No one was protesting in downtown Champaign, with its popular restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. No MAGA believer showed up with an assault rifle, as someone did in Indiana, or with a Nazi flag, as a man did in St. Louis’s Metro East.
The U.S. administration, destabilizing and unjustifiable in nearly all its actions, said Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “at its depth comes down to hero worship”—of Putin, Musk, Trump—but in the end we are sacrificing ourselves, “our children, our grandchildren, the possibility of life on earth….”
Before the president of the United States publicly imagined the Gaza Strip as a hip Middle Eastern Riviera, I only ever told this story to mock myself at parties. It was one of my bits. It turns out I am a prophet, I would declare.
I do not want to live like this anymore, scripted and tight and rigid.
Malls sold us canned fantasy. It could have been so different.
Finally, I confess...and realize what I have been missing.
“What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability."
Roy Ayers coasted on his unique sentiment and vibe. It was sublime, positive, and unfailingly warm and luminescent. What else would you expect a writer, any writer, to say about the musical talent who gave us the song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”?
"You listen constantly, in a kind of trance, for communications from your body; it is as if you have become a medium, and your organs a company of fretful ghosts."
Names are significant for Elon Musk. And now, for all of us.