Nowtopian

I’d Prefer Not To . . .

If you are someone who has been reading my blog off and on over the past years (I’ve been writing here since 2004!), you may have noticed my extended absence. I have a long list of reasons why I haven’t popped up here since early this year.

But rather than list all those reasons, I’m invoking Herman Melville’s saddest character, the descending-into-catatonia Bartleby the Scrivener. Starting as a scribe in a law office doing the new flood of work for the employer that resulted from the employer’s position in the New York patronage system of the 1850s, Bartleby performs adequately, even admirably, for the first months of his job. But when he is asked to do a routine line-by-line check of a legal contract, he simply announces “I would prefer not to…” which flummoxes his employer. This simple refusal grows like a tumor, the employer tolerating it and trying to explain it to himself, but ultimately failing to understand or overcome the ever more intransigent Bartleby. By the end of the short story, Bartleby has been cast out and descends into a bizarre kind of silence and refusal to participate in any aspect of his own or anyone else’s life. But his simple refusal to comply with the expectations and demands of his employer have echoed down the decades as an oddly inspiring model in the face of the stupid venality of modern life.

Democracy Wall on Valencia Street, still going after all these years.

So when I get up in the morning these days, I no longer listen to the news. I’d prefer not to. I glance at various online sources, but rarely do I read anything in depth. I’d prefer not to. I’d rather read a book, frankly. I am offended by the firehose of bullshit washing over us, day in day out, a daily acid bath of cruelty, brutality, and pointless violence. Do I owe it to the world to vicariously consume the details of genocide, to absorb into my personal psyche the horrendous toll of civilian death in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Libya, Ukraine, Russia? I’d prefer not to.

To what end is my distant witnessing through organs of overt and extreme propaganda? I know the worst people imaginable, with the smallest and blackest hearts and minds, are having a field day at everyone else’s expense. I know the least empathic and most narcissistic people are stealing everything they can lay their hands on as fast as possible, in a kleptocratic frenzy never seen before. I know that as a global society, not only are we not beginning to slow down the burning of carbon to stop the boiling of the earth, but we are accelerating that burning. Our government is rapidly approving the release of dozens of new carcinogenic substances into the environment, in our medicines, in our foods. The same government is incentivizing the destruction of the few remaining habitats where the remnant populations of endangered species have been hanging on, ensuring the radical shrinking of biodiversity that international conventions have spent years trying to arrest. They’re even paying corporations to halt wind projects while doling out billions in subsidies to the moribund and wildly expensive and destructive nuclear power industry. Do I have to learn about each new depradation, each new species facing the brink, each new horror that will degrade our shared planet for decades and centuries to come? I’d prefer not to. Do I have to know the details of the insane increase in plastic production, where we are going to produce two or three times more plastic in the next few years than was produced in the entire history of plastic since WWII? I’d prefer not to.

Am I supposed to get all excited about politicians who promise to be less awful than the people running the show but can’t bring themselves to call fascism fascism? Am I supposed to care about the details of how this society manages its ongoing commitment to radical inequality, to the reign of property over life, to the untrammeled power of billionaires and corporations to buy the government, the law, the police and military? I’d prefer not to.

Am I supposed to believe any of the bullshit being shoved down our throats all day about space travel, about human longevity, about how synthetic text prediction machines are going to become ‘super-intelligent’? Come on! I not only prefer not to, I fuckin’ refuse!

Am I supposed to fear a government that is drawing up lists of people to arrest and lock away for decades because they’re anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-Christian? I’d prefer not to. (I’ve been all that all my life, and more, and so what?) Am I supposed to turn a blind eye to the hopeless efforts of the small-minded, ignorant fascists to rewrite history, to ignore decades of scholarship on slavery and racism, on misogyny and patriarchy, on genocide? I’d prefer not to.

Am I supposed to write thoughtful essays about the many books I’ve read, the insights I’ve gained, the travels I’ve made, the looming sense of mortality that tending to my 94-year-old father has induced in me, the incredible sadness I feel about the future my 9- and 6-year-old granddaughters are going to grow up into? I’d prefer not to.

I’ll probably be back at it before long. But for now… (you know the refrain)…

Here are some plaques I found in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico when I was visiting recently. More history that cannot be forgotten…

Monumental Instability, or War of the Memorials

Unmanned Drone (2022) by Kara Walker, a The Brick in East Hollywood, February 2026.

As if to underscore the barbaric, cruel madness of the attack on Iran—the clearest indication yet of the end of Pax Americana, the once painfully slow and now surprisingly rapid decline of US power and supremacy—we have the nation’s capital filled with creepy multi-storied banners of a scowling Trump staring down from various public buildings. He demands to be seen at all times, even while in his ever more obvious dementia he is capriciously tossing away much of the soft power that the United States built up over the decades since WWII (not that I defend US power or supremacy or care about its demise except as a cheerleader).

His focus on his idiotic ballroom, the attempt to take over national culture through seizing the Kennedy Center, and insistence on rewriting (literally whitening) historical narratives in national monuments and the Smithsonian museum assumes everyone’s attention span is as short as his own and everyone is as ignorant as he is. But Trump’s obsession with statues is most telling. He is promoting large monuments of himself, of course, but he also is bringing back Confederate monuments toppled in the 2020 uprisings, and even wants to create a new park in time for this summer’s 250th birthday celebration full of statues of “great Americans” as his 2nd-grade understanding of history deems them.

So the battle is joined from coast to coast as history wars are being openly fought everywhere. In Los Angeles a show closes later this year (on May 3) called “MONUMENTS.” It is in two locations run by the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Geffen Contemporary adjacent to LA’s Japantown, and The Brick in East Hollywood. I went down with Adriana and LisaRuth on a field trip to check out the shows. While there we also stumbled on the Tavares Strachan show “The Day Tomorrow Began” at the LA County Museum of Art (through March 29) which was an exceptional contribution to this whole complicated question of monumentality, representation, audience, meaning, and art.

Kara Walker, an extraordinary artist who has had an amazing show (Fortuna and the Immortality Garden—Machine) running in the free part of the SF MOMA for the past year (where the Rivera Mural sat in the separate gallery along Howard Street), was offered the dismantled giant monument of confederate general Stonewall Jackson to render into something else. And did she ever! Her Unmanned Drone (2022) is a wild, twisted dismembering and re-membering of the man, his horse, and the various limbs and weapons that had been erected to extend his life and that of “The Lost Cause” into an indefinite future, but are now a defigurative apparition condemned to stumble and lurch defeated and unrecognizable through a permanent purgatory of civil war remembrance. But also to announce loudly the revolt that toppled the original, the context of its re-de-configuration, and in this case, to anchor the “MONUMENTS” show at MOCA in Los Angeles.

Walker’s stunning work stands alone at The Brick, and the rest of the show is next to Japantown. There you come face to face with a dozen massive confederate monuments removed from Richmond, Virginia and New Orleans, homeless artifacts after their demolition in the wake of three events described by Carolina A. Miranda in her review in the New York Review of Books (March 12, 2026): “the mass murder of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charlestown, South Carolina, in 2015; the violent Unite the Right rally two years later, when white nationalists descended on Charlottesville (Virginia) to preserve a monument to [Robert E.] Lee that was slated for removal, resulting in the death of a counterprotester; and the killing of [George] Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which sparked protests globally.” At the Geffen the large, often vandalized statues are juxtaposed to contemporary responses by a variety of artists, ranging from a bronzed rendition of Ferguson, Missouri (site of Michael Brown’s murder by police and subsequent uprising in 2014) to a series of portraits, “Stranger Fruit” by NY photographer Jon Henry, of black women with their adult black sons in their arms in the form of the classic Pietá facing across the room a massive Daughters of the Confederacy rendition of their version of it. In the show are graffitied pedestals, the disembodied arm and upright finger taken from the Jefferson Davis monument (the Vindicatrix, aka “Miss Confederacy”) which is tucked in an out-of-the-way corner with a video camera filming it, so it appears as distorted projections in various spots around the exhibit hall, to jarring photos of KKK members in full garb to several moving videos filling up whole rooms, including a subversive remix of Birth of a Nation. Somber bronze statues of Josephus Daniels (a newspaper publisher who fomented the white supremacist massacre and coup against the elected black city government in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898), and Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who penned the Dred Scott decision, sit impassively along a wall across from dozens of portraits of working class southerners both black and white at the turn of the 20th century.

A small detail from Kahlil Robert Irving’s bronze rendition of Ferguson, Missouri.

Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, deposed and graffitied, at the MOCA in LA.

From Jon Henry’s Stranger Fruit series.

Continue reading Monumental Instability, or War of the Memorials

Yes, There IS a Future!

Happy end of 2025 and beginning of 2026! It’s a New Year!

The title is not merely a self-exhortation, though I suppose it could be read that way. It’s been three months since I last posted something to my blog. I did write an essay about the Rise and Fall of the Junipero Serra monument during this time, but it’s over on Foundsf.org. The essay is part of our ongoing participation in the SF Arts Commission’s Shaping Legacy Project. I’ve been resisting writing for the sake of writing, even if I’ve done that a lot over the past 21 years on this blog. I like to write—that’s no crime (yet). But given the firehose of bullshit pouring out of every channel of mainstream media (mostly deferential towards the overt fascism engulfing our society), not to mention the bizarre hyper-abundance of opinions and analyses free-floating on substack, facebook, medium, tiktok, etc., joined by several million podcasts (literally) full of even more talking and opining, the best answer might be silence. I certainly don’t feel a need to repackage and repeat what everyone else is saying.

The Serra statue, stored in a warehouse after its toppling on June 19, 2020

Regular readers of this blog, who are vanishingly few by now, will know that for the past several years a lot of what I’ve been doing is digesting and interpreting all the books I continue to plow through. I do prefer reading books to anything I can find online or in magazines. I gave a presentation on the 2nd edition of Hidden San Francisco at the Howard Zinn Bookfair in early December and was delighted to have a full house of about 30 people at 10:30 in the morning on a busy day full of multiple compelling programs all pitted against one another. There were sharp questions and comments, but the one that was both flattering and frankly funny, was from my old pal Joe Berry, who commanded the floor to announce that I was (one of the) “greatest living bibliographers” and that was something everyone there should appreciate. So yeah, I read and then use this blog to record what I’m learning, hopefully in the process making useful summaries and offering fresh connections and insights. That’s what I do, much more than original research or reporting or any of the other possibilities that confront a writer.

As this past year unfolded, several readers of my recent novel wrote me to compliment what they felt was my prescience. I take no credit for describing what was pretty obviously coming down the pike. But the point of my fictional rendering of ICE Hummers picking up “suspects” and putting them in detention camps was to show how brittle authoritarian rule is, and furthermore, how utterly incapable such people are of managing (or governing) a complex society for any length of time. The quasi-martial law passes within a year in my novel, and so it seems it may recede in the face of widespread public revulsion, untold millions of “good soldier Schweiks” working to rule, forgetting to finish tasks, being late, not taking initiatives to fix things that might be easily repaired, etc. etc. The very dumb sycophants thrust into power have done everything they can to posture as macho toughs, only to destroy decades of carefully built up institutional, economic, and colonialist soft power. They are already finding the lofty pedestals on which they preen turning into eroding pillars of sand.

Posters restored to Democracy Wall on Valencia Street.

There is more horror and cruelty ahead, to be sure. As their small worlds explode, their smaller minds will use the powers they hold to lash out at real and imaginary enemies. That inevitability requires as much solidarity and effective collective response as we can muster. That’s been true all year, and will only be more true going forward. But ultimately, this will pass. The attempt to strangle wind power and solar and the Chinese car industry may work within the borders of the U.S. for a few years, but the rest of the world is moving on. The bizarre abdication of American Empire by the America Firsters is an unexpectedly welcome and entertaining aspect of their misrule. The neoliberal centrists will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, whether in 2027 or 2029 or later. So that begs the question of the new political forces beginning to emerge now. If the MAGAsters are turning on themselves and eating their own, the inchoate Left is shaking off its paralysis. From municipal socialists like Mamdani to the less visible millions of baristas, uber and truck drivers, warehouse workers, nurses, teachers, and even disaffected tech workers, activists across dozens of campaigns are confronting the Patriarchal White Supremacist dinosaurs at every turn. The slumbering rebels that filled the streets in 2020 to protest racist police violence are still connected, and know how to move together when they want to. The vast majority of Americans are… wait for it… anti-fascist! The racist cruelty and militarized posturing overstepping across the country could soon find itself on trial for countless crimes, petty and profound.

Meanwhile, the planet continues to cook leading to catastrophic floods, fires, hurricanes and droughts, which in turns is sending millions onto desperate journeys seeking refuge and asylum. Billionaires and kleptocratic wannabes like Trump and his family and political allies are looting public wealth with impunity. Public infrastructure continues to decay. People continue to lose their homes while rents and prices soar. Jobs are increasingly precarious and underpaid. The medical system is on the verge of collapse as millions have lost their shitty private insurance due to the right-wing destruction of Obamacare subsidies. Schools are falling apart, broke, and closing while public education is being gutted. Military spending has passed $1 trillion a year, 2/3 of which is lost in the Defense and corporate bureaucracies, lining the pockets of venal war profiteers. Unreliable software increasingly controls snap decisions over who gets bombed and when, while chatbots shield responsible people from accountability for their avarice and ineptitude. The term ‘polycrisis’ has been on the rise, capturing better than most the confusing chaos of our times.

Raj Patel illuminates the term in his recent short essay “Polycrisis: A Breviary”—

The polycrisis, then, is not merely a temporary convergence of disparate shocks. It is the structural expression of this simultaneous exhaustion—economic, social, and ecological. This leads to an interregnum of unusual consequences. Amid the rise of post-neoliberal authoritarian politics, it is on this terrain that alternatives are being forged.

For some people the daily drumbeat of horror leads to paralysis. For others it leads to frenzied efforts to plug the holes in the dike. But as Sarah Jaffe, one of the best labor writers of our generation, writes in her new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire:

We can, looking at the multiple states of emergency all around us, drive ourselves to exhaustion, to a kind of martyrdom that sees working ourselves to death as heroic, as long as it is “for the cause.” But a system that cares nothing for our individual lives will not be put down by our heroic deaths…. We know what happened in Gramsci’s Italy and across Europe and the world, but the results of our own time have yet to be determined. We reach back over and over again for Gramsci’s words: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Sometimes, this is mistranslated as “now is the time of monsters.” (p. 271-272)

Continue reading Yes, There IS a Future!