The only widely known, non-submerged Indigenous petroglyphs in the state of Vermont sit just outside the Windham County village—Ktsipôntekw in the Western Abenaki language—below the now-defunct Vilas Bridge. Only feet away from the Connecticut River are two sets of eerie carvings of faces. Almost like doodles, they are composed of simple circles for heads, dots for eyes, and short lines for mouths, some with what look like antennae sticking up from the heads. The age of the glyphs is unknown—estimates range from several hundred to over one thousand years old—though in the 1930s, the Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned a stonecutter to re-carve the then-fading originals. While this effort may’ve slowed the figures’ erosion, it means that the relationship between what we see now and the original petroglyphs is unclear (the act of cultural vandalism also marks one moment in Vermont’s still-contentious legacy of Abenaki displacement and appropriation). Even so—if you are willing to make the semi-precarious, unmarked trek to the near-riverbank, it’s an intense, obviously sacred place.
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Put together something short for this experimental compilation. Listen here: https://histaminetapes.bandcamp.com/album/antihistamine-2025
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gin rummy
Many pointed out the criminal hagiography of leading media obituaries of Donald Rumsfeld, who died two days ago—particularly the AP’s, by Robert Burns. The troubling truth is that these obituaries are essentially mundane, and would say the same about any of these people—Bush, Cheney, etc—even as leftists react with horror (or glee). The mainstream media is incapable of seeing these individuals as agents; they are instead figures embedded in institutions at distinct moments in history, synthesized into a sort of ‘great man’ theory of everything, updated for the spectacle-ized circus of the Western 21st century. Thus Rumsfeld’s downfall is (at worst) predicated on ‘mismanagement’ of the Iraq War, or poor politicking in its wake—not on criminal, sadistic cruelty, murder, pillage—and obviously, deceit—actions that by definition make him a war criminal, not to mention an atrocious human.
It will be the same when Bush is gone—if he died tomorrow, his obituaries might focus on his being a leading ‘anti-Trump voice’ in the GOP. If Kissinger ever dies, he will be noted (maybe) as controversial, after being described as one of the leading statesmen of the 20th century.
In other words—Rumsfeld is absolved, because everyone in power is absolved (except for the rare scapegoat, into whom is distilled some vague and dislocated societal sense of collective sin). In doing so the country is absolved, its agency denied, instantly forgiven, permitted no reckoning with the consequences of the horror and evil underlying it, the destruction it has wrought—and the perverse criminality of the men and women who do after all direct it is diluted into bureaucratic hum. Why? To do otherwise is anathema to the American creed of always being virtuous, maybe.
Rumsfeld of course is virtue-less but his death becomes basically meaningless. In their statement, his family said: ‘History may remember him for his extraordinary accomplishments over six decades of public service…’ I doubt it. I don’t think history will remember him; in the ongoing crack-up of the reigning consensus only those in the political-media elite will, and they only for a short while. He’ll probably be forgotten like all of these people. Which is sort of a shame, because despite how the Iraq War is collectively understood today (banal, misguided), the catastrophic crimes for which Rumsfeld was distinctly responsible are anything but mundane. To the extent he’s remembered, God willing, people will hold onto that.
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They’ll never learn
That Kamala Harris was chosen as Biden’s VP last week was not so much news as antinews. The absurdity of the Democratic convention is barely worth commenting on. The unbelievable strangeness and surreality of this moment is self-evident—but one thing struck me more than anything else watching the assemblage behind Biden (& Co) over the last week: these are all losers.
It’s a convention of losers: the losers who failed to remove Trump by shouting “Russia!”; the losers who failed to impeach him; losers who worked for Trump until they didn’t; losers who were forced out of the GOP because Trumpism left no room for their “respectable conservatism”—which just so happened to presage and create Trump; losers whose era of superficially progressive identity politics is long over. That’s what the Democratic Party is (manifested more than anything in its convention, held virtually): a big tent of losers.
So what makes one think they’re going to win?
It seems in the last week or so we (societal, media we) have collectively reevaluated this assumption—or at least have maybe begun to (or, well, maybe not)—in the face of Trump & Co’s increasingly brazen attempts to steal the election, coupled with that recent poll which showed Biden, despite the pandemic and literally everything else, polling merely four points above Trump. Or maybe it’s the fact that déjà vu is finally setting in and people are thinking: “wait, haven’t we done all this before?” I will self-centeredly note that I personally have consistently been extremely skeptical about Biden’s chances (do we not have any context?—can we not remember what happened merely 4 years ago, not to mention the world-shattering events of the last 4 months?) and am on record saying so.
For the briefest of moments in 2016, immediately after HRC’s loss, I thought the blatant delegitimization of the Democrats’ neoliberal program would be impossible for the “party” and their adjoining media apparatus not to face. How wrong I was; here we are, nearly four years later, doing it all over again.
They (the Democrats, et. al.) cannot do otherwise. It’s not in their DNA. We all know this, and we all know why: they are a confluence of corporate interests, contractually, constitutionally obligated to do as they do. (Which is what, exactly, if they perpetually lose? To play impotent foil to the Republicans, to keep the illusion of mass democratic participation alive?) This suggests, one might say, the impossible conceit of the Bernie program, the futility of “turning the party left,” and the ongoing impotence of the “progressive” (meaningless word, let’s discard it) attempt to shift the party; it cannot shift. They can only be what they are.
This is not an argument to vote or not vote, but frankly, this clown-show is not worth paying much attention to. They are marching off again, proudly ignorant as the Republicans, oblivious as ever.
decomposing nightmare parody 