The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same - U.S. Government Surveilling Citizens

Brian James Schill's  I Was a Punk for the FBI (LARB) inspired this post.

Then, with the speed of a Ramones song, it was over—impossibly so in the absence of some coordinated act of sabotage, says Holmstrom. “We just had so many weird problems,” he observes, sounding less paranoid than perspicacious and referencing COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that targeted putatively seditious groups. “There’s enough red flags that even if we don’t have a smoking gun, there’s evidence.”

*** 

 This, concludes Holmstrom, was ultimately what the state feared most. “They were worried punk would get out of hand like the hippie thing got out of hand,” he says. “I figured, okay, we’re going to pretend to be conservative—just troll everybody.” But it didn’t work, he says. “They still came after us. The Democrats put me out of business, and 10 years later, the Republicans wanted to put me in jail.”

And some things never change.

No, they don't. The moralizers, the improvers of morals, fear anything that might pose a threat to their imposing a stream-lined, regimented world where people behave without any distressful dissent to groupthink.

Meanwhile, headlines like these are proliferating: ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants (Brennan Center)

What’s new is that the federal government now openly says it will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions. Labeled as “domestic terrorists” by the administration, these targets include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them — all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president’s agenda.

This serious threat to free speech and privacy rights protected by the First and Fourth Amendments is not hypothetical, as administration officials are making no secret of their intentions.

In September, President Trump issued a memo ordering federal law enforcement to focus on ideologies that are supposedly motivating “domestic terrorism,” including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as well as opposition to “foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control).” The memo also highlights anti-ICE activities.

A democratic government that does not trust its citizens is not a democracy.

 

sch 2/18 

 

Submission, Indy Politics, Rejected

I ran down to Indy, taking a friend and his wife to the airport. On the way back, I went to Payless for groceries. I napped when I got home. 

I got some of my research project done.

The Lascaux Review, Strange Passage, Narrative, Liminal Spaces and Unsolicited Press: “Scenes From An Indiana Factory Town”

 Raleigh Review: “Ahab in the Moonlight”

Ninth Letter: Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984 

I quit for the day.  I am not feeling well.

2/18

I was just not well today. All I did was get to the writer's group, but I passed on seeing CC. I got through the email, cleaned the kitchen, and not much else.

A rejection:

Thank you for your submission to Chestnut Review. Although we must decline your submission this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it. Please do not interpret this as a judgment of your art as a whole. Individual tastes matter a great deal in decisions like these, and though we have to decline this round, we encourage you to keep writing and creating. The world needs it, and you.

Thank you, Sheila Kennedy, for pointing me to IndyPolitics.

 Three other posts written and scheduled over the next few days were done, and now I am calling it a day.

sch

 

Submissions and other things

I spent most of yesterday working on my novella and blowing deadlines.

Today was just about recuperating.

Odds and sods

2/15 

Thank you for sending us "Ahab in the Moonlight." We appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, this piece isn't the right fit for us. If you wish to submit again, please wait until one month has passed.

Thanks again for submitting, Samuel, and we wish you the best in finding a home for this elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Pithead Chapel

***

We are honored you have decided to share your piece "Coming Home" with us. Unfortunately, your piece was not selected for our upcoming volume.

While this piece may not be a fit, your future work might! Please consider submitting to us again.

Thanks,
The Editorial Board
Tir Literary Magazine  

Hamlet unravelled is a discussion that I listened to last night while working on my novella.

2/16

Southern Humanities Review - "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984"

Adroit Journal: -  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984", "Ahab in the Night", and "Agnes".

 Uncharted Magazine Cinematic Short Story Contest: "Going for the Kid"

Straylight Literary Magazine: "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

Talk Vomit: "Ahab in the Night"

 Southern Indiana Review:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

peatsmoke:  "Ahab in the Night"

SAND HILLS LITERARY MAGAZINE:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

The MacGuffin:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" .

AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought:  "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984"

Moonday Mag:  "Ahab in the Night"

Whistling Shade: "Ahab in the Night"

For Page & Screen Magazine: "Ahab in the Night" 

 Wow, six days for this rejection to arrive:

Thank you for submitting Ahab in the Moonlight to Unleash Lit.

We receive many worthy submissions, and our editorial decisions are never easy. Unfortunately, your submission was not selected, but we encourage you to consider us for future submissions.

Thank you again for your submission. We understand how much work goes into writing, and we hope you find the perfect partner for your work.

Best wishes,

Unleash Press team

 LARB Podcast: Richard Hell's 'Godlike' 

7 Short Lessons from Gabriel García Márquez  

 The Trouble with Aristophanes 

 ‘She dared to be difficult’: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think  - I did not think Morrison difficult to read, but maybe I did not read her as anything but a great writer. But the essay gave me much to thik about.

To read Morrison herself with the seriousness that she deserves requires that we account for the knot – or bind – of gender and race she shared with them. It is not an easy one to untangle. As Morrison wrote in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “one must look very closely at the black woman herself – a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification”. 

***

Morrison temperamentally disliked being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.” She often complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing, which gets read as merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses: “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.

Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contrarian politics. It was her commitment to reflecting the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” – in her own writing.

Her close friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated. Because people always looked at it through the prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon.”

Even without reading The Song of Solomon,  I found her amazing. I wonder if those who think she was some sort of charity case have read her on her terms.

 sch 2/16

 

Videos - Politics

 Not all that I watched, but all I thought worth saving.

 

Trump Says Republicans Should “Take Over” Voting | Chris CIllizza

 

sch 2/9

Videos - Film & Shakespeare & Stuff Like That

 Not all the videos I watched while sick were about history.

Not a real Trekkie, but I get sucked in anyway:

 Colm Meaney interviewed:

Shocking movies: 

(Sorry, but I did not “Eyes Wide Shut” so shocking apart from in its pointlessness.)

 

Sejanus and His Fall, and the End of the English Renaissance:

 

Musidora - French silent star

 

 

Troilus & Cressida why? Brecht!

 

 

 The Seaview:

 Crossovers:

 sch 2/9

Videos - History

 For two weeks I had little energy or appetite for writing, but watching videos takes little energy.

The Huns - genetics

 Sarah Paine: Something Huge is Happening to the Global Order:

 Comanches v. Apaches:

 What if Britain stayed out of WWI

 Austro-Hungarian Army

1066 fails

  Response to AlternateHistoryHub...

 Highland Regiments:

 Most Jacobite Town in Scotland:

 5 Vatican mysteries:

 Grumman F7F:

 Belle Gunness:

 Axe Man of New Orleans:

TR - what Trump aspires to and is too incompetent to stand the test:

Religion in the lands before America:

 sch 2/9

A Quick One

 I spent too long writing an email to my eldest sister, so I apologize for the bare bones of this post.

Yesterday, I attended my first Muncie writers group. I want to write a bit more on that than two sentences.

I talked to KH and MW yesterday. 

I have been nowhere today apart from the closest convenience store.

Hopefully, I have seen the end of one research project. I am running behind on the other. 

I worked a little on a novella. 

Too many naps today. 

Otherwise, I have been  making submissions.

 2/11

Colorado Review: “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984”

Blue Earth Review,  F(r)iction, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Review, Pithead Chapel, The Drift,  Southeast Review - “Ahab in the Moonlight.”

 

2/12

“Going for the Kid” went to Haven Spec Magazine 

Ahab in the Moonlight went to Toronto Journal, Southeast Review, The Drift, Pithead Chapel, The Los Angeles Review, The Georgia Review,  F(r)iction, Blue Earth Review, Southword, and Cover.

sch