The Homeless: I woke up this morning to discover the homeless had disappeared. Like something out of an AMC horror story, it didn’t quite register till I reached the 34th street and Herald Square exit, usually there are three homeless people who make it their home: rag stained, possessions in their bags, with the sort of urine, dirt and feces smell you’d expect given the circumstances, their home. But they weren’t dangerous. Well, today they are gone and the entire area has been cleaned. I exited towards 8th Avenue and 35th street, where many homeless people spotted my walk in the past year or so. certainly five or six on a consistent basis during the three blocks to my job. Today? None. My feelings are not ambivalent, I am worried and I don’t like it. When the New York Post print nonsense about how third world countries don’t have the homeless problem New York City does, you want to smack them. We have a homeless problem because we live in a free society where we can’t simply shovel off people’s rights because they have no money. For all the ways the homeless problem is a major pain on the neck. there is one way it isn’t: it keeps us honest by forcing us to see what happens at the lowest rungs of society. Who has moved these people? Who has the right to?
Recorded: A lot of fair stuff out there but screw it all, Marshall Crenshaw has brought together some great songs off his EP releases over the past couple of years on a terrific new album #392: The EP Collection. A must hear.
Live: Earl Sweatshirt tomorrow!!! Very excited.
Donald Trump: nearly 1 in 4 people in Mobile-Pensacola are planning to go to the Donald Trump stump speech. Meanwhile, people like the Post and Fox News are taking him very seriously. I have nothing left to say, I am baffled.
You know exactly what happened to them along with every other American and citizen who lives here with at least half a functioning brain. They were taken away in a police sweep built on “clean city” and “anti-disease” laws that were specifically written for the purpose. In the Third Reich they had what were called “fog of night” disappearances and while this is not that, the US has its own way of sweeping away what it considers to be undesirables, unique to its own history, dressed up as civilization and necessary sanitation measures for the rest of “us.”
This the country we wanted. Now we have it. Pearl-clutching, which I do myself, is not going to fix it.