2

The Declaration of Independence lists crimes against the American people which drove them to reject British rule. Replace ‘the King’ with ‘Trump’ and this list still makes sense. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these […]

4

He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers.  What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape […]

2

The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’ Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom […]

9

The Senate and the House. They are just going to do so much damage. I can hardly breathe, hardly swallow, it’s like iron in the chest. Now we see how dangerous our fears are, how fatal this cleaving to the lying pseudo-certainty that fist-raising white men seem to offer – in the face of unprecedented […]

Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but […]

3

Let’s think about the whole gun control question from another angle for just a moment. Imagine everybody has their own nuclear device. The Constitution enshrines our right to own these nuclear bombs and besides, we need our nuclear bombs in case the Government one day comes for us and we need to form a militia.

 […]

8

In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made […]

7

New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, […]

2

In New York we stayed off-island, on the sprawling mainland of the USA. I found it thrilling to go walking in the early morning light, while everyone was sleeping, admiring the funny little wooden frame houses and hanging over retaining walls at the back of the hill in Union City. From up high there you […]

18

Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books. I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park […]