So we're clear, this is mostly what's happened today:
 |
| The Ceiling |
I was joking around with my dinner companions the other night about how long I was going to keep this diary. When might it be appropriate to stop? Someone suggested that I will just drop it one day and disappear, another suggested that I could do it when the Mumbling Cheeto Fascist is no longer President. I don't know what the answer is.
I have been keeping an eye on Portland, where "authorities" are exercising full city-level control of protestors in Portland, Oregon, and saw a panic on Twitter as there are rumours this is in preparation for when Trump cancels the election. I have no basis in fact for this. But what a fucking chill that sent up my spine. I've been to Portland. It's really nice. Lots of food trucks with deliciousness, and probably some of the best coffee on the West Coast. Portlandia really does hit the mark, and that's a good thing. Now there's a heavy "federal law enforcement" presence there. How's this for a headline: U.S. attorney for Oregon requests investigation into reported arrests of Portland protesters picked up in unmarked vehicles.
 |
| Photo taken 18 July 2020 by Dave Killen - see more I can't tell if this is civil war, or not? |
I've been reading and listening to more of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine Mackinnon's work, including Dworkin's own reading of I Want A Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape that I recorded on Day 117, but you should listen to her say it almost forty years ago. At this very moment, I'm listening to a lecture by Catharine Mackinnon on Trafficking, Prostitution, and Inequality. She's a lawyer. Pointing out how fucked the law is around these topics. Incoherent, even. Listening to these women speak is sad and nourishing. There are so many facts and arguments and mentions in everything they say that make me realise how patient we must be. Dworkin, in particular, was a proponent of violence by women. She wrote that Hillary should have killed Bill and get pardoned by President Gore (instead of the strange performative "pathetic" lie she and he made of the Lewinsky scandal). It will become a civil war in the US if protestors turn to violence. That's because there are more guns than people there, and people who hold the firm belief in their right to bear them.
The problem is that you think it's out there. But it's not. Rape and war are not so different. They make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard and they take that sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you to kill and to die. As long as your sexuality has to do with aggression and your sense of humanity has to do with being superior to other people and there is such contempt and hostility in your attitudes towards women, how could you not be afraid of each other? - Dworkin
What I ate today is not interesting.
Update: I started watching No Country For Old Men which I used to think was "good" but, after one murder in the first scene, another in the second, an hunted animal shot in the third, a wounded dog in the fourth, and then a shootout with eight dead men in the fifth, I stopped.