Our survival is their failure

Robbing the Louvre in broad daylight and running off with a bunch of priceless jewels has got to feel so fucking good. My god can you imagine? I'm still high from walking out of Bradlees with a Motley Crue Dr. Feelgood cassette down my pants 35 years ago.

Today Sam Thielman of Flaming Hydra and FOREVER WARS writes about an ICE raid on Canal St. in New York and everything these pigs are trying to destroy that makes his city beautiful and Carmen Aiken the author of the new book of poetry hotspur writes about ICE raids in Chicago and everything these pigs are trying to destroy that makes their city beautiful.

Aiken will be reading from the book on October 29 in Tucson, AZ for the “hotspur and Shakesqueer" event.

Thielman previously wrote for Hell World on 25 comics you should read.

25 comics you should read

Something in here is for you personally

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Aiken wrote about protesting the DNC in Chicago, working at Trader Joe's during peak Covid, living in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 and what saving democracy is supposed to mean.

What does saving democracy even mean?

Destruction and creation at once

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

BOOK TOUR NEWS:

I'll be reading and talking about We Had It Coming with a great group of friends and colleagues on the following dates:

DC: Wednesday, November 5, 6pm at Busboys & Poets (Brookland)
Philly: Thursday, November 6, 7pm at the Pen & Pencil
Cambridge: Saturday, November 8, 4pm at The Sinclair
New York: Wednesday, November 12, 6pm at the Francis Kite Club

Please RSVP to the New York and DC dates (the latter isn't live yet but it will be here). Feel free to let me know if you're coming to any of them though. Particularly Philly and DC where I don't know as many people. It will be nice to say hello for a minute or two and then I'll go uhhhh I gotta go have a cigarette thank you so much for coming.

Help pay our contributors with a very reasonably priced subscription.

The Punishers

by Sam Thielman

My neighborhood in Brooklyn has elevated double-parking to a high art. As an avid hater of urban car culture my heart is warmed daily by the spectacle of some guy in a Porsche Cayenne honking furiously at stalled-out traffic in front of the elementary school where the kids are blithely crossing against the light in their too-big Minecraft backpacks because a parent has blocked the entire road with his 1998 Toyota Camry for a quick sec so he can hustle his own kids into it. 

In this same little quarter, the last decade has seen what I can only describe as a benign infestation of bakeries, all of them offering lower cash prices “to help us avoid credit card fees;” all of them serving perfect pastries from Yemen or China or Sicily. I take my kid to the Chinese one near the school and we sit and do his homework together.

Over the summer the Rite-Aid company closed the pharmacy where we used to get our prescriptions filled. It was filthy and they kept the deodorant locked up. Still open are a dozen much smaller, cleaner places that keep odd hours and have the shampoo on shelves like they don’t expect you to steal it and advertise their fluency in Chinese and Arabic and Spanish, though they will still accept your custom if you only speak English. These were the only places with hand soap and snacks during the pandemic. Every chain store was terrifyingly empty but the owners of these tiny cramped holes in the wall had called in obscure favors so that they could sell you Christmas-branded soaps in May and perfectly serviceable junk food with the ingredients listed on the side in Cyrillic. It was almost certainly illegal to sell any of it but I never got sick. 

When you hear conservative politicians talk about being “tough on crime,” these are the crimes they mean: crimes committed by people who speak languages other than English so that they can live through the week and help their neighbors stay clean and well-fed. 

On Tuesday a drift of porcine Homeland Security goons started kidnapping vendors on Canal Street, a place where the crimes are so universally beloved that tourists come from thousands of miles away to buy fake handbags off the folding tables and eat dim sum. The goons pushed one poor guy up against an advertisement for refurbished iPhones while he yelled “Brooklyn! I’m from Brooklyn! I’m from Brooklyn! I’m not doing nothing!” 

“You can film,” one of the DHS guys told bystanders in a gentle tone of voice. His collaborators wore zip ties on their backs so they could be easily unholstered. Outraged passersby followed the agents back to their stronghold at 26 Federal Plaza, where protests got loud enough that they sent out a detachment of more serious thugs to quell the locals. The footage taken by roving gangs of freelance video crew feds to be licensed to Fox News was the most important part, and that had been secured for broadcast to the people who were slobbering for it. Who wanted to enjoy the punishing.

American law, it seems to me, exists to create a condition of constant titillation for people whose material needs are never unmet, but whose appetites have been teased into a state of ungovernable sadism by sloganeering and advertising that promises a return to a world that never existed and never will. For you it is merely your life; for them it is content, something to send giggling to their friends in the group chat or watch with satisfaction on the news in between car commercials. Let that show the stuck-up girl at the office, the barista who rolled her eyes at you, the ranting homeless man who lives under the overpass. Providing this sort of satisfaction is now the aim of our entire federal government. They offer signing bonuses and lowered standards to whatever pathetic slob will make a foreigner cry for the camera. Just one more freeloader exiled from the Kingdom of Heaven. If they keep this up, soon there will be nobody left here but the true citizens, and surely then it will all be made Great Again.

New York City is a standing affront to this way of thinking. In the few blocks I walked today, the Dunkin’ Donuts next to the primary school was filled with hijabi women speaking English in thick Brooklyn accents. A guy a few blocks away owns a bright orange cybertruck with an American flag wrap on the bed gate and the name of his business on the side in Arabic. There’s a taco truck parked nearby that has been in the same spot for so many years that they have a website where they list the address of the closest bank on the corner. This city’s basic functions do not take place without a bunch of people yelling at each other in some provisionally agreed-upon shared language, minding their business and negotiating the commission of various parking violations, tax dodges, health code infractions and forms of loitering. You can’t really participate in urban life from the comfort of your living room, and perhaps that’s what’s most enraging about it to the class of people who want to stamp it out. 

I knew that eventually right-wing shock troops were coming here, of course. Everybody who lives in a city, which is most of us, did. But somehow I’m still surprised. I’m glad a bunch of angry people chased the DHS guys away and I’m glad the NYPD, of all people, was so ashamed to see these doughy fucks in vests that say POLICE that they put out a statement claiming they hadn’t been involved. They didn’t arrest anybody at the No Kings protest, either. 

But I wish they hadn’t taken anyone. I hate seeing people snatched away, even if they’re quickly released; it reminds me that this stupid country is like every other stupid country that has ever employed secret police. At the moment the targets are brown guys selling bedazzled iPhone cases and bags that say GUGCI on the side, but I’m sure they’ll get around to white guys who work at their desks next to their cats. I bet I’d look really gross as the crying prisoner in somebody’s iPhone video. At this point it seems like a matter of time.

I have my little Indiana Jones fantasies about saving my undocumented neighbors from the cops but of course the cops have guns and I don’t have a gun, and when they come for you, when they affirmatively decide your house is next, all you can do is run. It’s never very many people who can get away. I don’t think it will be me. All I can do is watch it getting closer, rolling up toward the stoop of my apartment building like the tide. The best thing us criminals can do in the meantime is stick together. Whatever language we speak. 

Sam Thielman publishes fiction and essays at Flaming Hydra, reviews comics for the New York Times, and edits Spencer Ackerman's FOREVER WARS. He is writing a book about DC Comics with his friend Sean Howe for HarperOne. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, their son, and a cat.

Well how do you like that? It just so happens I have a piece in the book that concerns this very matter.

Here's a quick little section I like to call "The newspapers are not going to save us."

I swear to god no matter how much we all hate this fucking bloodthirsty rag it's not enough.

Here's a section I like to call "We live in Hell now. More so than before I mean. Yeah it somehow all got worse."

What is going to be tomorrow

Notes from Chicago

by Carmen Aiken

It is October in Chicago. The National Guard did not come in September but we went downtown to protest anyway. In the Midwest when the fall hits, it comes sudden. Working downtown means the darkness in rapid creep around the El platforms, the ascent from the subway station to walk home. The first Saturday of September the light remained, though, and I rode to Grant Park. The cars went down Michigan Avenue and honked in support. It was el Grito – Independence day – with massive flags flying from windows and truck beds and we hollered back.

South down the Avenue back to the park after we made our way past the cursed sign off Wacker with our dutiful curses and middle fingers up, I found myself beside a group of young Black women, in step with the snare drum and the chants.

We’re not from here, they said to me. We just joined up. We have to be here with y’all. Another in a season of protests and when the sunset came I made my way back to my bar and its home to union organizers and bike messengers and Comiskey townies and teachers and punks and tourists and people’s parents.

The Guard did not show up. Or, no, that was eventually. A judge restrained them temporarily. The cruel, violent migra remain. The court cases fly daily. I don’t have words for what his happening here but it feels important to write them out anyway. Most days I turn over the concept and word “hate”, some clarion concept, and I cannot find a way to be spiritual about it.

+

We are in the auditorium of the high school off Pulaski on Saturday, me and someone I know from Dyke Night, which is a Monday every other month or so when we all reintroduce each other at Bernice’s and shoot the shit, or two weeks ago volleying the same refrain across the city. How are you? I mean. You know. Shit’s fucked. Hang in there. Fuck these guys.

Right now we agree that it does not matter we’re perhaps the types to build solitude. None of this is in our nature or our speed. It doesn’t matter, because now we are here. We sit to wait to listen and because it is Chicago, I meet someone who organizes with people I work with and she takes our information for encrypted messaging and we are on our way to being vetted for defense.

I don’t know what is happening in Bridgeport, but yesterday they came a block over and disappeared someone off 36th and Winchester right behind the library, right down the block from the community garden and the school, I say. Her eyes fill, she says, I’m sorry I don’t mean to cry but Thursday I warned the roofers when I was walking with my kid, 33rd and Wallace, and then they came and took them. Then they were gone.

+

The first week of September while we were waiting I walked down the block with my ma.

It’s impossible to believe, she said. Her variation on this point every time we talk.

You’ve been through this before! You were in the dictatorship! There are a few dictatorships in my house, but this is hers: the curfews in Santiago and a landlady who had been a secretary to one of the generals, the control and current of despair and resistance. All the things she did not put together until later and the things I did not put together until adulthood.

It’s not the same. The dictatorship was set when I got there. You just lived in it. What she meant was that we were in descent, going through it, new to our undeserving, lucky souls.

+

It would not be the presence of the Texas National Guard idly standing in front of Millennium Park or wandering down the LFP that would perhaps impact me more than what has already transpired. I know some of what is happening because I live here and it is my responsibility to know. My phone pings with text messages about where someone has been taken often within a half hour. Other days it's a long collection, a digest by days end of people gone all over the neighborhood. I’ve returned to Instagram so as to scan community alerts from rapid response groups down the street, a neighborhood over, wherever.

A couple Saturdays ago I went to grab veggies and check in on the org I work with at 45th and Marshfield. Afternoon and something not quite right about every CPD cruiser that seemed to be coalescing quietly and moving West. When I got back to my place I watched on a feed as neighbors out on Pershing and Kedzie came out on the sidewalk to yell at the ICE agents who shot a woman in her car, and got stuck or refused to move.

It felt insane to say out loud what it was like to watch ICE throwing tear gas canisters with no warning into a crowd of CPD beat cops and have them go running and stumbling with everyone else, then speed off the wrong way down the street.

+

At the high school amongst each other we agree the older generations are not Okay, the parents are not Okay, the kids are not Okay, no one is Okay. We are waiting for the alders to get up and speak to us and their staff are handing out signs the wards have printed for us that say You Are Not Allowed To Be On Private Property. You Are Not Allowed Here. They are popping up everywhere on 35th St., in Ravenswood, Downtown, in coffee shops, along Archer.

There is a tamalero at the entrance to the school and I hear him asking the teenage girls in Spanish about their brothers. Five, one of them says, there are five. I ask her for a small champurrado which I have apparently decided I like these days and if she has rajas and queso. They are so young and she pulls the tamales into the plastic bag.

They took her dad, the man tells me. I hand her the twenty and tell her to keep all of it and walk away. We can’t bring food into the auditorium and the champurrado is silky and scalds my throat. The alders tell us to sell them out and when we leave the meeting, they are packing up to leave.

+

At Broadview in their stupid reopened facility where protestors gather daily, where they have boarded up the windows with plywood, where they shoot clergy and refuse to allow them to give communion to the prisoners inside, where the State Police now continues to take away protestors, I went one Friday early, when things were not as hot as they are now. I hauled water and snacks from my trunk down the street in the heat to try and do something and then rushed back to my job, ashamed, hustling over the road where someone had chalked:

Quit Your Job
Save Your Souls

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It’s not a coup like I’ve known them. It’s the KKK rampaging through the street in disguise. It’s the SS hauling people out of their homes in the middle of the night. It is fascism, certainly. They are awful, cursed souls. This is all the point.

I am Okay in the way that better people than me were helpless and so I am doing what I know to do. This includes the whistle I carry, my noting of cars and addresses and eyes on alert, the grocery drives and donations to street vendor funds, the marches, the protests.

I don’t sleep well anymore and my dreams replay some of the terrible things that have happened to me. How are you? Shit’s fucked. My windows have been open in the weather and in the morning I hear the helicopters circling, I keep my ears open for a whistle, for a scream, for their awful cars to go screaming down Archer.

The park is empty when I run, as is Sherman in the Yards, and Harrison now, mostly. They took the tamelera in front of the bank drive-thru on Damen who had been there since I lived kitty corner fifteen years ago, down the street from the Pink Line. When I ride my bike to work or walk to the store, my head is on a swivel and I stare into cars I try and remember from my alerts, the big black SUVs and stupid white vans and even fucking Nissan Altimas with plates from Michigan or Indiana or New Jersey or no plate at all. Looking for bastard goons in sunglasses and shitty masks behind tinted windows. This is what it is like to live here, right now. I know exactly where I am, here in Chicago.

They are everywhere now. At first we knew what we faced on the South and Southwest Sides. Now they are terrorizing schools north, in Rogers Park and Uptown and Ravenswood, smashing into cars in Lincoln Square, detaining on camera an alder in an emergency room who is asking where their warrant is, slamming their hands behind their back and screaming. They are launching tear gas at elementary schools and grocery stores, and surrounding people on bikes in the lane who follow them at a distance. In Hoffman Estates they chase a fifteen year old into a driveway and throw her to the ground. In Evanston a crowd surrounds them and a man yells Get off my Lawn. A couple weeks ago my friend says the neighbors were all awoken in South Shore when the helicopters and flash grenades descended on an apartment complex where they zip-tied children and citizens and destroyed Black and Brown apartments and threw migrants into a U-Haul truck. A man awoke to a mother and her seven year old pounding on his door, and he hid them under his bed. He told his story on the radio, anonymously, where they reported at one point he broke down and could not continue the story. The mother and daughter have disappeared. Me, too, crying in my car.

+

Maybe more than ever in my adult life, I have found myself remembering the terms of the religion I was raised in and around. I have been thinking about notions of a soul, my soul, the notion of hate. I think of Tony Hoagland’s Reasons To Survive November

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

Maybe there are some heavens I believe in. Lately I find myself saying out loud and often how there’s nothing that will get any of these men’s souls past St. Peter after this. Not a single fucking thing.

+

Joy is hard to come by. I am thinking about connection, and tiring evermore of discourse about community or relating or the How To's of it all. These are not things we have time for here and right now. It is a cleave to be here in Chicago and see, watch, read, witness all of what is happening. Sometimes we wonder if everyone knows what is happening here. It’s happening everywhere, though.

I find myself easily slipping farther and farther away from what is Not Here. I find myself achingly grateful for friends who have reached out to me from far away to ask Are We Okay? and What Is Happening and who listen to me spiral out what I have seen, what we are doing, and that we are not giving up.

It’s not loneliness exactly. Somehow the garden variety malaise of Cuffing Season and edging ever closer to forty and the awareness of the cyclone fence between myself and people who cannot seem to get it, or refuse to name it out loud, or are just too far away and need no excuse, really, other than not living in it, is just a muted problem for which I cannot shore up rumination. I am uninterested in assessing community or what I need from others, to therapize how to give or take. There is too much to do.

I am gifted with an emerging connection with strangers and neighbors and people you don’t know, the people marching beside you, the people selling you food, everyone in an auditorium screaming loud as the alder reminds us in Spanish that we are together, and we are going to fight through it. It is with me jogging up concrete stairs at O Block to drop a lady her food, stashing eggs under the stairs in Bridgeport for someone else, helping my friends organize coloring for kids at a Know Your Rights training, handing out signs all across the neighborhood, checking in on my coworkers and friends and bartenders, too many Modelos maybe as we shake our heads and share the stories, riding the bus or train, trying to memorize license plates, trying to smile at people in the park.

It is isolating, and I am also a part of this. That’s community.

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For some time I wanted to write about what “hotspur”, the book I just published, meant to me. About what it was, why I wrote it, where it came from, anything. I had a lot of thoughts about it and scritched some outlines down but then it was the last two months and Jesus, who cared?

Last week, though, Ren at Skunk Cabbage Books graciously hosted an event for me and made it happen because God knows I wouldn’t have done it, even despite the militarized illegal police force kidnapping and assaulting people all around me. I felt terrible about it most of the week, despite having the incredible Ola Faleti and Tori Rego reading with me, which Thank God. The days before I could not figure out what to do. The thought of reading from this book I wrote so long ago, about love and honor and destruction, the veiled bits about the exile of continuing to tear at a wound you really need to close, about characters in a Shakespeare play fucking, for Chrissakes, made me furious at myself.

I thought a lot about poems and my friend Truong and his lines from “Four Letter Words”:

that I’ve been thinking about a way to write this letter to respond to this
time to salvage some semblance of what’s lost what’s lyrical that my
student comes to me and says I want to do the work but someone was
shot on my street just last night and right now gertrude stein is just plain
stupid that she says it and she means it that I am at a loss for words

So I got up there and I read some of my book but I also read this, and I read some of Forche, told the truth which was that right now things like my book were just plain stupid, or felt like it, and that I am at a loss for words. Being in that room with some kind people who came and listened, stuck around to talk about what was happening, who hugged and shook hands and left into the night meant something very important to me, too. We knew we had to keep making things like art, music, stories, poems, plays, comedy, and gatherings.

Here I am throwing together these three thousand words, knowing they wouldn’t really amount to much nor be very good, but because I had to find them. At the bar a man asked what I was writing and I told him that I was writing about everything that had happened, of hearing of so many in the street, of making plans to protect and feed each other because it was how I knew how to live in the world. He said that was a good thing to have and bought me a Modelo and we tapped cans to Fuck ICE.

At the reading I did what I had not done in some time and read a poem I recently wrote. Because I’m still writing poems. I am sharing it here because you, too, are connected to me and this. I hope you read this missive, and you know what is happening, and that you, too, will fight back as the times come for you. We will all share what we know. Stay safe and protect each other.

A Stay Of
after Gwendolyn Brooks

We wait and then it is gone. Wait
For the Lake Effect, for fake spring
then eleventieth winter
wait for each highway to flip
shuffle the IDOT crew decks
Kennedy to Ike to Edens to
Stevenson to Dan Ryan to Bishop
Ford. They’ll never get to the
Bishop Ford. Wait for the houses
to be sewn, sprout from the fields where
the towers and the homes waited, waited.
Winter is long, the crush of inland
island heat heavy, Homan black sites
cruel and buried, trigger fingers
senseless spasm.

Once the Mayor collapsed
an airport back into an island
policy no match for magic trick
overnight sleight of hands
here a runway, there an X.
Wait and work the calculus.
So: 300 of them, or, wait:
there: the variable. X or maybe
SS. Over 225 square miles.
Ceterus Paribus: what has always been.
Long division line: all of everyone
who does not want this.

Forgive me Miss Brooks, for I am
not owed your counsel
yet I know, somehow I have
to stay alive until an end
inevitable and whatever it may be.
“Stay here.” I will. I will.
All of us waiting or something
at least to curse and curse
careful practice from fucking up
the zipper merge, the express lane
the yellow left turn.
All of it that has come before
fire, riot, heat, cold, flood.
Stay here. 

Carmen Aiken writes a newsletter you can read here and is the author of the new book of poetry hotspur available here.

David Roth was good of course on the whole Platner imbroglio.

lol

We went to the protest in Boston the other day and it was a nice time. I don't really have too much to say about it besides what I wrote about the last protest. It was a very beautiful autumn day I'll say that. Perfect out.

Then a couple days later we went to the Conner O'Malley show and it was hilarious. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. I tried to take a picture but one of the ushers appeared out of nowhere instantly and put his hand in front of my camera which I thought was a pretty appropriate thing to happen in Conner O'Malley World. I took some nice photos in Chinatown though.