Words written on water

Is the dread heavy on you like it is on me?

Hello, hello, to readers friend and foe! Another dumb, exhausting week.

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.

Weekly Index:

The city council voted to put a question on the November ballot to get private colleges to give them more money. Colleges said hey what gives in a joint letter. ~/~ Chief Saucier blasted the DOJ report, advancing several conspiracy theories in the process. Worst one: people out there impersonate cops to get free sex from prostitutes. Kate Toomey bought it, lauding praise. Auburn cop Dominick Boschetto was one of 10 johns arrested for trying to have sex with a child in a North Adams sting. In Boylston, still no details not even the name of the cop who killed a 25-year-old man. DA Joe Early has ignored the Telegram’s repeated requests for the information. ~/~ Dunkies franchises across the region caught fines for overworking child laborers. Worcester ranked 14 on a list of 25 U.S. cities where $100,000 isn’t enough to cover basic expenses. ~/~ Maura Healey stopped in Worcester to discuss Trump cuts in the healthcare sector. UMass Chan Medical School could lose $80 million. The school then announced hundreds of layoffs. Area food pantries in a panic after $3.4 million cut to emergency food assistance from USDA. ~/~ Big ass solar field going in on the Leicester side of the airport. New permanent gallery of armor and weapons from the Higgins Armory to debut later this year at Worcester Art Museum. ~/~ Superintendent Rachel Monárrez will leave the district in June for a job in her native California.

Woof!

You will be sorely missed, Rachel. The shining example of why we need to be doing that thing we never do: hire from the outside. If Monárrez’s replacement is not hired by the exact same process, we’ll have shot ourselves in the foot yet again. The school committee race becomes very important in that way. More on that when there’s less to speculate and more to know.

Also: be normal. This is a good career and personal move for Dr. Monárrez and the only thing we should be doing is wishing her the best. She did not “let us down.” Quite the opposite.

A lotta work goes into these weekly dispatches. Please consider helping us keep this thing going!

In today’s post:

Dreaming of Spring—The Burncoat Eagles’ Nest— “requiring” voluntary payments—the gang goes conspiratorial—odds and ends

Dreaming of Spring

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.

Miserable week for the country: ICE arrested a full citizen in Florida and nearly got away with it. Another activist from Columbia University, Mohsen Mahdawi, behind bars. Öztürk denied bail. The Supreme Court to take up the birthright citizenship question in May. Lesser publicized: police agencies purchasing AI chatbots designed to ensnare activists. Silicon Valley-hatched private prison colony plans are surfacing, the final fusion of tech sector and state. CECOT is here to stay.

Another miserable week for the world. Ben Erenreich writing for Harpers on his time in the West Bank:

That June, the bulldozers arrived. Soldiers gave Eid thirty minutes to empty his house. After the demolition, only one jagged piece of wall was left standing. It had been the corner of his daughters’ bedroom. You could still see the little flowers the girls had painted on the wall in turquoise, purple, and pink.

This photo, man.

What choice...

Reading more voraciously than I ever have. Reading, reading, reading. Can barely bring myself to write on most days. What I’m eeking out now is impossible. The product of compulsion... a self-coercion to do the craft I otherwise love but dread this week and last week and next week... down here in the doldrums. Do you feel it? Is the dread heavy on you like it is on me?

To feel a sense of action: thunderclaps break the muggy day. I yearn for it. Do you? Hope for the inciting incident. The spring we can’t hold back.

The blushing rose will climb
Spring ahead or fall behind
Winter dreams the same dream every time

Instead, stuck in the doldrums, down where we get so bored it’s downright cannibalistic.

Facebook seizes on that impulse, cat to mouse. On that site, we’re encouraged to scour and hunt and catch and we eat each other, tiny nibbles at a time. In the process of these daily hyper-localized insular dramas, we destroy what solidarity was there to build. It rips apart the social networks it was based on, designed around. We lose sight of the long project—the serious, pragmatic leaders so necessary for movement work become the most likely to check out of the cannibalistic digital space. Meanwhile the fundamental social fabric of communities are thrown into disintegrating chaos. That process elevates the worst of us to fleeting moments of center stage: the main character, the anti-hero of the drama of the moment, which a community has pried, collectively, from a shallow digital well, for the sake of not feeling so empty. This fleeting character, who the site relies upon for engagement, who is built into the design, with no consideration for the local social ramifications, is a deep subversion of the social norms surrounding political engagement. A perversion. One we willingly facilitate. The character need not be good or bad, but a bad one has an easier go.

So we indulge in an extractive digital space designed to fill our deep deep deep deep deep deep spiritual malaise with momentary, algorithmic dramas—generated for us, shadow puppets on the wall. The emptiness momentarily satisfied by the temporary salve of argument.

We debate the morality of filming indigent people using drugs like something is at stake. As if there’s a right way and wrong way to “engage with the issue.” Helpful discourse versus harmful discourse. Of course there is a distinction, on simple morality grounds. But the conversation as it exists is centered around the video, as an object of media consumption. To see both the original act of drug use and the taping/resharing of it as consumptive behavior in their own rights, it becomes difficult to draw a meaningful distinction.

In the video I’m talking about—if you don’t know, lucky you, keep it that way—people are ingesting a drug that destroys you in a semi-public space. They are filmed by a presumably scolding onlooker, who, by nature of filming, understands the content potential of the scene—same as any more traditional addict looks at two 20 dollar bills in their hand.

The video itself is also a drug that also destroys you.

The main difference: those people on the screen were together in real life participating in their destruction collectively. Odds are if you’ve watched the video you did so alone, perhaps in the dark, perhaps lying down, only light the soft glow of the screen. It illuminates the unflattering contours of your face. Flashlight at chin, first act of the horror movie. Gotcha! Except no one’s there but you. Some gag.

Whether you found the experience revolting or enjoyable is all the same to Facebook. Like any dealer the contract ends at the exchange. They got your quantified attention, new palming off for the new drug of our time. What happens after the fact... to you, your community... not their concern. Either way you’ll be back.

Who is it, really, that destroys a community? And are we willing to admit that the definition of drug user is limited? Can we consider the damage wrought by Facebook as an intermediary between us and our natural, local social networks? The havoc wreaked upon possible solidarities and hard-won interpersonal relationships. Destroyed, sometimes, with a click.

The elevation of carnival barkers and the dissuasion of untold numbers of would-be leaders is what gets me. All the people who quietly go “all set.” Who could be real resources. Those of us left... Can we come to see it as a sort of collective drug habit? The endorphin release of social media engagement—I know it well!—is not dissimilar from an amphetamine high. Just the same, it leads some more than others down a path of the seeker. A traditional junkie runs out of money, of social capital, hits rock bottom. A downward feedback loop to ruin. The junkie of the social media drug experiences the opposite. The more time you put in, the more you’re rewarded. The worse you have to behave for the same rush.

A thought, anyway.

Paying taxes was especially terrible this year. I like how Luke O’Neil put it the other day:

It never feels good per se sending off money to the federal government around this time of year but it has never felt as bad as it does today. I know I have paid to produce so much suffering my entire life I’m not an idiot but there was always a plausible deniability baked in. Like how they put blanks in one of the firing squad rifles. Could be my money is going to school books or cancer research you could sort of lie to yourself before. But now there are no books being purchased and no research is being done.

Two days of scrambling work to make sure I keep away as much money as I can justify from the missiles and jets and bulldozers and AI scraping tools and sortable databases and detention center production. Mission mostly accomplished (as a small businessman I have some say in these things) but I was robbed of my only real day off, using up one whole precious Monday.

After the 12th straight day of work, gloom comes easy.

But silver lining, it feels good to get all that off my chest—the above passage is of a kind that hasn’t come to me in a while. To feel a real spark in these times... a precious rarity. A sign of spring, perhaps.

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The Burncoat Eagles Nest

I was at EL Music grabbing something or other Tuesday afternoon when I saw this very eerie thin band of a storm roll through...

...right over Worcester’s spookiest statue: the “Burncoat Eagle” I have long joked about having been plucked straight from the “Eagles’ Nest” of Band of Brothers fame.

That is a Nazi-ass statue if you ask me. I didn’t need to know anything about it to know that. Like any piece of art the truth of it is manifest.

But vindication of the objective variety came later that evening, when council stream compatriot Brendan Melican sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for the statue’s artist, Carl Milles. Within, a subhead reading “Milles support for fascism.”

Carl Milles expressed admiration for Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as for Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. Carl Milles feared the growing communism and was impressed by the rhetoric of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. To his friend Frances Rich, he exclaimed, "I love people who clean up their homes and have Sunday finesse. I don't care what they're called, but I hate disorder...". To Olga Milles, who remained in Graz for a while after the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria to the German Reich, Carl enthusiastically sent "Heil Hitler" greetings.

Oops! Burncoat Eagle designed by the Enthusiastic “Heil Hitler” Greeter.

All’s to say, lovely readers, that my Naz-dar tuning is evidently fine. Chalk it up to the vaguely German half of my ancestry, perhaps—an inherited sense for that peculiar aesthetic vibration that kept Hitler manic, Speer in business, peasants frozen in mud.

I’d say we should reassess the statue’s good standing if I thought there was a chance in fuck we would.

Meanwhile, in Holden:

“Requiring” voluntary payments

The cranks have found their whipping post for seething townie resentment: colleges.

On Tuesday the council passed an order from Candy Mero-Carlson to “require” that private colleges in the city invest 0.5 percent of their endowments into a community impact fund to help finance housing, supposedly. But also “community development projects,” whatever that means.

It passed 10-0 after a motion to send it to subcommittee for further study failed 4-6. Candy wanted it done right then damn it.

It didn’t seem to matter—to her or the mayor or other cranks like Russell and Bergman—that both the city manager and lawyer said they can’t “require” the colleges to make these payments. That they would have to be voluntary—same as the negotiated payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreements we already have with most of our colleges.

In the middle of the grandiose, chest-beating discussion Tuesday, city lawyer Alexandra Kalkounis told Russell, point blank:

“It would have to be a negotiated deal. We wouldn't be able to require the colleges to invest part of their endowment.”

That is, of course, exactly how the ballot question reads: require. But here we have the city’s legal expert saying in public on the same day as the vote that it wouldn’t be a requirement at all.

If you’re thinking wait we’re going to make voters vote on a ballot question for something the city can’t legally do, what? You’re right on the money: that’s exactly what’s happening. Stupid stupid stupid.

It’s a massive distraction and maybe that’s the point. Certainly it’ll serve to turn out cranks. Townie theater. But the cranks already turn out. Perhaps more to the point, it gives Candy a new Main Thing for those eager to forget about all the transphobia. But of course there are many more unwilling and or unable to forget.

Moreso it may be a manifestation of the age-old problem of city hall types: they’re closed off from the outside world, high on the noxious gasses of their hermetically sealed bubble... all breathing in the same long, slow whippet, talking to each other in the buzzing, foreign, distorted cadence unlocked in the throes of a nitrous oxide rush. In the unnaturally deep voices they reassure each other: thiiiis iiiis whaaaat theeee peeeoooopleeee waaaaaaant. And they’re downright giddy. Sucking up breath so as to not let slip a delighted guffaw. Respectability is the key, they’re aware. For whom and toward what end are matters for a different time. They’re in charge. That’s why they’re in the bubble full of gas. In Here, Decorum Must Be Maintained. It’s what separates them from those on the outside, those less deserving rabble. Us in here, we deserve it and anyone else outside of the bubble is beneath us.

Vision tunnels now, gas filling lungs, and presently they are unaware of the world outside direct circumstances. The isolation is a weighted blanket. It feels good to exist in the little simple world of the gas—where no one calls on you to think at all about what it is you’re doing, nevermind the ramifications. Where everyone around you is seeking that same rush to that same state of numbing stasis... where the world makes sense because the world is eliminated. Where everyone involved considers themselves the most important people to exist and so it must be true. Any notion to the contrary is a personal sleight. An ad hominem attack. An assault on their respectability. That such a notion enters the bubble is rare, of course. The police are on guard 24/7, and they’re handsomely paid, and they do the bidding of those on the inside. Paranoia sets in: what if the cops are actually keeping us inside the bubble? No no no. A ridiculous thought. But then again, have any of us tried to leave?

Just kidding, haha.

Etel Haxhiaj and Khrystian King were the only ones to directly acknowledge the moral flaw in attacking colleges at this particular moment in time. “Higher education institutions and particularly students speaking on their political rights are under attack,” said Haxhiaj. She asked the manager if he’d run this idea by the colleges yet. He said yeah, they were “shocked.” “They've expressed frustration about the order.”

On Friday they made their frustrations public. A joint letter from Holy Cross, Mass College of Pharmacy, WPI, Clark, Assumption:

“We are surprised and disheartened by the seemingly short-sighted nature of the council’s actions that selectively target certain institutions,” the letter by the presidents said. “The introduction of a nonbinding resolution is not only unnecessary, but potentially a roadblock to ongoing discussions with city leaders about further strengthening our partnerships.”

Most of the colleges pay voluntary PILOT agreements annually. These payments run to 2030 in some cases. Despite a claim to the contrary made by Mero-Carlson to suit her argument, they’re not expiring. From a PILOT report last year:

If they get pissed enough they can just stop paying, Then, with the passage of this weirdly heated ballot question, we’ll be back asking for a new round of voluntary (!!!) payments from a significantly damaged bargaining position.

The universities will be no more required than they are now. Millions of dollars are at stake here so that Candy can whip her crank base into a frenzy. Stupid stupid stupid.

“Again, the people of Worcester, all of the residents here, we can't sustain this kind of negative impact going forward,” she said Tuesday.

Just look around and you’ll see negative impact everywhere. Many magnitudes worse than the colleges’ property purchases. Candy decided to zero in on this, at this moment. That says it all.

“Harm was done to the members of our department”

Spent the whole show in the most recent Outdoor Cats on Police Chief Paul Saucier’s meeting with Kate Toomey’s public safety subcommittee about the DOJ report. What a wild wild wild ride. Catch up if you haven’t yet! “Episode 21: Evidence Dot Com”

Real quick just pulling out two conspiracy theories the chief put forward: That the report was “edited” by college interns. (We break down the inaccuracies around 35:00 in, video below should start at the proper time)

And that there are people running around raping prostitutes while, conveniently, impersonating Worcester police officers. It wasn’t the cops themselves, as stated in the report. (18 minutes in, same episode).

Saucier: “Unfortunately it is not uncommon for members of the public to impersonate police officers during interactions with women engaged in commercial sex trade in order to avoid paying for their services.”

Toomey, later, in response: “The terrible accusations, especially with the sexual assault issues, impacted the entire department. And I appreciate you saying that not one officer here would be willing to allow that to happen. (...) But harm was done to the members of our department, their families, uh by some of this.”

Harm was done to members of the department... by the credible systematic rape allegations. What are we to do with that?

(Hunt for more moments yourself: transcript of the meeting, with video.)

I suppose you can’t blame the chief for feeling like he has the right to blast this report. Say whatever he wants. I mean... the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division has, per NYT, rewritten the mission statement around Trump’s “culture war edicts,” such as “participation of transgender women in sports.”

In an email, Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative activist close to the White House who leads the unit, directed the division’s career work force to pursue the president’s agenda, outlined in executive orders and presidential memorandums, or face unspecified consequences. The revised statement encouraged investigations into antisemitism, anti-Christian bias and noncompliance with a range of Trump executive fiats.

The new directive calls environmental justice issues, like disparities in drinking water quality, the product of a “distorting, DEI lens.” Welp.

Seems pretty clear police abuse of power is no longer a priority for the DOJ. I hope I’m wrong, and that the Massachusetts staffers who worked on this report will buck the trend. But so far, it’s been radio silence.

In other Massachusetts news I almost missed (thank you to the reader who shared): The House passed a budget that includes a transgender sports ban. Per Erin In The Morning, “the first such measure to pass any legislative chamber in a blue state.” Folks... the opposition party!

Odds and Ends

Thanks for reading everyone! Really appreciate it.

Tips and merch are great too!

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If you have $1.2 million laying around you could give it to me so I can buy this haunted mansion in Gardner and make it the Worcester Sucks headquarters.

Very excited about the Greg Opperman banger I’ll be sharing in a few days stay tuned!

And Kelly Cashman, our Instagram manager, is a librarian in Framingham, running a very cool zine library within the library and small press collection. I need to schlep myself down Rte. 9 to go see. It’s part of the Greater Boston Zine Crawl taking place all August. She writes in:

Zines are a great way to build community and learn more about knowledge and experiences you may not be familiar with. Are you a zinester? You can submit your zine to be carried in the collection!

On the webpage there’s updates and a submission form.

From a recent Horizon Mass story on opioid settlement money:

During that same period, Worcester spent 80% of $405,000 on administrative costs. It was the highest amount of abatement funds used by any city last fiscal year—$331,000 was used to pay for the salaries of nine employees.

While cities and towns are allowed to expend settlement money to cover costs associated with planning and operating services, guidance from the Bureau of Substance and Addiction services recommends that they spend no more than 20% of the amount received in a year on strategic planning activities.

Classic.

Weird one: State overrules License Commission ruling on Micghael’s Cigar Bar and the rooftop overdoses. Does that mean it can reopen? Or will? Unclear.

Incredibly misleading headline from the Guardian here lmao

‘They’re selling meth to kids!!!’ Stirring up a fake moral panic for the clicks. Love to see it.

I recommend reading this: "Ain't nobody scared of you"—Black Neighborhood Forms Armed Patrol After Neo-Nazi Rally

Learned from a letter to Harpers about Jean-François Laporte’s “Mantra,” a piece of music made entirely with field recordings of a compressor cooling a hockey rink.

“Perhaps new symphonies are already being made by the rustling of the trees and the sound of everyday machinery,” the letter reads.

On that note time for me to get out in those trees. Til next time.