by Joan Harvey
It’s summertime. Things are heating up. A comet trips across the night sky; I make out its vast and blurry tail, then watch a sharp bright shooting star fall through the heavens. I drag a mattress out onto the deck and lie under a massive blanket of stars, a very milky way. I’m alone, and because I’m at the moment far from the terrible violence of the current American system, I’m able to experience this space as voluptuous and luxurious. I sleep and eat whenever I want. Rain comes early in the morning and I drag the mattress back inside. I eat peaches and cream, have an extra cup of coffee. Listen to Monk and The Gossip and Beethoven and various obscure djs and some old Tribe Called Quest. I can be random and feral (which a friend said would be a good name for a law firm). I am aware of how rare and, to use a term now obligatory and perhaps too much bandied about, how privileged this is. I am not living in poverty. My child is grown and on his own. I have space and time and no worries in this remote place of being shot by the police. The land and few people I encounter here have a deep quietness.
Meanwhile in the news, virulently anti-feminist lawyer Roy Den Hollander murders the son of a female judge he wasn’t happy with. In front of reporters, Representative Ted Yoho shakes his finger in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s face and calls her a “fucking bitch.” Many of us are pretty sure that if we had elected Hillary instead of Trump, thousands more Americans would be alive today. There have been many reports of how much better countries run by women have done during this plague, and yet, as Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times, Hillary was perceived more unfavorably than Trump, and far more unfavorably than Biden. Bernie Sanders is perceived as more trustworthy than Elizabeth Warren even though there is no basis for this. I’ve seen horrendous attacks by both men and women of the left on female candidates, as well as on anyone who has dared support them in any way. Read more »