Zeitgeist Spam

Tom Cohen on Trump

Were a malicious god to entertain herself by giving 21^st century mortals a shiny-toy word-name to chatter as distraction about while tipping points passed which rendered their doom irreversible, that word-name, self-regarding, would be “the Anthropocene.” Perhaps an update is due, in “2018,” as we pass beyond that next phase which, if only to break the spell of the A-word, we’ll call the Trumpocene? It marks an acceleration and arrival of what Anthropocene 1.0 had speculated about, largely, and seems to invert and cancel the “Anthropocene” imaginary like the Paris “accords” itself. “Trump’s” signifying value extends beyond the provincial U.S. screen, and not only because of the planet-trashing and climate denialist accelerations imposed in the face of what 2018 finds on display: super-storms wiping out coastal mega-cities, abrupt shifts in arctic ice, crashing ecosystems (reefs) popping up like whack-a-moles, not to mention the pre-hearsal of the triage of disposable populations or topographic zones, the first trickle of mass climate refugees—and, of course, the IPCC’s recently dumped up-date and panic sheet. We can’t seem to time any of this very well. What to make, then, of this sudden inversion of an “Anthropocene” imaginary culminating in the “Paris” accords, even if with fudged numbers that neither added up nor would be implemented? And, in particular, it’s total cancellation and occlusion by Trump? “A hoax,” “fake news,” deleted from Federal websites—on the contrary, doubling-down on pollutants, mega-extractivism, a carbon jouissance tipping the hallowed Stephen Hawking before death to remark Trump might single-handedly turn Earth into a bar-b-qued Venus (literally). (Brazil’s newly populist “tropical Trump” promises the same with the entire Amazon.) Of course, a bit more is at stake than a populist return to Potemkin ‘30’s fascist rhetoric going mainstream—walls, nationalisms, extermination rhetorics—or the rot of hacked democracies ill-suited for the era of climate chaos.

We must recall the hiatus of the moment, “2018,” a rough date which one can easily imagine future archivists puzzling over with facial twitches, one that will mark roughly the ground zero inversion or tipping point axis itself, arbitrarily marking off a before and after in relation to which all would be ciphered. Being abruptly beyond “tipping points” implies, of course, an irreversible acceleration of cascading feedback loops, automatized, impossible to alter. It turns out, then, not that Trump arrived as the reactionary white counter-strike to globalization, a fiat restoration to pre-constitutional monarchic and neo-feudal techno-oligarchy. More than a hint of charade attends this weird Liberace-caricature of a return of “Anthropos” himself, white, male, thieving, rapacious, dissembling, techno-eugenicist, etc., a dinosaur roar in a tarpit? Yet the Trumpocene weaponizes torrents of faux nostalgias by which “post-truth” populism’s ressentiment spirals are stoked and bot-driven. Back to Mao, back to 13^th century Russian non-sense, back to “nationalist” whatever—forming a vortex of re-active accelerations comparable to climate cascades or HFT short-circuitings. Rather, “Trump” would be the pure expression of 21^st century climate panic, and the climate autocrat to come (to divert Derrida). Trump cannot be read as a departure from some norm that will return (say, liberal democracy as pretext); rather, “he” assumes irreversibility and doubles-down, locking in winners and losers.

On the flip side of Trump’s blanket denialism in the face of raging mega-hurricanes and wiped out protectorates (Puerto Rico), a counter-logic emerged. It would be argued quietly in his efforts to repeal car emissions: yeah, climate chaos is all too real, but since the very worst outcomes are already baked in by century’s end—anyone can see this, no?—why tie ourselves up and deprive cronies of another exponential rush of power while this generation parties? This all takes place, of course, against the background of a hyper-inequality split which, with one eye on encroaching and arriving climate catastrophism, explains better why that will not return to some imagined equality pendulum swing. Trump—who sued Bill Maher for asking him to prove his father was not an Orangutan—heralds, with his white, eugenist babble, a species split being engineered by a self-designated survivor caste, one soon to be A.I. enhanced and gifted longevity, gene-edited and utterly distinct from the old iterations of Anthropos 1.0 (in need of retirement by then). Moreover, Mars would provide an escape imaginary down the road. Rather than denialism, Trump’s doubling down on accelerating extinction events is a bet on techno-evolution and the techno-eugenics that cannot, now, be stopped.

The Trumpocene appears as the next phase of climate chaos claims the peripheries and triages widening zones of disposability. The great joke of the racist populism stampede in America is the Trumpian fake-out of these “losers” (in his vocabulary), stripped of health care, herded for front-line disposability. Thus, the vertigo of Trumpism involves his inverse playbook: that is, not of denying but assuming and hastening irreversibility—this fold, now, from which extinction logics are locked in. It also assumes, in Roy Cohn fashion, a de facto “politics” of managed extinctions which arrives with the passage of “tipping points.” This vertigo has its amusements, as warring media-ecologies decouple from reference or “fact.” With its digitally engineered neural white-outs, “post-truth” screens and troll-farms--generating re-active spirals--the Trumpocene puts on display the “.0001 %’s” passive techno-eugenicist agenda. Temporalities mutate once tipping points pass—as Trump’s transportation flacks argued to the courts. Rather than the archaism of possessing an open or progressive future pinned to the “arrow of time,” the latter is calculably curtailed, said arrow boomerangs, and it now becomes a matter of “sustaining” or delaying the retirement of an epochal regime of life-forms.  

The current geo-political chaos and self-gaming of financial markets mimics that, too, of a system passing from entropy into a self-accelerating vortex. This inspires some to view Trump’s disruption as an algorithm or negative “singularity” itself. Perhaps “the Anthropocene” will come to name not a geological era among others but the fifteen or so years that Anthropocene Talk (Jedediah Purdy) flourished, largely, as a consolatory distraction for those on watch while said tipping points passed. No wonder Hollywood has switched from post-Apocalyptic survival products to extinction mise en scenes, in particular those in which viewers now identify not with survivalists but—acknowledging the dead-end--for the replacements (cyborgs, apes, de-extincted dinosaurs. . .). An unsubtle nudge and opiate from corporate Hollywood. Thus the internet pleads: Thanos did nothing wrong! It is the CGI Hollywood super-heroes who battle to preserve an extinction economy’s doomed status quo of identificatory and mimetic spells.

Anthropos, if he ever existed as such and isn’t just our conjured excuse, seems in retrospect less the educated male citizen Aristotle conjured than a shape-shifting con-man, a ghost algorithm whose idea of mastery would be to direct and survive his own snuff film. That assumes that Mars is accommodating and that the driver of techno-eugenics—A.I.—doesn’t get sick of the whole game and pull a Thanos. Even so, there is something grotesque in the version chosen for this spectral restoration, Trump—as if, again, an eye-rolling and malicious god were mocking us. This may prove hard to explain when the aliens arrive to sift through and analyze the “geological” dust and data. 

Re the shooting in Thousand Oaks: America is (almost) Great Again! 307 Mass Shootings in 2018!! But since this is the 313th day of the year, people, you are falling behind!! C'mon, America, don't be almost Great!!

To see this as a spreadsheet you can expand go to Gun Violence Archive and click on "export as csv"

Remember, civilization just means people live in cities, not that they are somehow morally improved, which is what civilized is usually taken to mean. There are no civilizations on earth in that latter sense. If there were, this wouldn't be happening.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN?

The Mediterranean Sea crossing is now deadlier than ever. One out of every 267 migrants crossing the sea died in 2015 and by 2017 the number had risen to one out of every 57 – and according to UNHCR between January to June of this year, one out of every 18 migrants have died attempting the crossing. While most of the focus has been on the decreasing numbers of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean, the images of drowned families that brought worldwide outrage in 2015 continue to be a reality on our shores. As recently as October 28^th, the lifeless bodies of two children were found off the coast of Spain. So what is happening in the Mediterranean? Below we take a quick snapshot of the emerging trends and current climate of migration across the Mediterranean.

There have been increasing difficulties for non-governmental organisations and civil society organisations trying to operate search and rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean. SAR has become progressively politicised in recent years and active collaborations between Southern European countries and North African governments, administrative and bureaucratic constraints, as well as a reluctance to allow vessels to dock at ports are common obstacles found among SAR organisations.

In June of this year, the boat Aquarius became stranded at sea for over two days after both Malta and Italy refused to let the vessel, carrying 630 people on board, dock and disembark. In August, Diciotti – the Italian coast guard ship – was also strandedat sea for five days after the Italian authorities initially refused to allow it to disembark. In late September, the Aquarius – by this time the last private rescue ship in the Mediterranean – was stripped of its Panamanian flag following months of EU pressure.

Of the three main routes that migrants usually take, the Central Mediterranean Route (CMR) has been the deadliest this year, with 1,267 reported deaths so far. People attempt this crossing by departing from Libya, where over 1.3 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. According to the UNHCR, migrants and refugee in Libya are in unsafe living conditions, suffering, with little or no access to health care, safe drinking water, shelter and food. As a result, people arrive in Europe extremely weak and in poor health conditions, something that has significantly increased in recent months. For 2018, on the other hand, the Eastern and Western Mediterranean routes have a reported death toll of 564 and 156, respectively, with the Western Mediterranean Route (WMR) becoming the most popular among refugees and migrants.

In addition to the above a new trend is emerging in the absence of adequate SAR presence at sea. As described by the mayor of Lampedusa in a recent interview, 2018 has seen an increase in the number of vessels arriving directly on European soil (such as in Lampedusa, Sicily and Malta), having made the crossing from Libya undetected and unsupported. These ‘ghost boat’ arrivals raise many concerns both from a humanitarian and security perspective; the physical condition of passengers having made this journey is significantly deteriorated and there is an increased likelihood that these passengers will not be identified and processed properly before disappearing on land (having not gone through the disembarkation procedures typical of the SAR vessels). The ‘ghost boats’ being reported show a reduction in numbers on board (from approximately 100-200 per boat to as few as 15 on smaller vessels) also points to a real concern that larger vessels are simply not making it this far and that people are being lost at sea by the hundreds.

Migrants driven by, among other things, violence, natural disasters, and political and socioeconomic instability, continue to attempt the crossing daily, facing dire obstacles throughout the journey. With no search and rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean, death toll numbers are only going to increase. The UNHCR and IOM have called on European States to strengthen refugee access to protection and to ensure there is a consistent and predictable approach to SAR. Despite migration being a top priority in the European policy spectrum, most of the focus seems to be on building stronger border enforcement measures.

MOAS was the first civil society organization to provide Search and Rescue services for migrants in the Mediterranean. Always abiding by both International Maritime Law and jurisdictional guidelines and regulations, MOAS rescued over 40,000 children, women and men during its four years in the Mediterranean and welcomed new SAR NGOs as they arrived. MOAS strongly believes in the need to protect the SAR space and condemns modern attempts to criminalise the rescuer, both for the purpose of saving lives as well as to increase transparency, accountability and responsibility at sea.

With the Noose Around My Neck 119

The Unknown Crying Man House Museum was created by the artist following his fascination with one of the fifty-two men arrested for “debauchery” aboard a floating nightclub in Cairo in 2001, the man photographed crying into a white cloth he was using to cover his face, and whose photo has become a symbol of LGBTQ+ oppression in Egypt. In Khaled’s museum, the artist imagines a home the Crying Man may have taken refuge in after the trial, self-exiling to Istanbul. One photograph from the Crying Man’s collection, “on loan” to the gallery, depicts an unpopulated coastal scene where two plastic chairs are stacked on top of each other. Titled Perfect Lovers (Alexandria), the chairs reference Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s synchronized clocks — but I like the question, because it makes me think ... where could the revisionist come from? Intuition tells me that the revisionist could have been born in one of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in the Great Basin Desert out in northwestern Utah. Since they’re composed of four concrete cylinders that are 18 feet in length and 9 feet in diameter and arranged in an open cross format and aligned to frame the sun on the horizon during the summer and winter solstices I’m guessing the revisionist was born on the ... summer solstice. It had to be the summer solstice. Or was it the winter solstice? Maybe it was the winter solstice ... In 2018 Dia acquired Sun Tunnels with support from Holt-Smithson Foundation. Dia relies on your help to preserve the artwork for all of us now and for future generations. Please leave Sun Tunnels and the natural environment exactly as you found it. Visitors must “leave no trace” at the site. Carry out any waste with you. Do not tamper with the artwork, make fire pits, or trample vegetation. I do not mean deceitful but not navigable; for example, if I perceived things in the same way as a praying mantis, my perception would not be misleading, but my body ... whoa. (In this sense, some forms of madness could be traced back to the onset of an alien perceptual apparatus, or be the result of a forcing to behave in ways extraneous to the body, as happens to the elephants of commercial circuses). But since everything is connected to all the others, the ruin ends up involving the revisionist. Even though money and politics are not born with us, and it seems impossible to question them. I mean, my piano teacher has been teaching for a long time, maybe for fifty years. To keep time, to go in time, you have to dedicate yourself to every joke, without rushing to get to the end. Next week I will hold a writing seminar in a prison where hundreds of women are being held, themselves victims of crime, many of them mothers. In the period following my mother’s death, I often dreamed of it. In one case, for example, I had to remember to ask the right question to the right person to access the next phase of the trip. But it turns out that there’s a sharp difference between the way logic describes hyperobjects, and the way math does, and I’m with the math. Like every energy-matter state in the universe has a specific frequency range. There are no transparent oceans. There are as it were green ones, yellow ones, blue ones ... and photographs. Mixing and overlaying topographical maps with images of meat,

            trying to face the city at the bottom of the sea,

            the city of dead reefs and jellyfish,

            but instead seeing the city in the sky, 

            I, the Monkey King, stole in here —

            and now I must steal away.

 

            Think of a snake and it will be a poison snake,

            as if there were no snakes but poison snakes;

            think of a shark and it will be a man-eating shark,

            as if the whole world were Disney.

 

            In traditional places there are as many ghosts as people,

            or even more ghosts than people, or even

            ghosts and no people.

            I hear someone talking and know that he’s a ghost,

            but I don’t want to mention it.

 

            The Warring States ended in 221 BCE.

 

            “The sun in the meridian may be the sun in decline,” said Huizi.

 

            It adds to the light from eyes an extra light.

            That is also true of emerald light.

            But red light better suits those with a taste for mythology.

            As reflected light it is often paler than the light from a rhodochrosite.

            Such a red light might fall on a bulky, space-suited figure.

But because I am not originally from Los Angeles, or even California, I do not know the names of most trees. Everything feels spidery and shaggy here, or toothy and pointy. And the green is a kind of grayish green. The trees are turning brown fast, leaving mounds of dead leaves piled up between parked cars. These piles are taller than most urban animals. Does the woodpecker ever come back around and gently, tenderly return an insect? Who can explain the logic of a dream? I am at a boba shop that offers mouth-watering flavors. I can look up and see Mount Baldy. The Tongva call it Yoát, or Joat, meaning snow, and the top still freezes over in the winter. Walking up there, at least for now, you can be in a whole other season. Not far away, if you listen closely you can hear parrots singing. If you feel closely, the singing become burning, the burning becomes water filling the cracks, and the water becomes a mass, and the mass becomes hollow. Then the house sold, was fixed up, the possible gangster and the other people moved out, and the homeless man disappeared. Which is to say I managed to fight of a sudden panic attack this morning by feeling the sensations and breathing. Could be the assassination of the two black people at Kroger’s by the guy who couldn’t get into the black church, could be the pipe bomber, could be the synagogue shooting, could be the photos of all the ribs of the starving Yemenis, could be Trump saying what me worry, could be none of those things. The visible merges with the invisible, all while hurtling forward as an unclassifiable entity. Since there exists little if any vocabulary for the seeming riddle posed by internal technology, the mind, the construction company ended up finding 411 graves, and kept all of those remains in a trailer for a long time. Or come by my place and we’ll hike over a couple blocks to Palisades del Rey, an old subdivision condemned in the ‘60s for being due west of LAX — but breaking in is easy, and the old streets are still there with the jets going 20 feet above, and there are hundreds of endangered El Segundo Blue Butterflies. Pythagoras appears. This enfolding continues the work of thresholding, extending the domain of the animate into all that can be held in the hand, eye or mind. As for the completely human and dandiacal gland, trans-corporeal and trans-historical, in the form of the “quick built” (suddenly appearing?) moon: David Hume is depicted as wearing a rather curious hat. Variously described by philosophy portraiture hat scholars as a “salmon-coloured turban” and “a scholar’s cap of rich but well-worn velvet,” it is an amorphous object, and a powerful lure for interpretation, in that it shows us as picture-viewers what we want to see. In contrast with Ramsay’s later, more famous portrait of Hume (dating from 1766), Hume is not wearing his customary wig; we might read this as meaning that he has replaced the formal sign of the public disputer with something in which we catch the philosopher at home, at leisure; we might also read it as a signifier of eighteenth-century Orientalism that saw the trappings of Eastern everyday life (the turban or various kinds of head-wrap) as fodder for an elaborate Western dressing-up game of the public home life. This is the kind of hat described in the last section of Lila Matsumoto’s Soft Troika as “those hats worn by Enlightenment philosophers,” “like fezes but more squat [...] sybarites often wear them.” Why would these hats be favoured by sybarites? Because of their softness against the head? “High jinks in the cathedral” is preceded by an image of a room in a museum or library with study tables and books on the wall and a display piece, perhaps the skeleton of an animal set up for display. What do these three objects have to do with one another? “Some of these Computer Dances have been used and more may be used as scores for dance.” My own early inclination was to read them as rivers (the u-shaped meander at the bottom right reminded me of the Thames as it flows around the Isle of Dogs), and rivers can indeed be walled off to prevent flooding. At the middle bottom the current loops back over itself a couple of times, while inside the upper enclosure there is not much current at all — the movement is often broken by patches of white space or horizontal hatching. Are we looking down on the jammed motorways of a captive population? Are blood cells or bacteria teeming through an artificial environment in a lab? “Overtures end, sometimes preceding no other performance.”

            At which point an overall colour emerges of green, or red — a          

            pattern transforms itself, and not always within the same logical

            framework of its creation — definition is the cause of this loop, is

            the loop itself, and appears [...] liquid, sometimes as an oil, perhaps

            spreading out in a reflective sheen, or acting as a solvent,

            a shadowpuppet, with a human’s hands casting the shadow

            of a slobbering wolfish dog against a blue wall.

One way to understand this would be to wonder how Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience would read if his distinctions between the two states were collapsed into a general state of confusion and doubt.

            We escape by a stream, we swim backwards

            We carry baskets on our shoulders full of herb books

The bulk of the piece is a set of notes on the Brontë sisters’ elaborately imagined world of Gondal, which took poetic form in their Gondal poems. The parallels between paracosms, detailed imaginary worlds, and any conception of a State become the peak of this theoretical inquiry into what to make of the bullshit that is going on all over the world right now. The task of a poem then is to consciously tease out how much of these fictions we really require, and how much causes us to turn our world, the only place we could really find our common rest, into hell. YouTube has lots of ASMR videos. Which is to say that “At every cleaving, the edges are cauterized. This results in an incremental, though infinitesimal, loss of mass.”

import time

import os

import re

import random

import argparse

import urllib

import itertools

import bs4

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import multiprocessing

from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool

genre_list = [‘portrait’, ‘landscape’, ‘genre-painting’, ‘abstract’, ‘religious-painting’,

              ‘cityscape’, ‘sketch-and-study’, ‘figurative’, ‘illustration’, ‘still-life’,

              ‘design’, ‘nude-painting-nu’, ‘mythological-painting’, ‘marina’, ‘animal-painting’,

              ‘flower-painting’, ‘self-portrait’, ‘installation’, ‘photo’, ‘allegorical-painting’,

              ‘history-painting’, ‘interior’, ‘literary-painting’, ‘poster’, ‘caricature’,

              ‘battle-painting’, ‘wildlife-painting’, ‘cloudscape’, ‘miniature’, ‘veduta’,

              ‘yakusha-e’, ‘calligraphy’, ‘graffiti’, ‘tessellation’, ‘capriccio’, ‘advertisement’,

              ‘bird-and-flower-painting’, ‘performance’, ‘bijinga’, ‘pastorale’, ‘trompe-loeil’,

              ‘vanitas’, ‘shan-shui’, ‘tapestry’, ‘mosaic’, ‘quadratura’, ‘panorama’, ‘architecture’]

style_list = [‘impressionism’, ‘realism’, ‘romanticism’, ‘expressionism’,

            ‘post-impressionism’, ‘surrealism’, ‘art-nouveau’, ‘baroque’,

            ‘symbolism’, ‘abstract-expressionism’, ‘na-ve-art-primitivism’,

            ‘neoclassicism’, ‘cubism’, ‘rococo’, ‘northern-renaissance’,

            ‘pop-art’, ‘minimalism’, ‘abstract-art’, ‘art-informel’, ‘ukiyo-e’,

            ‘conceptual-art’, ‘color-field-painting’, ‘high-renaissance’,

            ‘mannerism-late-renaissance’, ‘neo-expressionism’, ‘early-renaissance’,

            ‘magic-realism’, ‘academicism’, ‘op-art’, ‘lyrical-abstraction’,

            ‘contemporary-realism’, ‘art-deco’, ‘fauvism’, ‘concretism’,

            ‘ink-and-wash-painting’, ‘post-minimalism’, ‘social-realism’,

            ‘hard-edge-painting’, ‘neo-romanticism’, ‘tachisme’, ‘pointillism’,

            ‘socialist-realism’, ‘neo-pop-art’]

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()

parser.add_argument(“--genre”, help=“which genre to scrape”, choices=genre_list, default=None)

parser.add_argument(“--style”, help=“which style to scrape”, choices=style_list, default=None)

parser.add_argument(“--num_pages”, type=int, help=“number of pages to scrape (leave blank to download all of them)”, default=1000)

parser.add_argument(“--output_dir”, help=“where to put output files”)

num_downloaded = 0

num_images = 0

def get_painting_list(count, typep, searchword):

    try:

        time.sleep(3.0*random.random())  # random sleep to decrease concurrence of requests

        url = “https://www.wikiart.org/en/paintings-by-%s/%s/%d”%(typep, searchword, count)

        soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib.request.urlopen(url), “lxml”)

        regex = r’https?://uploads[0-9]+[^/\s]+/\S+\.jpg’

        url_list = re.findall(regex, str(soup.html()))

        count += len(url_list)

        return url_list

    except Exception as e:

        print(‘failed to scrape %s’%url, e)

def downloader(link, genre, output_dir):

    global num_downloaded, num_images

    item, file = link

    filepath = file.split(‘/’)

    #savepath = ‘%s/%s/%d_%s’ % (output_dir, genre, item, filepath[-1])

    savepath = ‘%s/%s/%s’ % (output_dir, genre, filepath[-1])   

    try:

        time.sleep(0.2)  # try not to get a 403

        urllib.request.urlretrieve(file, savepath)

        num_downloaded += 1

        if num_downloaded % 100 == 0:

            print(‘downloaded number %d / %d...’ % (num_downloaded, num_images))

    except Exception as e:

        print(“failed downloading “ + str(file), e)

def main(typep, searchword, num_pages, output_dir):

    global num_images

    print(‘gathering links to images... this may take a few minutes’)

    threadpool = Pool(multiprocessing.cpu_count()-1)

    numbers = list(range(1, num_pages))

    wikiart_pages = threadpool.starmap(get_painting_list, zip(numbers, itertools.repeat(typep), itertools.repeat(searchword)))

    threadpool.close()

    threadpool.join()

    pages = [page for page in wikiart_pages if page ]

    items = [item for sublist in pages for item in sublist]

    items = list(set(items))  # get rid of duplicates

    num_images = len(items)

    if not os.path.isdir(‘%s/%s’%(output_dir, searchword)):

        os.mkdir(‘%s/%s’%(output_dir, searchword))

    print(‘attempting to download %d images’%num_images)

    threadpool = Pool(multiprocessing.cpu_count()-1)

    threadpool.starmap(downloader, zip(enumerate(items), itertools.repeat(searchword), itertools.repeat(output_dir)))

    threadpool.close   

    threadpool.close()

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:

    args = parser.parse_args()

    searchword, typep = (args.genre, ‘genre’) if args.genre is not None else (args.style, ‘style’)

    num_pages = args.num_pages

    output_dir = args.output_dir

    main(typep, searchword, num_pages, output_dir)

with 20 lb brown rice

20 lb whole wheat flour

10 lb cornmeal

10 lb good beans — kidney or soy

5 lb sea salt

2 qts good oil

dried fruit and nuts

add nutrients and a sense of luxury

to this diet, a squash or coconut

siphoned via 42 Raptor engines, all burning liquid oxygen and dense methane in carbon fibre composites, then sweating DNA into an AdSense dustpan — and, by googling their services, you agree to these terms. And so, in the absence of [fuck. This is where the creature fell asleep on the section sign. He made a whole page of roerhr/raw/r/ish SOSes. Fuck. Sorry. Fuck] And the ants. I smell, think, they’ve found the motherdough. And yet, as I say (and I realize even now that I am perhaps repeating myself) that isn’t quite how it doesn’t proceeds to unfurl. Which is why Police is strikingly attentive to questions of scale and the modalities through which political terror operates. Entries on police sexual violence and rape, for example, offer conceptual clarity about the articulations of race, gender, space, and class power. Following the lead of Andrea Ritchie and others, the authors describe how policing is animated by a “patriarchal logic,” one which naturalizes rape, murder, and the disappearance of Black and Indigenous women. Patriarchy and sexual violence are not simply about the abuse of power, they argue, but intrinsic to the very functioning of police. The guide identifies how violent masculinity informs the routine activities of policing — like wearing a badge, walking with a police dog, or engaging in the patrol of poor, Black, Brown, Native, LGBTQI+, and working-class communities. In a standout entry on K-9, based on research for Wall’s forthcoming book, they describe “animalized police terror” as an understudied facet of policing. Correia and Wall locate the geographical origins of this form of terror in New York City, where K-9s have been used since the early twentieth century to protect private property and reproduce the relations of class power. In turn, how these instruments of state terror produce disfiguring damages on its victims, who describe the experience as being “eaten alive.” I mean,

            How do I unfuck my habitat if I dwell inside

            the crumbling curve of a large intestine?

 

            A exhausted himself arranging sunflowers.

            B drank too much hot water.

 

            C suffered a heart attack passing a toilet roll to his comrade.

            D lost his breath while playing hide-and-seek.

 

            E was poisoned from the ink in the newspapers.

            F stared too long at the air.

 

            [...]

 

            N lost balance and fell off the bench.

            O laughed.

 

            P died after squeezing pimples on his arms.

            Q simply failed to wake up.

 

                        When we open the casings we discover forks, engine oil, pulmonary

                                    indications, crushed

                        buttons.

                        offal, ossicle, epidermal crumbs [...] we will

                        open the casing 

            Untitled Gelatin

            Silver Print

            On Paper On
            Stucco On Canvas
            On Concrete

            Apotheosis:

 

                        Anonymous fragment.  Frag 
                        Ment.

 

                        Figure 150, Figure 151:
                       

            Harp

            Harp 
            With Bridge                Harp 
            Lute

            One-key 
            Xylophone 
            Slit

            Gong 
            Trumpet                      Gong
            Gong 

            Mallet 
            Whistle 
            Rattle

            Drum

You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. You wouldn’t call it an illness; why not? Forget all that, the world says. Don’t wear sunglasses in the house, the world says. This makes the first person singular a symbol for something. Shit is fucked up and gorgeous, which is, according to Robin Coste Lewis, a better translation than all life is suffering. It is 130 pages, with bibliography, 17-page index and Utopia Address Book. Really, there is so much pleasure in this book. I was in such a warm buzzy space reading it, especially after watching a seagull stand on top of another seagull. But there were military jets flying back and forth over the coast from Eglin Air Force Base, one of the largest bombing and training ranges in the US. The jets were the same color as the pelicans. Falafel is misspelled. Did you know a nuclear reactor’s efficiency is 1%? “So great was our famine, that a Savage we slew, and buried, the poorer sort tooke him up againe and eat him ... boyled and stewed with roots and herbs: And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne ... now whether shee was better roasted, boyled or carbonado’d, I know not, but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of. This was that time, which still to this day we called the starving time ...” No wonder the first president was in possession of an awful mouth. Abscesses festered; decay triumphed. At age 24, the first extraction. Twenty years later, incisors, canines or cuspids were gone. As he savored the gnarly taste of immortality, the rosy-cheeked progenitor was “indisposed with an aching tooth and swelled and inflamed gums;” dentures mauling the gums. When he spoke these words: “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States,” there was only one tooth in the foul mouth. As words billowed out of the acrid cavity, the fetor wafted, thick enough to see. It should have choked frogs; it should have made men sputter, but instead, swarming bots swallowed the miasma and spewed out sulfuric brimstone, the thickening substance gumming nation. Meanwhile, Father America worried about derisory sniggers about the slave teeth now rooted in his mouth. Then comes the Donner party: a chorus of bearded beings, owls mounted on monstrous snakes slithering through and swallowing up wel mel ti homeland in the winter of 1846-47. Like in Jamestown, the white hooters survived by feasting on human flesh. The first one to be devoured was Antonio, the Mexican. The next ones consumed were Eema Ochej and Queyuen, two Miwok Cosumne guides who tried to escape the feeding frenzy but were eaten nonetheless. So, the West was won. Our forebears ate the mother, feasted on Indian, savored the wife, spooned sugar from the skulls of Chinese skeletons. So why do white women vote overwhelmingly for Trump? Researchers have known about the Slow One, also called the Niland Geyser, since the 1950s. It formed when earthquakes caused deep cracks underground that allowed gases to move upward and escape at the surface, causing bubbling mud pools, the Los Angeles Times reported. Sometime in the last few years the Slow One started moving, first 60 feet over a few months and then 60 feet in one day. Now it’s approaching some railroad tracks. Which reminds me, the tracks remind me, they remind me of a Steven Seagal movie in which a train was going over a bridge, maybe it was in the Alps, anyway we were enrolled in a class held across a bridge. A bridge transformed by a sequence of bridges constructed with concrete and wood. An unfinished twine weaving of bridges and steps over invisible canals. No bike ramp. Lacking maintenance. A Chutes and Ladders type of bridge with no chutes and no ladders. A bridge I would have to jump from one side of to the next. A bridge with discreet passageways for those who need to break between leaps. The class we attended focused on radical movements and mobilization. At some point the poet Monica Hand shares her experience in previous movements — the experience of taking on leadership roles and knowing when to stand amongst the congregation. The instructor is pleased with her contribution. I stare. Does she know? Does she know that she’s ... in the dream I am reaching for her hand, grappling with and how should I confide to her. “I have to tell you something. After class.” Everyone in class stares at me confused. The instructor looks concerned. The bridge over the invisible canal shifts and I am now underneath and between a stop on the bridge. Here, there is a little shop with hand-painted recyclable cups and compose friendly spoons. A sign at its entrance reads: Do Not Take Photos. I order a German sausage and Jamaican coco bread, but a petite Japanese girl won’t serve me. I’ve lost the opportunity to tell Monica what I believe she desperately needs to know. I dreamt about my father after he died, too. I was never sure if I should tell him, so I just said things like, “Dad, uh ... why don’t you sit down?” And he said, “Son, listen carefully:

            metal dust or filings     fine sand

            shattered glass    materials for polishing

            hard gravelly substances

            stick in the tip of a pen and bend

            a small amount of corrosive acid    lacquer

            linseed oil    regular spit

            knotted balls of human hair

            threads    dead insects

            a fistful of hard grains such as rice or wheat

            sawdust or hair

            rubber crumbs from old rubber bands

            or erasers

            when the machine is paused you can make a

            small hole in the fuel line

            cover it with wax

            a small cut in the wire insulation

            loosen or remove rings and screw nuts

            press in some grease    spill dust and dirt

            make a small hole in the tank

            as the engine starts up the wax will

            melt    as it burns with the gas

            a sticky goo forms and spreads

            as it swells the steam is blocked

            the air bubbles    the circulation    it

            will need disassembling and

            repair    soft scraped finishes

            engines will gradually swell and

            choke    break   burn  and

            always embrace things, people earth

            sky stars, as I do, freely and with

            the appropriate sense of space. That

            is your inclination, known in the heavens

            and you should follow it to hell, if

            necessary, which I doubt.       

                                    Go back to sleep now

                        and I may leave a tiny poem

            in that brain of yours as my farewell.”

[Note: Sources: Kaitlyn A. Kramer, “I want you to know that I am hiding something from you”, at BOMB, 25 Oct 018 (re Mahmoud Kahled: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you at Helena Anrather gallery in New York); Miranda Mellis, quoted in Elisabetta Rizzo, “‘Being a writer means reacting’. Interview with Miranda Mellis” (tr. Google), at Altri Animali, 21 Oct 018; “Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels”, at Dia:; Miranda Mellis, quoted in Elisabetta Rizzo, “‘Being a writer means reacting’. Interview with Miranda Mellis” (tr. Google), at Altri Animali, 21 Oct 018; Timothy Morton, “New Idea about Hyperobjects!”, at Ecology without Nature, 22 Oct 018; blurb for Tomoyuki Koseko, Mimetic Maps, at shashasha; Xi Chuan, “Eight Fragments”, “Abstruse Thoughts at the Panjiayuan Antiques Market” (tr. Lucas Klein), at The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, Oct 018; Jackson Mac Low, “2nd Light Poem for Diane Wakoski – 10 June 1962”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Diane Wakoski: Six new poems from LADY OF LIGHT, following an older ‘Light Poem’ by Jackson Mac Low”, at Poems and Poetics, 26 Oct 018; JBR; Kenji Liu, Brent Armendinger, Steve Abee, Jessica Ceballos y Campbell, Eric Howard, quoted in Sesshu Foster, “Los Angeles, City of Poets”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 Oct 018; JBR; Will Alexander, Randy Cauthen, quoted in Sesshu Foster, “Los Angeles, City of Poets”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 Oct 018; Arul Benito Gerard, “Letters Against the Firmament by Sean Bonney (Enitharmon, 2015)”, Ellen Dillon, “3 Summers by Lisa Robertson (Coach House Books, 2016)”, Linda Kemp, and Calum Gardner, quoted in Gardner’s “Lease Prise Redux by Linda Kemp (Materials Press, 2016)”, Calum Gardner, and Lila Matsumoto, quoted in Gardner’s “Soft Troika by Lila Matsumoto (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2016)”, matt martin, “Computer Dances by Jennifer Pike Cobbing (Veer, 2017)”, Mike Saunders, and Iain Morrison, quoted in Morrison’s “Dark Pool Ripple by Mike Saunders (Lighthouse Press, 2016)”, Joseph Persad, “Common Rest by Holly Pester et al. (Test Centre, 2016)”, Sarah Hayden, quoted in Mike Saunders, “Turnpikes by Sarah Hayden (Sad Press, 2017)”, at Hix Eros 8; Robbie Barratt, “Modified implementation of DCGAN focused on generative art. Includes pre-trained models for landscapes, nude-portraits, and others”, at GitHub (see Zachary Small, “Christie’s Sells ‘AI-Generated’ Art for $432,500 As Controversy Swirls Over Creators’ Use of Copied Code”, at Hyperallergic, 29 Oct 018); Diane Di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #3, at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, 3 Oct 017; Juha Virtanen, quoted in Calum Gardner, “‘Enhanced Doom Gaming Engine’ by Juha Virtanen”, and Sarah Hayden, “‘A Lecture (2)’”, at Hix Eros 8; JBR; Jordan T Camp, review of David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide, at Society and Space, 30 Oct 018; JBR; Nicole Steinberg, “Gag Me”, at Dusie, 30 Oct 018; Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, “Official causes of death in a Chinese prison”, quoted in Robert Kiely, “Hula Hooping by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming”, Frances Kruk, quoted in Colin Lee Marshall, “lo-fi frags in-progress by Frances Kruk (Veer, 2015)”, at Hix Eros 7; Robin Coste Lewis, “Invocation: Blessing the Boat”, in Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems; Claudia Rankine, Citizen, quoted in Amy De’Ath, “Against Objectivism: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Nick Sturm, “Utopia: Review”, at Tender Buttons Press; JBR; Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn, “Sticky Notes, Part B (4–17)”, at e-flux 94; JBR; Laura Geggel, “A Gurgling Mud Pool Is Creeping Across Southern California Like a Geologic Poltergeist”, at Live Science, 2 Nov 018; JBR; Latasha N Nevada Diggs, “ORS Poetica (now infused with ghee…)”, at Harriet, 18 Apr 017; JBR; Ida Börjel, quoted in “Two Poets — Ida Börjel & Amiri Baraka”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 4 Nov 016; Frank O’Hara, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”, at Robert Ronnow Poetry]

Bernadette Mayer, "The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica" (Corina Copp told Diana Hamilton that Dorothea Lasky asked Mayer about the poem and Mayer said: “it started because I had a panic attack, and didn't know how to keep going." I can relate)

 

 

Be strong Bernadette

Nobody will ever know

I came here for a reason

Perhaps there is a life here

Of not being afraid of your own heart beating

Do not be afraid of your own heart beating

Look at very small things with your eyes

& stay warm

Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside

There is great shame for the world in knowing

You may have gone this far

Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much

Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently

You have nothing more to teach

Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence

& then only special childish laughter to be shown

& no more lies no more

Not to find you no

More coming back & more returning

Southern journey

Small things & not my own debris

Something to fight against

& we are all very fluent about ourselves

Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce

There's not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them:

I had written: "the man who sewed his soles back on his feet"

And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do

               to me

       if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if

       the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I

       covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned

If I suffered what else could I do

David Byrd, “Alcove” (n.d.), oil on canvas, 28 x 34 inches (reposted from Hyperallergic)

Donald Trump, you are not welcome in my part of San Diego either - even if you do what Bend the Arc asks you to [which I now see you are not doing]. Because you won't mean it. You are a POS. And everyone who still supports you is, too.

Letter to President Trump from Pittsburgh Jewish Leaders

Bend The Arc Bend The Arc: Pittsburgh

We are the Pittsburgh affiliate of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice.

Website

President Trump:

Yesterday, a gunman slaughtered 11 Americans during Shabbat morning services. We mourn with the victims’ families and pray for the wounded. Here in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, we express gratitude for the first responders and for the outpouring of support from our neighbors near and far. We are committed to healing as a community while we recommit ourselves to repairing our nation.

For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.  

President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism.

Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted.  You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.  

President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities.

The murderer’s last public statement invoked the compassionate work of the Jewish refugee service HIAS at the end of a week in which you spread lies and sowed fear about migrant families in Central America. He killed Jews in order to undermine the efforts of all those who find shared humanity with immigrants and refugees.

President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your assault on immigrants and refugees.

The Torah teaches that every human being is made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

This means all of us.

In our neighbors, Americans, and people worldwide who have reached out to give our community strength, there we find the image of God.  While we cannot speak for all Pittsburghers, or even all Jewish Pittsburghers, we know we speak for a diverse and unified group when we say:

President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.

Signed,

Bend the Arc: Pittsburgh Steering Committee

I guess America is great again

Hmmm ... a guy who walks into a market and kills two black people because he couldn't break into a black church and kill black people there, then a guy who sends pipe bombs to people who criticize Trump, and now a guy who shoots up a synagogue ... hmmmmm ... all in how many days? We're on a roll. Go for it, people! Let's see how great we can get! [And to Tom Wolf, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who just said "These senseless acts of violence are not who we are as Americans" ... well, Tom, yes it is.] 

Federal judge to order Ga. counties to stop absentee ballot rejections (reposted from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

The implementation of the injunction — which U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May plans to file Thursday — could complicate the work of election officials statewide, requiring the review of hundreds or thousands of ballot signatures with less than two weeks until Election Day. But civil rights groups whose lawsuits led to May’s decision have already declared victory in the battle, just one of many voting rights skirmishes to surface in what’s become a contentious Georgia election season.

“We are pleased that the court has enforced the due process guarantees of the U.S. Constitution,” said Sean Young, legal director of Georgia’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Today’s ruling is a victory for democracy and for every absentee voter in the state of Georgia.”

May submitted her “proposed injunction” on Wednesday in response to two different lawsuits challenging how Georgia evaluates mail-in absentee ballots and applications. She gave the Secretary of State’s Office and other parties involved in the litigation until noon Thursday to file responses to her proposal.

But she wrote that objections should be confined to whether or not any of the “language is confusing or will be unworkable for the implementing officials.” She stressed that she had made the decision to file the injunction and it was not not an issue attorneys should try to argue further in their written responses.

As presented Wednesday, the injunction would include ordering Secretary of State Brian Kemp and his office to tell local elections officials to make every effort to count legitimate mail-in votes. His office must communicate the following to local election offices:

• They “shall not reject any absentee ballots due to an alleged signature mismatch.” Instead, ballots should be marked provisional and would-be voters given “pre-rejection notice and an opportunity to resolve the alleged signature discrepancy.”

• Voters rejected using the aforementioned process shall have the right to appeal.

• Any absentee ballot applications where a signature mismatch is suspected also should not be rejected. Officials should instead “provide a provisional absentee ballot to the absentee voter along with information as to the process that will be followed in reviewing the provisional ballot.”

The change would apply to all absentee ballots and applications “submitted in this current election,” May’s proposal said — meaning it would apply to would-be mail-in voters that have already been rejected.

The contest over absentee ballots is being waged amid several other Georgia voting rights battles, all of which have taken greater prominence as Kemp remains in office while running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams. Voting and civil rights advocates have accused Kemp of voter suppression and the state has been thrust into the national spotlight over issues of voter access.

A report by the Associated Press earlier this month revealed that tens of thousands of potential Georgia voters were in limbo due to the state’s controversial “exact match” law, which requires voter information — including signatures — to match driver’s licenses, state ID cards or Social Security records.

Voters whose statuses are pending because of the exact match law, however, can still vote in November’s election if they present valid ID.

May’s order follows a Tuesday federal court hearing regarding motions submitted in a pair of lawsuits filed against Kemp and the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections. The order mirrors concessions sought in an Oct. 17 restraining order request filed in the suit led by the ACLU.

On Oct. 19, a preliminary injunction of much wider scope was requested in a separate suit led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Coalition for Good Governance. The order May proposed Wednesday applies in that lawsuit, but she has not ruled on the broader claims, which cover voters rejected for reasons other than signature mismatches.

A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office deferred comment Wednesday to state Attorney General Chris Carr’s office. Carr’s spokeswoman said the office could not comment on pending litigation.

A statement from Gwinnett — which was included in the lawsuits because it has rejected absentee ballots at a much higher rate than other counties — said local officials were reviewing the injunction order and would “provide its comments to the Court, as directed, by noon tomorrow.”

During Tuesday’s hearing, attorneys representing the defendants argued an injunction like the one proposed would add undue stress to already overworked elections officials.

“It’s too late for the plaintiffs to come now and ask this court to fundamentally alter the process,” Russell Willard, who was representing Kemp, said in court.

Bryan Tyson, an attorney representing Gwinnett, brought up another potential hurdle to meeting a court order. He said the county had every intention to follow the court’s directions, but that local election officials are technically required to conduct elections according to written state law.

A federal judge intends to issue an injunction barring Georgia election officials from tossing certain absentee ballots without giving would-be voters advance notice and a chance to rectify any issues.

Republicans wanted to suppress the Native American vote. It's working (reposted from The Guardian)

Control of the Senate in the 2018 midterms may hang on the fate of Heidi Heitkamp, the right-leaning Democrat from North Dakota. But her victory will be nearly impossible without the votes of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other Native communities across the heavily Republican state. Now, those communities are facing an insidious new threat: voter ID laws designed to strip American Indians of the right to vote.

In 2012, Heitkamp won the race for the US Senate on a razor-thin margin of 3,000 votes. Her path to victory leaned heavily on support from North Dakota’s 46,000 Native Americans, who make up 5.5% of the state population and are a core Democratic constituency across the rural west. In the 2018 midterms, Heitkamp’s re-election strategy – which could determine control of the Senate – relies on this same indigenous demographic.

The Republican party is well aware of this. Just five months after the 2012 election, the Republican-held North Dakota legislature passed a new voting law without any hearings or debate on the bill’s final text. The law requires North Dakotans to present at a polling station a driver’s license, state ID, tribal ID or other form of identification deemed permissible by the secretary of state in order to exercise their right to vote. In 2015, the state made the law even stricter, prohibiting the use of student, military and expired IDs, limiting the use of absentee ballots without ID and freezing the list of acceptable forms of identification.

These ID requirements present a significant barrier to Native Americans, whose communities have triple the unemployment and poverty rates of the rest of the state and who often lack transportation to travel long distances to obtain a driver’s license or state ID.

And that’s just the beginning. The law only considers identification that includes a residential address to be valid for voting purposes. This requirement disproportionately impacts Native Americans living on reservations, who often use a PO box because they live in rural homes that lack a residential address or are transient, moving from one family or friend’s house to the next.

In January 2016, a group of disenfranchised Native people who could not vote in the 2014 midterm elections filed a lawsuit alleging that the law violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race. According to the suit, there is not a single site where a state ID can be obtained on a reservation. Expert testimony brought by the plaintiffs suggests almost a quarter of North Dakota’s Native American population does not have valid voter identification – twice the rate of non-Native people.

A federal district court judge temporarily stopped the law from taking effect. But this September, the eighth circuit court of appeals reversed that ruling. Then, on 9 October, less than a month before the election, the US supreme court declined to hear the case, upholding the lower court’s ruling.

Tribes are now scrambling to issue valid forms of identification so that their citizens can participate in our democracy. On the Turtle Mountain Indian reservation, chairman Jamie Azure signed an executive order providing tribal citizens IDs free of charge. Demand is so high that their machine has overheated and started melting the cards.

Citizens of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation are out knocking on doors to inform their neighbors about the strict new rules, and arranging shuttles to get families to their polling stations. North Dakota has closed polling stations in some rural counties in the western part of the state due to budgetary constraints. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara offered to subsidize the polling stations their residents rely upon, but were rebuffed.

Now some voters in their community have to drive up to an hour one-way to cast a vote in person – and that’s assuming they have access to a car or can hitch a ride on the shuttle. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” Cesar Alvarez, a Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara citizen and an organizer for the Heitkamp campaign told me. “It’s disenfranchising people here.”

Proponents of the law, such as North Dakota secretary of state Al Jaeger, a Republican, have cited concerns about voter fraud as justification for the bill. But study after study has shown that Republican hoopla about voter fraud is baseless. Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt has tracked US elections from 2000 to 2014 and found just 31 instances of cheating out of over 1bn votes cast. Statistically speaking, Americans cheat at the ballot box about as often as we hit the Mega Millions lotto.

Like the poll tax, literacy test and grandfather clause of the Jim Crow south, the real purpose of voter ID laws like the one now in effect in North Dakota is to plant a white thumb firmly on the political scale. Native Americans and many others across the nation – including African Americans in Texas and Georgia – are staring down the prospect of a post-civil rights era.

On the Standing Rock reservation, in a community that knows better than any other what’s at stake, young and old are knocking on every single door, helping residents file absentee ballots to ensure voter turnout is high. Standing Rock youth have even decorated a Get Out the Vote bus that will drive from community to community on the reservation, transporting people to the polls.

The irony of this civil rights battle, which requires the literal first peoples of North Dakota to prove their roots are where they have been since time immemorial, is not lost on the indigenous communities leading the fight on the ground.

“We are being denied an inherent and moral right,” Judith LeBlanc, of the Caddo Nation and executive director of the Native Organizers Alliance told me over the phone between canvassing shifts at Standing Rock. “This is our territory, this is our land, and for them to say that we need to have an address in order to vote is an insult at best.”

• Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen in British Columbia