the content.
The War on Terror comes back home as a TV Show For A Death Cult.
HA HA.
June 27: 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?
July 4: A long way of saying nothing
What is the fucking point of this? Rhetorical question. The point is the TV show. Every day the show airs—they haven’t missed a taping since the pilot back on September 11, 2001. The show’s audience comprises an unstated death cult. Membership is in the millions, still growing. Almost everyone in America knows a member. To be around them even for a meal is vaguely uncomfortable, and so it happens only when it has to, on holidays, and only if they’re family.
In the show, the action always rises. Each season, a new and compelling enemy, more dangerous than the last. With its introduction, a new promise the viewer will be saved from their present circumstances. Freedom at last. The cultists find their lives oriented around the show, a dependency that deepens every viewing hour. It consumes their thoughts to the point it diminishes awareness of material reality. By the time the villain inevitably dies, resolving the season’s tension, they’ve already moved on to the next villain, the next arc, forgetting they hadn’t been saved at all. The promise of next time intoxicates their imaginations. Their heroes will kill for them once more. They don’t believe they’ll be saved, not like they once did, but they do believe in the future bloodshed. In the new enemy always on the horizon. The next one to be slain. They take comfort in the thought. They sit on their Lay-Z Boys in the dull ambience of the TV’s glow as they drift to sleep. Their homes are otherwise dark and empty. You, the person across the Thanksgiving table, are the enemy they’re saving for last.
July 13: All the fun a wicked god must be having with us
As local journalism diminished, the immigrants=terrorists belief flourished, animating the new department’s enforcement priorities and the new concept of “homeland” at the same time. A real chicken and egg situation right there! What came first: the disconnected communities or the scapegoat that needs a disconnected, atomized populace to stick. A decent book proposal, actually. Too much to get into today. Suffice it to say that fascistic scapegoats fall apart when people are allowed to see the genuine article up close—in, say, a puffy feature story about a church group doing a cleanup or block party or what have you. Kind of thing that fills the page on a slow day at the local daily but never in a million years makes it to Fox & Friends, where the scapegoat coincidentally is a main character making hourly appearances and the playground assault launched this week in LA’s MacArthur park is good and brave actually.
I’m reading Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman’s 2021 history of the war on terror. Early on he makes this quick throwaway observation I keep returning to: No one in America used the word “homeland” before 9/11. The previously gauche term was suddenly in vogue in the manic rabid wake of the attacks. The brand new agency bearing the name grew like a virus, becoming the primary vehicle for our directionless anger and need for social control. The production company for the death cult TV show in other words.
Thus, via the Department of Homeland Security, “homeland” became the last in a long historical lineage of analogous words analogously used to orient fascist movements. You can thank Democrat Joe Lieberman for that one! A fantastic example of what happens when politicians do what the pundits tell us they should: “reach across the aisle” to “get things done.” It’s in that middle ground—not on the fringes—we found ourselves repackaging some good old fashioned Blood and Soil. Freedom Blood and Freedom Soil. And with “Alligator Alcatraz” we have provided the history books a perfectly American response, as sleazy as it is stupid, to the cold and stiff and Germanic call of “Auschwitz.”
July 19: Holding the uncomfortable bag
Toomey and everyone else like her can’t see that she lives in the core, not the periphery. She becomes indignant when that reality is made obvious by the “blight” of desperate people idling in a public place nearer than she’d like to her nice neighborhood.
She will support both the police and the prevailing economic development edict wholeheartedly as long as she lives. She is far from alone. It is a rationally irreconcilable position, one that falls apart under the magnifying glass of even light critical thinking. And so the myth of “dropping them off” swoops in, offering the easy answer to an otherwise difficult equation. If only “the towns” were doing more, they say, absolving themselves of the integral role they play in the immiseration machine.
Toomey, especially, who says “We” when she speaks about the police, who takes her marching orders straight from the police unions, who works for the sheriff, will never ever ever understand what you’re currently reading. Perhaps you don’t either. If so, it’s not your fault. It only becomes your fault when you dig in, when you take what I’m saying as a personal attack and not a hand outstretched, begging you to begin a process of unlearning I’m a decade into at this point. To understand what it is we’re really up against here. In case you haven’t noticed the man behind the curtain is getting antsy of late. If your net worth is closer to zero than a billion this is not an academic concern for you.
August 15: There’s a white boat coming up the river
In “Powderfinger,” Neil Young describes a young man scrambling to do something about the menacing boat full of settler-colonial soldiers of some unstated variety coming up a river toward his riverside home. The story, told in first person, ends this way: “...I saw black / and my face splashed in the sky.”
Awdah Hathaleen spent his final moments documenting a bulldozer manned by settlers, Israel’s somehow even more Third Reich-coded response to the call of America’s neo-Nazi militia movement, as it chugged and sputtered through a Palestinian village, its driver intent on flattening the thing.
Around it, a scene the city manager might call “chaotic”: Settlers haranguing a group of angry villagers in “I’m not poking you” fashion, keeping them away from the bulldozer like it’s an SUV with New York plates on Eureka Street. And then one of them pulls out a gun. Whips around like he’s in a Western. Bang. Hathaleen drops to the ground.
This was a month ago. But in new footage released a few days ago by Israeli human rights watchdogs B’Tselem, you can (though probably shouldn’t) watch Israeli settler Yinon Levi point his gun. Muzzle flash. Camera falls to the ground. Then, black.
I refuse to turn the sound on but I’m told you can hear his last few breaths, the camera next to him facing the dusty ground recently chewed up by a literal engine of the ongoing genocide. Likely a Caterpillar product, by the way. Made in the USA, baby. The whole ordeal has been great for our domestic heavy demolition machinery industry. A good time to buy, as they say.
August 23: Skating by on the vibes
In the process, though, it advances the slow ongoing blending of municipal police, military, and private contractors. It blurs the lines, and you could argue that’s the real point. The “boots on the ground” have been blurring those lines for decades, what with the fusion centers, law enforcement councils, DoD purchase and sale agreements—the whole history of the Department of Homeland Security, for that matter. Trump is just bringing it out into the light in a way that makes Dems squeamish and plays well on Fox.
So you can see a possible timeline emerge here where Trump goes from Democrat City to Democrat City, threatening to do a DC to ’em, a nonstop culture war tour predicated on our most widely held belief across the political spectrum: that you shouldn’t have to personally look at or be near or god forbid interact with an unhoused person. That being in that position is a crime, actually. And the perpetrator ought to be banished from our line of sight. Sent anywhere, just not where they happen to be. What makes the news are the disagreements over how to achieve that reality. The polite authoritarians versus the frothing ones. As always, they share the same unstated goal.
It strikes me that Worcester is a city primed for this rhetoric to land. A few news items from just this week serve the point. But first, I want to talk about “crime” more generally.
September 19: Giving up the ghoul
The guy was a fascist dickhead, a carnival barker, and I have never once thought about him out of the context of that one meme about pee and balls. Apparently, neither did the deeply unwell shooter, who killed him not for any political reason but as a bit for his online friends? We’re stuck divining the tea leaves of his partisanship and not focusing on the fact that all the mass shooters are young white men from one extremely nihilistic strain of internet subculture who gather in the same niche internet spaces.
The kid does not have politics. Any politics. But even that’s not the point. There is a mass murder machine buried within the cultural fabric of the internet. It synthesizes widespread feelings of loneliness, alienation, depression, and obsession with media stardom and spits out random spurts of violence committed by random people for random reasons. There is no hand at the console of the machine, which is the actually scary part. Just millions of disaffected kids poisoning each other’s brains to varying degrees of severity. A balloon that fills and fills until pop.
October 6: A circuit of mutual services and complicity
I think we need to spend more time reckoning with the long-term effects of that moment in Web 2.0 when our feeds shifted from primarily time-based (posts appear in the order they were posted, newest to oldest) to predictively generated by algorithms and more recently algorithms we’re made to believe are sentient. The posts appeared with no expectation of a linear time relation. You’re getting something from Friday next to Monday next to two weeks ago next to BREAKING next to ads so many ads bereft of any chronological context. The only real constant: that contextlessness. The only thing the internet really cares if you see. You’re getting the reaction or counter reaction before you get the event itself. Discourse built on disjointed shadows. Just keep looking it’ll make sense eventua—Real Men Wear Ridge Wallets.
No one pretends anymore to not be actively gaming the attention system. It’s just what “posting” is now. Gaming it successfully is a success in its own right. Failure to game it is a personal failure. This plays a larger role in our uniquely American lone gunman problem than perhaps even the guns. It is the ‘One Weird Trick’ of last resort, but it hasn’t failed yet for anyone desperate enough to try it.
Something fundamental broke, I think, when all the apps did that shift at once, in like... 2018ish? Maybe? Suddenly all the posts all over were just messed up, appearing in front of us seemingly at random. Different for everyone. The linear chronology of events was tampered with in a way that seems hard to compare to other times or inventions. A shared reality immediately thrown into question.
There’s a PHD in there somewhere... late capital and the exponential collapse of time-space and everyone going crazy and all the loneliness and the multi-level marketing and the gunmen.
Woof! Catch me out here getting straight up evangelical about time. Suppose it beats the current evangelical concerns, “the family” and/or racial purity and/or heterodoxy. Tomàto tòmato tomatò. Same soup, different label.
All’s to say fuck it I’m posting at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. Why not. Who has the time to care? This is when I could get it done.
October 10: Our Elected Officials Are Afraid Of The People
I think the municipal orientation of this newsletter, the pointedly insular and geographically-focused nature of it, is a template for durability in these hollowed-out times. The mission of this newsletter and everything else I do with the time you all give me to do it is rebuilding a genuinely unique-to-Worcester media ecosystem. What the alt-weeklies used to do. As the internet gets worse and worse, I think we’re going to find that the only thing we’re left with is the communities in the places we live. And I want to provide—think i’ve done a decent job providing—some connective tissue to get us there.
December 8: You Talk About Things That Nobody Cares
I’m reading Kingdom Came, a later J.G. Ballard novel, that projects a new fascism, one that’s leaderless, rooted in consumerism, ambient. A piece of clothing—the St. George Shirt—marks the “in” group, who terrorize the “out” group (immigrants, mostly) because they can, mostly. Such mob violence comes routinely, almost always after professional sports, and as a rule it’s explained away by the authorities. Tossing over Bangladeshi take-out shops is the party after the after party, but it also upholds a delicate social order that swirls around a gleaming new shopping mall mega development. At the helm is a bombastic afternoon talk show host, taking his cues from an advertising man deliberately testing out his social experiments. The directives of this new suburban fascism come in the form of TV commercials, concocted by the ad man and performed by the talk show host, depicting indulgences of violence for the sake of it. Both of them fail to see what they’re doing in full. Their visions of themselves and who they actually are remain at worsening odds. They lament the street violence while remaining resolute in the belief they’re ushering in a new and more verdant social order. In other words they’re making it great again. If only the out group could be made to just... disappear. Then we’d be perfect, we’d be clean, we’d be big and beautiful.
Politics for the age of cable TV. Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.
Hmmm the public willingly colluding in its own deception? Would be crazy, I think, if any of this happened in real life right now in front of our eyes.
...
I went to Trans Siberian Orchestra at the DCU like Katie and I do every year and this year there was a new feature: little synchronized drones. A grand finale, the buzzing little things flew over the guitar players as they both soloed over the main riff of Sweet Emotion, the unofficial Massachusetts townie anthem, the riff we can’t all help but to love, having just moved to the “big finish” second stage in the middle of the crowd for the wildest set piece of the night, (in past years, a scantily clad opera singer in a human-sized snow globe. Halfway through the unexpected “Sweet Emotion” etude and these these kitschy toy versions of America’s most defining weapon of empire come buzzing out on cue. Our phalanx, our testudo formation, our trebuchet, our ship of the line. That which we have used to decimate our Bugs, in the Verhoovian sense. The Wedding Busters. The one thing anyone will remember about America in 1,000 years when, god willing, the agitprop wears off and people look at the thing clearly. They’re doing a little figure eight pattern and then they idled in the shape of a single cutaway Les Paul and we’re all going oooo and ahhhhh while The Trans Siberian Orchestra puts their bombastic take on our most beloved folk tune, the bass line taking on a baroque stiffness for branding purposes.
Directly to the right of me, across an aisle, there was a burly, bearded man dressed in an operator aesthetic. One step past Punisher Skull if you feel me. Under his dull green cargo shorts was a bionic leg. It went past the knee, featuring an elaborate joint mechanism in its place. Like the rest of us he watched the drones hover above the musicians—synchronized swimmers in a pool of data, unaware of and unbothered by the crowd below, executing on orders without needing to consider them. Cold, calculated, precise. Inanimate but for our designs and so they’re killers of world historic proportion.
I don’t know how this Operator lost a limb but a safe guess would be it happened in one of the unfortunate places where the whirring of a drone carries a different implication than it did in the DCU Center. Where people do not go oooo and ahhhhh but rather run for cover or think their last earthly thought before the whiz bang and the black. Did it fill him with a dull boredom? A dread? Did he feel pandered to? Did he think about it at all? Connect it to the circumstances that led to his losing a limb? Or did he nod along to the familiar riff, shout out the words burned into his brain... into my brain...
You talk about things that nobody cares
Did he bang his head like I did? Did it make him feel like he was home?
December 16: A hidden avalanche of a humanitarian crisis
Leaving the courthouse, I was reminded of how much I hate that building and how much the gleaming opulence of it says about power in Worcester. It’s much nicer than City Hall. It’s nicer even than the Federal Courthouse. They spent so much money on it. It’s easily the best-kept, most pristine, most active building on Main Street. The vestiges of other industries crumble—the Commerce Building being the best example—or become big chips in the ongoing members-only game of On The Map Off The Map. But the punishment bureaucracy maintains its grand facade. Not that it’s measured this way but if someone did I think they’d find it’s in the “top industry” conversation. The thing that really replaced manufacturing if you catch my drift.
It had me thinking, walking past the metal detectors and feeling the warm light turn back to the dull grey of the outdoors, that it’s that building the police are really beholden to. And yet their money comes from our building. The drab one down the street where democracy ostensibly happens.
Dwell on that stuff walking down the broad center staircase of the four open floors of the tastefully lit and marble-coated feeding tube for the local house of corrections and you can find yourself arriving at a question of whether the courts exist for the public’s interest or the public exists for the interest of the court. I found myself lingering on the image of a vampire presiding over a colony of thralls.
In this way you can see homelessness as a matter of convenience for a punishment bureaucracy. A perpetual and reliable criminal class, manufactured automatically by the free market which is of course American and thus Good. Early has a lot of ADAs, after all, and they all need something to do. Spend just a day in district court and you’ll see it: people bringing their backpacks with them up to the stand as they get slapped with trespassing charges, default warrants, stay-away orders, then sent off on their way with yet another albatross around their neck.
Anywho.