TWO STATE SOLUTION

"I'm a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the sate, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today's establishments."- Steve Bannon

In the wake of the Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Trump's responses vacillated between tacit condemnation and apologist approval, as he noted violence "on many sides, many sides." By the end of the week another in a long line of advisors, strategists, and spokesmen, Steve Bannon, had exited "government," and headed back to the comfort of Breitbart New, as editors declared "#war" on Hollywood, Democrats, the mainstream media and conservative Republicans. Who's left?
     More and more what I'm writing in (F)ancestor dovetails with reportage of what's happening the very day I'm writing it. I'd never even heard of Justice Roger B. Taney before this week and by the time I'd read the Dred Scott decision, his statue was literally being lifted off its pedestal in the middle of the night and trucked off to some unknown location in Baltimore.
   What the hell is going on here? Black Osterhouts, French semioticians, great photographers, racist newspaper editors, executed Jennings slaves and PhD. candidates lead me through a myriad of mazes and dark passageways as I read all I can get my hands on. My glaringly obvious inadequacies when I started this project have softened and are beginning to dissolve in the face of my aggressive compulsion.
    In this divided atmosphere of factional racist politics I turn 65, as the sun is blocked out by the moon. My birthday August 21st has come up so many times in the course of my research I can no longer keep track. On paper I'm a poor, white bachelor, collecting a small social security check, on Medicare and Medicaid, about to have an eye operation that will hopefully save my sight. What will a curious grad student think of me 100 years from now? A failed artist? An amateur historian? A crackpot cult leader? A cat lover? In looking back at this "family" history the one thing I can admit is how little we know and how much we are convinced of the opposite. Whatever happens tomorrow, some will see it as a sign.