PopWars

Our city is a Sanctuary City. We have a city street address but we live in a town which does not have guidelines that prohibit law enforcement from assisting in ICE maneuvers. So a group of citizens has been meeting at the library and preparing to take our concerns to the town board. The board appoints the police chief, establishes their budget and is ultimately responsible for establishing police guidelines.

We were standing outside the library this morning, waiting for it to open, when we spotted these three back military vehicles. I saw someone sitting in the smaller of the three vehicles and I walked over to ask what was going on. I asked if they were part of the town police and he told me they were from the city of Rochester and they were working with the town police on some sort of operation. I was ready to push for more information but I was distracted by the assault rifle in this guy’s lap. Its trajectory, in the that casual position, would have pierced the door and entered my lower half. At that moment the tinted window in the vehicle to my right rolled down and I said hi to another armed soldier. I muttered something like, “I didn’t know the city had such serious equipment” and I walked back to our group.

We planted a row each of lettuce, arugula, spinach and cilantro this afternoon and I got these news alerts on my watch while we were down there. I was trying to digest the first one – the Musketeer demanding the biggest firms on Wall Street to use his AI platform, one deliberately tweaked to generate racist, antisemitic and violent content. And then thinking about the war and Pete Hegseth uses biblical justifications, describing “the fight against Iran”Epic Fury” as a struggle for “Christian Nation” values. He prays for “maximum lethality” against the enemy, implying there is something like minimum lethality.

I looked up a few of Hegseth’s recent chestnuts:
“Blessed be the lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”
“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”
“Give them…overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
“Break the teeth of the ungodly.”

It seems like yesterday when W launched his “GWOT” (Global War on Terror” with “Shock and Awe.” In response I did the piece above for a Pyramid Art show. Tom Burke bought it and I had almost forgotten about it but here we go again.

Christ died for our sins or so the story goes. He died on this day, Good Friday, between noon and three o’clock. I remember sitting on our front steps with my brother and sister on day as beautiful as this one, a day off from school too, while we attempted to stay quiet for those three hours. It was my mom’s idea. We could only go so long without laughing at the situation. I don’t think we crossed the hour mark. We had already given up candy for Lent and we had just two more days before we could gorge ourselves on chocolate.

It is hard to find any humor in all this. I miss Charlie Rangle.

This sticker has been on the unfitly box at the corner of Goodman and Ridge for so long I can’t be sure which president it was intended for. It was cold and blustery but sunny day for the No Kings Rally and the local turnout was impressive. So many smiles in such dark times. If Congress can let the president go to war without approval or even a coherent explanation this sticker will read like a foreign lanquage.

I think we were headed up to the Portuguese restaurant, Adega on Elm Street in Toronto, when we spotted this sign. The red and yellow of the Spanish flag with a jack-like graphic in black in place of the coat of arms just screamed out to us. Too slick to be graffiti, I assumed Chaos was a club or a line of clothing but I couldn’t find anything via Google. The way the sign is framed by glue from what came before, the “ski” tag that just about matches the yellow above, even the green/blue figure interacting with the animated jack add interest. but I could quibble that the angle of the cross piece in the letter “h” doesn’t match the “c” and “a” but I like the graphic typography and word it serves is “Chaos.” The sign would work bette here in the states that it does up there.

These two photos were taken in two different countries, both from the train as we crossed the border after spending four days in Toronto. We had cold but beautiful weather there and rain on the way back, so these pictures reflect the dreariness. The Niagara River cuts a deep gorge and natural border between the two countries, and the view from the train was dramatic.

My cousin lives about a half mile from the Amtrak station on the US side. We called her to say hello on the way over (her dad, my uncle, was the world’s biggest train enthusiast). She arranged to have coffee and sandwiches from Di Camillo’s waiting for us on the way back. There is an hour of downtime while Homeland Security does its thing, and it flew by as we got caught up.