Goodwill store

When I spoke the other night of The Republicans being the most passive-aggressive American political party in recent American history the person to whom I was speaking thought I was speaking of The Democrats.

No, I said, The Democrats are a close second.

Furthermore, what we need to understand is that neither party has anything to do with our lives, since each has forfeited any legitimate claim of representing us, each deciding some time ago that corporate representation is quite lucrative, less messy, and leads too often to pregnant opioid addicts filing suits in The Supreme Court for the right to control their own bodies.

I was speaking to a Republican, a man who's lost all political faith, not only in his own party but in the larger enterprise of American democracy, and has given himself to conspiracy theories as outdated as the Clintons themselves. He likes to talk about The Rothchild's as being the root of all evil, and The Federal Reseve as an illegal gambling ring, things I would otherwise not be familiar with but am grateful to know, though I often hold the phone away from my ear while he is speaking.

Napoleon the Third (3) comes to mind as a figure from the past who would be completely at home in the present. This stuff--elite, authoritarian power, based on war creation & prolongation--seems to get recycled, not unlike the jacket I donated to Goodwill and ended up buying for $7 in the Goodwill store on Clement St. a year later.

Painting by Joe Goode, photograph by the author, Los Angeles, March 2020.