When someone shows you...

believe them.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. — Maya Angelou

Merry Christmas! To open this with a warning was not my intention. Here’s where I’m at... sitting in the living room with my dog Cicciolina, listening to Schubert with rain literally pounding outside. Good, we need it here in LA. A relaxing Christmas day before socializing… drinking tea, eating a slice of Panettone. Last night after returning home, I spent several hours releasing fears and breathing out the anger I feel about the orange beast and his cabal of fascist filthionaires.

I have known O. since 1975. That’s 50 years of friendship. She’s 80 and has been diagnosed with a fatal disease and feels she doesn’t have much time left. I am wrecked about this. My girl is an OG from way back and her sense of humor is intact about this thing, more than mine. Without knowing who Notorious B.I.G. was, the young orderlies wheeling her through the hospital are bemused when she recites Biggie’s “Ready to Die”. She is done with this new world of screens and email boxes flooded with cons, the bombardment of advertising, of dodging e-bikes who curse her on the streets of NYC for daring to be ‘in the way!’. She’s tired of the orange beast, the genocides, the costs of living she can no longer afford, the doctors who ignored all the warning signs. She’s ready. The last years have been breaking her brain, in part due to the orange beast’s regime and their methodology — to spew as much toxicity, cruelty and utterly dizzying disinformation on all of us who haven’t enough money and immorality to shield ourselves.

I was thinking about the last presidential election and Maya Angelou’s words, recalling conversations I had with supposedly progressive millennials. Thank the goddesses for the younger generations… kids in their twenties are leaving social media in droves! But the benevolent fates seemed to skip a huge swathe of millennials. (oops!) Do understand I am not calling out every American born between 1981 and 1996! Sorry, but I feel the need to name this creepy phenomenon of disengagement for what it is. I’m talking about the tics of a particular white mentality here in LA draped in a keffiyeh that screams Free Palestine! yet that keffiyeh can’t disguise the sniveling misogyny and racism hiding beneath: the tic that doesn’t give a flying F about a poor girl in Atlanta who dies from a miscarriage due to her abortion rights being taken away. Or their gardener being dragged off to a concentration camp in El Salvador by the new gestapo. A certain type of millennial, arrogant, holier-than-thou, refusing to debate when challenged, climbing to sit their entitled asses on their moral high ground. The same millennial bacterial mat who, when they shave their head and you tell them they resemble Vladimir Mayakovsky, although they haven’t a clue who he was and hardly care, will run to their phone to look up his image out of vanity. They’ll ghost you rather than have a kind and sincere conversation about the issues at hand. I don’t like using ghost in this context; the authentic ghosts I encounter usually have backbones (although diaphanous) and know to speak their minds without fear of reprisal, or possible constructive criticism, or god-forbid, a history lesson.

Beneath the disguises and the ideologies… they are terrified, defended, judgy. Sincerity, attempts at honest dialogue, every authenticity is thought of as ‘cringe’. What an awful state to be in… knowing everything yet not knowing who your true allies are.

So to repeat Maya’s warning, the orange beast showed us loud and disgustingly clear who he was the first time he mounted his golden throne. Most of us believed him, nearly 60% of the country while some believed, yet were indifferent (fake fakir millennials). Yes, the old guard Democrats are corrupt as hell, but they never would have taken away a woman’s right to control her own body, or demolished health care, or hired a gestapo to terrorize our country. Or leave our health vulnerable to the conspiracy-addled brain of a Kennedy exiled from his own family. These faux progressives, through their utter lack of strategic thinking and disregard for their own country, decided to blame Gaza on Democrats, aiding and abetting the criminal beast to skate back into the White House… a monument he is now destroying in service to his malignant narcissism. I recall telling one of these types who refused to vote how the beast had been working with Netanyahu and his son-in-law for over a decade on the destruction of Gaza and its people… she looked scalded, as if I were shaming her!… and now their grandiose plans of turning Gaza into the Mediterranean of the Middle East is happening without a guard rail in sight, step by genocidal step. Pedophile Mango Mussolini’s sex crimes against girls will continue to drip into our brain pans, and no one seems to have the key to the faucet… in league with his world wide web of filthionaire child-raping buddies, they are literally taking what was once and could be a livable attempt at paradise and running the world into Hell. The beast’s calling women journalists ‘piggy’, his comments about Rob Reiner and Michelle… just when you think he couldn’t be or do anything more reprehensible. According to friends in the midwest, people once trumpy are becoming absolutely NUMB after being endlessly pummeled with this gross madness.

Child rape? And still the Republicans support him? What in the unholy F? Our children are uploading their brains to AI, which manipulates them into depression, and sometimes, suicide. Oh, but you have shares in AI? So who cares, right? Some we imagine as allies will hardly state it like this, but it’s their bottom line. Money trumps every last fiber of humanism and goodness. (Here in the states, most people are scared out of their wits by the economy crashing, believing the more money you have, the safer you’ll be. It doesn’t matter if it’s at the expense of others. I wonder if they have plans to produce water when AI server farms have guzzled the last drops. Or if they’re saving up to head to Mars with Elon? It’s all NUTS.)

Every time a new photo of twitler surfaces of him with that self-satisfied smirk, his arm around a 12-year-old girl, and even though it’s straight from the FBI files, he accuses it of being AI-generated and will froth at the mouth about how dangerous AI is. Yet, he refuses to regulate it, is passing laws so the AI puppeteers can have their wicked way with us. The fascist spin turns all information upside down, and the flooding of the zone with toxicity, vulgarity, and evil continues unabated. It can make your brain feel on fire.

Musk keeps telling us all how he’s rigged the elections here and plans to do it again. He showed us who he is. Europe, please be stronger than we have been. It’s your time to believe this freak. To fight. His propaganda machines are over there agitating angry young men toward hate and violence. Trying to force fascism on countries who’ve suffered its blood-soaked history first-hand. If you’re in Europe and you’re reading this, please. Start with Musk. Work together to stop him or the same insanity will happen to you. France, Germany, and Ireland are enforcing EU-wide regulation laws… news that stirs up light. Keep it going.

And please excuse the rant. I do not mean to make anyone feel hopeless, no way! and I haven’t even gotten near what they are planning to do with us once the robots replace billions of jobs. I guess my hope is that a post of this nature might help incite someone to want to fight even harder in the new year. To not be afraid to express rage about what these madmen and their self-hating women are doing to our humanity. It isn’t hopeless. There is beauty in the world, so much beauty in people too. So many inspired and inspiring groups, organizations and communities to bond with.

Today for me, there is the music of Schubert. And St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. And St. Augustine, who believed in a literal Antichrist that would emerge just before Christ’s return. I do not believe in Christ’s return but from where I stand, the Antichrist sure looks hideously real to me. I believe in the Christ concept as a Holy Spirit dwelling within us all... the antithesis of the beast’s poison. The spirit of bells and birds.

And there is Jess Craven, and her lists of the GOOD things that are happening in her Sstack Chop Wood, Carry Water.

Something lighter… and 80’s pop can always lighten a mood. The Church of the Poison Mind (“love will make you blind in the church of the poison mind”) by Culture Club, whose female singer and my friend the wildly talented Helen Terry was hounded out of an amazing singing career by the snarky boys in the British music press. Their name-calling and nasty homophobia crucified her. She rose from that cross into a stellar career as a BBC film and television producer. It’s how girls like us roll. Kill us! We just keep ascending. And dancing!)

Here’s Bob Dylan with Joan Baez singing “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”. Dylan ripped the union song, “Joe Hill”, written by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson in the 1930s… and in this video, Joan throws a dig about it at Dylan. It’s also worth listening to Paul Robeson sing the original “Joe Hill”. I’m still mad at Dylan for ignoring brave warrior Sinéad O’Conner, who was bullied off his stage by a hateful crowd without a kind word from him. What is wrong with the world? Despite Dylan’s bad side, the duet shines in the spirit of the original “Joe Hill”.

Click on the LP cover to hear “Joe Hill”. Columbia Records used this graphic as Robeson’s album cover, created by designer Alex Steinweiss, released in 1943, the height of Hitler’s cruelty. Of Nazi concentration camps and mass exterminations, Baba Yar, the murder of Poland’s Jews, etc. These were days when the gatekeepers of culture, e.g. Columbia Records, actually cared about humanity and were brave enough to protest, to release a graphic like this. The American government was very slow to respond to Hitler’s evil. Sadly, no surprise there… and today the Nazis are buying up the media.

Marshall McLuhan’s brilliant book The Medium is the Message (1967) was pivotal in my understanding of how media works. I brought the concept to the film Born in Flames, for the story’s creation of mobile radio stations that could not be traced (at the time).

McLuhan proposed that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. He warned us about trading in our ability to think for ourselves. “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”¹ In other words, when we let corporations control what we see and hear, they decide what information we get. And it’s based on what helps their bottom line, not what we need to know.

I can’t help thinking of the children. Of how I watched a woman take away an iPad from a toddler who had a nuclear meltdown. The costs of addiction will be catastrophic if we don’t start paying attention to the dangers of the medium.

Some days, some hours it can feel like we’re riding a never-ending spiral into a Dark Age. It’s going on nearly ten brutal years of this drumpfian madness… even when he wasn’t president, the beast was running his shadow government from Florida. And yet, I feel a light breaking on the horizon. A shift occurring. Working class people, those whose pockets are being hit the hardest by the beast, are finally starting to wake and to want to rebel. We have our work cut out for us to carry this shift with compassion, and I regret when I move toward blame, as I have in this post. A resolution for the new year… to stop with blame. To always choose empathy and compassion. It is hard to reverse course when you’ve been gaslit, brainwashed. In order to be successful, to sustain the energy and the faith necessary to reverse this evil, we need not only fight. For our mental health we need to remember we still do own paradise… our inner worlds that connect to divinity in whatever way we feel it, describe it, experience it away from the screens. We can dance, and dance together like our lives depend on it. Because they do. Taking time for renewal for joy is a non-negotiable in order to be strong for the fight ahead.

May we erect our own personal firewalls about what we shall let in, and what stays out in order to maintain sanity for the fight ahead. May we be vigilant. may we be surrounded with love. With kind and brilliant people, good music, and a fierce desire to understand that love is action, and to take action as we help shift the world’s modality toward healing.

My next post will be for paid subscribers, about anti-fascist songs and poetry. A playlist. And love for the partisans. I’ll leave you with a stellar track from Television’s Marquee Moon… and a wish for a safe and inspired 2026. ❤️

1. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964