Without a Horizon

 

The Third Issue of Lodestar Lit has my poem "Remaking Our Everyday World," inspired by seeing Northern Virginia pass by at night.

The Grace of Rosslyn and Georgetown

 

Poem in Sola Poeta's second issue, based on my days walking across the Key Bridge every day to work

On the Democrats, or Down with Will Rogers Thought

 

“I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat,” comedian Will Rogers spoke these words almost a century ago. Back then it was a tongue-in-cheek good natured ribbing of a party that had just come out of a convention that required 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate. Yes, you read that right. In 1924, the delegates to the Democratic National Convention had to vote 103 times to nominate a man who would end up losing in a landslide to Calvin Coolidge. At least the Democratic Party of that era could contain its chaos to one gathering every four years. Today, the party’s disarray is on display 24/7. It is disorganized at every level of government and jurisdiction, at least where it can manage to get elected at all.

I know. Out of the Democrats’ recent defeat, a thousand think pieces have bloomed. Yet, most of them seem to ignore the essential issue Mr. Rogers' diagnosed a hundred years ago. They would rather focus on that nebulous term “messaging.” Among other issues with this analysis, it makes one crucial mistake: it assumes the Democrats have some secret message that they keep failing to deliver. They are otherwise unified and organized and at the same time forgetful of what needs to be expressed.  If only the Democrats could just put the right words together, the America people would fall over themselves to vote for any name with a donkey next to it. Extending this logic further,  maybe the Democratic Party can make a game of it, sending every American a decoder pin so they can figure out the “messaging” of the next election cycle like Ralphie in A Christmas Story.

All of these postmortems focus on messaging because it is convenient for the people posting them with their bylines attached. It requires no deeper reckoning with what the last two hundred years of the Democratic Party’s disorganization has led to in the present. They are also in line with the class interests of those who write them. On a personal level each one of these authors is hoping that their specific diagnosis will pique the interest of the party so they can get a gig consulting for it. Beyond that, on a more philosophical level, it helps to justify their whole line of work. Since they make a living trafficking in words, they have every incentive to promote the idea that a political party’s fortunes are tied to matters of vocabulary.

But the problem cannot be reduced to messaging while the party is such a mess of contradictions. We have seen that anything promised by one wing of the party, gets shot down by another. Or the so-called Parliamentarian gets to reject this and that proposal (you remember voting for them, right?) The Democratic Party has too many competing factions whose interests cannot be fundamentally reconciled. It is the party of billionaires and unions, landlords and renters, peaceniks and neocons, tree huggers and frackers, Zionists and Muslims, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter More. In short, the Democrats are trying to serve both Mammon and the masses and failing at both. Any attempt to salvage the Democrats has to begin with meeting this problem head on.

Of course, contradiction is nothing new in the Democratic Party. At certain times the party managed it for a generation or so. They did it after Jackson and then after FDR. But these partisan constellations were only able to do this for two critical reasons. First was the opening of new economic frontiers that allowed competing groups to get a cut of a growing pie. Second was the lack a national issue that could divide the coalition. Eventually both of these advantages ended and the Democrats fell apart. In the case of Jackson's Democrats, they were undone by the very national issue of slavery. For Roosevelt Democrats, their coalition collapsed from the pressures of confronting racism and war in Vietnam.

It seems unlikely that the Democrats will find themselves in such a fortunate position again. The era of free real estate is over and the era of free refills is coming to a close as well. As for national controversies, the Democratic Party can no longer sidestep these. Politics in America have become homogenized thanks to TV and the Internet. Take, for example, People running for school boards. They are no longer focused on the picayune details of lunches and bus routes. They run on the red meat buffet of culture war issues such as transgender rights and so-called historical revisionism.

For the Democratic Party to win in these conditions, it has to reinvent itself. It has to become a party that either Will Rogers or his present incarnations cannot make fun of for a lack of unity. Think about it this way: if the Democrats were a serious party with long term goals, Trump's people would have been running their own version of ads warning about a "Democrat Project 2025." Or 2029. But of course, they did not. And will not. This is but one small piece of evidence the alleged party of the people needs to reorient itself in order to fight the rightward lurch of the country. Because what is at stake is more important than which gang of politicos holds office. The installation of a complete oligarchy is at hand. 

Unfortunately voters have been presented with few choices to stop this. The Republicans are the party that will make this transformation happen on purpose. Meanwhile the Democrats of the current cycle have become the party that will let it happen. Whether on purpose or not, the effect is the same. What kind of Democratic Party (or any party for that matter) would be better suited for the challenge of the day? The answer is predictable if you know me, but I do not care. The best version of the Democratic Party is one that has a solid base in the multiracial working class and is built around their representative organizations. While there will disagreements here and there in this model, at least this party will not be haphazardly built on top of known and active political fault lines.

Now for my most controversial drop. The historical and current iteration of this Democratic Party, amounts to little more than a rent seeking entity. It is run by a consulting class that inserts itself between activist groups and the avenues of power. Those who want to improve conditions for labor, minorities, women, or the environment have to go to this party, hat in hand, and beg for them for promises of change. As a result, those who run the current donkey show demand increasing contributions of cash, political labor, and votes when a simple majority is claimed to be not enough. 

It is helpful to compare the trajectory of the Democrats with the Republican Party, a party that fears its activists and works aggressively from election to election to enact its agenda. Whether they win or not is not the immediate issue. Commentators have rightly noticed the aggressively ideological character of today's GOP, though what they fail to remember is that the party was created as an explicitly ideological project. Of course that free soil, free labor, and free men ideology is in no longer in force among Republicans. Nevertheless, there was a clear political objective at one point and it echoes through to the present day. Today's Republicans have learned from that era. They have a party setup to deliver specific results. 

Know this. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans can point to a specific time and place (1854 Ripon, Wisconsin) when their party was established. They can also explain what led to this event, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But what do Democrats have? A party built on various patronage networks, unifying urban sachems and rural courthouse gangs. It is a party that was founded by Jefferson, or Burr, or maybe Andrew Jackson, or quite possibly Martin Van Buren. It was not even consistently called the Democratic Party during all the times of its apparent founding. 

The Democrats of that era, the Democrats of Will Rogers' day, and Democrats of today have tried to pretend their messy big tent approach to politics is a secret strength that allows everyone to somehow feel represented. It should be increasingly evident this is not working. Creating a big tent in American politics ultimately leads to a sideshow, with figures like Manchin and Sinema gumming up the works. A real party with actual aims would be able to discipline these prima donna types, or better yet make sure they did not feel at home in the Democratic Party to begin with.

As it stands, the Democrats are awakening to see themselves restricted to coastal enclaves, a handful of cities in the interior, and the Black Belt in the South. Former strongholds in the Rio Grande Valley are going red, along with the rural upper Midwest. Appalachia is completely gone and if the Democrats are not careful they might start losing New Jersey in presidential and senatorial races. In the face of these changes, a complete structural reorientation is needed. The party needs to become a new kind of machine that is controlled by working class organizations, mobilizing working class voters across race and gender, to delivers real change to all working class Americans. 

Or the Democrats can continue on their current path. It is certainly easier emailed than done. Crying wolf to fundraise and waiting for the Republicans to screw up so much that it puts the Democrats back into power. Unfortunately this time around, if they continue with this approach they may find themselves joining the Whigs and Antimasons in the graveyard of American politics. Who knows what else they will take down with them when this comes to pass. Maybe a little Free Soil will be there to help ease the journey with Henry Clay Charon.  

 

An Urbane Print in the Midnight Fawn Review

New poem in the Midnight Fawn Review. It has a Mondrian feel to it. Click on part 2 of their first issue to read it.

Put the U in UCity Review, by Reading these Poems

 

A Ford Escape Hybrid and David Duchovny

The UCity Review, which is located in the shadow of Washington University in St. Louis, has published 11 poems of mine. They deal with a variety of topics that range from the TV show Californication, to horses, from kayaking on the Potomac to getting a dick drawn on your face.

Alternate Routes to the Department of Education

 

And other poems. Thanks to Alternate Route for publishing them!

Live from AWP, it's Poems in Lothlorien Poetry Journal

 

Here comes the HMS Poetry with Poems, Doot Doot

Good morning from Philadelphia, land of Cheesesteaks, Punchy Rambo, Ladies with Horns, and the Freshest of Princes. Here are five poems to contemplate, courtesy of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. 

Eisenhower on the Beach

Enter through the gift shop

In search of outdoor activities to do in the time of Covid, I came upon the Eisenhower Memorial in DC. The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial that is. Yes, I too was surprised it was for him and not his college presidential powerhouse of a brother Milton S. Eisenhower. For years I had heard about it being planned, entailing the usual fights between designers, architects, historians, locals, and the family of the honoree. When I moved to Brooklyn, it seemed to still be in the ether between drawing and argument. Now it is finished, completed and dedicated by America’s real president. That’s right, Joe Manchin.

A bird's eye view. Explains the lack of pigeons.

This is the Lay of Ike. The memorial is located south of the National Mall, near the Air and Space Museum. I suppose it is fitting. The man helped build suburban mall culture and he established NASA. Not that you would learn anything about that from the spread of metal and marble in front of the Department of Education. More on that later. The Memorial has no central point. Its elements are scattered across a plaza without a central point of focus. Instead, there are two bas-relief sculptures and two large columns at either side of the park. Behind them is a sort of mesh fixture elevated above the plaza. At night it is supposed to light up and depict the Normandy Landings (D-Day, not Hastings). 

The recent toppling of Rebel monuments has begun a conversation about the nature of memorialization itself. Not just who is to be honored, but how and to what purpose. Unfortunately, the planning for the Eisenhower Memorial happened before these issues came to the forefront of public debate. Not that those responsible for constructing the site are ignorant of them. Debates about memorials were present in academia before they became prominent in the summer of 2020. Still, one wonders how this memorial would look given the fallout of the George Floyd protests. Not that Eisenhower was a unworthy subject who should have been ignored. Then again, he has been absent on the National Mall for decades and Americans seemed more or less able to go on without pausing to remember him. 

blah, blah, blah tell us about the MIC!

Personal merit, necessity, or legacy aside, there other questions to consider behind the purpose of a memorial. At one time, the idea was to provoke a kind of reverence in a secular temple. Think of the Lincoln Memorial, which brings one up a series of steps to stand under the imposing figure of Lincoln. All white and made of stone, he sits in judgment of the country. After one is done bowing and supplicating below the 16th president, it is time to look elsewhere. Now the view centers on the moving text of the Gettysburg Address. The whole process transforms Lincoln into a holy figure for the nation. He is the martyr who managed to midwife the republic through the birth pangs of a new freedom. 

Gradually this approach fell out of favor. An emphasis on movements, particularly involving Women and People of Color emerged. When the “great men” (and women) of history were so memorialized, their monuments became less about reverence and more about education. This might occur through symbolism, or more often than not, actual text, preferably from the speeches of the person being depicted. The FDR Memorial and the WWII Memorials come out of this development. The experience is not of one central figure or architectural feature, but of many disparate elements.  Gone is the temple or shrine. They have been replaced by open-air museums. This does pose a new set of challenges. How do you convey so much information about a figure or an event without overwhelming the spectator?

Will it get some wind for the sailboat?

The Eisenhower Memorial goes with a minimal approach. It deals little with public perception of Ike, the details of his life, the context of his times, or the effects of his presidency. Eschewing all that, the man’s life is condensed to a couple symbolic vignettes. The approach can be likened to the opera Einstein on the Beach, where snippets of Einstein’s life and work are abstracted to the limits of recognition. Here, Eisenhower is a boy in Abilene. Then, he is a general. Finally, he is a president. Three acts with no drama.

What war did he win? It isn’t clear. Who did we fight? It wasn’t mentioned. Why did we fight? A mystery. According to the available statuary, Eisenhower was simply a general raising a fist at beleaguered troops. The effect is not inspiring. He reminds one of the blowhard officers from Catch-22. His presidency is a foggy recollection in bronze as well. The two decent things he did in office, enforcing desegregation, and condemning the military industrial complex (which, to be fair, he built) go unmentioned. All we see of Eisenhower c. 1953 to 1961 is standing around with people from his administration in the midst of doing something presidential. The firm of Nixon & Dulles & Dulles is nowhere to be seen, presumably off in the distance plotting Operation PBSuccess. 

The site is being worked on and in development. The trees they planted are still growing. I presume there is time for other things to be added to the plaza. Maybe they will figure out a way to be nicer to the people working in the Department of Education. Once they had windows looking out on the Mall, and now the view is blocked by a post-modern Bayeux Tapestry. It displays an event they might deal with teaching, but they didn’t carry out! Meanwhile in Langley, their view isn’t obscured by a steel lattice depicting the Bay of Pigs. 

The littlest toilet

If you do want to learn more about President Eisenhower, there is a gift shop. Inside of it are many books with many words and pictures. There are footnotes and citations galore. Maybe that’s the real purpose of the memorial. Show the inadequacies of stone in order to bring people back to the page. Step one: draw tourists in who recognize the name. Step two: confuse them about the life of Ike. Step three: push people into buying books to explain why people liked him. One of the oldest scams in the…um…book. The site also has restrooms. I don’t know how the ladies’ side of the divide is, but the men’s room has the smallest toilet I’ve ever seen in DC. So it’s got that going for it.

Who cares about the founder of the highways, go look at some model trains instead

The Worst Monument in DC

In this age of statues coming down their plinths, and places being renamed, calling something the “Worst Monument in DC” brings to mind the usual culprits. However, this monument is not bad because it honors a Confederate, a slaveowner, or somebody who did medical experiments on enslaved women. It is also not problematic like the statues honoring the Emancipation Proclamation. You know the kind: they show a helpless and shirtless Black person in chains being uplifted by a very starch-shirted Abraham Lincoln.

No, this infamous title belongs to a monument because of its aesthetics, not its politics. At least with those other kinds of statues you know what they are supposed to represent. I don’t mean on a deeper level in terms of just dog whistles, but on a surface level as well. A statue of General Robert E. Lee on a horse shows General Robert E. Lee on a horse. You can get offended by it because you know who you are supposed to think of when you look at it. One could argue a monument that’s too abstract might even be worse, because it doesn’t even let you get angry.

One such monument exists in DC. It is little known, though hundreds of thousands of people drive past it every year. Most of them hardly get a glance of it, and even fewer know that it is legally in DC, despite being on the right bank of the Potomac (in case you didn’t know, Columbia Island, that strip of land next to the Pentagon is part of DC). It is near another monument which people might recognize, but it is a hundred times better than this one. That competent monument is the Navy – Merchant Marine Memorial. The bad one? It’s called the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac.

A monument to Idaho

Just the length of the name should tip you off that something isn’t right. A good memorial is succinct and named for one person, group, or event. Think the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. The Emancipation Memorial is another one, so long as we’re talking names here and not set-up. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac is the opposite of all that. It contains too much, which the same might be said for old LBJ. I doubt that was the intention though. Instead we have a confusing mess that tells us what kind of memorial it is and the river it is on. Off the top of my head I don’t think any other monument in DC has that designation.

It's not the easiest memorial to get to either. You have to drive onto the island, park, and walk a bit until you hit the right grove. But that could be said of plenty of landmarks in the city, and I won’t count that against it. The memorial to Teddy Roosevelt requires quite a hike to the middle of his eponymous island. It doesn’t detract from the way it is set up and the possible educational value of the site. I know it’s not a textbook (what monument is?), but one can at least clearly meditate on and contemplate the subject.

This is not the case with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac. There is little in the design or the artwork chosen that conveys anything about LBJ and his achievements. Approaching the memorial, all one can see through the pine trees is a large hunk of pinkish granite. No, it isn’t a statue of our 36th President, as much of a hunk he was. The granite is simply a large rock, stuck in the ground. A prurient mind might say it’s a memorial to Johnson’s Johnson, the infamous “Jumbo.” How could they know any better? The rock is not shaped, cut, etched, or hewn into anything with a recognizable pattern. It isn’t even a menhir.

Johnson's Johnson, the Jumbo of the Capitol Hill Zoo

The area around the megalith isn’t any more informative or inspiring. There’s a small sign that gives a basic outline of the memorial and its function, along with a recording of Lady Bird Johnson that doesn’t work. When I pressed one of the buttons for it, I hoped that instead I would get to hear LBJ ordering pants from his tailor. It’s more Taylor though, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The device is broken, along with many of the paving stones near the central rock.

Adjacent to it are a handful of slabs of granite, made of the same exact shade as the central stone. On each of them are selections from speeches LBJ gave during his life. None of the selections are particularly memorable or illuminating. They say little about the man himself, his times, or the issues he was championing. I know the man wasn’t the most gifted speaker, but the designers could’ve chosen something more inspiring. He had Bill Moyers to work with. Something he said after JFK was shot perhaps? Or his speeches to Congress on Civil Rights? There’s another issue with the slabs too. They are difficult to read, thanks to using that foreskin-colored granite.

At the right angle, one can get a nice view of the Potomac and the other monuments that dot the skyline of DC. It only serves to remind the unlucky visitor, of how much worse Johnson’s memorial is compared to the ones for Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington. It makes one wonder if this is actually a site dedicated to Andrew Johnson, and that this is all a sick joke to embarrass our 17th president for botching Reconstruction and buying Alaska.

Not pictured: wasp nests

In the same park is a monument that is much better and more interesting, the Navy – Merchant Marine Memorial. It honors those who have died at sea and rare for a war memorial, it doesn’t show the people lost. No names are etched on it and no human figures are depicted. There are waves and seagulls (along with wasp nests tucked inside the waves, but those are a later addition) made of metal, sitting on a small plinth. They depict the watery resting place of those lost, and remind us that many are gone forever with no recovered remains. It also has bubbles.

Perhaps the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac represents the conclusion of the memorial as traditionally understood. Our presidents are too big and contain too many multitudes of contradictions to be reduced to a statue. Constant revision of their legacy and shifts in historical opinion also make it difficult to come to any final consensus about them. In that sense the giant rocks is fitting, as the reputation of LBJ has waxed and waned over the decades. Now it appears to be waxing, in part because we are nostalgic for a time Congress and the President could work together to pass major pieces of legislation. But it will wane again, when we reconsider the costs of Empire.

A Collective of Poems in Collective Unrest

Five poems of mine are up at Collective Unrest. They are of a political nature. One is about Redlining, and the rest are from a series I've been working on called "La Resistance." I started them after Trump's inauguration. The title is partially a self-deprecating joke.

Eight Poems in Zombie Logic Review

One poem in Zombie Logic Review? No. Two poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. Three poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. Four poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. Five poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. Six poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. Seven poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. Eight poems in Zombie Logic Review? No. I mean, yes! Eight of my poems in Zombie Logic Review right here.

Tuck Somewhat Everlasting

Two poems of mine have been published in Tuck Magazine. Read them.

Listen to My Father on a Radio Show

My father, Michael A. Nardolilli, works for the Montgomery Parks Foundation. Their major initiative these days is building a museum to tell the story of Josiah Henson, one of the real-life inspirations behind the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. He recently talked about this project on the Kojo Nnamdi show (13 minutes in, under the episode title: How The Region’s Forgotten Slave Stories Are Being Rediscovered)

Five Poems in Twenty Two Twenty Eight

Come one, come all, this time I've got a link stuffed with poems. Not twenty-eight poems in Five and Twenty-Two. Not twenty-five in in Twenty-Eight and Two. And certainly not twenty-two poems in Eighty-Five and Twenty. I have five (you can count them) in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, a DC and NYC based journal. 

A Poem from the FBI

When we went after the Communists, it was okay,
Because they were Communists, after all

When we went after the Socialists, it was okay,
Because they were sort of like Communists, right?

When we went after the activists, it was okay,
Because they wanted to help the Reds

And when we went after the Blacks, it was okay,
Because they were all Red underneath

When we went after the anti-War types, it was okay
Because the wars were against Communists

When we went after the terrorists, it was okay
Because they were terrorists, it’s simple

(When we went after the kids in basements
Making bombs with instructions we gave them,
It was okay because they were terrorists too)

Then we went after the Anti-War types again
Because the wars were against terrorists

But look, now the President is going after us,
Come on patriots! Why aren’t you in the streets?

Hot Park Ranger, the Summer's Last Hit

My sister made a music video for her song Hot Park Ranger. Give it a view and a listen. Then go visit one of America' natural parks, such as the Thomas Stone National Historic Site.

Poems Dredged Up from May

It's not a protest, it's actually a close up of a Georges Seurat painting

Hey, I forgot to post a link to some poems I got published in Immix back in May. Well, it's only August so hopefully they haven't passed their expiration date yet.

The Route of the Next Women's March on DC

Hopefully, we won't have to have another march like the one yesterday ever again. Nevertheless I think we need to be prepared for next time. While there was a planned route, it quickly broke down. It was for the best of reasons though, namely that so many people showed up! Inspiring as that may be, I doubt we'll have the freedom to organize ourselves and spread out peacefully under the noses of the authorities in the future.

Now I have no intention of mansplaining here, this is just an idea for the route of the next possible march to take. I think we should start at L'Enfant Plaza and from there head north. Just as a baby was born there once, so shall the next march be born there as well:

This will take the march through the Mall and next to all the important museums. Tourists won't be able to avoid us. After politicians, I think they're the next most important group to reach out to. Then at H Street we will branch off into two groups. Going any farther north will be trouble because there won't be enough space and amenities to support the protest:

One group will head east and curl around Union Station and end near the Capitol grounds to make our case heard to the legislative and judicial branches:

However, that will still leave the executive branch to reach out to, and reach out we will! How? By walking over to 17th Street, then going down past the White House to occupy the space between it and the Washington Monument:

So the next Women's March on DC will look something like this:

Wikipedia's diagram is insufficiently pink

Comparing Inaugurations Trump Vs. Obama

This image has been making the rounds lately in one form or another:

...in order to compare attendance at Obama's 2009 inauguration compared to Trump's in 2017. I just want to say this is a very misleading image. All that white you see was actually filled with people. They were just wearing hoods.