This column is a little different. Lots of my leisure time has been spent walking around shouting or in jail. A collateral effect of this is that you get a lot of time to look at cops, who are not like us. I saw a summons where a cop had written, under the section “Defendant stated in my presence” the phrase “FREE PALENSTEIN.”
Have you ever watched a cop write something? They thrust all of their inert spatulate fingertips together at the effective end of the pen, maneuvering it as if they were more accustomed to holding pens with their mouths and only reluctantly have begun to use their fingers. Many of them look like they are, at this very moment in their adult lives, at serious risk of being held back. All this is apparent even before considering their walk: Is the waddle an optical illusion somehow caused by the utility belt? Or are they trying to operate a Pez dispenser with their ass cheeks?
Most recently, I was arrested by Officer Thomas Spinard of the New York Police Department, who took some time away from his normal duties as the department’s welder—“Cells and doors”—to zip-cuff a bunch of people for sitting down in the wrong place. Ten hours later, while we were being out-processed, I asked him something that had been eating at me: “Why is your badge number so short?” (Most badge numbers are five or six digits long, noticeably lengthier than Tom’s.)
He was pleased. “This is a crowd favorite—this was my grandmother’s badge number.” “You’re fucking with me.” (Risky, but I was already in jail.) “No, swear to God. When I joined the department, they made me write an essay explaining why I wanted this one, and I did, so they gave it to me. She was one of the first women on the force.” “You’re telling me your grandmother’s badge number was 69?”
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“As to what stance people should take, you know, whatever, the average progressive lefty woke shithead from Brooklyn, what they should think about all these matters. Yeah, I think, ‘Get your head out of your ass.’” I was talking to Christopher Ketcham, author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, and of last November’s Harper’s cover story, because something happened to my favorite bird. He continued: “Stop thinking about Homo sapiens as the flying center of the world and start thinking about the others. [. . .] Let's give them a chance to survive and thrive outside. Outside of human domination.”
The greater sage-grouse, per the Audubon Society, is “a large grouse with a chubby, round body, small head, and long tail,” which doesn’t sound like much, but wait: “Males change shape dramatically when they display, becoming almost spherical as they puff up their chest, droop their wings, and fan their tail into a starburst.” During courtship dances, they use big, highlighter-yellow balloonlike air sacs on their chests to make an alien booming sound that can be heard half a mile away. The Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management proposed a plan in the middle of March to kill them at a more moderate pace.
Ketcham described the Bureau’s plan as “just more business as usual. The Trump administration, the Biden administration, before that the Obama administration: Same shit, dude. It’s basically deferral to the extractive interests, the cattle interests, the you know, utilitarian use regime of the public lands, and preservation is shunted aside.” Between 2007 and 2013 the grouse population had collapsed, per one estimate, by 40%, by another, 55%. Obama considered making the grouse an endangered species in 2015; Exxon and the ranchers talked him out of it. The Bureau controls the most acreage of sage-grouse habitat of any federal agency—sixty-five million acres across ten states—and it has placed some nominal protections on how this public land can be exploited. Neither the old rules nor the new proposal include prohibitions on resource extraction: Mining, grazing, and fracking can proceed.
The sage-grouse used to be ubiquitous. In what is generally considered the first Western novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, the figure of the sage-grouse is cataloged alongside more typically exotic frontier knowledge as an object of the “tenderfoot” narrator’s passionate incomprehension: He is “begging to be enlightened upon rattlesnakes” and “sage-hens,” but also “how to rope a horse or tighten the front cinch of my saddle” and shoot a gun. One of Wister’s friends on the range was Teddy Roosevelt. When Wister was writing, the grouse population was 16 million. Today, it’s around 200,000.
An average population of sage-grouse needs 40 miles of sagebrush to survive, because they basically only eat sage, and they are virtually the only creature that can survive on sage. Sage is a poor source of petrochemicals, and cattle can’t eat it. None of it can be turned into money, and the Bureau’s job is to turn land into money, so they allocate more leases for grazing and mining. What this has produced is an elaborate grouse-mulching operation. The small-holding, soi-disant rancher is America’s kulak. Destroy him and save the grouse.
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Ketcham also told me that he has “long argued that a precision, thermonuclear strike on Manhattan island would help get rid of a lot of the worst things on Earth, namely, let's name them: Advertising, mass marketing, the publicity industry, corporate publishing, Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ.” We should be able to handle corporate publishing. The Big Five don’t want you to know this, but it is possible to read novels that are neither MFA projects nor strained romans à clef. Indeed, some are written inside a prison and smuggled among prisoners inside it as fifty-four hand-written sheets of paper folded into tiny capsules and concealed in balls of bread dough.
Wisam Rafeedie wrote his revolutionary novel The Trinity of Fundamentals, a fictionalized account of the nine years he spent living underground as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Rafeedie believed his novel had been lost when the only copy was confiscated—only to find it on the curriculum of a political development class he was teaching years later, preserved by another prisoner who had copied it without Rafeedie knowing. Now, for the first time, his book has been translated into English by Dr. Muhammad Tutunji, in collaboration with 14 members of the Palestinian Youth Movement, and published by 1804 Books. Rafeedie describes his protagonist, bound hand and foot, watching his captors from under a blindfold:
His eyes could see only these boots, with a few leather shoes worn by policemen and sneakers worn by intelligence officers interspersed throughout. The authority belonged to the sneakers. They were the thinkers, planners, decision-makers, the issuers of order, and the leaders of nocturnal campaigns. Meanwhile, the combat boots heeded, obeyed, and executed their orders. The leather shoes were there merely to give a superficial hue of legality[.]
To smuggle the handwritten capsules of Rafeedie’s novel out of the prison, prisoners would coat them in melted plastic and swallow them. Imagine doing that to share a story.
Triple Canopy held their annual film series “Standard Deviations” at BAM in March. This year’s installment was guest-curated by Yasmina Price, with Jesse Trussell and Rachel Ossip. I saw Red Army/PFLP: Declarations of War (1971), a film “from Japanese filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao [that] follows Japan’s Red Army faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon as they prepare for revolution.” Rachel and I exchanged some emails, some of which are reprinted here (with minor emendations for clarity):
GS: Did you have a favorite part of the film? Was there something about it that convinced you it was the right thing to have in the series? Was there an image or phrase that’s especially memorable for you?
RO: In Declarations there’s a romantic, almost erotic, visual treatment of guns—lingering touches, hands running over barrels. Many of the shots of rounds of bullets are incredibly beautiful, and I think Adachi built up an intentional lust not around violence itself but the tools of it, to promote armed resistance. There’s one scene where a group of young women, many in bright 70s dresses—lime green, pink-and-orange paisley—watch in awe as a woman in the center expertly dismantles a rifle. Everyone’s smiling and laughing. That scene always strikes me.
For the series we were trying to show a range of works that were “not-films,” or not cinema, in some way, or that pushed against the conventions of what you’d typically see in a movie theater. Of course cinema and propaganda have always been intimately intertwined, but this film is so upfront—literally declarative—about its propagandistic aims and goals. It’s a film, but it’s also a declaration of revolutionary world war.
GS: Toward the end of the film, one PFLP fighter—sitting in front of those [big red posters printed with “GAZA” in Arabic]—paraphrases Che to the effect of “we hope the entire world becomes like Vietnam” in one of several messages addressed to their Japanese comrades. The thing I loved best about the film was its insistence on internationalism as a real, living affinity among people struggling for liberation and equality: In that same section, one of the Japanese Red Army’s speakers addresses the Viet Cong and NVA, fighters in Palestine, and the Black Panther Party in an exhortation to form the “borderless army.” Do you think that has any special resonance for us today (literal or otherwise)?
RO: The call for the borderless army is the primary aim of the film, right? It explicitly calls for a revolutionary world war, one that unites oppressed peoples and all revolutionary movements—an expanded and unified armed Third Worldism. I do think that has resonance today. There’s allyship, shared resources, and collusion between the leadership of neocolonial states, between their murderous “defense forces,” across the globe, whether via arms deals or training or political and ideological support. There’s a long romance between the US police force and the IDF. We can’t look at one side in exclusion; these struggles are already deeply intertwined. How do we counter that except with a similarly international solidarity?
As I write this, one of my friends is preparing to sail to Gaza with hundreds of others and thousands of tons of humanitarian aid as part of the Freedom Flotilla. They’re going to break the Israeli blockade.