erik lundegaard

 RSS
ARCHIVES
LINKS

Saturday January 11, 2025

Please Don't Take a Picture

It's been a week, hasn't it? Cue R.E.M.

I thought it was bad on Tuesday when we got a Trump press conference out of Mar-a-Lago, and Fuckstick didn't rule out military-economic force to take over the Panama Canal and/or Greeland and/or Canada, which led to a New York Times headine about a “reinvigorated” Trump, or some such bullshit, because there's never been a right-wing politician whose boot the Times wouldn't lick, or whose false machismo it wouldn't pump up. (See: “confident” Rick Perry and his “shot of vigor” from 2011.) This was also the day Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the release not only of Jack Smith's special report on the classified documents case (her jurisdiction) but Smith's Jan. 6 case (not). She's obviously doing what she can to run out the clock and tarnish and weaken the rule of law in this country. Where is she from again? Colombia? Can we send her back with the first wave? That'd be some nice irony. How do you like them manzanas? We're truly sending back all the wrong people.

Oh, right. That was also the day Mark Zuckerberg got rid of fact-checking on his platforms—a policy implemented by him in 2017—in advance of Trump's presidential lies. What a worm. The more money the man, the weaker the spine, apparently. Some have argued it's less kowtowing to Trump than using the election as an excuse to do what libertarian, “open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science” Silicon Valley wants to do anyway. Either way, I prepared, yet again, to leave Meta, this time Instagram and Threads, as I'd done with Facebook in 2019, as I'd done with Musk and Twitter in 2022. Some people have to flee countries, I just have to flee social media platforms. I count my blessings. You can find me at: @elundy.bsky.social.

And then we got the LA wildfires. I have friends and relatives living there, including in hard-hit neighborhoods, and though their homes haven't been destroyed, as of now, their lives have been upended. We can't go a month, it seems, without some natural disaster hitting us, but this one hit me harder than most. It was the friends and relatives, sure, and the impotence we all felt, but it's also what LA means to anyone who cares about movies. It's the birthplace of our national stories. That night and the next, I watched “Chinatown,” as I tend to do when the Trumps of the world rear their ugly heads, and I wondered what neighborhoods I was watching that might be gone now. The fact that the movie is about the politics of water—who gets it and why and how money is made from it—as modern LA was a tinderbox—well, that just underscored everything.

But the news that hit hardest was personal. On Tuesday, the prosecution in my my brother's murder let us know that they now agreed with the defense that the accused is incompetent and won't stand trial. It's not unexpected, it's just ... “So that's it?” Yes. For now. It will be reviewed again in six months. The notice made me imagine the final moments again, and ... He's gone, and that's it. I could go on and on about this but I won't. Intellectually I get it. Emotionally, it's something else.

Anyway, that's one week down in 2025. Stay safe, as they say.

Posted at 10:33 AM on Saturday January 11, 2025 in category Personal Pieces