Blaugust

What a strange summer it’s been.

In general, we are fond of the season. We’ve shared a long romance, one that’s spanned two centuries. Lately though, it feels as if it is coming to an end. As if the world and its dreamiest season, whom we loved for a time, has moved on, but too quick for our hearts to keep up, not yet free of the hope that we could see one another through the haze of those manic dog days one last time. We look outside, witness the occasional glimmer of possibility, only to see it fade with the quickness of its arrival. Then that awful dawning: what if all those flickers of euphoria, those moments that seemed inchoate beginnings, were, in the final instance, parts of a sequence destined for cataclysm? What if summer is over? Not like “See you next summer” over — like, really over.¹

This is all quite fanciful — as our departed comrade Joshua Clover wrote, everything ends. That’s a certainty. And anyway summer has always meant accepting the melancholy of its eventual end alongside its ecstasies. Perhaps what we are thinking through is simply an acute version of the allegory of autumn’s arrival. Perhaps precisely what we’re doing is summermaxxing. We are in a moment of great shifts, and we’ve yet to find our footing in this new atmosphere. If we’ve been quiet lately, it’s perhaps a reflection of the disorientation that seems to rule the moment. But let us stay anchored to our theme of summer’s twin languor and intensity. A brief cataloguing might ground us:

The year began with LA aflame. Spectacular, because LA is the world capital² of spectacle, but catastrophic nonetheless. Add it to the ledger of the decade’s horrors. Then summer came. LA aflame again. These, however, were flames of revolt. We let out a sigh of relief. Finally, the 5-year Thermidor had come to an end.

Or had it? Two months after the torched Waymos, we’re not so sure — Gaza is starving, the burn cycle has turned to flood, and ICE’s assault on immigrant populations remains as uneven as the resistance to it. The disorientation of the present is due precisely to this uneven character of catastrophe and revolt. The causes are global, but the effects seem to manifest locally; a flood there, a fire here; a raid here, a riot there. It’s both too much and too little. Is there a such thing as catastasistrophe? Does not roll off the tongue, do not like. One thing is certain: if the enemy prevails, the neologisms will be horrific.

We wish we had something like hope on offer. Pinned within the grips of blind optimism on the one hand, and We Are the Beautiful Losers-melancholia on the other, we would like to opt for a secret third thing. For now, it’s study. Summer is for blogging, and studying with comrades.

This Black August, as we approach the 54th anniversary of the Comrade George Jackson’s martyrdom, we turn to his example not via his prison letters, but the more directly revolutionary Blood in My Eye. We admire his erudition regarding the stakes of disarming police and military power in the U.S., his analysis of a “pig class,” as well as his brutally hilarious quips about cops. Like many other members of the black radical tradition, he took seriously the revolution in Palestine. Demonstrating this deep solidarity between struggles, we recently learned that a gorgeous poem titled “Enemy of the Sun” by Palestinian poet Samih Al Qasim was long misattributed to George Jackson after his Black Panther Party comrades found it in his prison cell following his death. (The poem is the featured image of this post.)

Ok fine we’ll leave you with one piece of feel-good news: a guy who works (worked) for the DOJ in DC recently chucked a Subway sandwich at a CBP goon. He fled but was ultimately arrested, upon which he said “I did it. I threw a sandwich.” Uncritical support for sandwich guy.

¹ If one were looking for evidence of the end of an affect, the pop charts wouldn’t be a bad place to look. Survey says that that summer feeling is curiously lacking this year.

² The fires were so vast in their destruction of highly-valued real estate that they caused losses in the European FIRE sector.